Ode on a Grecian URL
Saturday, December 23, 2006
Next steps and last comments
Here are a few links to the resources I point to on the Further Reading (etc.) handout I passed around last week.
I've linked to the Oxford World's Classics editions of most of those books not because the OWC editions are inherently superior to others, but because they tend to be accurate and cheap editions. If you're toying with the idea of majoring in English and you want to get a sense of the editions majors read, look for Norton Critical Editions instead -- here's a link to the Norton edition of Middlemarch.
If, on the other hand, you are a sane person, go to your local Barnes & Noble and grab one of their Barnes & Noble Classic Editions -- you can almost always get super-cheap hardcovers of classic books if you're not interested in footnotes and lengthy introductions.
As a culture, we Americans have invested maybe a little too much cultural capital in reading. We've built it up to such an extent that it's considered pretentious or intellectual or silly or scary to be seen reading fat nineteenth-century novels in public -- you are more than likely to get strange looks if you're publicly reading a book that isn't obviously some bestseller with a shiny cover and a massive head shot of the author on the back. This in itself is sort of irrelevant -- all of you have braved public opinion a thousand times by now -- except that it sort of feeds back into our self-opinion, so that we start thinking of ourselves "Am I being too pretentious? Should I be reading The Ambassadors in secret, or at least swap the dust jacket with the cover of some Grisham novel?"
It doesn't help me to think of these novels as bestsellers themselves -- Dickens and Collins together sold hundreds of thousands of books during their lifetimes -- although you can try that. What you need, maybe, is to find a reason you are reading. Perhaps you're looking for a way to annoy the next dipshit who starts hitting on you at a party -- start dropping casual literary references and he can't help but feel his own dipshittiness; or perhaps you are looking for a way to avoid your family (this was always my reasoning) -- after all, they'll feel a little more shamed about making you hang out and do dreadful family things if you're clearly being literary in the corner of the room.
There's a lot to be said for the generic goal of "increasing your vocabulary" -- the only permanent way to do so is to read voraciously, and in particular to read outside your comfort zone. Books can also do a great deal to increase your understanding of character: although they can't increase your people skills (trust me), they can help you better understand the Isabel Archers of your life. Books play a genuine role in teaching us about sympathy, in teaching us how to better understand each other. (This might seem at odds with their ancillary function of removing us from those around us; however, books remove us from our contemporaries only to introduce us to new kinds and classes of people. At least, good books do this. Spend enough time with Henry James novels and you can't help but like people a little bit more, and understand them a little bit better.)
This is all a bit pedantic and rambly, I know, but for years I have struggled with finding a vocabulary to explain the basic life-changing power of reading. Why do you read? How do you read?
I was up until 4 am this morning reading Special Topics in Calamity Physics -- it's always rare and wonderful to find these books that just pull you through, these books that refuse to let you turn out the light. Maybe, at heart, all good books are like this: we don't need to have some complicated excuse system to explain why we read them -- they just leap at our eyes and hold them open until we've turned the last page.
Podcasts
- Podictionary is a word-of-the-day podcast with a wonderful amateur etymologist. I highly recommend it if you are looking for a way to better understand our language. (iTunes link, podcast feed link.)
- The New York Times Book Review is one of the premier American book-reviewing organs, and their podcast is strangely light-hearted and delightful. (iTunes link.)
- On Words With John Ciardi is a fantastic, somewhat silly weekly etymology lesson with the American poet who created probably the best translation of Dante's Divine Comedy.
Blogs
- Bookslut is pretty much required reading these days if you're interested in filtering through the thousands of books published every year to those few books that are really worth reading. There is a Bookslut blog that provides daily comments and links if you're not as interested in the long-form review.
- Arts and Letters Daily was envisioned, I'm guessing, as a portal for readers. It has links to pretty much every interesting or important argument or commentary about literary culture. To be honest, I don't read it any more -- I just have too much other stuff to read -- but I found it enormously fun for several years.
