

Becoming "well read" - wallflower
http://www.pandalous.com/topic/becoming_well_read

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grellas
The idea of a "canon" is in reality a valuable one in that it seeks to
identify quality expressions of the human mind in literature, history, and
philosophy as expressed in different times and places throughout history.

The core idea is really a by-product of the scientific age in which people
came to believe that human knowledge can arrive at various forms of objective
truth that are of lasting value and not merely of ephemeral appeal to a
particular culture and for a particular time. It has come under severe assault
in our post-modern era by those who claim that all such expressions of what is
ultimately supposed to be true or good for everyone are in reality mere
pretexts by which particular groups gain and keep power over others. In other
words, a work of supposed lasting value is nothing more than something that is
held out to be such by those who stand to gain from propagating the values it
reflects.

This is far too jaded a view for my tastes and, unless we are to give up on
the idea of human betterment by learning from the works of those who preceded
us, the idea of a canon as a basis for self-improvement remains strong with
me. By reading widely and variously across a spectrum of great minds, you will
become much richer in knowledge and in your means of expression.

Harold Bloom is probably the best-known modern proponent of a Western canon
and his list is large and varied, as chronicled here:
<http://www.interleaves.org/~rteeter/grtbloom.html>.

A pretty good overview of "great books" lists (Western and Eastern) also
appears here: <http://www.interleaves.org/~rteeter/grtintro.html>.

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jseliger
The problem, as the commenters to that question note, is that no one is really
sure what it means to be "well read" anymore. Louis Menand talks about how the
end of the consensus on the "canon" or lack thereof has played in universities
(and their requirements) in _The Marketplace of Ideas_ : where he notes that
only a few schools, including Columbia, still have "great books" courses
grandfathered in. (See my post here: [http://jseliger.com/2010/01/21/problems-
in-the-academy-louis...](http://jseliger.com/2010/01/21/problems-in-the-
academy-louis-menands-the-marketplace-of-ideas-reform-and-resistance-in-the-
american-university/) for more on the book).

Anyway, as a consequence most people, with the exception of Harold Bloom and
some other literary conservatives, don't know what should be in the canon, or
would rather fight about what it means to have a canon than to read it. This
is in part related to the larger question of how English and humanities types
think; there's a decent book on that subject called _How Professors Think_ ,
which deals with the legitimacy crisis in English.

That's from an academic angle. As for what I think, I'm not all that impressed
by the idea of reading things merely because they have been read, and
therefore going from Plato to Don Quixote to Austen to Dickens to James to
Joyce to Roth; to my mind, being well-read means reading books that are
interesting, unusual, show something new about the world, and so forth,
whether they're canonical or not. To me, very little fiction is of real
interest before 1900—yet a lot of it is part of the "canon," that I have to
put scare quotes around. Do you want to read that, or excellent modern novels
that have, in my view, improved on what has been, like Ian McEwan's
_Atonement_ , or most of Robertson Davies' work, or Ursula K. Le Guin's better
novels (like _Earthsea_ ), or Carlos Ruiz Zafon's recent novels (which are
very highly plotted and very fascinating), or Umberto Eco's _The Name of the
Rose_ , or, or, or...

As you can tell from the way I've structured my response, I'd prefer the
latter. To my mind, being well read means reading a lot and reading
meaningfully—not reading a particular set of books.

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robryan
Wonder if there are many people like me here, I mainly read non fiction, stuff
about business, the world and statups and programming ect, a lot of the stuff
featured on here but in longer format.

I read the occasional fiction but because of my limited reading time and my
reading speed not a lot, I can certainly appreciate well written text and love
a good story but I find myself having zero interest in reading a lot of the
classics of literature.

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chasingsparks
I'm (almost done) writing a blog post about this.

