I love book lists. You know, those things where it's all "50 Books You Must Read Before You Die" and "75 Best Books Ever in the World" and "100 Classics If You Haven't Read Them You Are Stupid". I was talking about this with my mum and sister today, and Anna was saying she finds them dismaying because they make her feel like she isn't well-read. As for me, I always like them and I always go through and add up my totals even if I have somewhere else to be in the next five minutes. It's fun. Here's why.
1. I often feel like I am well-read when I add up my totals. Unless they have loads of philosophy books on them, I have normally read a lot of those books. I was an English major so I had to. I had to read Moby Dick twice, and the payoff for this and other miseries is that when there is a list like this, I have usually read a bunch of them. Though I think I should be able to give myself two points for Moby Dick since I had to read it two (2) times and it is as long as - like, it's really really long, okay?
(I was trying to think of some sort of dirty joke about Pinocchio's nose, to illustrate how long Moby Dick is. And I couldn't think of something. Oh well. I am not that clever.)
2. I come across these lists relatively often, because people love to make them, and they always remind me of books I have been meaning to read. Like Doris Lessing. I keep meaning to read Doris Lessing. One of these days I will. Or, to give a better example, Salman Rushdie. I used to see Salman Rushdie's name all over the place, and I was all, Whatever, I'll get to it, and eventually, I got to it. Which means that now when Salman Rushdie's books are on these lists, I have read them. Plus, it turns out I really like Salman Rushdie. And if he hadn't been on book lists all the time, reminding me about his existence, this would never have happened.
3. This will not stand up under scrutiny given how much I thought I was going to hate Salman Rushdie and other authors I can't think of right now, but here it is anyway: for a lot of the books I haven't read, I am pleased not to have read them. Because I know I won't like them. And because I think without having read them that they are stupid. Thus instead of feeling not-well-read, and thus not enjoying the book lists, like Anna, I feel aggravated with the list-makers for putting stupid books on their lists, and pleasingly smug with myself for knowing better. And then I have a big internal (or sometimes out-loud) rant about how racist and sexist everyone is with The Classics, and how foolish the list-makers are, putting on more than one book by Faulkner (esp. if neither of them is Light in August, which is the one I was forced to read) or whoever, and that is fun because it's fun to feel like a better person than someone else.
Yup.
3 comments:
I wouldn't make Doris Lessing too high a priority. At least not her fiction. It can be awfully heavy-handed, as well as stylistically awkward and marred by peevish prefaces. I can't say that it is uniformly bad (I've read either 1.5 or 2.5 of her books (can't remember whether I read the sequel to Mara and Dann), and they had spots of interestingness, and Mara and Dann actually started out gripping), but if you want to read something bleak by a twentieth-century British woman with a first name ending '-ris', I highly recommend Lessing's exact contemporary Iris Murdoch instead. Not one thing I've read by her has failed to be sharp and funny and surprising and un-didactic.
Oh goody! That makes my life simpler! Very well, away with Doris Lessing, I banish her from my mental reading requirements list!
...er, but I am not trying to read something bleak by a modern British author whose name ends in "ris". Poor Doris Lessing shares a birthday with awful Bosie. Ugh.
The more reason to give her a miss. But do read Iris Murdoch! I liked A Fairly Honourable Defeat, to start.
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