quacks like a blog, dances like a book-lover

[truepenny]

Patrick Nielsen Hayden says it for me and says it better:

At the moment, really, the most rational possible reaction to the Bush administration's national-security policy is to light one's hair on fire and run down the street screaming about Jesus.

But in lieu of that, you can always attend a candlelight vigil near you. (Link found via the incomparable Mesile.)

***

Bookslut led me to this one. Britain's Poet Laureate Andrew Motion (here complaining about how these kids today don't read the classics) has a list of books for creative writing students to read. Here's his list, along with reactions by a variety of people.

Now I looked at this list:

Motion's must-reads
Tristram Shandy by Laurence Sterne
Middlemarch by George Eliot
Great Expectations by Charles Dickens
Ulysses by James Joyce
Emma by Jane Austen
A Handful of Dust by Evelyn Waugh
Brighton Rock by Graham Greene
Waterland by Graham Swift
Midnight's Children by Salman Rushdie

And I admit, my first thought was, Huh?

I've read five of the nine, the first five to be exact. All of them except Emma I read because they were on the reading list for my Master's Exam. (Emma I read 'cause I'm geeky like that and I wanted to.) Now, my Department and its Program are admirable in many many ways, but "radical" and "cutting edge" are really not words one would choose to describe them. (Jane Austen's on the M.A. reading list, too, but the book IIRC is Pride and Prejudice.) So can we say, Hello canon? Yeah, we can. We can say it real loud and maybe bust somebody's eardrum, too.

The four books I haven't read are the twentieth century literature part, and the chief thing I notice about them (because I'm feeling bitchy and strident--but NEVER shrill--this morning) is that they're all men. So the list is 7 to 2 in favor of the men, and the two women represented are about as safely canonical as someone with two X chromosomes can be. (I love Jane and George, I do--tho' I love George more in the breach than in the observance--but they are not threatening. Not even a little.)

Granted, Motion's list is specifically meant to redress a perceived lack of familiarity with the canon (although he doesn't phrase it as such, and I'm kind of thinking that might not be an accident), but STILL. (I said I was feeling strident, right?) I'm also not quite sure what, besides being "well-rounded," which, frankly, Socrates, I don't think is a sufficient end in itself (there's no use in being "well-rounded" if it doesn't inform how you think and act and live), a creative writing student is supposed to gain from this list.

So I'm making my own list. Nine books, like Motion's, that I think are "classics" and creative writing students should have to read. Feel free to join in.

1. Hamlet by William Shakespeare.
2. Yes, okay, fine, Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen.
3. Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte.
4. Villette by Charlotte Bronte.
5. Bleak House by Charles Dickens [ETA OR Moby-Dick by Herman Melville].
6. [REVISED: The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson. You may substitute The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Spark if horror gives you the deep-down heebie jeebies.]
7. Watership Down by Richard Adams. (No, I'm not kidding.)
8. The Dead Zone by Stephen King. (I'm not kidding about this one, either.) [ETA OR Beloved by Toni Morrison.]
9. Wild Life by Molly Gloss. (Okay, not technically a classic yet, but it needs to be shoved in everybody's face until it BECOMES a classic, because it is that damn good.)

My list is more subversive than Motion's, but that's because I think the canon is a tool of oppression in the hands of the Western imperialistic, patriarchal, phallocentric literary regime which reifies text into fetish ... oh god I'm stopping before I hurt someone. What I mean is, I think the canon per se is bullshit (anything that makes me read James Fenimore Cooper in high school is arrant nonsense) and I think if one's going to make lists of this kind, they should not be REINFORCING THE GODDAMNED CANON, FOR THE LOVE OF FUCK.

Anyway, that's my list. You can notice the strong slide toward the sfnal as we move into the latter half of the twentieth century, but that's because I think that's where the action's at. Sure I'm biased, but so is Motion.

Comments

We are twin souls...

[yonmei.livejournal.com]

Well, almost. I've also read 5 of Andrew Motion's 9 (2 and 3, 5, 7, and 9). But I've read 7 out of your 9 - no Bleak House (I hate Dickens), but Molly Gloss? Nevererdover...

Re: We are twin souls...

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

I'm not terribly fond of Dickens qua Dickens, but I love Bleak House, and for the purposes of this sort of list, I think it's a great book, because it's enormous and insane and ambitious and only partially successful. People always choose Great Expectations for lists because it's short, and I think personally that it's also not very interesting.

However, if you'd like to substitute Moby-Dick for Bleakk House, that's fine with me.

Molly Gloss is an American writer. She's written four books, Wild Life being the most recent. It won the Tiptree (http://www.tiptree.org/) in 2000, which is how I heard of her in the first place.

I can't describe Wild Life in any kind of a way that will do it justice. It looks like it's going to be a sort of retro-pastiche nineteenth-century adventure novel with a female hero, and then it goes off and does soemthing ... different. I love it.

Publishing info: Gloss, Molly. Wild Life. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000. ISBN 0-684-86798-2

Re: We are twin souls...

