I have spent the day immersed in Leave it To Psmith, and what a magnificent day it was. And I have now purchased Summer Lightning, and I refuse to feel the least bit guilty about it, so there.
On a related note, I also happened to read a (mostly) lovely essay by Salman Rushdie titled “Ask Yourself Which Books You Truly Love“:
All human life is here, brave and cowardly, honorable and dishonorable, straight-talking and conniving, and the stories ask the greatest and most enduring question of literature: How do ordinary people respond to the arrival in their lives of the extraordinary? And they answer: Sometimes we don’t do so well, but at other times we find resources within ourselves we did not know we possessed, and so we rise to the challenge, we overcome the monster, Beowulf kills Grendel and Grendel’s more fearsome mother as well, Red Riding Hood kills the wolf, or Beauty finds the love within the beast and then he is beastly no more. And that is ordinary magic, human magic, the true wonder of the wonder tale.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/24/opinion/sunday/salman-rushdie-world-literature.html
And (or should the word be but?) because us economists are always supposed to look at all ides of the issue, here’s the other side of the spectrum:
As a simple rule of thumb, just imagine every time you’re telling a good vs. evil story, you’re basically lowering your I.Q. by ten points or more.
https://fs.blog/2012/01/the-danger-of-storytelling/
(And finally, do remember that The Truth Always Lies Somewhere In The Middle)
EconForEverybody 