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.
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...
Yes! It’s always especially confusing to me that reading 19th century English literature or even Greek stuff is not considered diverse, given the cultural diversity that you point out. Sometimes the double argument is even made that someone like Swift or Eliot is both not diverse and is not writing “for” current readers, which just seems like a contradiction.
Yeah I don't totally expect everyone to agree with me, but...given that we believe race is a social construct then...why is reading dead, white authors not diverse? Like...why is Shakespeare more or less my ancestor than Kalidasa? Surely it can't be just because I share more DNA with Kalidasa.
I feel like it’s because it’s easier to reuse the old symbols that were once used to justify “western” superiority, just reverse their meaning, than it is to construct a totally new imaginary that would actually fit our more enlightened understanding.
Yeah and it goes the other way too. If we are all one race, then Kalidasa does belong to everyone! And now there are a lot of POC with some vested interest in retaining exclusive rights to their own culture. Seems silly to me, but literally nobody agrees with me on these things
I agree 1000% about the 19th century novel being the right place to start for most people most of the time when it comes to literature. It is like the Beatles or Beethoven: as close to ageless as it gets, forms a lingua franca, even people who distrust it for being too popular or old-fashioned are formed by it and don't honestly believe it is bad.
As an academia-adjacent person I don't think professors on average are *quite* as illiterate and obscurantist as you say, but plenty are, I see where you get the impression and I wish I could object more forcefully...
My experience in US academia has been that the administrative demands placed on teachers and the research demands placed on scholars leave little emotional room for the leisure it takes to be a lifelong learner. That same sort of attitude ("idle hands are the devil's playground") has also discouraged students from pursuing education outside the assessment. Tenure-track professors may start off with a love of learning, but eventually get hammered into (1) the narrow range of expertise needed to get published, or (2) the superficial knowledge needed to teach survey courses. There is little time or energy left for non-urgent reading. So young professor are often more widely read than their older colleagues.
This is certainly true and you see both factors at work constantly. Still, just as according to Adam Smith there is a great deal of ruin in a nation, the academic humanities, social sciences and philosophy retain an enormous amount of true learning and curiosity of the kind that transcends mere expertise. The non-STEM portions of the university are decaying rapidly, but it would still take a long time for them to collapse (intellectually or otherwise).
I think it's true that people get into the humanities because they love literature and love to read, but...the incentives of the system really discourage people from following and maintaining that curiosity. It's a trade-off, because you genuinely _do_ become an expert in your actual field. And that's a worthwhile thing! It just means you're not a very good role model for your students, who tend to be generalists rather than specialists. This is a problem with the research university (versus liberal arts) model as a whole--the education it offers just isn't suited for the kind of life most students will lead.
I think that an Anglosphere-specific problem, one that’s is particularly bad in the USA, is that there has never been much of a place in our conception of general culture for philosophy. (Catholic institutions are a bit of an exception here.) John Dewey and Bertrand Russell were big cultural tone-setters, but after them anglophone philosophy very much wanted to be a hyper-specialized discipline similar to science, *not* a part of the general culture of the common reader.
Partly for this reason the so-called “theory” that emerged from the very different traditions France and Germany hit us in a very strange way in the 1960s. It became the property of literary academics who lacked the broad culture and philosophical sophistication of figures like Foucault, Althusser or Adorno. In American hands “theory” became a kind of method, at worst a kind of rote jargon. As a result, specialization often came to mean writing and thinking about literature in a way that had very little to do with the reading experience of the curious generalist.
In principle there’s no reason why a Willa Cather specialist can’t teach a crackerjack course on Spenser, and often the Cather specialist can do just that.
This is great. I tell people who don't fancy "old prose" to start with a modern book they love (Susannah Clarke, J.R.R.T, etc) and work back through the chains of influence.
Yes to reading the authors you mention. But triple yes to re-reading them at different stages of life. I'm 62 and my reading experiences have never been better. Currently re-reading Anthony Powell's A Dance To The Music Of Time. Underrated.
Yes I don't re-read that many books, but I do re-read some of these great books. I reread Proust a few years ago and enjoyed it immensely more than the first time through (to my surprise).
I absolutely agree about 19th Century literature. And Middlemarch!
