Does anyone want to be "well-read?"

http://blogs.suntimes.com/ebert/2011/04/death_disports_with_writers_mo.html

by yarapavan • 15 years ago

33 10 15 years ago

blogs.suntimes.com

chalimacos• 15 years ago

Regarding lists, this one by Fadiman&Major is one of the most compact and pertinent I have seen:

http://interleaves.org/~rteeter/grtfad4.html

zwieback• 15 years ago

Thanks for that. Has a lot of my favorites so it must be good!

cafard2• 15 years ago

Well, from her list, I do read a few: Kenner and Powers within the last six months; Ransom not recently, but I could recite at least two, maybe four of his poems most of the way through with reasonable accuracy. Others I have read, and consider to have taken on a factitious importance from America's own sense of itself following WW II. I wonder how any of Bellow outside _Seize the Day_ will last, or Updike, or Mailer.

I don't want to be well-read, though I often want to read.

(And is John Auerbach really Erich Auerbach in disguise?--go to Google and see what you think.)

pavlov• 15 years ago

Seems quite Amerocentric. Are English speakers particularly averse to translated literature?

cafard2• 15 years ago

The list beginning the article is very much the US literary landscape--largely the New York literary landscape--of Ozick's youth. The chances are good that she had met nearly all the persons mentioned, and knew two thirds of them fairly well. So I wouldn't infer too much from that.

I don't know whether we're particularly averse to translated literature. A neighborhood book club I belong to has read four translated books out of about 30 total. For myself, I find it frustrating at times: I often suspect that the translator got something wrong, but can't guess what.

khafra• 15 years ago

The article showed a postage stamp bearing Samuel Clemens' visage, but didn't include his relevant quote: "A classic is a book that everybody wants to have read, but nobody wants to read."

ahoyhere2• 15 years ago

Yes. Additionally: lots of people aspire to be well-read, but disagree with her choices. As far as I can tell, they're all fiction.

She doesn't list Michel de Montaigne, Thoreau, Emerson, William James, or other authors of "classics" that I would consider to be required to be considered "well-read."

brudgers• 15 years ago

No Descartes, Augustine, Plato, Homer, etc. either - It's a bit of an English major's list, and with no one like Richard Wright, Jose Saramogo or V.S. Naipaul it lacks enough when it comes diversity of viewpoints to raise the question, Is being well read as valuable as being widely read?

swombat• 15 years ago

Being well-read has more to do with reading the classics than the more modern authors (which the author does seem to half-acknowledge, though I'm not entirely sure what point he's making).

You find out which are the classics as you observe them enduring for decades, and then centuries. Dickens will always be with us. So will Hemingway, I suspect. JK Rowling? Unlikely.

The fact that someone like Lionel Trilling is no longer read simply indicates that, no matter the critical acclaim at the time, he was not, in fact, destined to become a classic, imho. And yes, "classic-ness" is not something that an author will know about themselves during their lifetime. History is the judge, and history only judges dead authors.

Does anyone want to be "well-read?"

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