[yonmei.livejournal.com]

Oh, I've read Moby Dick. I liked it. I read Great Expectations because I wanted to go to one of my dad's lectures before he retired, and that was the book he was lecturing on. It's the only time I've ever managed to finish a full-length Dickens novel. It's basically a Cinderella pastiche, made appallingly rococo in best Dickens style.

Molly Gloss sounds good: will look out for her.

[coffeeandink.livejournal.com]

Yes, I noticed that about Motion too. I do better with your list than his--4/9 of a well-read person on the Motion scale, but 8/9 of a well-read person according to Truepenny!

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

What's the one on my list that you haven't read?

[coffeeandink.livejournal.com]

The Dead Zone.

I tried Stephen King when I was thirteen or so. It deeply, deeply freaked me out. I do not read Stephen King. Life is better for me that way.

[ex-ajhalluk585.livejournal.com]

I've actually only read four. Given that of the four I read, three irritated me to screaming point, and the fourth irritated me as closely to screaming point as Jane Austen can (Persuasion IMHO is a far finer work) and I know I've never been able to get into either Joyce or Dickens, and I can only succeed with Greene's entertainments not his other stuff I can only say that this reading list was calculated to make me feel illiterate.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

It's the Dead White Men Strike Back list.

Other shamefully underrepresented groups, aside from women, include people of color, writers from other parts of the Commonwealth (Canada, Australia--why is Peter Carey not on your list, you pretentious git?), oh I could go on and on. But I won't.

I'll froth slightly about Joyce instead. I know he's one of the great writers of the twentieth century, blah blah stream of consciousness blah blah modernism-cakes, but he's also one of the most howlingly UNAPPROACHABLE writers it has ever been my misfortune to do battle with. I've "read" Ulysses, in that my eyes have scanned every word on every page, but I could not have so much as answered a multiple choice questionnaire about it five minutes after I was done. If you want to win people over to reading your "classics," keep Ulysses OFF the list.

And oh thank goodness! Somebody else who doesn't like Emma. I thought it was just me being contrary ... well, it probably is me being contrary, but at least I'm not alone. *g*

[yonmei.livejournal.com]

Emma herself persistently annoys me (I also feel very sorry for her, but mainly she annoys me). But I love Emma, though Persuasion, Mansfield Park, and of course Pride and Prejudice are my Top Three.

also asians

[(Anonymous)]

I hate Emma with as much of a vengeance as it is possible to feel against Jane Austen. In fact, I would love to hear your deconstruction of Auten's books, after the bang-up job you did on Narnia. (having not read The Dark is Rising, I missed out on that one) Sense and Sensibility comes is her only other book I have issues with. Its the only book I have ever read where I preferred the movie. I'll avoid spamming your LJ with my ramblings though... just wanted to mention that Salman Rushdie is nice to have on the list simply because any Asian at all needs to be represented to show that English belongs as much to the colonised as to the colonisers. V. S. Naipaul is much more heavy - I'd put Arundhati Roy's "God of Small Things" and Vikram Seth in a list of mentionables, but I think, in terms of literary merit, people prefer Rushdie. Of course, if we enter the arena of masterpiece litrature translated, then we open up even more vistas.
Deepa D.
(who, as an Indian, has a vested interest seeing her country's authors appreciated)

[infinitemonkeys.livejournal.com]

I've read six of nine on the Motion scale, and six of nine on yours and I am not remotely as well-read as say, you or Melymbrosia, or even half the people on my friends' list.

It's all very cosy, isn't it? Motion's choices seem very much skewed towards the male north London literati point of view, what with the Greene and the Rushdie and Graham Swift. Rushdie is not 'English' but he was part of the English literary scene until the fatwa and the decamping to New York to hang out with U2. Waterland is gorgeous, but I wouldn't make any claim for it to be worthy of inclusion in the top 50 works of all time, never mind a list of nine.

I'm only amazed that we didn't find Martin Amis on there, given Motion's perspective.


A Handful of Dust isn't Waugh's best book (though it is his best ending -- indeed, one of the best endings I've ever read) and even though I should not be, I was put off reading Waugh's books after hearing about the man's behaviour. After the war, under rationing, each British child was given a banana from the first shipments as a treat. Evelyn Waugh sat in front of his children and peeled and ate *their* bananas in front of them. There was also the crashing snobbery, misogyny and racism of course, but the banana thing sort of summed it all up *g*

[coffeeandink.livejournal.com]

Your picture makes me feel all shippy about John and Aeryn. Damn you.

You are very well read, just pathologically modest.

What a horrible story. It gets to me even though I hate bananas. *Why*? What reason did he give for doing that?

bananas

[yonmei.livejournal.com]

It's quite a famous anecdote: From The Sunday Times (http://www.suntimes.co.za/1998/11/01/lifestyle/life02.htm): Auberon Waugh remembered this time of post-war hope at the family table, when the banana ration was distributed: "The great day arrived when my mother came home with three bananas." But before the eyes of his three children, who had only heard of the deliciousness of the banana but had never had one, his father, Evelyn Waugh, took the fruit, peeled it and cut it, poured on cream and sugar, and "ate all three. It would be absurd to say that I never forgave him. But he was permanently marked down in my estimation from that moment, in ways which no amount of sexual transgression would have achieved... From that moment, I never treated anything he had to say on faith or morals very seriously."

