Start with 19th century literature
In the wake of all this chatter about whether the next generation will be able and willing to read books, I've been thinking a lot about my own responsibilities. What do I want young people to do? What do I think it is good for them to do?
What I'm capable of stating quite strongly is that people who aspire to be writers of fiction ought to read the great 19th-century fiction writers.
Generally speaking, we read the classics for two reasons. The first is that they expand our ability to read, write, and argue. The great 19th-century novels are somewhat long and are usually written (even in translation) in a more difficult syntax, with longer sentences and more dependent clauses, in a way that is typical of how people wrote in English until quite recently. Reading these books will train you to read and concentrate. But to do so without conscious effort. The books don't need to be studied; they can just be enjoyed.
Dickens, Eliot, Emily and Charlotte Bronte, Austen, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Chekhov, and Gogol—these authors ought to be enjoyable. They might not be initially, but I have a hard time imagining that any aspiring writer of fiction won't find at least one book amongst this clutch that grabs their interest. And after reading that book, they'll be better able to read others. Personally, I think Emma was the book that launched me onto a genuine love for 19th-century literature, but other peoples’ entry-point might be different.
If you're an American and you aspire to write fiction, you should probably also read Edith Wharton, (early) Henry James, Willa Cather, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Herman Melville (by which I mean Moby Dick).
I feel very confident in stating that an aspiring fiction writer ought to start reading these authors. It seems relatively uncontroversial to say, but most fiction writers haven't done it, unless they were forced to in college (which most weren't).
One thing I like about Brandon Taylor is that he clearly embarked upon something like this course of reading, and it very much shows in how he writes about literature. Same thing with Jonathan Franzen, Jonathan Lethem, and a number of other writers we could name.
Beyond that, it becomes harder to say. That's really the trouble with these things, no? Who ought to read what? Both the subject and the object are very much up for debate. What if you're not a fiction writer, but just have general intellectual ambitions? What if you're not a writer, but some other kind of artist? What if you aspire to be a leader in business, government, or the military? What if you have no public aspirations, and are only seeking wisdom and personal consolation?
And, by the way, wasn’t there some second reason for reading the classics? Some reason I left dangling? Well, that’s obvious: it’s to gain metaphysical truth—something I’ve written about before, albeit awhile ago.
But we all know the kind of person who ought to read the Great Books: someone in their twenties who has some kind of intellectual aspirations.
This is the kind of person who really ought to immerse themselves in the best thought of the past, but who finds instead that they're systematically redirected into reading only contemporary stuff instead. They think they’re really adventuring if they read Raymond Carver or Ralph Ellison. Which is all fine to read, but it’s still very contemporary.
Most contemporary American kids have the American research university as their event horizon—writers who aren’t in some way shaped by our university system are unlikely to impinge much on the American twentysomething’s awareness.1 Kids are scared to read anything that’s too alien, and there’s a reason for that—it’s because their professors are themselves often very parochial readers!
I find that most PhDs and professors are extremely wary of reading primary texts at all, even those that’re written in languages they can understand. Unless something is specifically their field of expertise, they usually don’t read it. That's because they’re so aware of the fact that their own thoughts about the book might not be the appropriate thoughts—the thoughts that a true scholar on the subject would likely have.
And that becomes even more true when it comes to reading a book in translation. They don't read, say, The Mahabharata because it's not their field, and they're wary of having thoughts about it that differ from the thoughts of, say, a professional Sanskritologist.
Professors don't read very much outside their subject matter area themselves, so it's no surprise that students don't either. It's just an inescapable part of the general vibe that universities give off—universities are temples of authority, and they discourage reading except under someone's tutelage.
As a result, books go unread, except by the people who are paid to read them.
If you’re put off by reading translations because you hate the idea that you’re not reading the original author’s words, that’s understandable. I think that fear is unmerited—even if translation robs us of a lot of the poetry, much of the meaning and power of a text still shine through—but it’s a defensible position. Still, that provides no excuse for avoiding literature in English.
To me it seems like a huge mistake to not prioritize reading 17th, 18th, and 19th century English literature. The culture that produced even a comparatively recent writer like Jane Austen or George Eliot was much more alien than the culture that produced, say, Raymond Carver or Ralph Ellison.2
And that alien-ness is precisely why you read the Great Books. To get a genuinely different perspective. It’s such a gift that we have these amazing authors that we can read in the original quite easily. We talk about not being to read, say, Proust in the original or Tolstoy in the original. Well…we have George Eliot! And, even further back, we have Defoe, Henry Fielding, Samuel Richardson. We can read them all in the original.3
They’re writing in a form that’s recognizable to us—the novel—which provides guardrails, so we sort of understand what we’re reading, but the worldview is quite different! It’s so much more alien than, say, a contemporary Indian or Japanese novel could be, because a contemporary novelist is always, no matter where they live, touched by modernity—by that huge change in mores and attitudes that affected Britain first, starting in the mid-18th century, and then gradually the entire world. If you go back even further, we’ve got Milton, Shakespeare or Chaucer, writers we can read in the original who are mostly untouched by modernity. That’s incredible. That’s exactly as incredible as being able to read Homer in the original.
And you can do it on your own, without any aid or language instruction. I think it’s just a very natural thing for a curious person in their twenties to start reaching further and further back into the history of English literature. Oftentimes, all they need is to be reassured that this is in fact something it's possible to do on your own.
I don't think there's any particular need for reading clubs or for the Great Books movement itself, for that matter. We all know the books that are important.
Amongst the English the big names are: Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Defoe, Fielding, Wordsworth, Keats, Byron, Austen, Emily and Charlotte Bronte, George Eliot, and Dickens.