I read, and loved, all of Austen (including the juvenilia) decades ago (with rereading since). Emma is probably my favorite too. But I didn't continue to much more 19th Century fiction. Emily and Charlotte, to be sure, but I bounced off Wuthering Heights and liked Jane Eyre in more of a YA fashion, if that makes sense. I read a bit of Dickens (Nicholas Nickleby and A Christmas Carol) but didn't continue.
So I think it was Middlemarch that lit the fire. I read that in 2016, I think. That is truly a revelatory novel. Around the same time I read James' Washington Square, and Cather's short novel A Lost Lady. That too was a revelation -- Cather is an amazing writer, and I proceeded eventually to My Antonia (one of the Great American Novels without doubt) and O Pioneers! And Wharton too -- I read The House of Mirth almost by accident (the only interesting book I could find on an Ipad I was stuck with on a trip once.) Another great novel -- and Wharton's short stories are also astonishing.
More recently: Trollope. Terribly underrated. Thackeray -- Vanity Fair of course, but also Henry Esmond, which I like even more. Dumas (The Count of Monte Cristo may not be a Great Book, but it is indisputably Great Entertainment.) Tolstoy. Gaskell (North and South is wonderful.) Oliphant. Braddon (another Entertainer, I suppose, as is Wilkie Collins.) And David Copperfield finally -- another revelation. Manzoni's The Betrothed.
I know that I must get to Chekhov soon, and I have a Collected Stories. And more Trollope. And Bleak House and Great Expectations. Flaubert. Of the reading of books there is no end, and I suppose that's a good thing!
I forgot to add -- Carver really is a great short story writer. "So Much Water So Close to Home" is about as terrifying story as any I've read. And "What We Talk About When We Talk About Love" is astonishing. And, dammit, they are better in the Lish-edited versions!
Also, Kipling, especially late Kipling*, is essential.
(*That is to say, 20th Century Kipling. Though his earlier stories are very good as well. I think I've read everything except the Stalky stories, and the very late dog stories, and the novels. (Though I have read Kim.))
All of your recommendations (that I've read) are great of course! I did consider putting Thackeray on my list, but he felt a bit British for my audience. But I love Thackeray, love Gaskell (have read all her books), love Lady Audley's Secret, love Manzoni! LOVE TROLLOPE. He's probably the 19thc author who's given me the most pleasure, honestly--I've read nineteen of his books! What an incredible, gentle, thoughtful world he builds.
And Count of Monte Cristo is just so gripping. It feels silly to recommend it because the book is so entertaining! It surely doesn't need to be read like homework at all.
Should I really read Kipling?! I've never even considered him before--where should I start?
Hmmm. I actually read a bunch of Kipling's Indian stories first (my grandfather left me a uniform edition of a lot of Kipling's collections) -- books like Under the Deodars and Soldiers Three, and I liked those a good bit. Stories like "The Phantom 'Rickshaw" and "The Strange Ride of Morrowbee Juke" and of course "The Man Who Would be King" get recommended a lot, and they are very fine.
But then I proceeded to the 20th Century collections, and the greatest stories in them are a step above -- he is one of the greatest of all 20th Century English short story writers. The first 20th Century collection is TRAFFICS AND DISCOVERIES, and it has "Mrs Bathurst", "'They'", and "Wireless", all great stories. The best of the stories are sprinkled through most of the collections, really -- I particularly like "Dayspring Mishandled". "Mary Postgate", "Swept and Garnished", "As Easy as A.B.C.", "The Village That Voted the Earth Was Flat", "The Janeites", "The Wish House", and "The Gardener", but I am sure I am missing some. I guess looking at where those come from, ACTIONS AND REACTIONS and DEBITS AND CREDITS are also great collections.
