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What Books Don’t You Need to Read Before You Die?
The Internet world inundates us with lists about things we need to read or do or see before we die: thus “Fifty Places You Must Visit Before You Die,” “The Twenty Movies You Must See,” “Twenty-Five Herbs You Must Integrate into Your Cooking,” and on and on and on.
In the literary world, we have the Modern Library’s 100 Best Novels of the 20th Century list and Radcliffe College’s competing list. For broader historical coverage, you have The Guardian’s 100 best books of all time , or the 50 greatest books of all time,which is a synthesis of 107 great books lists. Time has a list of 100 best novels (1923-2005). Heck, there’s even one entitled “50 Books to Read Before You Die.”
I have mixed feelings. I believe in the idea of a canon of the greatest works of literature. There are novels of such transcendence in their literary qualities or their universal themes that anyone would be edified by seriously reading them. In this group of greats, I would include masterpieces like Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov; Conrad’s underrated Nostromo, all of Austen’s works (though a case can be made against Mansfield Park and Northanger Abbey), any of several works by Dickens (e.g., Bleak House, David Copperfield, or Great Expectations), Cervantes’ Don Quixote, Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, Cather’s Death Comes for the Archbishop and My Antonia, Twain’s Huckleberry Finn, and others.
There is a strong inference in most of these lists that suggests if you, the reader, consider yourself intelligent or educated you’d better get these books read, pronto! On the other hand, if you don’t read most of them, turn in your “I’m a decently educated and moderately well-read person” card.
A bit of much-needed counterculture is beginning to develop. Thus, a few years ago, The Telegraph published “Not the Fifty Books You Should Read Before you Die.” On this list were a few books that I greatly admire (Emma, Nineteen Eighty Four), but far more that I too would place on a list of books that one can safely, even aggressively, ignore. Among these were the perennial top-ten novel Ulysses and Lolita (about which more below), as well as other famous books like The Great Gatsby, War and Peace, Les Miserables, One Hundred Years of Solitude, Ian McEwan’s Saturday, or The Metamorphosis. It also includes several pop culture, pop psychology favorites as Eat, Pray, Love, The Alchemist, Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus. Others on the list are The God Delusion and my personal favorites, The Da Vinci Code and Twilight. Of course, the books on the Telegraph’s list make no pretense of being of equal literary value.
So let me address two books that—if you’re looking for permission—you need never read ever: and you may fail to do so with a clear conscience.
First is Nabakov’s Lolita. Yes, I know the writing is wonderful and supposedly something is going on below the surface that redeems the book. I’ve never found the redeeming stuff, so all I was left with was a middling-long novel recounting the mind and acts of a middle-aged pedophile. Maybe this is a metaphor for something high and good, but the subject matter is so utterly disgusting, I’m unable to get past it.
Second is Joyce’s Ulysses. I actually finished it during the past week, aided by the brilliant narration of Jim Norton (and a female narrator, whose name wasn’t mentioned who narrated the final section: Molly Bloom’s long soliloquy while half asleep). If you do decide to read, read it along with the narration, which is superb. Ulysses makes every top ten list—and as often as not it’s no. 1. Now, I admire Joyce’s technical ability: his early set of short stories (Dubliners) is superb. And the final story in Dubliners, “The Dead,” is on my list of top five short stories in the English language.
But then Joyce abandoned straightforward narrative for the experimental: so we end up with long sections of stream of consciousness, sheer wordplay, impenetrable puns, suddenly shifting narratives, allusions that make no sense without a detailed understanding of Irish and Dublin history, a host of unseemly characters, including some that are utterly boring (Stephen Dedalus never does a single thing that makes him interesting).
My fundamental problem with the book is that it’s filled with linguistic pyrotechnics without the leavening influence of a plot, characters, and narrative that makes sense to the normal, unenlightened reader like me. A great half-hour fireworks show works great. But 672 pages of fireworks with little else becomes a big bore. I’m not alone. Ron Rosenbaum, the eminent Shakespeare scholar, a few years ago wrote a column, whose premise was that Ulysses is greatly overrated, with the exception of one chapter: the penultimate (entitled “Ithaca”).
My conclusion: you don’t have to read Ulysses or Lolita, and can retain your credentials as an educated person.
