When size matters

Just as scotch bottles have become bigger, story books have also become fatter

A few days ago, a friend said he doesn’t read fiction. This reminded me of an incident forty years ago when, largely in order to prevent an earnest friend from forcing Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Virginia Woolf, etc on me, I told her I never read story books and that my tastes in fiction ran very much lower. 

Eventually, she turned her attention to someone else and I was able to return openly to the only form of private entertainment that was available then. TV as we know it now was still two decades away. 

In those days, one had to nurse