Perhaps it's a bit gauche to argue, but the thing that always bugs me about Great Books discourse in the US is that it assumes the reader to be a kind of lowest common denominator—an American with no history (or sense of history), no language except English, and no inherent interest in what happens outside of the Anglophone literary world. Yet the comments thread to this very post demonstrates the exact opposite: It's full of people who have fashioned their own very cool personal canon from the one with a capital C. In my reading life, I've come across way more uncritical adoration of certain authors of so-called Great Books than critical assessments that might tell us, for instance, that late Henry James is bad, late Joyce is bad, that Shakespeare wrote a lot of mediocre plays that really should be dropped in favor of the best work by his fellow Elizabethans, that much of Tolstoy's early work is uneven, and much of his late work incomprehensible, and so on. In our desperation to defend Great Books, I think we often end up defending bad work by brilliant authors. Instead of canonizing them, what would it be like if we tried to humanize them? What if we wrote a book about all the Great Books that totally suck? (And, just as crucially, why they suck?) This is the Great Books discourse I am waiting for.
p.s. Willa Cather and Edith Wharton are gods made flesh, and I will hear no argument against their otherwordly genius :)
The ecumenical outlook is fine, but ultimately it offers no guidance to the reader. People are allowed to read whatever they'd like, but don't they want to hear what I think is important? We have only one life to live, and even the best of us will surely read no more than five thousand books within that life. One of those five thousand should be Middlemarch.
Writing about the Great Books that suck is kinda silly, because very few of them suck. To say that The Cossacks isn't very good is kind of a silly thing to say--nobody is out there recommending the Cossacks. Same thing with Coriolanus. It's a straw-man argument. The actual Great Book--Anna Karenina, War and Peace, Hamlet, King Lear, etc--these books do not suck.
Also, late Henry James is extremely good--just not for everyone.
Having spent a fair amount of time with a pack of 18 y/o college freshman in the last few months, I can confidently say that "reading" isn't anywhere near the top of the list. From my perspective, it's looking like schools responded to digital media by making engagement with print media *less* fun for students.
>>Herman Melville (by which I mean Moby Dick)
It's a shame that Moby Dick is pretty much the only Melville novel that gets recommended and read, because he produced some really fun, weird, and truly unforgettable dumpster fires of longform fiction.
>>Raymond Carver
I trust you've read "How Iowa Flattened Literature?" I'm still convinced that a major problem of fiction (particularly "literary" fiction) is that the peculiar incestuous relationship between Iowa-inspired MFA programs, agents, and publishers had locked the scene into a kind of artificial stasis. An older friend of mine who does routinely visit Barnes and Noble and buy new releases recently told me that if she picks up a book, glances at the author bio in the dust jacket, and reads "Brown University, Iowa Writer's Workshop, lives in Brooklyn," she puts it back down because she already knows what she's getting.
I'm an English prof at a liberal arts college and I read everything, especially outside my area of expertise. I obviously don't know the English professors that you do, but in my experience, they are much wider readers than you give them credit for.
I had another English professor in my comments agreeing with me, so my perspective is surely not completely out of line, but I'm glad it's not your experience!
I enjoyed this piece. As someone who grew up reading a lot of genre fiction, majored in English lit (and was a terrible reader there), who now writes several hours a day, even I’ve had very long periods where I struggled to pick up a book. Any book.
I do believe there’s a lot to be gotten from the classics, whether you’re a writer or not, and I think well-articulated arguments like these will help encourage people to read them.
I also believe that technology—smartphones, social media—is doing real harm to our attention spans. I’m just old enough that I remember not having them, and even I struggle to keep away, knowing what effect they have on me. The idea of connecting to a time when they didn’t exist as you mentioned is quite appealing.
I'm really glad you included Moby-Dick as essential, even though you didn't like it! It's probably my number one. I don't think you included Ulysses here; I found some value in it (as much as I found in Gravity's Rainbow, far more than Infinite Jest) but I feel like everyone should read Moby Dick and The Odyssey before they should read Ulysses. Also, the progression from The Odyssey to Moby-Dick to Ulysses to Gravity's Rainbow to Infinite Jest really proves your thesis here: there's some serious diminishing returns as well go along in that progression.
I teach high school English, and I don't really push 19th-century novels in my AP Literature class unless students have gotten to a certain level. We read four choice novels (off of a giant list) and four as a class, and the only early lit one we read as a class is The Scarlet Letter, which is spicy enough for them to get over the language barrier. You really have to have total fluency in all of the different aspects of a novel in order to appreciate these books. Otherwise, they get bored, they don't read them, they fake it.
All the kids who are in a small discussion group where one of them is reading Anna Karenina are totally fascinated by it and keep saying "I should read that," but when they find out that she's reading 250 pages a week and they're reading 50 they back off.
