Zombie Mayhem

With time as perhaps our scarcest good, isn't a bad book one we might define as "not worthwhile," that is, as too unimportant, uninteresting, or unrewarding to justify spending time, money, or effort on it? Arthur Schopenhauer once quipped, "One can never read too little of bad, or too much of good books." Therefore, he maintains in his essay "On Reading and Books," "In order to read what is good one must make it a condition never to read what is bad; for life is short, and both time and strength limited."

Following this precept—time management and all that—I am the lucky reader of very few "bad books." This is cause for self-congratulation: my time's well spent! But I am haunted by the question: what if those books I have deemed unworthy of my time aren't really bad? Should I not give them a try—and start reading Pride and Prejudice and Zombies (2009), and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and Zombie Jim (2009), and other classics mixed with zombie mayhem?