I read stories out loud to Paula in the evening. Our most recent genre is fairy tales. Right now we are reading Grimm's Fairy Tales, unabridged. There are many familiar stories like "Seven at One Stroke". Since I was raised without a TV I probably recognize more than my share. The original Grimm's anthology contains 211 fairy tales so it will take us several months to read them all. Some of the tales seem to have little more than entertainment value on the surface.
But these tales are closer to the spinal material of good character than much of what passes for entertainment today.
Paula and I laughed our asses off for two days over a fairy tale called "The Giant and the Tailor". It was less than two pages long and seemed to say that giants can get scared, too. When the giant meets the tailor for the first time he quips, "What do you want, you little fly's leg?" And when the tailor starts to brag the giant grumbles into his beard, "The knave can do much more than bake apples!"
All this brings me to the point. There is clearly such a thing as reading the wrong things. This is one of the key themes of "The Voyage of the Dawn Treader" by C.S. Lewis. As "Dawn Treader" readers know, Eustace is unreliable because one of his biggest problems is that he "has read all the wrong books."
Having raised kids, I have a lot of respect for people who see value in those young lessons. But tellingly, most people (who don't know Jack) think of C.S.Lewis as a writer of children's books. As a teacher of literature at Oxford and then Cambridge, Lewis wrote many influential scholarly works and was quite prolific. Amazon still lists 160 titles by him, many of them deeply philosophical - including the few children's books that he wrote. Yet most of us belie our ignorance of a great modern era philosopher by assuming that he's only a writer of children's books.
Here is some of the more measured of the blazing rhetoric that is rabidly circulating right now regarding labeling people. In particular, these articles highlight the naivete when the criticism is patently incorrect.
Reading inspires imagination and thoughtfulness. I prefer to be thoughtful about others and reserve judgement of those who read. We are what we read - even more than we are what we eat.
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