I loved Ulysses! Almost too much! It really changed how I wrote, and it took a year or so for my writing to recover. I do think a certain kind of person should read it--both because it's enjoyable and for bragging rights =]
I agree with everything you're saying. Reading these 19th-century books--it's just a skill. It's not a matter of intelligence or even literacy. I do think reading these books improves your literacy considerably--perhaps more than reading any other kind of book. There is an initial learning curve, and it takes the right book to bump someone over that. For each person, the book is different, but I have faith that somewhere amongst these authors most people who have the fluency to read, say, Grapes of Wrath, will find a book that they can enjoy.
Personally, I was assigned Pride and Prejudice in 10th grade, and I didn't read it! At the time I read mostly sci-fi novels, so I just couldn't really understand P&P. Too difficult, too alien. In college I started reading 20th-century literature, Fitzgerald and Marquez, etc, and then I finally had the fluency. I think this 100 percent proves the point you're making. There's just a progression that kids ought to follow. Most kids who've gone to college, they're capable of enjoying, say, Hemingway. And if they're capable of enjoying Hemingway, there's probably at least one 19th-century novel they're capable of enjoying. And once they've enjoyed that, they'll enjoy others.
Yep, P&P is over assigned—-I’ve got a bunch of copies of it, I offer it, too many kids take me up on it who then get frustrated. It doesn’t make me want to assign it.
I wonder if Edith Wharton could be the gateway drug here: the kids who read The Age of Innocence and The House of Mirth LOVE them, and they’d be more ready for P&P then. Unfortunately I don’t have 40 copies of a Wharton book so we can’t do it as a whole class read.
I find it kind of scandalous that we can call a class where students can’t read, like, Dickens “AP”. I just whipped through a tale of two cities for the first time ever in about two days in an absolute rush of absorption. If there’s anything particularly baroque or challenging about it, I sincerely don’t know what it’s supposed to be; it’s not even long!
I mean, it's not that they can't, it's that most of them just haven't read enough literature in their lives up to there to really enjoy it. This is Naomi's point, I think: there is actually a progression here for kids with chops, who get bored by YA fiction in about 5th grade and start reading Steinbeck or Hemingway in middle school. That was my progression: reading Mice and Men and The Red Pony in school, reading Grapes of Wrath outside of school. They should start reading 19th century literature in high school, but instead they're often encouraged to read MORE 20th century or even 21st century lit, and most of that stuff isn't deep enough.
I guess I find it surprising that modernists, relatively approachable ones to be sure, like Hemingway and Steinbeck are an easier way in for most students. I’m not sure how much closer the world of Grapes of Wrath really is to students’ experience than that of 19th-century society.
Hell, 50 years ago we read Tale of Two Cities in 10th grade, with a side helping of Burke's Reflections. And liked it. (The only thing that had a universal thumbs-down in that class was a long excerpt from Taha Hussein's Stream of Days; I've just in the last year or so been reminded of that and wondered if I should try again.)
One of the kids in that class asked if we could read ... I forget what it was, it was current at the time; the response was "You don't need my help for that."
This is Anne Brontë erasure! Tenant of Wildfell Hall is a fantastic read and the culture in it surrounding the Victorian concepts of childbearing, temperance, and early feminism are very alien, like you said. I wrote a paper for my masters program about Anne Brontë’s influence on Dickens so to include one must include the other.
Thank you, Naomi, I fully agree with the main ideas of the post.
But to me this: "Amongst the Russians, the names are Tolstoy, Chekhov, Dostoevsky, and Gogol" seems unbelievably scarce. I can maybe add ten more names to this list, and it wouldn't be enough. The main problem is translations, of course: this is the reason your "English" list has thirteen names to the "Russian" four.
This is so well put! Not patronising, not snobbish - just curious and passionate about good books. I always think that people who are put off by 19th century British books don't realise how sensational they can be - like, Thomas Hardy wrote some proper soap opera stuff
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...
Thank you.
Yes! It’s always especially confusing to me that reading 19th century English literature or even Greek stuff is not considered diverse, given the cultural diversity that you point out. Sometimes the double argument is even made that someone like Swift or Eliot is both not diverse and is not writing “for” current readers, which just seems like a contradiction.
