Quote:
Originally Posted by JSWolf
Lord Peter Whimsy is crap. It's terribly racist.
As for Spencer, I beat you to that and already mentioned it.
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As I stated in another thread, Jon, we can either abandon older books and classics, declaring that they are racist, etc. or we can read them and appreciate (by which I mean, understand) the time under which they were written.
We can also say that pretty much
everything written prior to 1980 is also sexist. So what? Will I keel over dead if I read Pride & Prejudice, where the goal is to snag a husband? Will I faint dead away, if I read Chandler--as mentioned above, fine vintage prose--because almost all women are basically evil double-crossing backstabbers and murderers?
Do we lose all the written history of storytelling, so that, God forbid, we don't see or read something sexist or racist? How far we have come from "sticks and stones will break my bones but names will never hurt me," and IMHO,
not a good distance.
Half the books on my list have lines or comments that are racist by today's standards. We can read them, make a quick mental note of something that would be objectionable today and move on. Expecting yesterday's authors to hold to today's standards seems absolutely ridiculous to me. What, did Dr. Who pick them all up, bring them to today, educate them and then drop them back, instructing them to write not-objectionable-150-100-years-later prose?
And, BTW, it's
Spenser. Not Spencer. For what it's worth. If you don't want to read Wimsey, more power to you. Frankly, I'm
shocked that you think it's appropriate to try to dictate to others what they should or shouldn't, or worse,
"can't" read.
Hitch