Concise summary: I used to think the same way but now I don't. Fiction allows
you to experience situations that test your character by comparing your
theoretical actions with that of the fictional characters. It's not only
passive entertainment, but it's very active process of introspection.

~~~
robryan
I guess it depends where you are at in life to, as you said in your blog post
in some areas of non fiction you have reached the point where it give you
little value to read more on the subject.

I watch quiet a few TV shows, a well written TV production can give you a
similar feeling to a well written novel without the time investment. Certainly
not arguing that a TV show is a better form than a novel, just a good
substitute in which a great story can unfold over time and only take up 45
minutes of your week.

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telemachos
What the hell. Here's my list of literature everyone should at least try (in
no particular order):

Homer: both the Iliad and Odyssey

Sophocles: Oedipus the King (read it - far better than you might think)

Plato: The Apology of Socrates

Sappho's fragmentary poems (the translation by Anne Carson titled _If not,
winter_ is especially good)

Dante: Inferno

Shakespeare: at least one tragedy, one history, one comedy and one of the
final "problem plays"

John Donne: a bunch but if none else Elegy XIX To His Mistress Going to Bed

Philip Larkin: he didn't write much; read the complete poems (if nothing else,
look at "Born yesterday")

T.S. Eliot: "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock", "Return of the Magi",
"Hollow men"

Ernest Hemmingway: A Clean Well-Lighted Place

Herman Melville: Bartleby, the Scrivener

Joseph Conrad: Heart of Darkness and The Secret Agent

Gustave Flaubert: Madame Bovary

George Orwell: Any and all of the essays, but especially "Shooting an
elephant" and "A hanging"

Stendahl: Red and Black

James Joyce: A Portrait of The Artist as a Young Man

Andre Dumas: The Three Musketeers

Samuel Beckett: Waiting for Godot

Tom Stoppard: Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead

I'll shut up, except to say that although I agree with some of the people on
the thread that reading "great books" just because they're considered great is
stupid, these books were all a joy. I remember them each pretty happily and
return to a few of them now and again and just browse through for awhile. Some
"great" books really are great, and if you're reading for yourself (not as a
forced assignment), they're often well worth the effort (because, yes, none of
them reads like a magazine article).

~~~
gjm11
The _Journey_ of the Magi. Dare I conjecture that you were thinking of the
Return of the Jedi? :-)

(More seriously, I'd put the Republic ahead of the Apology, and the Waste Land
ahead of Prufrock, much though I like Prufrock. Also, for the benefit of
anyone wanting to lookg things up: Hemingway; Stendhal; Alexandre Dumas. For
the avoidance of doubt, I'm only bothering to quibble because I think your
list is a good one.)

~~~
telemachos
Those spelling errors are pretty awful. I can't fix it any longer sadly, but
thanks for catching them. I need to proof better online. I also appreciate the
quibbles: it makes for better conversation.

As for the Magi, I think I just had that title wrong. I am not enough of a
Jedi fan for that to be it (unconsciously maybe...). As you can see from the
spelling, I made the list too quickly and without checking things. But I think
I've always had that title wrong. Here's my real guess: when I first studied
that poem, our entire focus was on the finale (when the magi return home "no
longer at ease."). So I guess that's what stuck in my head.

I picked the Apology over the Republic because I prefer Plato in his Socratic
phase to him in his Platonic phase. Also, the Apology is about 20 odd pages,
while the Republic is many hundred.

I think The Waste Land is completely overrated, but love Eliot's other poetry.

~~~
gjm11
I hereby retract my Star Wars slander. I think TWL is rather uneven; the Fire
Sermon section seems to me very fine indeed. On reflection, though I'm not
convinced TWL is better than Prufrock, so I retract that too. (The Four
Quartets are better than either. But long.)

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drp
Start by reading books by people who write things your are interested in and
are also well read, Oliver Sacks and Haruki Murakami work for me for example.
While reading keep a list of the authors, books and music they mention, then
read and listen to them. Iterate.

~~~
telemachos
A favorite trick of mine forever: try all the books mentioned in the
bibliography or notes of any book you like. Some you will not go far with;
some you will love. It really helps to have a good library available to do
this right.

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j_baker
This post is interesting because it made me discover pandalous (which sounds
awesome) moreso than I want to be well-read.

~~~
nopassrecover
Yes, definitely a great way to get people involved. Although I can't believe
with this design it's a new site.

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maxharris
I posted this on Pandalous, but since other people are posting answers here:

I'm surprised that no one has yet mentioned any of Ayn Rand's works.

I highly recommend Atlas Shrugged, The Fountainhead, and her many nonfiction
books. For an academic perspective on these ideas, I recommend two of Dr. Tara
Smith's books (she's a professor of philosophy at UT-Austin) - "Viable Values:
A Study of Life as the Root and Reward of Morality" and "Ayn Rand's Normative
Ethics: The Virtuous Egoist."