Yeah I don't totally expect everyone to agree with me, but...given that we believe race is a social construct then...why is reading dead, white authors not diverse? Like...why is Shakespeare more or less my ancestor than Kalidasa? Surely it can't be just because I share more DNA with Kalidasa.
I feel like it’s because it’s easier to reuse the old symbols that were once used to justify “western” superiority, just reverse their meaning, than it is to construct a totally new imaginary that would actually fit our more enlightened understanding.
Yeah and it goes the other way too. If we are all one race, then Kalidasa does belong to everyone! And now there are a lot of POC with some vested interest in retaining exclusive rights to their own culture. Seems silly to me, but literally nobody agrees with me on these things
I agree 1000% about the 19th century novel being the right place to start for most people most of the time when it comes to literature. It is like the Beatles or Beethoven: as close to ageless as it gets, forms a lingua franca, even people who distrust it for being too popular or old-fashioned are formed by it and don't honestly believe it is bad.
As an academia-adjacent person I don't think professors on average are *quite* as illiterate and obscurantist as you say, but plenty are, I see where you get the impression and I wish I could object more forcefully...
My experience in US academia has been that the administrative demands placed on teachers and the research demands placed on scholars leave little emotional room for the leisure it takes to be a lifelong learner. That same sort of attitude ("idle hands are the devil's playground") has also discouraged students from pursuing education outside the assessment. Tenure-track professors may start off with a love of learning, but eventually get hammered into (1) the narrow range of expertise needed to get published, or (2) the superficial knowledge needed to teach survey courses. There is little time or energy left for non-urgent reading. So young professor are often more widely read than their older colleagues.
This is certainly true and you see both factors at work constantly. Still, just as according to Adam Smith there is a great deal of ruin in a nation, the academic humanities, social sciences and philosophy retain an enormous amount of true learning and curiosity of the kind that transcends mere expertise. The non-STEM portions of the university are decaying rapidly, but it would still take a long time for them to collapse (intellectually or otherwise).
I think it's true that people get into the humanities because they love literature and love to read, but...the incentives of the system really discourage people from following and maintaining that curiosity. It's a trade-off, because you genuinely _do_ become an expert in your actual field. And that's a worthwhile thing! It just means you're not a very good role model for your students, who tend to be generalists rather than specialists. This is a problem with the research university (versus liberal arts) model as a whole--the education it offers just isn't suited for the kind of life most students will lead.
I think that an Anglosphere-specific problem, one that’s is particularly bad in the USA, is that there has never been much of a place in our conception of general culture for philosophy. (Catholic institutions are a bit of an exception here.) John Dewey and Bertrand Russell were big cultural tone-setters, but after them anglophone philosophy very much wanted to be a hyper-specialized discipline similar to science, *not* a part of the general culture of the common reader.
Partly for this reason the so-called “theory” that emerged from the very different traditions France and Germany hit us in a very strange way in the 1960s. It became the property of literary academics who lacked the broad culture and philosophical sophistication of figures like Foucault, Althusser or Adorno. In American hands “theory” became a kind of method, at worst a kind of rote jargon. As a result, specialization often came to mean writing and thinking about literature in a way that had very little to do with the reading experience of the curious generalist.
In principle there’s no reason why a Willa Cather specialist can’t teach a crackerjack course on Spenser, and often the Cather specialist can do just that.
This is great. I tell people who don't fancy "old prose" to start with a modern book they love (Susannah Clarke, J.R.R.T, etc) and work back through the chains of influence.
Oooh yeah Susanna Clarke is a good one. Tolkien too.
Yes to reading the authors you mention. But triple yes to re-reading them at different stages of life. I'm 62 and my reading experiences have never been better. Currently re-reading Anthony Powell's A Dance To The Music Of Time. Underrated.
Yes I don't re-read that many books, but I do re-read some of these great books. I reread Proust a few years ago and enjoyed it immensely more than the first time through (to my surprise).
I’ve only read all of Proust once. But have read Swann’s Way many times. Have you tried Dance To the Music Of Time?
Never tried, I read Afternoon Men, and it didn't make a huge impression. Maybe I'll try dance at some point
I absolutely agree about 19th Century literature. And Middlemarch!