A couple magazines
- Bitch magazine is at the cutting edge of contemporary pop feminism. It comes out quarterly and its prose is as stunning as its commentary. Seriously, buy a copy the next time you're at Borders -- it's a wonderful read.
- The Virginia Quarterly Review may have a stuffy name, but in the last few years VQR has transformed itself into the New Yorker for the under-40 set. Its issues are 300-page tomes, but they're packed with seriously exciting short stories, poems, plays, paintings and photography, and generally some astute cultural criticism and news analysis. If you want a taste of the sort of work they publish, read through "Shepherdess", by Dan Chaon.
A few books
On the handout I listed probably dozens of books, somewhat indiscriminately. If you want a somewhat shorter list, try this one:- If you liked Pride and Prejudice, try Middlemarch or The Age of Innocence
- If you liked Great Expectations, try Bleak House or Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell
- If you liked Wuthering Heights, try Love in the Time of Cholera
- If you liked The Moonstone, try The Woman in White or Special Topics in Calamity Physics
- If you like The Portrait of a Lady, try The Ambassadors or Mrs Dalloway or Swann's Way
I've linked to the Oxford World's Classics editions of most of those books not because the OWC editions are inherently superior to others, but because they tend to be accurate and cheap editions. If you're toying with the idea of majoring in English and you want to get a sense of the editions majors read, look for Norton Critical Editions instead -- here's a link to the Norton edition of Middlemarch.
If, on the other hand, you are a sane person, go to your local Barnes & Noble and grab one of their Barnes & Noble Classic Editions -- you can almost always get super-cheap hardcovers of classic books if you're not interested in footnotes and lengthy introductions.
As a culture, we Americans have invested maybe a little too much cultural capital in reading. We've built it up to such an extent that it's considered pretentious or intellectual or silly or scary to be seen reading fat nineteenth-century novels in public -- you are more than likely to get strange looks if you're publicly reading a book that isn't obviously some bestseller with a shiny cover and a massive head shot of the author on the back. This in itself is sort of irrelevant -- all of you have braved public opinion a thousand times by now -- except that it sort of feeds back into our self-opinion, so that we start thinking of ourselves "Am I being too pretentious? Should I be reading The Ambassadors in secret, or at least swap the dust jacket with the cover of some Grisham novel?"
It doesn't help me to think of these novels as bestsellers themselves -- Dickens and Collins together sold hundreds of thousands of books during their lifetimes -- although you can try that. What you need, maybe, is to find a reason you are reading. Perhaps you're looking for a way to annoy the next dipshit who starts hitting on you at a party -- start dropping casual literary references and he can't help but feel his own dipshittiness; or perhaps you are looking for a way to avoid your family (this was always my reasoning) -- after all, they'll feel a little more shamed about making you hang out and do dreadful family things if you're clearly being literary in the corner of the room.
There's a lot to be said for the generic goal of "increasing your vocabulary" -- the only permanent way to do so is to read voraciously, and in particular to read outside your comfort zone. Books can also do a great deal to increase your understanding of character: although they can't increase your people skills (trust me), they can help you better understand the Isabel Archers of your life. Books play a genuine role in teaching us about sympathy, in teaching us how to better understand each other. (This might seem at odds with their ancillary function of removing us from those around us; however, books remove us from our contemporaries only to introduce us to new kinds and classes of people. At least, good books do this. Spend enough time with Henry James novels and you can't help but like people a little bit more, and understand them a little bit better.)
This is all a bit pedantic and rambly, I know, but for years I have struggled with finding a vocabulary to explain the basic life-changing power of reading. Why do you read? How do you read?
I was up until 4 am this morning reading Special Topics in Calamity Physics -- it's always rare and wonderful to find these books that just pull you through, these books that refuse to let you turn out the light. Maybe, at heart, all good books are like this: we don't need to have some complicated excuse system to explain why we read them -- they just leap at our eyes and hold them open until we've turned the last page.
Labels: blogs, books, podcasts, recommendations
:: posted by Mike, 11:27 AM