In 8th grade I had a great teacher in a class called "Literary French". This was in a French-oriented high school in a boring Nordic city. Usually the teachers there were a motley crew of random francophones with no credentials whatsoever... Except for this one incredibly smart guy, who was actually a published author from Paris. (The general assumption was that he had ended up as a teacher in that nowhere place because of a woman.)
This being a literature-oriented full-year class, there was naturally a list of books to be read. Somebody asked: "Do we have to actually read these?" His answer was: "No. In school, you can almost always manage if you read 30 pages from the start, 30 pages from the end, and the author's bio. The important thing is not to read every page but that we talk about the books."
No other teacher at that school would have said that. For an 8th grader, it was like turning a key to unlock something that felt fundamental: books are not checkmarks on an assignment list; school is not a collection of tightly defined rote tasks to be performed for their own sake; what you get out of books and school depends entirely on what you bring to the table yourself.
Initially I thought you were advocating only reading the start and end of books. I was going to make a comment about only running the start and end of a marathon - you might get the best bits of the atmosphere, and afterwards be able to discuss it as if you'd run it all - but you'd have missed the core of the experience.
But, on reflection, maybe you are actually saying that the teacher meant you could get away with only reading the start and end; but the point was that you got out what you put in, and so the focus shouldn't be on what you have to do, but on what you choose to do?
I'm over forty now and I am only starting to read the books we were assigned to read at school, e.g. Stendhal, Flaubert, Dostoevsky and the likes. In fact I guess I read these books as a kid but got nothing out of them, except grades. These are actually very good books, but being forced into reading them is the very way to make them unpalatable for life. If I didn't gave them a second try, I would still consider that as "literature" in the pejorative sense. In fact they are life, just more concentrate and immersive.
We 'did' Animal Farm at school. Pointless for me as I knew none of the history, the whole Allegorical facet was missing. I quite enjoyed it though.
When you're 11-15 you just don't have the context for many of the "great works". Would be interesting to sit in on the curriculum meetings of that age and hear what the rationale for those choices was.
On the other hand, a lot of the books I had to read for assignments weren't good reading, but did convey good messages.
1984: A HORRID read, but a very telling archetype of distopia.
The Great Gatsby: It really took 8 chapters to cover the thin vain outer shell before cracking in to the empty but interesting destruction of it all? Maybe a good metaphor for market crashes and corrections, but not a good read.
The discussion part; I don't recall having a single meaningful actual /discussion/ of the books in class. That might have actually helped make the mindless drudgery of reading them have more meaning and allowed for deeper reflection about the meaning of the content we head read.
Gatsby is not about being a metaphor for anything in particular; it's a snapshot of a particular time and place, an account of what a certain society was like. It's just an intriguing (and quite beautiful) story that captures the spirit of a certain era.
By analogy, what you wrote is like saying:
> The Mona Lisa? Roughly 75% of it is just kind of blurry. I can see her face in the middle, which I guess captures her likeness, but a photograph would've probably been better.
It's easy to miss the point or merit of these books in class: often they're forced reading, you read them too early, etc. I would strongly encourage you to pick up 1984 or The Great Gatsby again, and read it one of these days. You'll probably get much more out of it.
These books are considered among the greatest ever for good reason, and I'm sure you'll pick up on that if you give them another try. I think that Gatsby is so good that I re-read it once a year.
Gatsby is really superficial, uncompelling, flat. I picked it up because it's referenced so much in USA media as being the book kids read at high-school.
Personally I don't think anyone would be missing out by not reading it. It's just a weirdly written snapshot of life that's presented in such a tedious and uninspiring way ... what do you like about it?
My issue with Gatsby, after maybe 5 or 6 attempts at reading it, was that I could never bring myself to give a damn about ANY of the characters. It found it impossible to relate to any single one of them, and thus couldn't bring myself to care about what happened to them either.
I felt the same way about the Bell Jar. About halfway through I tossed my hands some up exclaiming "just walk into traffic and get it over with already". I couldn't possibly care about that character either. Never went back to finish it.
1984 had some disturbing beauty, and I did find myself concerned and caring. Pretty sure I read it twice by the time I was in my mid twenties.
