About the Reader

Hi. I'm Stu, nerd, reader, father of two.

I just wanted to say a couple of things about me and my project.

Firstly, I Am Not A Scholar. 

Well, you know, not of literature. I'm reading for fun, from a modern, Western perspective. People study these things for a living. They know more about them than I do. I'm liable to miss bits. I'm likely to miss nuances, and cues from cultural context. When I read Romance of the Three Kingdoms, I got totally confused about which Cao was a nephew or a cousin or an uncle or an unrelated Cao, and it showed up. I make errors.

I'm generally relying on Project Gutenberg and similar out-of-copyright sources, which means I'm reading older translations for a popular audience. There are probably better sources out there, by now. If you're a scholar.

Secondly, I Have No Wish to Offend. 

I'm - obviously - not sticking to English literature, which means I'm commenting outside of my home culture. But I have no wish to belittle or mock anyone else's culture or history. I hope to have the distance of time to mute any offense, but if that doesn't work, let me know.

I adore this stuff. I can only adore it from my own perspective, but I hope that's a broad one.

Lastly, I Am Looking for the Fun. 

Some of this stuff is heavy going. Styles change. Social mores change a lot, and there's a lot of stuff that was normal to the ancients that we don't like at all. And a lot of books from the before-times are slow and ponderous, and that gets worse as you go back.

But in a lot of cases, if you perservere you hit a point where you grok the style and suddenly you're devouring it.

And then it's glorious.

So I write about the fun bits, not the slog.