In some ways, it comes off as one of those "I'm smarter than you" interviews. And that kind of thing makes me tired. I'm arguably smart (or at least, I was doggedly persistent enough to earn a Ph.D., and yes, I do think persistence is a big part of success in graduate school, at least as much as native intelligence is - I saw some very smart people wash out because they couldn't deal with their experiment not succeeding the first time, or having challenges with analyzing their data). But waving your intelligence around like a baton doesn't endear people to you. (That's something I learned fast, as a pedantic grade schooler. And there's a difference between being smart and looking smart, and I think the problem comes in looking smart....there's smart and there's pedantic and most people dislike pedants).
And calling other people "stupid" because of aesthetic choices annoys me. Yes, I reserve the right to call someone "stupid" if they text and drive, because that endangers their life and the lives of others. But someone who chooses to watch "Extreme Cheapskates" and similar shows? That's not my taste but whatever, I don't have the energy to judge someone who likes those. (Queenan calls book clubs "stupid". And he also rails against libraries, I presume from what he says, because they have "popular" books as well as the classics.
And he refers to mysteries as "trash," which frankly annoys me, because I LIKE a lot of the mysteries out there, I find them relaxing to read, and as he said: "And I think, in a way, people read for the same reason that kids play video games ... they like that world better. It works better, it's more exciting, and it usually has a more satisfactory ending." Yes. Like the person who committed a crime actually being caught and punished for it....And also, many mysteries in some way celebrate intelligence and being observant; the detective would not succeed were s/he not someone who paid attention to what was going on, who looked at the little details, and who thinks about things.
He also gives a short list of must-read books. Here they are, with my commentary:
Darwin - Marx - Wagner: Critique of a Heritage, by Jacques Barzun (Oh, I'm sure this would make me smarter if I read it. But I just look at that title and my brain goes "DO NOT WANT." I'd rather read "Godel, Escher, Bach", which is on my bookshelf but which I've not cracked because I've heard it's notoriously difficult)
A History of Western Philosophy, by Bertrand Russell (Again with the "spinach." Again, I'm sure it would be good for me to read it but I'm not sure I want to)
Madame Bovary, by Gustave Flaubert (Haven't read it but might someday)
The Sun Also Rises, by Ernest Hemingway (The Hemingway short stories I read, I found kind of depressing and not to my interest)
Père Goriot, by Honoré de Balzac (I want to read this one; I've read the modern novel about the young men secretly reading Balzac during the Cultural Revolution in China. Pere Goriot is one of the books they read; they refer to him as "Old Go")
The Great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzgerald (Read this one several times, first time for a high school lit class. I have to confess I find it a depressing book; none of the characters really do anything useful with their lives. Though maybe that's the point.)
Great Expectations, by Charles Dickens (Read it, liked it. I read this as an adult, never was exposed to much Dickens in school.)
Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Brontë (Read it as a teen, loved it then, re-read it as an adult and found it....perhaps a bit tiresome.)
Emma, Persuasion or Lady Susan, by Jane Austen (Another group on my to be read list. Have read Pride and Prejudice, I'm thinking perhaps Sense and Sensibility will be my next "classic" novel once I finish Bleak House. I enjoy Austen because she's not "goopy.")
Gulliver's Travels, by Jonathan Swift (Read about half of this a couple summers ago, was in a bad headspace and gave up on it because the cynicism depressed me. Probably will finish it someday)
The Iliad, by Homer (Read it in Great Books in college. Have the Fagles translation on my shelf now (it's supposed to be good) but can't quite bring myself to crack it open.)
Part of the reason I tend to hold off on things like "Godel, Escher, Bach" and re-reading the Iliad is that I read slowly, and I often don't have much time to read "for fun" - I may read an hour a day or so for research, but that's different from fun or cultural reading. (And yes, I consider, for myself, reading the "classics" fun.).
