In the Sunday's NYT Book Review, Joe Queenan offers some good-natured insights on compulsory summer reading lists (link). You'd almost call it wry, except that Joe Queenan is never wry; its a Queenanesque rant on the evils of such an imposition, together with a grudging acknowledgment that this kind of mandate probably leads the young to Better Things.
As it happens, in adulthood I have read quite a few of the Victorian doorstop novels, and I think I know why. The reason is that I didn't read much of anything when I was young. I've never read To Kill a Mockingbird or Catcher in the Rye, but I'm really too old to have met them in high school anyway. Thing is, I never read Story of a Bad Boy (link) or Penrod and Sam (link) either, despite my mother's suave efforts at inducement. When Mr. Boland in the 11th Grade assigned Tale of Two Cities, I simply didn't bother. I don't know quite how I got round it, but I was a pretty good con artist in those days (I even made a bit of money ghosting book reviews for others, sometimes of books I hadn't read myself). In any event, I never accrued the warm puddle of animosity that keeps so many people off the big books until well into adulthood, perhaps forever.
What happened instead was there came a time when guilt and curiosity began to catch up with me, together with an uneasy intution that I was really, really ignorant. So I started throwing my head against the cultural brick wall. It's been nearly 50 years now and as I say, I've been able to chalk up a good deal of material. And never once have I had to say: gee, this is more interesting than I ever suspected in high school.
There are gaps. Still haven't read Our Mutual Friend, hope to get to it in the next year or so. Probably will have to knock off The Ambassadors, at least to curry favor with Mrs. Buce. Assuming I have the time, I suppose I will get to Proust's Captive, though it doesn't appeal to me. I've pretty much given up on Finnegans Wake. I suspect I never will get to Clarissa.
Oh, and for whatever it is worth, I never have finished Tale of Two Cities.
2 comments:
Oh, don't do it. Don't give up on Finnegans Wake. Use the wiki at finnegansweb.com -- or listen along while you read. It draws you in much tighter to actually hear the dialect spoken.
Thanks for the tip, Finnegan Fan. I took a quick look and I must say the Wiki is amazing. I know I'll be back and I'll even try to come up with a post about the site, if I can think of anything original to say.
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