Not To Be Tossed Aside Lightly...

Today I ascended these stairs:

In order to embark upon the process of decluttering all this:

The upstairs landing tends to get a little disordered.

When I came upon the subject of the title of this post:

As Dorothy Parker once said, "This is not a novel that should be tossed aside lightly. It should be thrown with great force."

I can't imagine why I haven't gotten rid of this book before now.

The summer of  '03 I was taking a summer course in world literature at The College.  It was a month of intensive reading and writing, all the way from Homer to Ibsen.  I didn't have time to read anything but my assignments. I loved the class, but I was looking for a way to reward myself after all the serious reading was done.  I took a trip to Memphis one weekend and went to my favorite bookstore and saw the book pictured above.  It looked interesting.  I heard people talking about it in the bookstore.  Someone said, "It changed the way I look at church history."  Well, since I love a good mystery, and love Church history, I thought The DaVinci Code would be a great book to read after I was finished with all the hard reading I was doing for my class.

So, the class ended and there I was, on a blanket in my backyard, with my tea and my book, ready to enjoy the rest of my summer.  Except, as I started to read, I began to notice something.  I was not enjoying the book. At all.  The writing seemed...terrible.  I told The Professor that I thought the writing was really bad. He said, "Carlyn, you've gone from reading Kafka to light fiction, give it some time."

I kept plugging away, hoping that even if the writing wasn't great, the story would make up for it.  WRONG again.  The more I read, the angrier I got.  No wonder that book changed the way the person in the bookstore looked at Church history!  Most of the information in the book about the Holy Scriptures, early Christianity, even Emperor Constantine, is either out-right wrong or distorted in a twisted way.

I finally finished the book and put it away on the bookshelves on the landing upstairs. I don't know why I even kept it at all. The decluttering process brought it to my attention today. It's going out of my house tomorrow.  It is one of the few books I have ever read that I completely despise. It will be thrown with great force into the dumpster.