Today's topic is the march of time.
It's running out, btw. And many of us are confronted with a terrible
fact – we have utterly failed to read most of the world's
indispensable fiction. We are going to die without having read
Milton, Thackeray, one or all of the Brontes, the funniest Austen
novel, and that book of Audrey Lorde poems that has sat and will sit
invitingly on a poetry section shelf.
I've decided to come clean
and reveal a representative sample of the embarrassing gaps in my
education and therefore the loosening joints in my life of the mind.
Let's start with ten novels I'm embarrassed that I haven't read but
am simultaneously defiant and won't read them if I live to be 105.
Moby Dick – I'm just
not gonna read the damn thing, I don't care about whaling, and while
today's blog may be a counter example I know when to quit
Anything by Charles
Dickens – I've gotten more than 50 pages into Oliver Twist and I
get where its going and even if it a big surprise, it wouldn't
surprise me that much. I could be wrong but the first 20-30 pages of
a “Tale of Two Cities” rivals the sparkling conversation of
Calvin Coolidge.
Tristram Shandy –
Laurence Sterne
Don Quixote - Cervantes
Portrait of a Lady –
Henry James
USA Trilogy – John
Dos Passos
The Heart is a Lonely
Hunter - Carson McCullers
Anything by Joyce Carol
Oats
My Antonia – Willa
Cather
Crime and Punishment –
Dostoyevsky
I promise to never read
these books, and to resist any & all hectoring from my many
better-educated friends who may attempt hopeless sighs and gaze at me
with the rare and burning mixture of pity and condescension.
But wait, there's more:
Here's the top ten classics I have not read, and feel chagrined about
& harbor secret though vague plans to rectify the situation:
Middlemarch – George
Elliot
Neither Huck Finn or
Tom Sawyer – now that's embarrassing
Jane Eyre – Charlotte
Bronte
Marcel Proust – well
there is a slight dispensation since I'm not over 60
Ulysses – James Joyce
What Maisie Knew –
Henry James
Beloved – Toni
Morrison
The Autobiography of
Malcolm X
Vanity Fair –William
Thackeray
Not a word of William
Faulkner – an accomplishment if a ghastly one
Middlemarch and Jane Eyre
are at the top of the list, I've read lots of Henry James so I'll get
around to Maisie. Why Faulkner scares the shit outta me I cannot
say, but he does. I'm vain, superficial, callow, and snobby enough to
read Ulysses just so I can claim I did it. These qualities got me
through the first 150 pages of War and Peace (numerous times) before
the thing got airborne and flew me to page 1564 before I klnew what hit me. Why, you might ask would I
eschew Carson McCuller's masterpiece? They made a movie of it, and I
began to ball during the opening credits. If I'm gonna collapse in a
blubbering tribute to the unrecognized tragedy and unacknowledged
pain and the grief of our waste of life's impermanence, I prefer to
do so at the climatic recognition scene and not so much through the
entire book.
All great novels break your
heart, they wound and mend. In E.M.Foster's “A Passage to India”
a chapter opens with this line: “Some hundreds of miles westward of
the Marabar Hills, and two years later in time, Professor Narayan
Godbole stands in the presence of God.” I was disappointed to learn
this was metaphorical, because by this time in the novel I was
interested to know what God would actually say to Godbole.
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