Thursday, January 10, 2008
Not Reading
While the Lazy Hungover Bastard reads the London Library, the English publication of Pierre Bayard's book - amusingly reviewed in the NY Times here - reassure the rest of us that there's really no need. Surprisingly for a French intellectual, Bayard seems fundamentally sound and disarmingly honest in this matter (not that I'm going to bother reading his book, natch). There are, after all, many more way of 'knowing' a book than reading it cover to cover - especially as so much reading is wasted effort. Even the greatest books can contain large amounts of padding - part of the experience of reading, true, but surely optional? - and few prose works demand the total, cover to cover job. As for modern fiction - so much of that is an annoying, frustrating waste of time, so little of it couldn't be brought in at two-thirds the length, that these days I rarely bother with it, unless I have good reason to believe it will be worth the effort. Of most reading, too, as Bayard admits, we remember almost nothing. As for unread great books, I'll happily own up to never having read, strictu sensu, the Divine Comedy, Don Quixote, Paradise Lost, the Aeneid and indeed War and Peace (tho that I shall definitely get round to). Any confessions, bloggers?
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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.
And, of course, Moby Dick.
ReplyDeleteMoby Dick is pretty good - prose Wallace Stevens, oddly.
ReplyDeleteI have read War and Peace - which is surprisingly easy - but not Moby Dick... oh dear.
ReplyDeleteTo my shame i got half way through Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy and never went back. But it's not as if it's a novel, i suppose i can pick it up at some point.
ReplyDeleteAlso gave up on Rabelais. i just didn't find him remotely amusing.
i'm a believer in persevering in spite of slow starts or difficult patches, and not skim-reading if the book is good, but i seem to be the last living human being to feel this way.
Quite a few philosophical works I haven't read in their entirety but from reading various secondary sources I think I have a fair grasp of their main ideas. Life is too short to wade through Kant, for example.
ReplyDeleteAs for the Western canon in general (that guy Bloom provided a pretty comprehensive list), I have barely touched it. Put it this way, if it was a five hundred page book, I'd be halfway through the blurb on the dust jacket. But I'm not a philistine, it's just that I have to work for a living. And I've the attention-span of a goldfish with ADHD, so I'm never likely to make it through some of the more worthy stuff.
‘War and Peace’ is a surprisingly easy read, though a few of the later parts drag a little. I've never read 'Finnigan's Wake' after being foolish enough to read ‘Ulysses’. Pynchon is the modern writer I repeatedly try to read but can’t – my mind wanders within the first twenty pages. Conversely, I've not read 'Confederacy of Dunces' because I always begin it, think it's too good to ruin, and then leave it alone.
ReplyDeleteThe one book I know I should have read but haven’t managed to get through is Conrad’s ‘Nostromo’.
Yep I think all of the above are on my Not Read list, tho I lied about having read Finnegans Wake in a university admission interview. They knew it, I knew it, but how was anyone to put it to the test? They hadn't read it either. Ulysses I have read, all of it twice, parts more than twice. Honest. I doubt if there's anyone living (outside academe) who has read all the way through the Anatomy of Melancholy, and very few who've managed Rabelais, even in the Urquhart translation (no I haven't either). Some books, very important in their day, seem to become all but unreadable - this will happen more and more as readers in Britain become ever dumber. A mere century on, it seems incredible that George Meredith was one of the most widely read novelists of his time. Now he just seems too... difficult.
ReplyDeleteMeredith! Good grief! I am at this moment reading The Amazing Marriage. It's not all difficult.
ReplyDeleteBeckett: "James Joyce was a synthesizer, trying to bring in as much as he could. I am an analyzer, trying to leave out as much as I can."
ReplyDeleteI prefer Beckett. If I want to experience life in great detail I won't open a book, I'll open my eyes.
Zzzzz.
ReplyDeleteWell you could open your eyes in order to read a book, Neil. While cloistered academics are strange people, this modern "books are rubbish, you need to get some real life, watch footy and drink beer" thing is going too far the other way. Books are a part of life, so i don't see how you can draw the distinction between 'real life' and 'books'. It's true that, as i say, people who spend all their time alone reading are odd, but that doesn't mean reading is anti-life.
ReplyDeleteare any of these on DVD? if it's a good book it stands to reason someone will imagine it'll make a good film...
