The Literary Blog Hop

I have been a frequent participant in the Book Bloggers Hop and it has been a great experience.    I have found a lot of new blogs to follow from it and gained some great readers along the way.   It has made me feel part of the international book blogger community.    Most of the participants in The Book Bloggers Hop focus on young adult, paranormal books as well as what is commonly called "chic lit".    I tend to read classics, Asian fiction, short stories and modern writers like Virginia Woolf, Katherine Mansfield and Ford Madox Ford.    I also read living writers like Thomas Pynchon,  A. S. Byatt, Salman Rushdie, Kenzaburo Oe, Banana Yoshimoto, Margaret Atwood, Kristy Gunn, among others.   I am very open to new to me authors and find book blogs the best source for reading ideas.  

The hosts of the brand new Literary Book Blog Hop are inviting those of us who see ourselves as "literary book blogs" to join their hop and have asked initial participants to pick a book they regard as "literary" and explain what this means to them.    At first I did not really care to answer that question as I prefer to talk only about particular works and authors without generalizing about the broader ramifications of reading or the reading life but now I have decided to very briefly venture an answer.   

Of the books I have recently read and posted on I would say Vladimir Nabokov's Pale Fire would be considered a literary book by almost all its readers.   By literary book I mean one in which part of the meaning (a term I also do not really like) of the work is carried by  how it is told not just in the conversations and plot action.    A newspaper article just gives the facts but a literary work uses its style, structure, method of narration, form and cultural references to do its work.

We need to recall Dickens was published in the tabloids of his day and Shakespeare was mass entertainment.     Sometimes I wonder what books written since WWII will still be read in the 22nd century.