Unread classics are the guilty little secret of many literati. The feeling that there are important books that we should have read or should be reading has the odd effect of turning one of our greatest pleasures into a session of nagging self-doubt.
I’m not talking about the instant sensation published this month, the tell-all blockbuster you saw at the airport or the mystery you put in your beach bag. I’m talking about those doorstoppers that might have been covered back in Victorian Literature on the day you ditched class. Books like “Vanity Fair,” “Middlemarch,” “Moby Dick” or any of the great Russian novels that are at once so rewarding and so demanding.
In a sense it’s ridiculous to talk about feeling guilt with regard to reading, but for many of us the feeling persists and is, if anything, exacerbated by tomes like “1001 Classics You Must Read Before You Die,” edited by a British academic named Peter Boxall. Of this work, William Grimes wrote in The New York Times, “(I)t plays on every serious reader’s lingering sense of inadequacy. Page after page reveals a writer or a novel unread and therefore a demerit on the great report card of one’s cultural life. Then there’s that bullying title with its ominous allusion to the final day, when for all of us, the last page is turned.”
Boxall’s book contains an implicit challenge: How many of the titles have you read? Grimes opines that “a reasonably well-educated person will have read a third” and then reveals that he’s right on the money with 303. I did somewhat better (307), but who’s counting?
What’s more, books like this invite arguments as to what’s included and what’s left out. More than half the novels were written after World War II, most authors are British, and there are some amazing omissions.
For example, there are no dramatic works recommended and no poetry. Even among novelists, such writers as Stephen Crane, William Dean Howells, Frank Norris, Barbara Pym, Joyce Cary, Orhun Pamuk and Yusanari Kawabata are inexplicably missing. Moreover, there are some howlers listed that no one need waste time on. Take “American Psycho” — please.
Even allowing for the quirkiness of personal taste, however, most of us would admit to reading deficiencies. A colleague of mine, for example, a distinguished scholar, recently confessed that she hadn’t read James Joyce’s “Ulysses,” though of course she feels she should. Joyce comes up a lot in discussions like this, especially since I personally know no one who’s ever finished “Finnegan’s Wake.” There’s also Proust’s gargantuan “Remembrance of Things Past” and Robert Musil’s “The Man Without Qualities.” I could go on, but I feel bad enough already.
Making reading sound like work
Tim Reynard, lead bookseller at the Greenwood Village Barnes & Noble, understands.
“I don’t exactly feel guilty about not having read certain books,” Reynard said recently. “But before I came to work here, I mainly read popular fiction. I’ve never read ‘The Iliad’ or the ‘Odyssey,’ and I definitely feel there are other books I should read, like ‘Ulysses,’ ‘The Fountainhead’ and Dumas’ ‘The Count of Monte Cristo.’ ” Asked why he feels he should read anything in particular, Reynard responded, “These are books that matter to our lives, books that are relevant.”
I wouldn’t argue with that, but I remember a friend in college who dutifully carried Tolstoy’s “Anna Karenina” around with him for years, reading a few pages whenever he got the chance. He thought biting off small pieces of a masterpiece was a reading strategy, but I doubt he ever finished it. Another friend set himself the task of memorizing the Oxford English Dictionary. The last time I saw him he was through the letter D and bearing down on E.
The rise of book clubs also responds to this general feeling of obligation, of knocking off books we wouldn’t tackle on our own, though admittedly in a social setting with a focus on recent publications.
But it strikes me that there’s something wrong with feeling this way about great literature. Of the 700 or so books on Boxall’s list I haven’t read, for example, Grimes comments, “An ambitious reader might finish off one a month without disrupting a personal reading program already in place. That means he or she would cross the finish line in the year 2063 . . . death might come as a relief.”
Who wants to live this way? It makes reading sound a lot like work instead of enjoyment, even for those of us who work at it. It also leaves out the books one might want to reread and puts a premium on shorter works in order to lengthen the pile one has completed before the Grim Reaper finds his way to the door.
It’s not all doom and gloom. Boxall’s book gives you ideas for reading, piques curiosity about new books and is a treasure trove for book clubs. Going back to the idea of the doorstopper, however, I’d vote for longer selections, especially for a discrete summer’s reading, books one might stop and linger over while sipping a cool drink. Novels like Dickens’ “Our Mutual Friend,” Trollope’s “Barsetshire Chronicles” or Mann’s “The Magic Mountain.”
Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky have made a great contribution by providing new translations of many of the great Russian writers. Reading even one of their novels over the next few months is guaranteed to give you a sense of accomplishment commensurate with real intellectual achievement, as well as serving the function of filling in the inevitable holes all of us have in our literary lives. Me, I’m making a third run at “The Brothers Karamazov,” also available in a new translation. Wish me luck.
David Milofsky is a Denver novelist and professor of English at Colorado State University. You can reach him at david.milofsky@colostate.edu.