ReplyDeleteNow, now, El, don't be putting words in my mouth. I am certainly not advocating beer and football as a substitute for reading. Now that would be a bad substitution! I am an avid reader, a reading zealot, a book-buying, book-hoarding, beat-it-into-my-children-with-a-hardback kind of parent. I was merely referring to my preference for certain kinds of books and writers. For instance, I don't want to read a detailed description of one minute of the narrator's life that stretches to fifty pages. You know, that kind of thing. That's all I was saying. Now, where was I...
ReplyDeleteZzzzzzzzzzzzzzz
Forgive me a moment but why would any intelligent person set out to write a book that was difficult to read and, if they did, why would any other intelligent person volunteer to read it? Is there no end to human competitiveness?
ReplyDeleteAlright, fair enough. Maybe, in my feeble attempt to be pithy, I was a little unclear.
ReplyDeleteReading the London Library. Poor Bryan.
ReplyDeleteEquivocating a bit there, Neil - are you sure you're not A JESUIT?
ReplyDeletei have recently decided that unless i have good, scientific grounds for believing otherwise, everyone is a Jesuit. And i'm starting with you because you're a Dub.
I've read The Amazing Marriage too, Bryan. It is short, is it not? Actually I've always had a soft spot for Meredith - and Modern Love is surely one of the greatest of all poem sequences. I'd recommend that to anyone - and it's not difficult.
ReplyDeletePut me in front of the Everyman Library and I imagine I'd have read shamefully few.
ReplyDeleteOnes that come to mind are Trollope, Richardson, Henry James (I did try one - no thanks, god what a bore), War and Peace (the world's favourite unread book?), Proust, Musil, Balzac, most Dostoevsky, too many Russians, in fact. TBH, there are plenty of other books I read once, because I had to, and to which I have never wished to return. Mrs Gaskell and the awful Wordsworth come to mind. Whoever encouraged that man to write poetry has a great deal to answer for. The only one I feel remotely guilty about is Trollope, which I suspect I'd enjoy. I have read the whole of Gibbon and loved it. With racey story like that to tell ... come to mind, Don Juan was a racey one too. Robin Lane Fox is my current Fat Book Fave. Imho, epic tales, if they are available to us at all any more, are now the province of historians, not novelists.
Never read Remembrance of Things Past, Finnegan's Wake, Madame Bovary or anything by Dostoevsky. Started Ulysses, set it down at the end of the day and couldn't come up with a good reason for picking it up again, so I didn't. I regret not having sampled Dostoevsky and might get around to him some day. I dimly recall thinking Moby Dick was pretty good, but that was 40 years ago. I read War & Peace and Don Quixote some 30 years ago. About the same time, I remember reading each and every word of Les Miserables because a friend was just raving about how wonderful it was, wondering when it was going to get better for 3/4 of the book and figuring I've gone this far might as well finish the damn thing for the last 1/4.
ReplyDeleteNever got to grips with the Bhagavad Gita myself. But I guess that's just me.
ReplyDeleteParadise Lost is stirring stuff, Nige - heartily recommended.
ReplyDeleteActually, the one book that's stalked me, remaining largely unread for most of my adult life, is the King James Bible. As a "cultural Christian", I've dipped into it here and there for reference and pleasure, but a desire to read it cover to cover will probably haunt me, unfulfilled, to the grave and, verily, oblivion.
It's a tragedy that most folk will never conquer Richardson's Clarissa. I only managed it as a student, intoxicated by the ceaseless cheerleading of a great tutor, dedicating a fortnight to the task. It broke me, but in a good way.
Catch 22 springs to mind as a book I just cannot get into after several attempts. I'm over it.
Ah, yes, the Bhagavad Gita. I'd almost forgotten that one. It was one of the assigned books for my college core course seminar: Fanshen (William Hinton), The Wretched of the Earth (Frantz Fanon), The Palestinians (Fawaz Turki), Intervention & Revolution (Richard J. Barnet), and, surprisingly, The Lonely African (Colin M. Turnbull). There were a couple of others, but I can't remember the titles.