I read, and loved, all of Austen (including the juvenilia) decades ago (with rereading since). Emma is probably my favorite too. But I didn't continue to much more 19th Century fiction. Emily and Charlotte, to be sure, but I bounced off Wuthering Heights and liked Jane Eyre in more of a YA fashion, if that makes sense. I read a bit of Dickens (Nicholas Nickleby and A Christmas Carol) but didn't continue.
So I think it was Middlemarch that lit the fire. I read that in 2016, I think. That is truly a revelatory novel. Around the same time I read James' Washington Square, and Cather's short novel A Lost Lady. That too was a revelation -- Cather is an amazing writer, and I proceeded eventually to My Antonia (one of the Great American Novels without doubt) and O Pioneers! And Wharton too -- I read The House of Mirth almost by accident (the only interesting book I could find on an Ipad I was stuck with on a trip once.) Another great novel -- and Wharton's short stories are also astonishing.
More recently: Trollope. Terribly underrated. Thackeray -- Vanity Fair of course, but also Henry Esmond, which I like even more. Dumas (The Count of Monte Cristo may not be a Great Book, but it is indisputably Great Entertainment.) Tolstoy. Gaskell (North and South is wonderful.) Oliphant. Braddon (another Entertainer, I suppose, as is Wilkie Collins.) And David Copperfield finally -- another revelation. Manzoni's The Betrothed.
I know that I must get to Chekhov soon, and I have a Collected Stories. And more Trollope. And Bleak House and Great Expectations. Flaubert. Of the reading of books there is no end, and I suppose that's a good thing!
I forgot to add -- Carver really is a great short story writer. "So Much Water So Close to Home" is about as terrifying story as any I've read. And "What We Talk About When We Talk About Love" is astonishing. And, dammit, they are better in the Lish-edited versions!
Also, Kipling, especially late Kipling*, is essential.
(*That is to say, 20th Century Kipling. Though his earlier stories are very good as well. I think I've read everything except the Stalky stories, and the very late dog stories, and the novels. (Though I have read Kim.))
All of your recommendations (that I've read) are great of course! I did consider putting Thackeray on my list, but he felt a bit British for my audience. But I love Thackeray, love Gaskell (have read all her books), love Lady Audley's Secret, love Manzoni! LOVE TROLLOPE. He's probably the 19thc author who's given me the most pleasure, honestly--I've read nineteen of his books! What an incredible, gentle, thoughtful world he builds.
And Count of Monte Cristo is just so gripping. It feels silly to recommend it because the book is so entertaining! It surely doesn't need to be read like homework at all.
Should I really read Kipling?! I've never even considered him before--where should I start?
Hmmm. I actually read a bunch of Kipling's Indian stories first (my grandfather left me a uniform edition of a lot of Kipling's collections) -- books like Under the Deodars and Soldiers Three, and I liked those a good bit. Stories like "The Phantom 'Rickshaw" and "The Strange Ride of Morrowbee Juke" and of course "The Man Who Would be King" get recommended a lot, and they are very fine.
But then I proceeded to the 20th Century collections, and the greatest stories in them are a step above -- he is one of the greatest of all 20th Century English short story writers. The first 20th Century collection is TRAFFICS AND DISCOVERIES, and it has "Mrs Bathurst", "'They'", and "Wireless", all great stories. The best of the stories are sprinkled through most of the collections, really -- I particularly like "Dayspring Mishandled". "Mary Postgate", "Swept and Garnished", "As Easy as A.B.C.", "The Village That Voted the Earth Was Flat", "The Janeites", "The Wish House", and "The Gardener", but I am sure I am missing some. I guess looking at where those come from, ACTIONS AND REACTIONS and DEBITS AND CREDITS are also great collections.