Amongst the Russians, the names are Tolstoy, Chekhov, Dostoevsky, and Gogol.
I find that all the quibbling about these lists tends to be about the 20th-century writers. Which is definitely fine, it’s fun to argue—but in practice very few people are reading Milton without reading Woolf. I love Woolf, but you can spend your life reading just Woolf, Joyce, Faulkner, etc! Modernism sometimes seems like a bit of a trap to me—a sterile blossom. Definitely read the great modernist classics, but if you were to start skipping books I’d say Woolf is more skippable than, say, George Eliot.4
Reading English-language authors is more important than reading French, German, Italian, Latin, or Greek authors in translation. Of foreign language authors, only the Russians are truly essential for an American. The Russians simply encapsulate all that's best in Continental literature, and their influence on contemporary American letters far surpasses that of any other non-English literary tradition (besides that contained in the Bible).
Anyway, people should go out and read these books! I think that's a good use of time! And it doesn’t take that long. Like, I’m pretty sure I’ve read at least one work by all the authors I’ve mentioned so far (besides Raymond Carver), and I’m only thirty-eight.
Reading the Great Books is a lifelong endeavor, but reading the fifteen or twenty authors I’ve mentioned so far—it doesn’t take a lifetime. It’s something you can do in your twenties, after you get out of college. I see tons of people on Substack who've realized this and are basically in that phase right now:
and come to mind.4Usually when you pick up a classic book, there's some kind of introductory material at the beginning, and that intro material is about all you need.
Yes, there's so many caveats you can make about this activity. Without context, you can't really understand the text. Sure...so what's the alternative? If you read a Penguin Classic or Oxford Classic, then the context is in the book—there's footnotes and intro material. Tons of it. Either it's possible to supply the context and make the book readable, or it's impossible, and the book shouldn't be read. If it's the latter, then what are we doing? Are we really saying nobody should read old books anymore? That's silly. Obviously we should read old books. Even professors think old books are important. But their livelihoods are tied up in this system that makes it very difficult for them, personally, to read old books outside their specialty area. That sucks for them, but it's not really a problem that applies to the rest of us.
P.S. Just wanted to note that I am going to post my novella, Money Matters, on Thursday, November 1st. It’s a longer than normal tale, but it’s strongly influenced by my reading of 19th-century novels, particularly in the frankness with which they talk about money and social mores. It’s about a guy who’s inherited a house from his uncle, and he owes a lot of money in property taxes, but he doesn’t really want to sell. The guy is a bit of an alcoholic, but I don’t think he’s a bad guy—he knows that left to his own devices he’ll end up destroying this house, like people inevitably do in stories like this. So he schemes to get back his ex-girlfriend, a nurse, who might basically be willing to support him, in exchange for this house. The only problem is he’s also seeing (and perhaps living with) this other girl, who might be trying to kill him.
This one—this is the book! Just sit down and read this book. It’s the one.
Originally I used Hemingway as an example in this paragraph, but then I remembered that Hemingway did not go to college! Which seems incredible to me, but just goes to show how parochial I myself am. He was certainly from the class of people who often sent their kids to college, but even amongst this class, going to college was less universal in the pre-War era than it is today. Instead of going to college, he started working as a reporter instead. Ralph Ellison and Raymond Carver were from a class of people who, if they’d been born fifty years earlier, probably would not have gone to college. But because they were born in the 20th century, they did.
Raymond Carver, to be clear, seems like a great writer. I’ve read a number of his short stories, in the passive way you’re made to read them when you’ve done a degree in creative-writing. I don’t know if I’ve actually sat down to read a collection of his, but I highly doubt it—I certainly don’t remember doing so. I have read Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, which is justifiably famous, and Ellison himself is a writer who was shaped by reading Chekhov and who often fought, rhetorically, to place himself in a literary tradition that went beyond his own time and place. His essay on this topic (“The World and the Jug”) is probably taught more often than his actual fiction!
With many of these older writers, they often used a capitalization style that was quite different from what we’re used to. I don’t really know the history of this. I think it was more common in the 17th century than in the 18th. Regardless, modern editions often make a number of changes to the presentation of older texts—changes intended to make them more readable for contemporary eye. I used to not pay very much attention to the front-matter of these books, where they’d clarify what exact changes they’d made. I remember that I used to find German-style capitalization (where nouns are capitalized, even if they’re not at the beginning of the sentence) to be extremely distracting, and I’d search for texts that corrected this usage. I can’t even remember which texts I’m talking about precisely. But still, this is a change that’s much more minor than, say, translating a text.
Now, there’s a broader question, which is…will reading these books make you successful in the intellectual marketplace? Well, maybe. I’ve definitely made it work for me! But I do think it’ll give you a better chance of producing the kind of work that deserves to have success, regardless of whether it actually achieves success or not.
Love this. Reading is like exercising. You have to work up to your goals gradually, so as not to injure yourself. 19th century British literature is a great place to start: not too hard, not too easy, but probably just outside of most people's comfort zones. If you keep pushing back the boundaries of what you can tolerate, you will, sooner or later, be able to tackle anything at all, and genuinely enjoy it. You'll also become a better judge of what would you ought to read next.
Absolutely agree. All 19th century foreign literature, which we call "classic", I read in my high school during trigonometry or other boring classes. (Don't recommend this to today's students.) It connected me to the world, to different cultures, to understanding the people, their history and so on... And Russian novel of 19 c.! By the away, none of them ever studied how to write, they only read the others, their talents were extraordinary and that was enough to create the Literature, we admire. And how greedily we follow all the modern foreign literature which was coming from West...