ReplyDeleteDespite numerous attempts to finish it, the charms of The Bhagavad Gita were lost to me, alas. After skipping the seminar discussion that day, I confessed as much to the seminar leader. As he was a recently defrocked Catholic seminarian, so that went well and all I had to do by way of penance was recite Guantanamara 5 times, write letters to my US Senators and congressman denouncing CIA involvment in the overthrow of Allende, and man the picket lines in support of the United Farmworkers boycott of grapes and Safeway for a week, endlessly repeating choruses of De Colores all the while.
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ReplyDeleteI've spent years doing battle with Sartre, Foucault and the other French existentialist/postmodern twits without ever really reading anything they wrote. Actually, I tried briefly a couple of times but couldn't make a bit of sense out of what they were going on about. Thank God for secondary sources.
ReplyDeleteTried to read some supposed classics of the Assholes from France (Fuckall, Lacan, Dreadida etc.) but gave up after about 20 pages. Those 20 pages took a week of hard work and in the end i realised the 'thought' was largely banal bullshit, and so presumably cloaked in near-incomprehensible prose to impress people who dig that shit.
ReplyDeleteRead the King James Bible cover to cover once over about 6 months. Amusingly, a Fundamentalist Christian friend tried to emulate my agnostic feat but gave up - he kept getting stalled in Second Chronicles, truly one of the world's most tedious books, and i think the only utterly uninteresting one in the OT & NT.
In the end the only way to get through Second Chronicles was to get fairly drunk and scan each line mechanically on the theory that if anything interesting happened my brain would notice. It didn't.
Paradise Lost is one of the largely unread classics that really repays the work, unlike the Assholes from France.
elberry, the only people who take pride in having read the Bible cover-to-cover are atheists.
ReplyDeletei decided to read it as if it was a novel or possibly a post-modern autobiography, God writing about Himself through about 60 different authorial viewpoints. It kind of makes sense that way though the subject comes across as a bit of a nutter.
ReplyDeleteI like it, Peter. Very droll.
ReplyDeletei decided to read it as if it was a novel or possibly a post-modern autobiography,
ReplyDeleteYeah, I once read the telephone book as if it was a textbook on natural history. Man, I couldn't believe people take it seriously.
Peter, you obviously have no idea of the pervasiveness and organised evil of the Society of the Telephone Book, or the Telephonists as they're also known. Their influence reaches into every corner of Western culture: they control the press, Bryan, tv, supermarkets, everything. Think if a child grows up constantly bombarded with pro-Telephone Book propaganda, cunningly disguised as, say, Dangermouse or The Wombles, how can he not end up a true believer?
ReplyDeletei could go into this in more detail but you can do the research yourself. Knights of Malta, the Telephonists, the Queen, Pentagon, it's all the same people.
elberry, you have to stop tarring all telephonists with the same brush and cherrypicking the crazy ones. For every terrifying 6 ft. 7 in. fundamentalist Viking telephonist who dreams of cutting your line off for late payment of the bill, there are millions of tolerant, moderate ones willing to extend credit for several months so you can chat up the models from your site. Honestly, listening to you go on about the great telephonist conspiracy is a bit like listening to a political theorist whose only exposure to the issue is a familiarity with a Book of British Telephones.
ReplyDeleteHere I am, in a library near a beach in Florida, and the majority of the patrons today are a) in the kids' section for a reading program or b) on the computers (like me), or c) in the massive "Genealogy" zone researching their ancestors.
ReplyDeleteBrowsing the stacks? No.
"War and Peace" rocks, but you can skip some of the long musings on history. "Moby Dick" I finally read a couple of years ago; I liked it, but unlike Frank Wilson, I don't think it's the great American novel (I'd say "Huck Finn" for that).
Proust: No can do past the madeleine. 19th-c Brits: I love 'em all, and George Meredith rates right up there for me with Dickens & Thackeray. I *loved* both "The Egoist" and "Richard Feverel." Not keen on novels in verse, but I'll try MLove if Nigel recommends it.
People are waiting for computers, so I must print out boarding passes for a night flight and boogie out. Au wiedersehen, pets!
Peter, you naive and foolish comments reveal that you are yet another sheep brainwashed by the Telephonists. Bah! i am going to go into my corner and sulk now, convinced that i am cleverer than everyone else because only i am wise enough to see the Hidden Hand of the Telephone.
ReplyDelete