Welcome to Flashmobfiction! The idea is simple- share quick bursts of your favourite fiction with random people in random public places! Arrange it with as few or as many as you like! Just do it!
Just like we Brits love to talk about the weather to complete strangers, we want to promote a quick burst of literary chit-chat on the move... No snobbery here, tell it like it is. I myself have many reading 'personalities' depending on how I feel on a given day...
Books give an insight into our lives and often reflect the preoccupations of the times
(although why early twenty-first century people are so interested in boy wizards and vampires is open to lengthy speculation). However, the point is this: that talking about books opens up our world and the worlds within us, helps us to express our fears and desires, opening up new possibilites in our future lives.
Well, at the very least, you can get together and have a banter with like-minded people. Or just freak people out. Your choice.
So...If you only had 2 minutes to read your favourite bit from your favourite book and pitch it to someone else- what would it be and why?
For me (today) it would be 'The Old Century and Seven More Years' (1938) by Siegfried Sassoon, a beautifully evocative work which recalls Sassoon's idyllic childhood before the onset of The First World War. It is out of print now but well worth a read, just for the pure escapism and sensual delight of Sassoon's poetic style:
'I liked to hear the sounds of life going on around me - the jays squawking down among the green-peas, and the gruff voices of the gardners at their work. There was the rumble of the wheelbarrow being trundled down a path; later on, in June, when they were mowing the long grass in the orchard, there was the sound of a scythe being sharpened on a stone...'
I was not able to read this without being painfully aware of the contrast Sassoon would face in the horrors of the French battlefields just a few years later. Perhaps that is what motivated him to write such achingly beautiful sketches of a vanished way of life. And one, (if our voracious appetite for 'bygone era' dramas is anything to go by), reflects our yearning for an apparently 'simpler' way of life.
