No, I did not stop reading books. I don’t think I could even if I wanted to. There is a lot to read but I wanted to tell you about a special book I stumbled on that I have not in a long time.
A dangerous book that can influence your mind, seduce, remind you that the most powerful thing in the world are words. That is what Literary Rogues by Andrew Shaffer is about.
Literary Rogues is the kind of book you can read in a day. It is that well written. But even better than that, Shaffer is a master of the art of not telling too much. Just enough. To hook you and make you curious to read more. And later, to try and find out details you suspect Shaffer may have left out in his passion to keep the book short.
This is a book anyone interested in creativity will find riveting. Many of the authors featured here are canonical. Their works like Madame Bovary, The Flowers of Evil, On The Road, The Great Gatsby, and Frankenstein are considered to have enriched world literature immeasurably.
If there is anything like Serious Literature, they are considered the embodiment. It is therefore “humbling” and eye-opening to see these great men and women in a light we rarely consider them. As human beings whose lives were a complicated mess like you probably consider your own life to be.
Many were addicts of a sort. Samuel Taylor Coleridge and De Quincy were incurably addicted to opium at a time when addiction was little understood and those under its thrall looked down upon.
Lord Byron could not resist trying to bed an attractive woman, whether she was related to him or not. F. Scott Fitzgerald could not stop himself from trying to put on a show no matter where he was or how foolish it ended up making him look. Hunter S. Thompson could not stop playing with guns.
Elizabeth Wurtzel rarely put the pill bottle down or understood why not. This was decades before diligent research revealed that big pharma had a stake in ensuring we were all popping more pills. It was good for the bottom line.
The rogues in the title is not an exaggeration.
You would imagine that a writer’s life is supposed to be boring but many of the authors featured here had anything but boring lives stuck behind their desks. Many were running from the law, several were at the battlefront while others let their passions and addictions lead them down the deadly path of murder. Intimate Partner Violence is all too common in the pages of Literary Rogues.
If you read Literary Rogues at an impressionable age, several of these lives are likely to strike you as more than remarkable, examples you might want to emulate. In an age where there is a growing counter-reaction to “Wokism,” being told that to drink hard, party hard, or snort anything is a sign of cool can hold deadly appeal.
This is why I warn you that Literary Rogues could be a dangerous book for you or in the wrong, susceptible hands. Not everyone is meant to live hard. But it sure makes for a gripping read, as Literary Rogues is.
