Reading

From my son's Live Journal page, I picked up the newest "meme" circulating on the Internet, a list of the 100 books most likely to be returned - unread - to the library. Books One Ought to Read, in other words.

The list is a mix of classics (The Iliad, Vanity Fair, Tom Jones, Moby Dick, Ulysses, As I Lay Dying) and a lot of contemporary fiction (The Historian, Oryx & Crake, Beloved.)

My list would be different - for example, I would certainly leave off 100 Years of Solitude, which I found unreadable, and would probably add all 12 volumes of Anthony Powell's A Dance to the Music of Time, arguably an acquired taste. (And then there's our family's collective guilty pleasure, a French potboiler called The Lady in the Car with the Glasses and the Gun.)

My daughter-in-law thinks a more interesting list would be the books you have thrown across the room (with or without finishing.) I think she is on to something. (See "100 Years of Solitude.")

Recently, thanks to the UU World, I came across a delightful article called "Why I'm sticking with classics." The author, a Unitarian minister, said when he realized he could not possibly read everything, he gave up on contemporary fiction completely, and reverted to classics. (To keep up with cocktail party conversations, he relies on his "cliff notes" -- the NY Times Book Review.)

His first classic was The Scarlet Letter, which he had read - and hated - in high school. Coming to it in middle age was an entirely different experience.

My first joyous rediscovery of a previously slighted classic was The Wind in the Willows, which I first read well into middle age, wondering how I could have missed it.

Just this week I finished A Sentimental Education, by Gustave Flaubert, a writer who has been on my own list of Authors One Ought to Read for many years. I recommend it enthusiastically, as much for its startling contemporaneity as anything else. Who knew that France in the 1840's (the tumultuous period leading up to the revolutionary year of 1848 and its repressive aftermath) was so much like our own chaotic world?

And the other day I treated myself to this, just to have all of Emily in one place. Next thing I may have to read is a book by Ann Fadiman called Rereadings, in which she says classics have to be re-read in order to be properly appreciated. I'm seriously considering beginning A Sentimental Education again soon, because I am sure there is much in it I failed to slow down and appreciate while eagerly turning pages.