That's really cool. Especially - how literary it is that a published French author ends up ... banishing himself to a snowbound land because of a woman.
My kids both had a high school teacher who taught high school to support ( I think less financially than as experience ) his real job - writing textbooks. Huge influence for both.
I feel like many books (especially non-fiction) have this predisposition of making their books much longer than it needs to be. In essence, unless it's highly technical/informational, their book is usually making some sort of an argument that they sometimes stretch out to a certain number of pages to make it seem to have more "depth". I feel like you can summarize a book down to it's essence making it something like 20-50 times shorter, which I do by highlighting and adding notes.
An engineering professor I greatly respect was talking about a book about the class material he liked better than the one the department said he had to use. Author A's book was 1000 pages long, Author B's (the professor's preferred) was about 100 pages. In his words, "The REAL geniuses just need 100 pages. AUTHOR A needs 1000 pages."
Personally, I'd rather read 100 pages of clear, concise prose than 1000 pages of the author rambling and making sure everybody's on the same page and adding his buddy's research about something remotely related to the subject and blah blah blah...
For fiction, there's the separate aspect of enjoying the writing style (including the more verbose ones, or the ones with more "unnecessary" flourish) by itself. Obviously this is very subjective and depends on the reader - just keep in mind that if you find the book too long and tedious because it dwells too much on "uninteresting" points, or repeats itself, someone else might actually find all that enjoyable.
In fact, that someone else may even be yourself at some later date - I have found that some previously read books make more sense and become more enjoyable after having personal life experiences that enable you to relate emotionally, or just get you interested in the subject.
I've long thought that most non-fiction and non-tech/educational books that I've ready could be just a long blog-post. They iterate over every detail of each example for so long that it eventually becomes a book.
Turns out, blog-posts aren't really as sellable as books.
If you would like an author who can do such a thing, read Borges. His fiction is rarely over 50 pages, is absolutely riveting and beautiful, and his nonfiction mirrors this.
This sort of underminds the fact that, like any art, many authors write books because they actually enjoy the act of writing (perhaps not physically) and telling a story, and are doing so for their own sake. They aren't making their work convenient for you, but producing a work that they personally feel happy about. Sure, cut the Great Gatsby down to the bare essentials.. but then it probably wouldn't be the Great Gatsby.
It's all a matter of personal taste and the purpose of reading a piece.
Think of it as being like food, or some other sensual pleasure you enjoy.
If you could condense all meals into a pill and just swallow it would you? Probably not, because sometimes you want to just 'get the sustenance' and sometimes you want to enjoy the experience, to revel in the presentation, flavour, texture and company you're with. Books are exactly the same. There are times when the we want the key pieces. But sometimes, fiction and otherwise, it's worth enjoying the writing itself, the mental images that are created, the use of language, rhytmn and flow to make both major points and to explore subtleties.
I tried to read The Art of Explanation a couple years ago. 60 pages in the book just started repeating itself. I gave up at about 100 pages, came back later and I can't remember if I finished it or gave up again.
For a book about the Art of explaining things it sure did a lousy job of getting to the point.
Often audio book versions of books are abridged. You might try those for the classics. If you get a good narrator it can add to the experience as well.
I could never get through Pynchon or whatever but Infinite Jest wasn't a slog at all. Wonderful prose full of hilarious details and moments. Wacky sci-fi alternative universe stuff. Great descriptions of dynamics in a tennis match.
It's certainly a long book but you don't have to treat it like a academic paper to enjoy reading it. It's a fun read, for real! Well actually it's kind of depressing but moment to moment it's fun.
The only Pynchon I couldn't read was "Mason and Dixon". I'd have to learn to reach 18th century writing at length.
Maybe I'd just had enough.
What hooked me on GR was the similarity to Richard Farina's book, which is not a slog at all and one of my favorites that I'd read when younger. When I found this was probably intentional, it was a very cool thing to find out.
Gravity's Rainbow is not worth the slog, IMHO, unless you like beautiful plot constructions and vulgar wordplay. As a commentary on literature, as a novel, as a piece of writing, and most of all as a story, Mason & Dixon is (by far) Pynchon's greatest work.
