Thursday, March 6, 2014

The authors I have read.

A Top Ten Tuesday list I saw at Jane Greensmith’s place got me thinking.  The conceit is to list author’s you have never read, a variation on the Humiliation game.  Authors, not individual books.  Never read, nothing, not a word – a strong criterion for a vigorous reader.

My first thought, a pleasant one, was that for major writers of the 19th century I am draining the pool pretty well.  Ten years ago it was full.  Stendhal, Hugo, Zola, G. Eliot, C. Brontë, Thackeray, and Ibsen, to run through the best-known names before I get to great writers like Leskov, Storm, Sholem Aleichem, Machado de Assis, and Eça de Queiroz, were all unread.  They were hardly unknown, in a sense, but no matter how much I came across their names they were something close to rumors.

I have only mentioned novelists.  Poets are a different story, at least in English.  I come across a single poem in an anthology or magazine and I have knocked him out of the game.  I have never sat down to read a book by Constantine Cavafy, Eugenio Montale, or Elizabeth Bishop, but I have read poems, stray lines, and even passages from letters by them all, often in reviews of books about them.  Someday I will read these poets more seriously, but I have at least brushed against them, just as I had glimpsed Emily Dickinson, however dimly, before I read her more seriously a few years ago.  Someday I will stop confusing Edwin Arlington Robinson and Robinson Jeffers – I will really read them rather than rely on scattered poems encountered twenty-five years ago.

Sometimes it is not clear what it means to have read an author.  Two years ago, I wrote about my limited reading of Henry James.  I had read half a dozen of his works, but given the amount and variety of his work I did not feel like I had read him.  It was interesting to discover how many other readers felt the same way.  Four or five novels was somehow not enough.  I would guess that the reader of Huckleberry Finn, Connecticut Yankee, and “Fenimore Cooper’s Literary Offenses” would happily say he had read Mark Twain, however many other good books Twain might have written.

I feel like I have read some writers without having read them at all.  How many articles and reviews have I read about V. S. Naipaul?  Over so many years, it seems endless.  Maybe someday I will try one of his actual books.  I have not, but I feel like I have, just as I feel like I have read more John Updike and Ian McEwan than the one book apiece I have actually read.

My success, to call it that, is all the result of the passage of time, a war of attrition with occasional offensives, like a winter assault on Scandinavian writers.  I am always grinding away.  At some point, I will over-extend my supply lines and lose the war, but so far I can pretend that I am Napoleon, that I am making progress towards some undefined but surely important goal.  But it is just time, time spent reading rather than doing something else.  Book bloggers fret a lot over the growth of the pile of books To Be Read, but the pile that Has Been Read keeps growing, too.

At this point I ought to offer my own Top Ten authors, but I believe I will save that for the next post.

34 comments:

  1. I hope you have now read some Nathanel West!

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  2. Now I am wondering the number of books to read to have read an author. I have read five books by Toni Morrison and I don't know if I have read her.

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  3. A list of my unread authors would be an embarrassment, especially given my former profession: teacher of literature.

    But, as an excuse for myself or anyone, there are entirely too many authors of merit and too few years in a lifetime. The math simply will not work.

    Now, who are my most egregiously overlooked authors? Whoever wrote the Bible would be the answer. Like many people, I've read snippets but not entire books (e.g., Genesis, Exodos, Psalms, Mark, Acts, Revelation, etc.). The one exception would be Job. I guess I better remedy that oversight someday. I really should sit down and read the most influential book in western history.

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  4. Nathaniel West - no! He goes on my Top 10 list, no question. He is close to a true Humiliation.

    Nana - I suppose the very fact that we ask the question about a writer like James or Morrison tells us something about the writer. Something about the complexity of their ideas or style, or the kind of ambiguity they employ. I don't know. It is not just a question of the number of books, is it?

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    1. I think it depends on ignorance too. The more ignorant a person is of something, the easier it is for them to believe they know that thing, so that a person who had heard about the size of James' oeuvre, and knew that he wrote short stories as well as novels, and whose friend had told them that the language in The Golden Bowl was not the same as the language in The Bostonians -- this person wouldn't believe that they knew James, whereas the person who only knew that he was some sort of dead author with or without a beard might feel happy and confident and say, "Henry James, he's like such and such" on the basis of Daisy Miller at the age of fifteen for two weeks in high school.

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    2. As I climb the pile of books the mist recedes, revealing more piles of books.

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    3. "more piles of books," indeed. I remember when I was in my early 20s, say, and I believed that the number of good books was pretty small, that the number of good "classics" was pretty small. I figured that if I read diligently for a decade, I'd have read all the good classics, because there just weren't that many. But as you say, of course, the more one reads, the more books one finds out about, and the horizon recedes infinitely. I think about all the non-European literature out there and I get shivers of fear. I think about drama and poetry and I almost despair.

