

Does anyone want to be "well-read?"  - yarapavan
http://blogs.suntimes.com/ebert/2011/04/death_disports_with_writers_mo.html

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khafra
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."

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ahoyhere
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."

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brudgers
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?

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ahoyhere
None of it matters if it doesn't lead you to be a more thoughtful, flexible,
inquisitive, humble, introspective person.

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swombat
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.

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

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

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

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

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cafard
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.

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cafard
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.)