The Crying of Lot 49 is the foil—short, with a meaningless story only good for the experience reading it.
I don't think Lot 49 is meaningless at all -- it has a lot to say about people who get wrapped up in conspiracy theories and how once you go down that road, everything begins to look like part of it. That's as relevant to politics today as it was in the 1960s when Pynchon wrote it.
Couldn't get into Infinite Jest. Still sitting on my bookshelf; ~50 pages in, I really just didn't care.
DFW's Kenyan commencement speech is what got me interested in his writing. I'd like to go back and finish Infinite Jest at some point, but I don't see it happening any time soon.
The first 100 pages are by far the hardest. They contain the stylistically most challenging passages, and DFW introduces nearly all characters and settings within those 100 pages, in a non-linear fashion to boot. For that reason, it takes a while to get into. You'll get the hang of it between page 150 and 250, and from there on, it's an absolutely riveting read.
I'd mostly agree, but say that it took me more like 300 pages to "get" his style and an additional 200 pages to actually enjoy. Its a serious investment, but absolutely worth it. Easily one of my two favorite books of all time, next to GEB. I finished it and had a strong urge to start reading it from the beginning again immediately.
A good place to start is a collection of his essays -- short enough to read in a sitting but will help you get into his style. "A supposedly fun thing..." was my gateway
I am reading DFW's nonfiction right now, before i jump into infinite jest. I am almost through Consider the Lobster, and ive managed to piece together the duality of DFW's cynicism and desire to not be so. and then all his literary critique which is exciting in and of itself.
for the what it's worth, i felt the same about gravity's rainbow. pynchon's writing is endlessly fascinating and if there's a section you don't like it's no big deal, because something drastically different is right around the corner.
After 3 unsuccessful attempts to get into GR, I just started skimming pages until the action/prose caught my attention, about 120 pages in. I have no shame circling around back later.
The stuff you don't read don't become part of a knowledge base. Figuring out how to circumvent that in order to learn and think is a huge issue, especially if you want common culture and/or more knowledge growth.
EG: You could read about the nuance of every computer language by every author out there - how does this help you become a better programmer? Alternatively, how do you know when you should read something, especially if it isn't about your language/issues you are dealing with right now, because it could be insightful to problems you will be about to have in general. Multiply by lots of people facing the same choices, and then what?
"My small act of countercultural scholarly agency has been to refuse to continue reading or assigning the work of David Foster Wallace. The machine of his celebrity masks, I have argued, the limited benefits of spending the time required to read his work. Our time is better spent elsewhere. I make this assessment given the evidence I have so far accumulated"
>Coming from a critic, this confession sounds both imperious and ignorant
Ugh. Nobody cares about your title or your perceptions on what you should and shouldn't say based on it. How about just state your thesis and let the reader decide how to interpret it.
>My small act of countercultural scholarly agency has been to refuse to continue reading or assigning the work of David Foster Wallace.
Swerve, academia. We're dealing with a rebel here.
I don't really care that many people have a hard time with DFW's pretentious style or book length. I enjoyed infinite jest immensely—there are some really golden scenes that will stick with me forever. Would I read it if I was overworked or busy? no.. but I wouldn't read Shogun or Shantaram if I was too busy either.
My point is, if you don't feel like doing something, great—but then getting prescriptive about it & trying to dissuade others seems like an error.
"Abundance" is not a personal problem in the arts - maybe it's a professional one, but that is addressing an entirely different goal of curation rather than as a recipient of art.
It is the idea that one is supposed to "keep up" or "know everything" ala "last person to know everything" e.g. leibniz, is absurd.
The author has kind of buried the lede and is actually against subjugating herself to accepting what "the literary marketplace put forward as worthy of attention".
I think this is a much more interesting problem in the sciences than in literature.
There is too much high literature for a scholar to read it all. So like everyone else, the scholars mostly read what makes the popular bandwagon by virtue of reaching a critical mass of interest.
But in the sciences, people are writing about things that matter! The overlooked articles are missed progress.
In literature, writers are writing to write. If masterieces go unnoticed in the avalanche of quotidian works...oh well? There are plenty of perfect wildflowers which go wholy unappreciated as well. Should we mourn the missed opportunity?