It took me about a year to finish reading "Middlemarch" but I consider that time well spent - the characters lived in my head during that time, I would think about them and their motivations and how they reacted to things as I went about the day. I actually think being able to read slowly, being able to take your time, is a great luxury. There's no pressure on me to finish the book, there are no reports to be written or expository essays, none of that. If I totally miss the big symbol that teachers harp on, that's OK.
I think my acceptance of reading slowly is partly in reaction to how I had to read in college (and to a lesser extent, in high school): I remember weeks in Great Books where I had to read more than 300 pages, on top of the other coursework I had. So you can't read deeply or "comfortably" when you have to go that speed. So now, as an adult out of school, when I read for enlightenment or culture, I allow myself to read slowly. I might only finish five or ten pages of a novel in a night. But that's okay. Sometimes I might need to go back and re-read parts to reacquaint myself with a certain character (Dickens is bad for this; he usually has forty or fifty different characters). And that's okay. There is no "reading police." (And I think sometimes I get a richer experience of a novel for my slow-reading and going-back-and-re-reading).
And I admit, sometimes I'd like to be able to be one of those people who can boast of how many books they read, and how many "difficult" books they read. (Dickens is, in some ways, "difficult" in the sense that his sentence structure is more complex than some modern writers, and he may use unfamiliar words, but his plots are definitely made to move the story along, and provide convenient cliff-hangers for serialization. I can see how he was the popular literature of his day - but his books are still enjoyable to modern people. Or at least, they are to me.) But I'm accepting that that may not be who I am, that I may be better suited to read fewer books more slowly but maybe get more out of them than I would from speeding through.
I choose mostly "classic" (Victorian British and older) literature because I like it. I've read a few modern novels that made me twitch or that disappointed me. (For example: woman has stable, kindhearted, but not very exciting boyfriend. She cheats on him with bad boy. Then she wonders why her life is falling apart. And I'm sitting there going, "I'm no Doctor of Love, but I can tell you exactly where you messed up, honey"). I did like "Life of Pi" (which I may re-read. I think I still have my copy....and I see now they have made a movie of it, which seems interesting to me; I'd think that was one book it would be hard to translate into a movie. I wonder how they handled the floating seaweed-forest island) and I liked "The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time" but there have been a lot more modern novels that just disappointed me, so I tend to avoid them.
I'm also discovering the early/midcentury British novels that are out there - light and fun and maybe not deep, but that still show a glimpse of a vanished world. And a big reason I read is for the escape - for the chance to see a time or a place foreign to my own. (That may be why some modern novels frustrate me; they are too much like the day-to-day life I see around me).
A History of Western Philosophy, by Bertrand Russell (Again with the "spinach." Again, I'm sure it would be good for me to read it but I'm not sure I want to)
Madame Bovary, by Gustave Flaubert (Haven't read it but might someday)
The Sun Also Rises, by Ernest Hemingway (The Hemingway short stories I read, I found kind of depressing and not to my interest)
Père Goriot, by Honoré de Balzac (I want to read this one; I've read the modern novel about the young men secretly reading Balzac during the Cultural Revolution in China. Pere Goriot is one of the books they read; they refer to him as "Old Go")
The Great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzgerald (Read this one several times, first time for a high school lit class. I have to confess I find it a depressing book; none of the characters really do anything useful with their lives. Though maybe that's the point.)
Great Expectations, by Charles Dickens (Read it, liked it. I read this as an adult, never was exposed to much Dickens in school.)
Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Brontë (Read it as a teen, loved it then, re-read it as an adult and found it....perhaps a bit tiresome.)
Emma, Persuasion or Lady Susan, by Jane Austen (Another group on my to be read list. Have read Pride and Prejudice, I'm thinking perhaps Sense and Sensibility will be my next "classic" novel once I finish Bleak House. I enjoy Austen because she's not "goopy.")
