{"id":136,"date":"2012-08-11T17:12:46","date_gmt":"2012-08-11T17:12:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/t8el.com\/?p=136"},"modified":"2012-08-11T17:12:46","modified_gmt":"2012-08-11T17:12:46","slug":"in-praise-of-reading-bad-books","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/t8el.com\/?p=136","title":{"rendered":"In praise of reading bad books"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I miss reading bad books. My addiction to reviews means I end up intentionally avoiding a lot of wonderful writing. Worst of all I have almost forgotten the <em>surprise<\/em> of unearthing a masterpiece. High five-star expectations only cause bigger disappointments.<\/p>\n<p>We need to read bad books to know how good they can be. We should not take good writing for granted. It is hard and it is rare.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;Life is too short for bad books and bad wine,&#8221; a wonderful LSE professor once told me. Since I hardly remember what corked books taste like, I am not even sure whether most of what I read is actually a good vintage.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I miss reading bad books. My addiction to reviews means I end up intentionally avoiding a lot of wonderful writing. Worst of all I have almost forgotten the surprise of unearthing a masterpiece. High five-star expectations only cause bigger disappointments. We need to read bad books to know how good they can be. We should &hellip; <\/p>\n<p class=\"link-more\"><a href=\"https:\/\/t8el.com\/?p=136\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;In praise of reading bad books&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[16],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/t8el.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/136"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/t8el.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/t8el.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/t8el.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/t8el.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=136"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/t8el.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/136\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":137,"href":"https:\/\/t8el.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/136\/revisions\/137"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/t8el.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=136"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/t8el.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=136"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/t8el.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=136"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}