This is all a long introduction to a larger question: What books—classics or otherwise—can we willfully, with malice aforethought, refuse to read, and still die having lived a fulfilling life?
Published in General
Overrated books? Hmm… Stranger in a Strange Land. All the interesting ideas in that novel are available in other Heinlein novels, wrapped around an actually interesting story.
Assuming, that is, any of the ideas are interesting either. I thought not, but I suppose others would disagree.
BDB: Thanks for so eloquently skewering Pirsig for me! As a collegian of the mid-Seventies, he and Ken Kesey – with a side of Vonnegut – were shoved at me as ‘liberating’; I found all three infuriating…Again, thanks, and Rawr!
MT: Why is it that so many authors whose language makes me want to love them betray my trust with thumpingly melancholic outcomes? (Yes, Cather/Fitzgerald/Stegner/Helprin, I mean *you*…Sigh.)
I don’t care if something is exquisitely written if it is going to put under the ground in a depression. The Goldfinch comes to mind here. Grrr. What a waste of three hours. I couldn’t finish it.
I haven’t seen Walden mentioned yet – “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately [but not too far from home so as to not walk too far for din-din], to front only the essential facts of life [Aw, Mom, this is the 3rd night in a row we’ve had beans!], and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived [Mom, when are you doing laundry?? I’m running out of shirts!].”
-E
Gordon Korman once noted, in the genre of young adult novels, any time you see a picture of a dog on the cover and an award, that dog is going to bite it by the end of the book.
The pattern holds for quite a bit of “great literature” even if they’re more subtle on the cover.
Never read it, learned to despise it by proxy having had to read “My Side of the Mountain” three times in various English classes.
I’ve always thought that’s one of the points of the story. These characters are cold individuals.
Actually James’ problem is not the story, it’s the writing style, feels pedestrian to me.
I can die a happy man without reading thousand of pages of War and Peace, or Ulysses.
Margaret Atwood.
Is this a Canadian thing? Do Americans get force-fed Atwood?
He takes off his helmet. His son tell him how much more fun he was when he was crazy.
Maybe because the beauty shining through our everyday lives is rarely triumphalist? Because life itself, with all its real joys and mercies, remains a bittersweet vale of tears? Friends drift apart, young beauties grow old, romantics choose unwisely, lovers misunderstand each other. Cather believes deeply in mercy, though, which is why I love her so.
Students get force-fed “The Handmaid’s Tale” so that they’ll learn to properly fear and hate religious people.
What a contrived pile of agenda-driven nonsense that was. For the left, violent theocracy is forever descending on America, but for some reason it’s always landing in the middle east.
I Liked the first part of the comment about The Great Gatsby, but I’m a War and Peace defender and admirer. I mostly hear negative things about Ulysses so I’m not exactly champing at the bit to read it. Then again I hear mostly negative things about War and Peace and that turns out to be one of my favorites, so….maybe I’ll give Ulysses a go after all.
IMHO, “just ugly” is Wright’s signature design.
We can’t be friends. : (
The sad thing is that Atwood is an excellent writer. But her quite obvious agenda(s) are far too intrusive. She just beats you over the head with it.
Grandfather is not a central character, but this one passage makes him completely real. And once we know more about Jim, we come to realize that he looks back with regret for what he has been lost and left behind.
This passage also resonates with me because it also describes my own father. He never let his words become “worn dull from constant use.”
I posted a somewhat related thread — books I hated when I was told to read them, but which I really appreciate now:
http://ricochet.com/hated-assignments-beloved-oases/
I don’t think I’ve ever read Atwood, but this reminded me of a book I read in high school that I hated. The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver. It was all about a Baptist Preacher/Missionary and his family. I remember what annoyed me the most was that even though this was supposed to be a Baptist Minister he was trying to baptize children in crocodile infested waters for their salvation. As someone who grew up in a baptist church, I can tell you that this is specifically something a Baptist Minister would never do. But also it had this we think we are so superior but multiculturalism milieu.
I would only add that Ulysses is challenging and I felt I could deal with anything the business world threw my way after writing a thesis on that novel!
I developed a lot of highly analytical skills after reading authors such as Joyce which continue to help me decades later in business.
Barbara Kingsolver is indeed annoying and preachy. But she can write well, I’ll give her that. I’ve never been glad I read any of her books, so I’ve stopped…