In the sciences, people in different fields are each reading from much smaller subsets of the available papers (which are much shorter to start with), and there's a system in place that means most reasonably competent papers will get read by at least a few people in the field.
This argument applies to all forms of media. As the barrier to entry to create plummets, there's going to be an insane amount of noise, even if there's tons of good stuff around. If you don't need a publisher's/editor's approval, no one is going to tell you your work is not worth distributing.
But "not reading" is click bait. The author is just being more selective in how they spend their time, since they can only afford to consume an increasingly narrow sliver. But you are seriously missing out if you elect to ignore the (good) stuff that will last, like (IMO) GEB and Infinite Jest.
So, does this suggest that the new canon is full of books that are actually uninteresting? Because it seems to me that canonical books should be there because everyone found them worthwhile, even if some of them seem daunting. For example, Les Misérables, is a worthwhile book, fully interesting in my opinion.
I do sometimes read books because of the hype, like Catcher in the Rye, that I later wish I read something better. But the only book I read to say I read it was "The Beautiful and Damned" because I heard it called a book that you always wish you could say you had read but you never did. Of course, it wasn't as good as I hoped.
But, dang, if you are reading just to be able to drop names, get a new hobby...
David Foster Wallace (amusingly enough) wrote on such themes. IIRC, the piece I'm thinking of is a review of a biography of Dostoevsky. He talked about how many old classics are full of sincere, deeply held beliefs, that in more modern (postmodern) literature would be mocked endlessly. Strong beliefs are now mainly written about to tear them down with snark, and being ironic/jaded is the default posture of fiction.
Is that accurate, and does that result in less interesting works? I think there's a definite argument to be made there.
I think that finding something worth caring about that doesn't prove to be hollow is one of the fundamental problems of modern life, perhaps especially for intellectuals. So those works may be more interesting to people who wrestle with that in their personal lives.
Ah, interesting side-question there: does the arrow point both ways? Disillusioned authors writing for a disillusioned public -> increased chance of public being disillusioned in the future if they grow up exposed primarily to media telling them everything is empty?
You read stuff because it's supposed to be genius. And sometimes you don't get it at all. So you wonder what's wrong with you. If you're committed you try again. And again. Until you get it and it's genuinely one of your favorites.
That happened for me with Marquez and Pynchon. Still rereading Joyce and Proust.
So yes you can't read just to say you've read, but you can start down that path just because you've heard you're supposed to. At least that's what my experience tells me.
FWIW The Catcher in the Rye is meh out of perspective, but when you look at the American canon before vs after you can't help but notice the originality and the influence.
tl;dr: Tenured literary critic cautiously questions the usefulness of popularity as a metric for evaluating literary fiction, with specific reference to David Foster Wallace's absurd timewaster Infinite Jest. ('Absurd timewaster' is my phrase, not hers, but when you boil down what she said, it's what you have left in the pot.)
One thing worth considering is that not everyone considers the same things to be worthwhile, but popularity is too coarse a metric to use to choose what to read. IJ was one of the most valuable (to me) books I've ever read, and I finally read it after about three false starts on the basis of some clues (eg Schwarz' review) that I might find it so valuable. A mainstream full of -you- would have misled me.
Figuring out what books you're going to like is really hard. If anyone knows a good way, besides the extensive process of collecting reviewers you trust and making friends who know your tastes - do share.
I'm convinced there isn't a way to even increase your chances, let alone guarantee satisfaction. According to a spreadsheet for 4 years my average star rating hasn't changed (~3.5) and at different times I tried different strategies which all ended up with the same end result - a (wonky) bell curve.
So now, instead of wasting time chasing reviews and recommendations I just read the damned book - this way I increase the amount of 5 star books I've enjoyed for the low price of more 1 stars I can have a good chuckle about.
I'm not sure it can be done. Maybe part of the answer is for you to give yourself permission to quit a book after reading, say, one quarter of it. Then you can be the judge for yourself. (Or did your false starts carry you that far through IJ?)
Wow, I'm much more petulant. If the first page doesn't capture my attention, I flip somewhere in the middle, randomly, then read. If the author can't engage me on any of a few randomly selected pages, I drop the book.