      Re-reading is so important, because that's how we learn that we'll never really know any authors. A book should seem like a new experience every time we read it, yes? Maybe some people don't like that, though.

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  5. I dunno, R. T., maybe snippets count as "read." Not to dissuade you from reading Genesis, which is superb. And Ecclesiates, have you read that? Oh my, oh my. But reading snippets gives a lot more information than reading nothing. And there are passages that could by themselves keep a fellow busy for a while.

    To de-elevate a bit, it is clear to me that anyone interested in English fiction should read Anthony Trollope. But it is not clear to me that such a person needs to read an entire Trollope novel. It is not that Trollope never changes, but he does not change much, so a healthy chunk of Barchester Towers or whatever will tell you 1) what Trollope is like and 2) whether you want to read more. It does not take an 800 page novel to answer those questions.

    I seem to be returning to my old knowledge / experience distinction.

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    1. Don't forget Song of Songs, King James version. That is good stuff!

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    2. I am pretty much assuming KJV!

      Yes, Song of Songs and some selection of the Psalms are essential, although I have always struggled with the Psalms for some reason.

      Actually, for the Psalms, skip the KJV and go with Mary Sidney's earlier versions.

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  6. I am humbled and intimidated when I look at the reading suggestions at the end of Harold Bloom 's Western Canon.....too many books....too little time....so bloggers like you, Tom, help me refine my goals. I think Song of Solomon -- naughty little book -- should be my next selection. Still...too many...too little....sad....sad....sad....

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  7. The calculation must be different if you can read like Bloom, who used to read a thousand pages an hour and has lamented that in his old age he has slowed to five hundred pages an hour.

    There is also a good argument against knowing too many authors. It is also valuable to intensely read and reread the handful of authors I find especially meaningful. Maybe more valuable. I suspect this is a question of temperament, though. What makes a reader restless.

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    1. Trying to read all the books you should read is like trying to empty the ocean with a teaspoon. The more you read the more you know you should read. Maybe for Harold Bloom it was like trying to empty the ocean with a jug, or even a bucket. There is a lot to be said for reading and rereading a limited number of books intensely but the problem is "What books?" By the time I've read enough to know what books I will probably have no time left.

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  8. I think there is a good argument against "knowing" too many authors. What makes me restless is when people start counting things up instead of talking about the ideas in what they've read. It's like in baseball--I like the statistics to be interpreted and narrated for me as I watch a game. Number of RBIs means little to me without context.

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  9. Yes, exactly, this is why survey classes using thick anthologies are so important. Cram as many writers as possible down the throats of the impressionable youths. Most of the writers will be expelled, but some will become permanently lodged in the soft young brains.

    There is a strong element of chance here, why this author and not that one.

    Having said that, there are many ways to define "should." In some ways "should" is an ocean, in others it is just a shelf or two of books. The vast majority of books and writers should not be read.

    To a significant degree, the answer to the question "What books?" is a matter of chance.

    Jeanne - what about the people who count things up and talk about the ideas? Readers, like baseball nuts, have to do some counting up. Not as much as the serious baseball fans, thankfully.

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    1. I find people who count things up and talk about the ideas revealed by the numbers pretty thin on the ground. It is easier (and often more satisfying) to categorize and talk about ideas, as you show in "Authors I Have Not Read."

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    2. Maybe don't look at the next post about the Muncie library, though.

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  10. AR/T . . . if you are saying that you will be posting a list of the top ten authors you have not read but plan on reading, then I look forward to that list and commentary . . . and in the meantime, I will begin giving more serious thought to my own list that follows the same criteria . . . how much do you want to bet that there are very little mirroring between lists? . . . BTW, I love and hate survey course anthologies -- there is too much to choose from, and there is too much that is not included -- it is an annoying paradox.

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  11. correction -- change "there are" to "there will be" in the mirroring phrase . . . and to think that I once taught English composition and grammar . . . Yikes!

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  12. Yes, I'll put up some sort of list today. Why not, everyone loves lists. Although there are some limits on the fun of this game.

    Love and hate the anthologies - that seems to be universal! Note in The Little Professor's Victorian poetry syllabus, which uses a Broadview anthology, the number of links to online poems. Something crucial is always missing.

    Someday, though, I will write about my undergraduate Brit Lit I and Brit Lit II classes, each of which was based on a different method of using the Norton anthology - and they were both taught by the same professor!

