Consider it withdrawal. Imagine spending the last seven years of your life toting around lists of prescribed reading and obediently whittling away at what seems like an endless array of tomes aimed more at edification than enjoyment. Suddenly, your intellectual horizons are liberated (read: you’ve left grad school) and a whole, largely uncharted literary world lies before you. What do you do? In my case, you turn to another reading list.
OK, perhaps it wasn’t the most imaginative way to kick off an existence unencumbered by the latest academic book reviews or scholarly articles designed to drown the reader in two-dollar terminology, but I needed a place to start. For me, I decided to spend 2009 becoming “well read”—whatever that might mean. I suppose the term is relative; however, I have always associated it with an individual who was familiar with the classics—and not merely those forced upon them throughout the course of their secondary and post-secondary education.
A cursory Google search for “best book list” yielded several results, including the Modern Everyman Library’s 100 Best Novels, Time’s All-Time 100 Novels, The Telegraph’s 110 Best Books (apparently the more conventional “100” didn’t suit), and others. Being a bit of a stodgy traditionalist, I adopted the Modern Everyman’s list and have since been working my way through it in no particular order.
A friend, and fellow voracious reader, looked askance at me when I admitted that I was implementing a regimented reading schedule. Yes, I was interspersing books from “The List” with my own choices, but I was committed to reading all one hundred over the next few years in order to, as mentioned above, become more “well read.” “You know it’s not a bad idea to read outside of the canon,” she said, disagreeing with me as to the utility of the exercise. “You’ve spent years being told what to read, now, why don’t you read what you want?”
But that’s the thing: I am reading what I want. In my pursuit to become more well read, I want to know what makes these books like these “classics” in the conventional sense and what made some of them scandalous or controversial in their own time. It isn’t that I lack the creativity to select my own reading material; it’s that I want to learn why these books were selected when countless others are available. What makes Lolita, Women in Love, or The Day of the Locust so enduring? Why have these made the cut decades after their original date of publication? And why are they still being read today?
At first, the task seemed daunting, and one I wasn’t entirely convinced I would enjoy. I have never been one who gravitates toward twentieth-century American literature and a preliminary glance at the list reveals a liberal sampling of precisely that. Some of the repeat offenders include Henry James, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, and William Faulkner. Granted, my exposure to them are about as “mainstream” as you can get (e.g., Portrait of a Lady, The Great Gatsby, A Farewell to Arms, The Sound and the Fury, etc.) However, I do believe that part of the joy of reading comes from exposure to books that lie outside of your assumed “comfort zone.” You never know what gem you might find (for me, so far, it is Thornton Wilder’s The Bridge of San Luis Rey). Though I tend to prefer nineteenth-century British novels above all else, I suspected the challenge of confronting a list of books I was not entirely familiar with, nor wholly interested in reading might nevertheless prove gratifying upon its completion.
So far so good. I have reconnected with E.M. Forster (having last enjoyed A Room With A View several years earlier) and I have discovered the chilling post-colonial criticism of Jean Rhys in Wide Sargasso Sea. I think I may forever have a love affair with D. H. Lawrence since Sons and Lovers and why I had never heard of Ford Maddox Ford still astonishes me! Second encounters with Edith Wharton and F. Scott Fitzgerald have proved rewarding, and I appreciate them all the more since giving them another try. (Admission: My only failed encounter has been with Malcolm Lowry after a mere forty-seven pages and has since been consigned to the backburner; however, I anticipate returning to him in the future.)
I look at this endeavour as continuing my education. The more I read, the more I learn, and the greater my horizons become. Finding your own list, even if it is merely to tackle a book or two that you’ve been meaning to read for ages, is a wonderful exercise. I sincerely believe that it’s a wonderful way to discover unexpected treasures.
OK, perhaps it wasn’t the most imaginative way to kick off an existence unencumbered by the latest academic book reviews or scholarly articles designed to drown the reader in two-dollar terminology, but I needed a place to start. For me, I decided to spend 2009 becoming “well read”—whatever that might mean. I suppose the term is relative; however, I have always associated it with an individual who was familiar with the classics—and not merely those forced upon them throughout the course of their secondary and post-secondary education.
A cursory Google search for “best book list” yielded several results, including the Modern Everyman Library’s 100 Best Novels, Time’s All-Time 100 Novels, The Telegraph’s 110 Best Books (apparently the more conventional “100” didn’t suit), and others. Being a bit of a stodgy traditionalist, I adopted the Modern Everyman’s list and have since been working my way through it in no particular order.
A friend, and fellow voracious reader, looked askance at me when I admitted that I was implementing a regimented reading schedule. Yes, I was interspersing books from “The List” with my own choices, but I was committed to reading all one hundred over the next few years in order to, as mentioned above, become more “well read.” “You know it’s not a bad idea to read outside of the canon,” she said, disagreeing with me as to the utility of the exercise. “You’ve spent years being told what to read, now, why don’t you read what you want?”
But that’s the thing: I am reading what I want. In my pursuit to become more well read, I want to know what makes these books like these “classics” in the conventional sense and what made some of them scandalous or controversial in their own time. It isn’t that I lack the creativity to select my own reading material; it’s that I want to learn why these books were selected when countless others are available. What makes Lolita, Women in Love, or The Day of the Locust so enduring? Why have these made the cut decades after their original date of publication? And why are they still being read today?
At first, the task seemed daunting, and one I wasn’t entirely convinced I would enjoy. I have never been one who gravitates toward twentieth-century American literature and a preliminary glance at the list reveals a liberal sampling of precisely that. Some of the repeat offenders include Henry James, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, and William Faulkner. Granted, my exposure to them are about as “mainstream” as you can get (e.g., Portrait of a Lady, The Great Gatsby, A Farewell to Arms, The Sound and the Fury, etc.) However, I do believe that part of the joy of reading comes from exposure to books that lie outside of your assumed “comfort zone.” You never know what gem you might find (for me, so far, it is Thornton Wilder’s The Bridge of San Luis Rey). Though I tend to prefer nineteenth-century British novels above all else, I suspected the challenge of confronting a list of books I was not entirely familiar with, nor wholly interested in reading might nevertheless prove gratifying upon its completion.
So far so good. I have reconnected with E.M. Forster (having last enjoyed A Room With A View several years earlier) and I have discovered the chilling post-colonial criticism of Jean Rhys in Wide Sargasso Sea. I think I may forever have a love affair with D. H. Lawrence since Sons and Lovers and why I had never heard of Ford Maddox Ford still astonishes me! Second encounters with Edith Wharton and F. Scott Fitzgerald have proved rewarding, and I appreciate them all the more since giving them another try. (Admission: My only failed encounter has been with Malcolm Lowry after a mere forty-seven pages and has since been consigned to the backburner; however, I anticipate returning to him in the future.)
I look at this endeavour as continuing my education. The more I read, the more I learn, and the greater my horizons become. Finding your own list, even if it is merely to tackle a book or two that you’ve been meaning to read for ages, is a wonderful exercise. I sincerely believe that it’s a wonderful way to discover unexpected treasures.
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