Perhaps it's a bit gauche to argue, but the thing that always bugs me about Great Books discourse in the US is that it assumes the reader to be a kind of lowest common denominator—an American with no history (or sense of history), no language except English, and no inherent interest in what happens outside of the Anglophone literary world. Yet the comments thread to this very post demonstrates the exact opposite: It's full of people who have fashioned their own very cool personal canon from the one with a capital C. In my reading life, I've come across way more uncritical adoration of certain authors of so-called Great Books than critical assessments that might tell us, for instance, that late Henry James is bad, late Joyce is bad, that Shakespeare wrote a lot of mediocre plays that really should be dropped in favor of the best work by his fellow Elizabethans, that much of Tolstoy's early work is uneven, and much of his late work incomprehensible, and so on. In our desperation to defend Great Books, I think we often end up defending bad work by brilliant authors. Instead of canonizing them, what would it be like if we tried to humanize them? What if we wrote a book about all the Great Books that totally suck? (And, just as crucially, why they suck?) This is the Great Books discourse I am waiting for.
p.s. Willa Cather and Edith Wharton are gods made flesh, and I will hear no argument against their otherwordly genius :)
The ecumenical outlook is fine, but ultimately it offers no guidance to the reader. People are allowed to read whatever they'd like, but don't they want to hear what I think is important? We have only one life to live, and even the best of us will surely read no more than five thousand books within that life. One of those five thousand should be Middlemarch.
Writing about the Great Books that suck is kinda silly, because very few of them suck. To say that The Cossacks isn't very good is kind of a silly thing to say--nobody is out there recommending the Cossacks. Same thing with Coriolanus. It's a straw-man argument. The actual Great Book--Anna Karenina, War and Peace, Hamlet, King Lear, etc--these books do not suck.
Also, late Henry James is extremely good--just not for everyone.
>>What do I want young people to do?
Having spent a fair amount of time with a pack of 18 y/o college freshman in the last few months, I can confidently say that "reading" isn't anywhere near the top of the list. From my perspective, it's looking like schools responded to digital media by making engagement with print media *less* fun for students.
>>Herman Melville (by which I mean Moby Dick)
It's a shame that Moby Dick is pretty much the only Melville novel that gets recommended and read, because he produced some really fun, weird, and truly unforgettable dumpster fires of longform fiction.
>>Raymond Carver
I trust you've read "How Iowa Flattened Literature?" I'm still convinced that a major problem of fiction (particularly "literary" fiction) is that the peculiar incestuous relationship between Iowa-inspired MFA programs, agents, and publishers had locked the scene into a kind of artificial stasis. An older friend of mine who does routinely visit Barnes and Noble and buy new releases recently told me that if she picks up a book, glances at the author bio in the dust jacket, and reads "Brown University, Iowa Writer's Workshop, lives in Brooklyn," she puts it back down because she already knows what she's getting.
I'm an English prof at a liberal arts college and I read everything, especially outside my area of expertise. I obviously don't know the English professors that you do, but in my experience, they are much wider readers than you give them credit for.
I had another English professor in my comments agreeing with me, so my perspective is surely not completely out of line, but I'm glad it's not your experience!
That's fair.
I enjoyed this piece. As someone who grew up reading a lot of genre fiction, majored in English lit (and was a terrible reader there), who now writes several hours a day, even I’ve had very long periods where I struggled to pick up a book. Any book.
I do believe there’s a lot to be gotten from the classics, whether you’re a writer or not, and I think well-articulated arguments like these will help encourage people to read them.
I also believe that technology—smartphones, social media—is doing real harm to our attention spans. I’m just old enough that I remember not having them, and even I struggle to keep away, knowing what effect they have on me. The idea of connecting to a time when they didn’t exist as you mentioned is quite appealing.
I'm really glad you included Moby-Dick as essential, even though you didn't like it! It's probably my number one. I don't think you included Ulysses here; I found some value in it (as much as I found in Gravity's Rainbow, far more than Infinite Jest) but I feel like everyone should read Moby Dick and The Odyssey before they should read Ulysses. Also, the progression from The Odyssey to Moby-Dick to Ulysses to Gravity's Rainbow to Infinite Jest really proves your thesis here: there's some serious diminishing returns as well go along in that progression.
I teach high school English, and I don't really push 19th-century novels in my AP Literature class unless students have gotten to a certain level. We read four choice novels (off of a giant list) and four as a class, and the only early lit one we read as a class is The Scarlet Letter, which is spicy enough for them to get over the language barrier. You really have to have total fluency in all of the different aspects of a novel in order to appreciate these books. Otherwise, they get bored, they don't read them, they fake it.