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  13. Speaking of poets, I only count one as read if I've read at least a whole book from cover to cover; just a poet won't do for me to consider him read.

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  14. I'll have to disagree about Twain. I don't think you can really know him without reading some of the private stuff (like "1601" or "Letters From the Earth") and the darker, later work (like "Pudd'nhead Wilson" and "The Mysterious Stranger"). He was full of surprises.

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  15. Twain also gives readers plenty of disappointments....he is so uneven in his efforts....but a writer who is so prolific cannot always produce winners...

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  16. Doug, I'm not saying people who feel that way are right!

    No, wait, actually, what I am working on the the is the idea of "have read." I do not believe it is a feeling of comprehensive knowledge.

    I am not sure that a disappointment, a bad novel by a writer, cannot just as easily count as "have read," although I am less sure about that. I guess it depends on the writer and novel. The Reivers is not especially good, but it is definitely pure Faulkner, while A Fable by itself would give a reader a completely mistaken idea about Faulkner.

    Is there a Twain book so far from his center that it would be similarly deceptive, that does not sound or feel like Twain? The parts of The Gilded Age that Twain wrote could hardly be easier to pick out.

    I definitely count a single poem or short story or essay as "have read." And cover to cover, no way, no way - see example of Trollope above. Dig out what you need and move on.

    Perhaps this is where my academic training kicks in. You do not read everything in your bibliography from cover to cover. You loot books like a Viking. For certain purposes that is the right approach to literature.

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  17. Well, Twain's center shifted with age. "Pudd'nhed Wilson" is a rich, painful, complicated mess, but not particularly funny. "The War Prayer" is not much like "Connecticut Yankee," but maybe closer to the real Twain. And then there's "Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc," so unlike the rest of his work that he published it under a pseudonym (another pseudonym). Looting is absolutely permissible, but I would loot late, rather than early Twain.

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  18. Ah, you make Joan of Arc sound like it fills the role of A Fable.

    You help me realize that my idea of "have read" is much more about, say the "public Twain" than the "real Twain." Public whoever, real whoever.

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  19. Twain was complicated and conflicted, which makes his writing that more worth reading.

    As for disappointments, I certainly hope nobody reads "As You Like It" or "The Rape of Lucrece," and gives up on Shakespeare...

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  20. I am reluctant to tell someone that he read the "wrong" book, but I would at least goggle my eyes strongly at that fellow who punts on Shakespeare.

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  21. Well, I guess someone's disappointing reads are another person's treasure. I was so impressed with those books that I still remember the days and the places where and when I first read The Reivers, The Mysterious Stranger and As You Like It:

    In the spring time, the only pretty ring time,
    When birds do sing, hey ding a ding, ding:
    Sweet lovers love the spring.

    This carol they began at that hour,
    With a hey, and a ho, and a hey nonino,
    How that a life was but a flower.

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  22. I won't speak for Doug, but I, too, find As You Like It full of wonderful things, but I would also put in the category of Advanced Shakespeare.

    The Reivers I put in the Generic Faulkner box. It may have been the last Faulkner novel I read, so perhaps that is why it seemed so ordinary. It is a long ways from As I Lay Dying.

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    1. Oh, "As You Like It" has some wonderful bits, but I don't think it's Shakespeare's best. Will anyone defend "The Rape of Lucrece"?

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    2. Defend "The Rape of Lucrece," not me. It was written for a purpose with which we now have little sympathy. Luckily for us, it apparently failed.

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  23. Trying to empty the ocean with a teaspoon is a pretty apt metaphor. While I always enjoy going into the library, occasionally I have a "naked lunch" moment of seeing what's actually before me: an infinity of books I will never read, authors I will never know in the least, not even of their very existence.

    Nearly every book I read seems to be an attempt to address some self-perceived gap, even as I'm aware that it's not a gap but a bottomless abyss. But some particular unread authors or books seem important, in a relative sense, to read nonetheless (I'm embarking on Trollope in part because not having read him excludes me from so many interesting conversations).

    I do sense, though, that a lifetime of reading sharpens one's ability to discern what's worth reading from what's not so much worth reading - and also one's ability to find, even in the latter category, whatever may be of interest. I don't think I've ever been completely bored by a book.

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  24. I believe in cultural capital or a common culture enough to think that people should do some reading for it. A little bit. Every English-speaker should know what a passage of Shakespeare looks like, how Dickens sounds. I would not want to push the commonness too far. Uncommonness is also quite valuable. And there is no reason to be neurotic about any of this, not to take your time. I have been pleased by how the "should read" authors have taken care of themselves over time.

    What you say at the end, I find that too. But I am an Appreciationist who loves literature more than particular books. So there is always something.

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