EDIT: Why am I being modded down? I think these ideas are essential for any
person to consider themselves "well-read". I am being voted down because a few
people dislike (or misunderstand) the ideas that these books put forward.

~~~
mquander
I suppose you're being voted down because a lot of people don't like _Atlas
Shrugged._ Personally, I think it's fair to say that if your aim is to be
well-read, you should probably pick up Ayn Rand at some point just because her
novels are likely to be common ground with other folks you're dealing with.

That said, the actual quality of writing in _Atlas Shrugged_ and _The
Fountainhead_ is frankly god-awful. If you're making a canon full of books
that exemplify the craft of written storytelling, _Atlas Shrugged_ would be
sitting somewhere behind the Twilight novels.

~~~
maxharris
Can you explain why you think the writing is "god-awful"? I've read both
books, and I don't agree with this at all.

(I'm not trying to be sarcastic. If you're correct, you should be able to make
your case with more specific examples.)

~~~
mquander
Well, her habit is that whenever she has a theme that she wants to emphasize,
instead of demonstrating it, she just says it; either through the narrator's
description of things, or through some huge silly speech like Galt's famous
monologue at the end of _Atlas Shrugged_ , Francisco talking about the beauty
of money, or Dagny's dialogue with James Taggart's wife. That's ridiculous.
Either Rand doesn't have the skill or inclination to demonstrate through story
the philosophy that she foists upon us, or she doesn't trust her reader to be
smart enough to figure it out.

Besides that, generally purple prose, one-dimensional characterization, and
way-too-exaggerated melodrama. I think I have a copy in the pile of books over
there so I'll see if I can't find any passages that exemplify my complaints.

Anyway, I think there's a lot of people besides me who feel the same way, so
if you search around online you should be able to find plenty of folks
bitching and moaning about Ayn Rand's fiction.

EDIT: _Atlas Shrugged_ , page 316 in my edition (I opened it randomly.) Dagny
Taggart met Hugh Akston in the diner and is riding somewhere on a train. I did
not italicize the following or quote it because it's quite ugly on HN, but
it's verbatim.

It was the chance conversation of two men somewhere behind her that came
beating suddenly against her closed attention.

"But laws shouldn't be passed that way, so quickly."

"They're not laws, they're directives."

"Then it's illegal."

"It's not illegal, because the Legislature passed a law last month giving him
the power to issue directives."

"I don't think directives should be sprung on people that way, out of the
blue, like a punch in the nose."

"Well, there's no time to palaver when it's a national emergency."

This impels Dagny to go grab a newspaper and read about the awful directives,
and so on.

How inartful. Good fiction does not spoonfeed arguments like this to the
reader; it leaves the reader to argue it out himself, in his own head. It
presents him with a story, not a conversation. And it doesn't present half of
the story as an endless series of straw men waiting to be knocked down, as
Rand treats all her "evil" characters.

EDIT: _Atlas Shrugged_ , page 567 in my edition. This is what Ayn Rand wrote
about Counterfactual Rand's famous theatre production, _Progressive Atlas Just
Held It_ :

The man in Roomette 3, Car No. 11, was a sniveling little neurotic who wrote
cheap little plays into which, as a social message, he inserted cowardly
little obscenities to the effect that all businessmen were scoundrels.

Oh dear!

~~~
maxharris
"Well, her habit is that whenever she has a theme that she wants to emphasize,
instead of demonstrating it, she just says it"

<http://www.exploreaynrand.com/1957/>

Have you seen Diana Hsieh's page and podcasts on this? If you don't have the
time or interest in the podcasts themselves (I highly recommend them,
however), the questions alone reveal depth that almost no one gets when they
read her book the first time (this was certainly true for me!)

~~~
mquander
I haven't, and now that I'm all fired up about Ayn Rand, I suppose I'll listen
to them this afternoon. Thank you!

------
Someone
"I want to become "well read," but I don't know where to start."

If you want to read and have both time and access to a library, becoming "well
read" in some subject area is a given; just read. If you want to become well
read in a subject area that does not interest you, think twice. So, what are
your interests?

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jdminhbg
The most helpful hint for this came to me from Tyler Cowen at
marginalrevolution -- he puts down books he's not interested in. If you're
reading something and it's a chore and you don't like it, switch what you're
reading. You can't possibly read everything "worthwhile" in your lifetime, so
you might as well concentrate on things you like. You'll fit more in that way.

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elblanco
Really? No Dune? The rest of Herbert's work is meh, but that book is genius.

