| Monday, February 22, 2010 |
| Homework |
When I was in school, I was introduced to the world of Required Reading, where a teacher would assign, say, William Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, and everyone in the class had to read it and then take a test to prove that we had read it. ("What is Brutus’s explanation for killing Caesar?") As a lifelong lover of books, I quickly discovered that I hated Required Reading. The best way to make me not want to read a book was to assign it to me in class. This led to, among other misadventures, learning that renting the movie version of "Dr. Zhivago" is not an adequate substitute for reading Boris Pasternak's novel if you want to get a good grade on the final.
While I was avoiding Cry the Beloved Country, it's not like I was spending all of my free time reading Tiger Beat. Entirely on my own, I read the collected works of J.D. Salinger and F. Scott Fitzgerald, along with pulpier stuff like Jeffrey Archer, John Irving, M.M. Kaye and Colleen McCullough. (I remember choosing Kaye's The Far Pavilions to read on a trip to Sweden because, at nearly 1000 pages, it was the fattest novel I could find at WaldenBooks.)
Then I got to college, and Required Reading took on an even more sinister cast. In my English lit classes, we had to read a book every week; one of the most miserable weeks of my college career was spent plowing through Herman Melville's Omoo. Some of the books were inscrutable (William Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury); others were just plain boring (Henry James' The Portrait of a Lady). Yeah, I know I'm going to hear from people who think a Henry James novel is their idea of a beach read, but I honestly can't think of one single book I read in English lit that I enjoyed.
I was thinking about this because I've been wondering lately if there is some nutritive value, so to speak, in reading books that are "good for you" instead of simply picking up books that appeal to you. Should I be reading Crime and Punishment instead of The Help, even if I don't think Dostoyevsky is "fun"? Was my education somehow inadequate because it resulted in me preferring Anne Tyler to Theodore Dreiser? Would I be a better person if I was reading Faulkner and Woolf? Or, once the degree is hanging on my wall, does it even matter if I never again read anything weightier than Entertainment Weekly?
Perhaps part of it comes down to enthusiasm. In my big college English lit survey classes, I never got the sense that the professors (or T.A.s, for that matter) were genuinely excited about the books they were teaching. Whereas in junior high English, my teacher, Mr. McBee, assigned Dickens' Great Expectations, and when some of the pupils groaned, he exclaimed that this was an amazing book and that once we read it, we would never forget Pip and Mrs. Havisham. And you know what? It was, and I haven't.
If you truly love a certain Great Novel from the canon, let me know in the comments and maybe I'll give it a try.
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posted by 125records @ 5:16 PM  |
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| 9 Comments: |
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I had never read Mrs. Dalloway or indeed anything by Virginia Woolf, but I did read The Hours back in the early '00s when it was all popular and enjoyed it, so I figured I'd give it a shot. It felt like a sort of self-imposed homework assignment at first, but I ended up loving it -- loving it a lot more than the Hours, in fact. It's a very weird and interesting book, basically a series of linked internal stream-of-consciousness narratives over the course of a single day, some of which are more coherent than others (though none of them reach the level of near-unintelligibility of, say, Sound and the Fury, which for the record I also loved). It made The Hours seem very bland and conventional by comparison; all the narratives in Mrs. Dalloway are really vivid. And it isn't even especially long. I recommend!
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I should also say that I really love Julius Caesar! It's probably my favorite Shakespeare play. It helps if you stop trying to figure out who the good guys are, because there really arent' any.
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My main prob with Billy the Shakes is that the language is sometimes a bit impenetrable to the 21st century ear. However, I have certainly seen several productions I enjoyed, such as Shotgun Players' "Macbeth" and "King Lear." Oddly enough I have never seen "Julius Caesar."
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I don't think you should feel any obligation to read the classics, but it might be worth trying to ease your way in to see if they're really not your thing or if you were just put off by school.
Often an author's most famous work is their most extreme, and not really the place to start unless you like diving into the deep end. Faulkner is a prime example: much better, I think, to start with The Reivers (a comedy, not too difficult), then maybe As I Lay Dying, Absalom, Absalom!, and only then take on The Sound and the Fury. I love them all, but I would have no idea what to do with the latter when I was in high school.
Similarly, try Dubliners first, then Portrait, then Ulysses.
Another good approach might be to pick up a survey anthology such as the Norton Anthology of English Literature. It's a lot easier to check out a writer by reading a short story first!
I always liked reading assignments better than any other, even if the book didn't thrill me. I hated writing essays, though.
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My feeling is: life's too short to read something you don't enjoy. I never feel guilty for putting aside a book that's not doing it for me and picking up something else. Sometimes I go back and find a book I'd given up on to be really great -- it's just a matter of what I'm in the mood for.
That said, I think Tim's advice is great -- dabble in anthologies, start with more approachable works, and see what grabs you. And sometimes the canonical works can heighten your appreciation for more contemporary books (see: Hamlet and Infinite Jest).
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I second Mrs Dalloway. Like the commenter above, I read it after reading The Hours, and found both books immensely enjoyable and moving. (And I wrote a song based on it, called "10 Minutes")
Crime and Punishment is one of my favorite novels--I like almost any book about redemption and aside from having to remember 27 different Russian names and patronyms, it's smooth reading.
I read Howards End last summer, and was surprised how much I loved it. I didn't realize E.M. Forster has more in common, style-wise, with Ian McEwan or Julian Barnes than with other stuffier British writers.
And as for Shakespeare, As You Like It is charming and easy to read. I found it much less of a slogfest as his other more serious plays.
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We have the Norton Anthology of Literature (a remnant of my college English), so that might be worth cracking open. As for life being too short, I just stopped reading REVOLUTIONARY ROAD for that reason - life's too short to care about whiny characters. I'd rather spend my time listening to Half Man Half Biscuit CDs.
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Maybe I should have stopped reading "Gulag Arhipelago" several hundred pages ago! Though with only 70 pages left, I'm not going to stop now. Though I'm not recommending it either!
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I can read any George Eliot, but if it weren't for Middlemarch, she'd be a forgotten writer; likewise Thackeray's Vanity Fair. Both quite readable, but you have to bear in mind that these are my airplane reads. Give me an Austen or a Trollope & I'm a happy camper.
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I had never read Mrs. Dalloway or indeed anything by Virginia Woolf, but I did read The Hours back in the early '00s when it was all popular and enjoyed it, so I figured I'd give it a shot. It felt like a sort of self-imposed homework assignment at first, but I ended up loving it -- loving it a lot more than the Hours, in fact. It's a very weird and interesting book, basically a series of linked internal stream-of-consciousness narratives over the course of a single day, some of which are more coherent than others (though none of them reach the level of near-unintelligibility of, say, Sound and the Fury, which for the record I also loved). It made The Hours seem very bland and conventional by comparison; all the narratives in Mrs. Dalloway are really vivid. And it isn't even especially long. I recommend!