(Some exceptions are made, for example, if someone recommends the book).
That'd certainly be my advice, although I'd put it in stronger terms: I can't describe how liberating it was to realize it was permissible to decide that an author is wasting my time.
gwern points this out in his essay, Culture Is Not About Esthetics [1]. He points that even if he read only the books that won awards, there would still be far too many to finish in his lifetime. Given that, it is no crime to ignore recent books, and, in fact, it may be better for us to stop publishing new literary works and concentrate on better appreciating the old masters.
My main issue with this is that I believe there are certain styles of books that don't exist yet because they are created as societies emerge. And I would very much want them to exist. Just like there are movies I would want to exist, and video games I would want to exist. And, in many cases, there are no proper alternatives.
On a similar note, I'm increasingly less interested in a lot of old literature due to the "I've seen this before, we've already talked about this, and this perspective is massively outdated" effect.
For all the talk of how there's lots of everything, there are still whole categories of topics I have never seen at all, or they were covered really poorly.
I think this concerns are better addressed by superior aggregators and niche audiences than by the banning of production of media.
I have a new habit of reading a Princeton University Press book a week, it's good to get a modern update from a professor on the status of Greek history research, and other subjects. For example this book was one of the best books I've read in years the explains why we learn elementary math the way we do currently and how it's changed through history, how it ties into more advanced concepts, how infinity complicates everything. A great read with little noise http://press.princeton.edu/titles/10697.html
I think there is a kernel of truth here (popularity != quality) but that being a truism the rest of the article is just justifying why the author doesn't read books that are considered good books. It's entirely true that large books command more attention than small ones, but I think writing a really good large book is much more difficult than writing a really good small book, which seems reductionist but just considering how quickly you an iterate on a shorter book vs. the time it takes to revise or rewrite a longer one. There's a quote from a review of some Franzen or Safran-Foer novel that talks about how a new writer's first page is brilliant, first chapter is great, and how it basically trails off from there most of the time. Maintaining the prose quality and style and complexity of narrative that Wallace does in Infinite Jest is no mean feat, and this may seem controversial but I think in that sense it is a greater accomplishment than some shorter works.
This isn't to say I don't see the value in brevity or that I don't believe it's difficult to write good short books: I do think it's difficult. However because reading a 1000-page book does take more time (I don't think it's necessarily harder word for word) you have to make the writing worth it, which is undeniably difficult.
What I'm getting out of this article is another angle on the pointlessness of literary criticism and possibly even literary studies. Let's have the English department focus on teaching people how to write rather than how to analyze, reanalyze and overanalyze works of literature. What all this overthinking leads to is just the muddle found in the posted article.
Y'know... I use BookTv as a filter these days. Sometimes, the BookTv is all I get. Other times, it's worth getting the book ( at least from a library ).
This is probably somehow a Wrong Thing but I can't help it.
Ann Coulter (!!!) was flogging her Trump book recently, and she almost came off as human. There's not the same pressure to be a performer there.
I'm amazed literary critique is a job. Definitely Ark B material. This book fetishism always rubs me the wrong way. A book is a conveyer of thought. Like a conversation, phone, film, comic, game, diagram, chart. As much as I appreciate your agonising over Infinite Jest your opinion of it based on not having read it is not convincing. There is a solution to your conundrum you face in this article - don't talk about Infinite Jest.
The whole idea of the Great Conversation or the like is preposterous and not only because it's not physically possible (and hasn't been for decades). You don't have to have been to all the countries on the planet to find common ground and common language to talk about travelling and contribute to the conversation.
This being a literature-oriented full-year class, there was naturally a list of books to be read. Somebody asked: "Do we have to actually read these?" His answer was: "No. In school, you can almost always manage if you read 30 pages from the start, 30 pages from the end, and the author's bio. The important thing is not to read every page but that we talk about the books."
No other teacher at that school would have said that. For an 8th grader, it was like turning a key to unlock something that felt fundamental: books are not checkmarks on an assignment list; school is not a collection of tightly defined rote tasks to be performed for their own sake; what you get out of books and school depends entirely on what you bring to the table yourself.