Here it is then - the latest literary sensation from France - and for once it's slightly interesting. A prof ahs published an unapologetic defence of skimming the classics. Not reading them at all and forgetting them altogether are also, he says, no impediment to intelligent and passionate conversation. Seems to me he's stating the fairly obvious (a French trait, n'est-ce pas?) - life really is too short for many of the more doorsteppish classics. Anyone out there ever read all of Don Quixote, for example? (If so, why?) As a slow reader with defeatist and amnesiac tendencies, I feel little shame about what I've never read or forgotten - nor do I see any obstacle to expressing firm opinions about it. Am I honestly exepcted to have read Harry Potter or Lord of The Rings before opining? Come now... However, I do feel slightly ashamed of never having even started War and Peace or The Idiot or The Brothers Karamazov, to name but three - and, of course, having only skimmed Proust.
Confessions, anyone?
Tuesday, August 21, 2007
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A blog about, among other things, imaginary ideas - What ifs? and Imagine thats. What if photographs looked nothing like what we see with our eyes? Imagine that the Berlin Wall had never come down. What if we were the punchline of an interminable joke? All contributions welcome.
I agree, Bryan. If a book doesn't grab me after 60 or 70 pages then I give up. And I don't care who wrote the blasted thing. I will not persevere or even skim just to say I've read such and such a so-called classic. However, it does sometimes depend on my mood. Like most of us, I'm sure, A Brief History Of Time melted my brain very quickly. Much of Joyce is too much like hard work. Proust is soporific. Didn't get through Delillo's Underworld either. The list is endless really. What can I say - I'm impatient.
ReplyDeleteNot me, Neil, Nige.
ReplyDeleteSorry, Byran. You see, I couldn't even read to the end of the post. Well, Byran, are you a skimmer? Go on, admit it. Nice use of alliteration, by the way.
ReplyDeletesome people bolt their food, but are they getting sufficient enjoyment and nutrition. though when faced with a dull menu, I'll often go for the starter and then straight onto the pudding.
ReplyDeleteno, I read recently advice from some well-known author that one should give up if not impressed with a book after a few pages. I can't recall who but I know I'd given up on one of his just before the advice was printed. I say, it's all right to be bored by genius. one doesn't have to endure nothing for no one.
One of the problems is that far too many books are simply too long - and that nearly all modern fiction is both overlong and a waste of time anyway. I heard once of something called the page 31 test - open the book at that page and you'll know all you need to know about whether it's worth reading or not. Would save a lot of time - but I fancy I've got the page number wrong...
ReplyDeleteB-r-y-an, of course. Terrible typing times two.
ReplyDeletethat's what I do, Nige! I read the very first paragraph and another at random and if they haven't got me, they haven't got me.
ReplyDeletebtw, it was nick hornby's advice, i think.
i persevered with a great many weighty tomes, because i find many great books have slow beginnings. All this bull about how an opening has to be rivetting & easy to read, with nice sympathetic characters, or the book is a failure - that would condemn at least half of the classics of literature: Hamlet? boring, a ghost and some sentries, who cares?; Inferno? what's this dark wood bollocks, bin it; Paradise Lost? ugh, long words, not reading that!; Proust? what's all this garbage about some bloke's childhood? crap!; etc. etc.
ReplyDeletewell each to his own but you don't get a dog in order to bark yourself hoarse; any hard work should be done by the author rather than the reader.
ReplyDeleteor I could ask why they're considered great reads if they're plain hard work to get through? sounds like there's ''much room for improvement'' (as my old english teacher used to write on the bottom of my work...)
Skimming classics? Try getting a Ph.D. in English without doing so. My focus was the 19th-century British novel (can you spell doorstop?), but for my Orals at Columbia I also had to know Melville, Hawthorne, all of American Southern literature (my specialty -- and Faulkner wrote *a lot* of books); William Butler Yeats (my major author -- had to know every play, all the poems, and the most incomprehensible book ever written -- "A Vision"); and then there was Renaissance literature, which included everything you can think of from Shakespeare to Fulke-Greville.
ReplyDeleteI *have* read most of the 19th-century British novels worth reading (I highly recommend George Meredith's "The Egoist," best book of the 1850s, though no one reads it nowadays), but I had to skim all of George Gissing, and when it came to Melville & Hawthorne, I only -- finally -- read "Moby Dick" a couple of years ago. Proust? Forget it. I know enough to know about the madeleine, but I couldn't get into his stuff.