Gulliver's Travels, by Jonathan Swift (Read about half of this a couple summers ago, was in a bad headspace and gave up on it because the cynicism depressed me. Probably will finish it someday)
The Iliad, by Homer (Read it in Great Books in college. Have the Fagles translation on my shelf now (it's supposed to be good) but can't quite bring myself to crack it open.)
Part of the reason I tend to hold off on things like "Godel, Escher, Bach" and re-reading the Iliad is that I read slowly, and I often don't have much time to read "for fun" - I may read an hour a day or so for research, but that's different from fun or cultural reading. (And yes, I consider, for myself, reading the "classics" fun.).
It took me about a year to finish reading "Middlemarch" but I consider that time well spent - the characters lived in my head during that time, I would think about them and their motivations and how they reacted to things as I went about the day. I actually think being able to read slowly, being able to take your time, is a great luxury. There's no pressure on me to finish the book, there are no reports to be written or expository essays, none of that. If I totally miss the big symbol that teachers harp on, that's OK.
I think my acceptance of reading slowly is partly in reaction to how I had to read in college (and to a lesser extent, in high school): I remember weeks in Great Books where I had to read more than 300 pages, on top of the other coursework I had. So you can't read deeply or "comfortably" when you have to go that speed. So now, as an adult out of school, when I read for enlightenment or culture, I allow myself to read slowly. I might only finish five or ten pages of a novel in a night. But that's okay. Sometimes I might need to go back and re-read parts to reacquaint myself with a certain character (Dickens is bad for this; he usually has forty or fifty different characters). And that's okay. There is no "reading police." (And I think sometimes I get a richer experience of a novel for my slow-reading and going-back-and-re-reading).
And I admit, sometimes I'd like to be able to be one of those people who can boast of how many books they read, and how many "difficult" books they read. (Dickens is, in some ways, "difficult" in the sense that his sentence structure is more complex than some modern writers, and he may use unfamiliar words, but his plots are definitely made to move the story along, and provide convenient cliff-hangers for serialization. I can see how he was the popular literature of his day - but his books are still enjoyable to modern people. Or at least, they are to me.) But I'm accepting that that may not be who I am, that I may be better suited to read fewer books more slowly but maybe get more out of them than I would from speeding through.
I choose mostly "classic" (Victorian British and older) literature because I like it. I've read a few modern novels that made me twitch or that disappointed me. (For example: woman has stable, kindhearted, but not very exciting boyfriend. She cheats on him with bad boy. Then she wonders why her life is falling apart. And I'm sitting there going, "I'm no Doctor of Love, but I can tell you exactly where you messed up, honey"). I did like "Life of Pi" (which I may re-read. I think I still have my copy....and I see now they have made a movie of it, which seems interesting to me; I'd think that was one book it would be hard to translate into a movie. I wonder how they handled the floating seaweed-forest island) and I liked "The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time" but there have been a lot more modern novels that just disappointed me, so I tend to avoid them.
I'm also discovering the early/midcentury British novels that are out there - light and fun and maybe not deep, but that still show a glimpse of a vanished world. And a big reason I read is for the escape - for the chance to see a time or a place foreign to my own. (That may be why some modern novels frustrate me; they are too much like the day-to-day life I see around me).
3 comments:
I read to enjoy reading. Not to make someone else happy. And I can see why reading slowly would make the enjoyment last longer. I read a lot of mysteries b'c they are fast and enjoyable and just as you said, everything ends up the way it is supposed to. Altho I listened to Life of Pi as an audiobook and I was frankly so upset by it. So much of it was upsetting and not great car reading. EEP!
His list sounds like a list of "books you can boast about having read" rather than a list of books that you would read because they are, in some manner, "great." I gather he doesn't say WHY these are the books on the list? They don't strike me as all being particularly masterly, or as teaching great Life Lessons: they do strike me as titles everyone would recognize and go "Ooooo."
So the guy read some books.
Whoop de freakin' doo.
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