All the kids who are in a small discussion group where one of them is reading Anna Karenina are totally fascinated by it and keep saying "I should read that," but when they find out that she's reading 250 pages a week and they're reading 50 they back off.
I loved Ulysses! Almost too much! It really changed how I wrote, and it took a year or so for my writing to recover. I do think a certain kind of person should read it--both because it's enjoyable and for bragging rights =]
I agree with everything you're saying. Reading these 19th-century books--it's just a skill. It's not a matter of intelligence or even literacy. I do think reading these books improves your literacy considerably--perhaps more than reading any other kind of book. There is an initial learning curve, and it takes the right book to bump someone over that. For each person, the book is different, but I have faith that somewhere amongst these authors most people who have the fluency to read, say, Grapes of Wrath, will find a book that they can enjoy.
Personally, I was assigned Pride and Prejudice in 10th grade, and I didn't read it! At the time I read mostly sci-fi novels, so I just couldn't really understand P&P. Too difficult, too alien. In college I started reading 20th-century literature, Fitzgerald and Marquez, etc, and then I finally had the fluency. I think this 100 percent proves the point you're making. There's just a progression that kids ought to follow. Most kids who've gone to college, they're capable of enjoying, say, Hemingway. And if they're capable of enjoying Hemingway, there's probably at least one 19th-century novel they're capable of enjoying. And once they've enjoyed that, they'll enjoy others.
Yep, P&P is over assigned—-I’ve got a bunch of copies of it, I offer it, too many kids take me up on it who then get frustrated. It doesn’t make me want to assign it.
I wonder if Edith Wharton could be the gateway drug here: the kids who read The Age of Innocence and The House of Mirth LOVE them, and they’d be more ready for P&P then. Unfortunately I don’t have 40 copies of a Wharton book so we can’t do it as a whole class read.
I find it kind of scandalous that we can call a class where students can’t read, like, Dickens “AP”. I just whipped through a tale of two cities for the first time ever in about two days in an absolute rush of absorption. If there’s anything particularly baroque or challenging about it, I sincerely don’t know what it’s supposed to be; it’s not even long!
I mean, it's not that they can't, it's that most of them just haven't read enough literature in their lives up to there to really enjoy it. This is Naomi's point, I think: there is actually a progression here for kids with chops, who get bored by YA fiction in about 5th grade and start reading Steinbeck or Hemingway in middle school. That was my progression: reading Mice and Men and The Red Pony in school, reading Grapes of Wrath outside of school. They should start reading 19th century literature in high school, but instead they're often encouraged to read MORE 20th century or even 21st century lit, and most of that stuff isn't deep enough.
I guess I find it surprising that modernists, relatively approachable ones to be sure, like Hemingway and Steinbeck are an easier way in for most students. I’m not sure how much closer the world of Grapes of Wrath really is to students’ experience than that of 19th-century society.
Hell, 50 years ago we read Tale of Two Cities in 10th grade, with a side helping of Burke's Reflections. And liked it. (The only thing that had a universal thumbs-down in that class was a long excerpt from Taha Hussein's Stream of Days; I've just in the last year or so been reminded of that and wondered if I should try again.)
One of the kids in that class asked if we could read ... I forget what it was, it was current at the time; the response was "You don't need my help for that."
This is Anne Brontë erasure! Tenant of Wildfell Hall is a fantastic read and the culture in it surrounding the Victorian concepts of childbearing, temperance, and early feminism are very alien, like you said. I wrote a paper for my masters program about Anne Brontë’s influence on Dickens so to include one must include the other.
Edith Wharton and Willa Cather were great and I agree that they should be read, but they were 20th-Century.
Thank you, Naomi, I fully agree with the main ideas of the post.
But to me this: "Amongst the Russians, the names are Tolstoy, Chekhov, Dostoevsky, and Gogol" seems unbelievably scarce. I can maybe add ten more names to this list, and it wouldn't be enough. The main problem is translations, of course: this is the reason your "English" list has thirteen names to the "Russian" four.
This is so well put! Not patronising, not snobbish - just curious and passionate about good books. I always think that people who are put off by 19th century British books don't realise how sensational they can be - like, Thomas Hardy wrote some proper soap opera stuff