The symbolist poets, though? Love 'em. Ditto Eugene Sue, the mystery novelist who sparked Wilkie Collins (love his stuff too) and all the rest of 'em.
Now, as a book reviewer, if I can't get into a book -- and I am patient, like Elberry recommends -- I simply won't review it. No use shooting fish in a barrel, as Dale Peck does.
Come on, Elberry, a slow start is all well and good, as long as it doesn't run to a hundred pages. That's just bad writing.
ReplyDeleteoh, yes, i agree there. When i say a slow start i mean the first 5-10 pages. Cormac McCarthy's All the Pretty Horses has a slow opening 10 odd pages but is one of my favourite man-killing novels. i do regret persevering with Anna Karenin, which is odd in that it's easy to read but i felt absolutely no interest in 'what happens next', there seemed no plot at all. i read the whole 700-page thing then thought, "actually, there is no plot." Or no plot that really interested me, anyway.
ReplyDeletei'm not averse to hard work as long as i get something out of it, whether it's whores or erudition, man-killing strategies or an expanded vocabulary, it's all good. But to expect a novel to begin "Here's how to kill a man with a stapler" is soft: you have to work at it. A good author will typically hide such information, to keep it from minors & impressionable types.
Classics aren't always novels, poetry or plays. I love diaries, letters and works of non-fiction - the letters of Byron or Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Pepys and other diarists, Boswell's Johnson, Elizabethan pampheteers and eccentrics (Thomas Nashe, e.g.), old travel books, there are loads of good things out there. These are often so much more vivid and alive than the dullness and lethargy that comes with feeling I "ought" to plough through some huge nineteenth-century novel, let alone the horrors of Proust or Henry James. Give me Norman Lewis any day.
ReplyDeleteNo one is well read. There are far, far too many books out there for that. The best we can hope for is to read well and attentively the things that agree with us and not waste too much time on the stuff that doesn't.
Well said Mark - and I'm sure we British over-value the novel and lyric verse (not to mention the sodding drama), just because we've historically been rather good at them. Those Elizabethan and Jacobean prose writers produced geat stuff, outside all those genres - and they're easily skimmed (cf The Anatomy Of Melancholy).
ReplyDeleteAnd Susan - good to know there's another Meredith fan out there. Hope you've read Modern Love...
Good gosh -- I haven't read Modern Love, Nige, and I should. I read "The Ordeal of Richard Feverel" (quite the shocking novel of 1859) and "Egoist," but I doubtless skimmed that one. I shall pursue it!
ReplyDeleteAnd Mark, you're right about the diaries and such like. I adore Samuel Pepys; "Travels with a Donkey in the Cevennes," by R.L. Stevenson; tons of stuff by Defoe. Fanny Burney's letters -- incredible; ditto Claire Clairemont's; Marguerite de Navarre -- only wish I could've read her stuff in the old French.
But today I have "Death of Ivan Ilych" with me to read on my dinner break. I love this novella and it's been a few years since I read it. We'll see how I have changed since then -- for that's what novels do to me. Indeed, I just reread another classic for the first time in 30 years, Betty Smith's "A Tree Grows in Brooklyn." A *great* novel about pre-WW I NYC and the poor immigrant families of its poor borough over the bridge. This is another of the books people think of as children's literature (e.g., Stevenson, Dickens, et al), but it's so far beyond that. Anyway, when I first read it, I identified with the 11-year-old protagonist; now I understand her mother much, much better.
Anon, mes mignons.....
Nige, at 4.24pm you mentioned 'easily skimmed' and 'Anatomy Of Melancholy' in the same sentence. I've just tried it; I've learned nothing and have now got a headache!
ReplyDeleteYou haven't lived until you've read every last word of Clarissa.
ReplyDeletei've been slowly reading Anatomy of Melancholy since about 2002. i'm halfway through, or was when i decided i didn't have the energy after work, and switched to spy thrillers. Great thing about Burton is, you can leave year-long gaps without any problem.
ReplyDeleteI tried to read Don Quixote this year. I really did. But when I hit page 670 (after months of forcing myself to try just a little more), I looked at a couple of pages at random throughout the remaining 320 pages. At this point I gave it up as a bad job.
ReplyDelete