Here’s something from Britain’s Telegraph that was great fun to read (and watch, too): A survey asking some well-known literary types what canonical work of literature they hadn’t read, and were ashamed to admit it.
The video for this thing is fun, with people such as Simon Sebag Montefiore, celebrated for his books about Stalin, admitting he’s never read Wuthering Heights, which didn’t stop him from winning the highest marks in a school class years ago for his paper on the Bronte novel.
The posts on this piece are even better. There are a lot of them, and several writers and books keep coming back as the most unread, and while I expected Joyce and Proust to pop up a lot, I was a little surprised to see Dickens come up repeatedly as someone readers pretended to read but assiduously avoided.
Joyce: As for Ulysses, which comes up often here, I’ve read it once and have almost finished reading it a second time. I decided to read it again because I couldn’t possibly catch all the references, and many sections took very slow, careful reading to become clear.
But I loved it; there is a great deal of music in Joyce, both literal and in the way the language sounds, and I found it intoxicating. Few other books I can think of really put you in the sights, sounds and scents of a specific place like this one does, nor do many authors really give you interior monologues that are as accurate, that is to say, ambiguous, as Joyce does.
To me, it’s an astounding achievement, even though there’s quite a bit of it that’s still obscure to me. Makes it worth reading again, to my mind. But I haven’t tried Finnegans Wake (though the American Scholar had a good piece earlier this year about a Finnegans Wake reading group; maybe that’s the best way to read Ulysses, too.)
Dickens: Great Expectations is my favorite novel of his, though I haven’t read his favorite, which was David Copperfield, nor have I gotten to Bleak House. I have enjoyed Oliver Twist, A Tale of Two Cities, A Christmas Carol, and his American Sketches. I love his work, though, and am looking forward to reading more (a good TV adaptation of Martin Chuzzlewit whetted my appetite for that novel, so maybe that’s next.)
Faulkner: He comes in for abuse in these posts, but I thought Light in August was magnificent. Like Joyce, difficult to read, but also like him, absolutely redolent of a time and place. I like to say, like the preacher’s wife, “Now you see what I have bore,” but no one seems to get the reference, so I’ll stop. Haven’t read The Sound and the Fury, though.
Austen: A frequent topic in the posts. I’ve only read Pride and Prejudice, which I enjoyed. Liked the Sense and Sensibility movie that Emma Thompson did, though.
Woolf: No one in the posts seems to like Orlando (again, a good movie, with Tilda Swinton); I didn’t mind it, but I liked Mrs. Dalloway much better. I love the opening pages in particular, which also are steeped in a specific London.
Melville: Poor old Herman. Everybody in the posts seems to have ignored Moby-Dick, which I greatly enjoyed the second time around. During the first, I found the whaling and digressions really tedious, but now I like them.
This, too, is a deep picture of a particular culture alive at a particular time in American history, and it’s fascinating.
Two other things about this little contest: Many of the works resisted here are long-winded novels of an earlier time, and because technology allows us to have much more immediate entertainment, the draw of these books for their diversionary value is much smaller than it used to be.
If you really want to read something like Moby-Dick, you have to plan it, you have to give it time, and you have to let it speak to you on its own terms. You can’t demand that it interest you right away; many of these books aren’t designed this way.
Henry James’s novels, for instance, I find quite difficult to read because his characters speak what strikes me as nothing approaching actual speech even in late Victorian and early Edwardian high society, and he tends to spend great swaths of time mulling over very small events. But even with my distaste for his aspect of his art, I liked The Golden Bowl, tough as it was to get through (the movie’s not bad, either).
It’s not exactly my kind of novel, but some of the descriptive writing is astonishingly beautiful, and the overwhelming sense of erotic tension throughout makes it worth putting up with his longueurs.
The other thing worth noting is that many of the books we have read for classes, and even on which we have written papers, aren’t in our conscious memory anymore and so have to be re-read. Most of the books I’ve mentioned reading here I read quite a while ago, and many of their details have gone into hiding in the deep recesses of my brain.
But I think good reading is often about re-reading; some of the greatest works of our literature require repeated encounters. If you’re really interested in a painter like Cezanne, for instance, you’d do as Rilke did and go back again and again to study the paintings. You wouldn’t hear the Beethoven Ninth just once, like it, and decide you never needed to hear it again. Same thing with great writing. Truly understanding it requires renewed acquaintance.
One last little postscript: Someone who posts on the Telegraph story says he or she is Canadian but ignores Canadian literature. That’s too bad, because there goes Robertson Davies, one of my favorite writers.
Tempest-Tost, for instance, is a lovely summer read, and his next-to-last novel, Murther and Walking Spirits, is a good character study as well as a nifty historical fiction. And then there’s The Lyre of Orpheus, which deals with a young composer. Davies was a terrific writer, and his fellow Great White Northerner is missing out.
Anyone out there want to ‘fess up? Take a look at the story, the video, and the posts, and post here: What :”great book” haven’t you read, and why?
1 Comment
September 1, 2008 at 4:00 pm
So many unread books it’s hard to know where to start, like having read only one by Dickens, “Great Expectations.” But the lapse of mine that’s most puzzling and shameful is “Hound of the Baskervilles.”
As a boy I read the 56 Holmes short stories, the two short novels and half of a third, “Valley of Fear,” before losing interest during the interminable flashback. But “Hound” was the longest single work and that was my excuse for putting it off until last, even though it’s only (I just checked the pristine copy I’ve owned for 30 years) 173 pages. The one Holmes book virtually everyone reads and it’s the one I’ve never read. Sheesh.
I hear you about making time to “schedule” books. I read “Moby-Dick” as a New Year’s resolution, beginning Jan. 1, 2008, and finishing in late March. Just five or ten pages per day, but the important thing was to keep going. Wonderful book, including the digressions. This approach worked so well I’m thinking of tackling another doorstop in 2009, maybe “Don Quixote.” They’re a nice challenge and it was satisfying to return “Moby” to the shelf, no longer unread.