Reading should be enjoyable.

Books, stories, blogs – what ever they are, should be easy to digest, and in someway uplifting.

I have horrible memories from school (well beyond the Mrs Cook era) of having to read paragraphs over and over again, trying to identify the “subtle subtext”. The “hidden” meaning. For that matter, any meaning.

Maybe that points to the fact that I just wasn’t smart enough to interpret the words and works of the “critically acclaimed”.

Critically acclaimed, I might also ask, by whom? Some stuffy academic sitting behind a leatherbound desk in a cluttered office in the bowels of an old sandstone building, somewhere on some university campus. The same stuffy academic who has never actually written anything that people have “wanted” to read, as opposed to “required” to read, because it formed part of their assessment? Those arbiters of excellence?  

No. I’m very comfortable remaining “critically unacclaimed”. Or “uncritically unacclaimed”.

Whichever is less noteworthy.