40 is not 20 - Day 25

Needing a break from the trials of life, I picked up two of my favorite childhood classics to escape for a few hours. Louisa May Alcott's Eight Cousins and its sequel, Rose in Bloom, are charming Victorian era novels about orphan Rose Campbell and her seven rowdy boy cousins as they grow into adults at the turn of the 20th century. As I finished, I was reminded, again, that fiction can speak louder than truth.

As I snuggled down and became engrossed in the story for the second time in my life, I was struck by the enormous contrast between this genteel coming of age story and that of the last ones I read a couple years ago. Bella and Edward have nothing on Rose and her beau. Not even close.

Yup, your read right. To fulfill a promise I made to a dear young lady in my life, I read all 90 gazillion pages of the four Twilight books. While I'm not worse for wear, they provided me with a pulse on today's youth culture. There's no surprise today's culture is radically different from that of 100 years ago.

Uncle Alec "paused a moment, then added with an anxious glance at the book, over which [Rose] was still bending, 'Finish it if you choose only remember, my girl, that one may read at forty what is unsafe at twenty, and we never can be too careful what food we give that precious yet perilous thing called imagination.'" Rose in Bloom


Wise words.