As far as I know, Evelyn Waugh never offered nor was asked for any reason for taking all three bananas for himself. If anything, I would guess it was straightforward patriarchy: he was the man of the household, the most important and powerful person in it, and therefore by God entitled to those bananas: he wanted them, and therefore they were his by right. (Parallels between this anecdote and the current political situation are left as an exercise for the reader.)

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

I've never read Evelyn Waugh, and now it seems quite likely that I never will.

I don't consider myself particularly well-read either. Contemporary mainstream literature is as a great howling wasteland to me. Early modern English drama, check. Representative sampling of Victorian novels, check. Passing familiarity with a host of unrelated things that were on my M.A. list, check. Random acquaintance with Australian and African novelists, due to course taught by beloved and crazed Shakespeare professor in undergrad, check. Smattering of nineteenth and twentieth century drama, likewise of twentieth century women writers, both due to undergrad classes, check. Nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first century supernatural and fantastic fiction, check check CHECK!

But well read? No. I'm not as well read as Melymbrosia (or as well read as Here's Luck, for that matter). I'm probably not as well read as you are. I think I just talk a good game.

[papersky.livejournal.com]

I've read all his except Tristram Shandy and all yours except the Gloss and (ugh) Stephen King and I haven't read your alternate Beloved either, because if ever anything looked like a token black female being shoved down my throat it was that. I'm sure it's a very good book if you say so, but the marketing makes me gag.

Oh, and I haven't read Hamlet, come to think, only seen it performed. So I score better on Motion's canon... pah.

I think attempting to get "well read" into a little list like that is pernicious, I think there's something broken about the entire concept. Looking at both those lists makes me realize I never made a better decision in my life than to be a classics major.

My list of what everyone ought to have read if they want to know where western culture is coming from is The Faber Book of Children's Verse and Tam Lin, and then follow up things you like and the references outwards in a spiral.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Oh, I wouldn't defend my list on any grounds except being a better list than Motion's. *g*

I like lists. It's a personal quirk. But I don't think the prescriptivist approach to being "well-read" is the way to go. You just read. It is inevitable that one book will lead to another. And every time you talk with someone about books, that leads to more books.

Motion has pointed to a problem: students don't read as much these days as they used to. I've taught undergraduate creative writing students; I can vouch that he's not wrong. But the solution to the problem isn't to assign little lists of required reading; it's to teach people to want to read and to read with discrimination (I would argue the two go hand in hand, although I know there are plenty of counter-examples to prove me wrong). Once you do that, the "well-read" bit takes care of itself. It's like the old axiom about "give a man a fish ..."

[pdcawley.livejournal.com]

Don't read Tam Lin, hear it sung. Same goes for any and all of the other big ballads. And do you want the 'never once asked her leave' version or the '...green leaves came between' version?

[cija.livejournal.com]

My list has one of yours and one of his:


Villette by Charlotte Bronte
Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier
Kidnapped by Robert Louis Stevenson
The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson
Wise Blood by Flannery O'Connor
Seven Gothic Tales by Isak Dinesen
The Good Soldier by Ford Madox Ford
A Handful of Dust by Evelyn Waugh
Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh

Wuthering Heights or Bleak House or Possession should probably replace Brideshead, but I don't want them to.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Ooh, The Haunting of Hill House! That bumps The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie right off the list. Dunno where MY brain was this morning.

[oracne.livejournal.com]

9. Wild Life by Molly Gloss. (Okay, not technically a classic yet, but it needs to be shoved in everybody's face until it BECOMES a classic, because it is that damn good.)

YES YES YES YES YES YES.

[ahem]

Did someone already ask why you chose SENSE & SENSIBILITY over PRIDE & PREJUDICE, or even PERSUASION? I ask because SENSE is my least favorite of Austen's books, because I think the middle needed considerable editing down.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Um, *blush*, because my memory of it has been so colored by the movie: (a.) Emma Thompson is amazing and (b.) I have a neon-pink irrational Thing for Alan Rickman. Also because Elinor is my favorite of Austen's heroines.

It wasn't a thoughtfully pondered critical decision, and I won't attempt to defend it. Pride and Prejudice would be a much more sensible choice.

Another list

[(Anonymous)]

Here's another list of nine. I don't know whether it's a list I would want to cram down everyone else's throat, but it's certainly a list of books I wouldn't want to be without. Of course, YMMV...

1. Gaudy Night, by Dorothy L. Sayers
2. The Daughter of Time, by Josephine Tey
3. Romola, by George Eliot (although I can see preferring Middlemarch)
4. Divine Comedy, by Dante (ideally a dual-language edition of the original Italian and DLS's translation, though that would be a cut-and-paste job)
5. The Cornish Trilogy, by Robertson Davies
6. A glut of Shakespeare (boundaries vague, but say Macbeth, Hamlet, King Lear, Othello, Twelfth Night, Romeo and Juliet, sonnets, Midsummer Night's Dream, Measure for Measure, Merchant of Venice)
7. Possession, by A. S. Byatt
8. The Lions of Al-Rassan, by Guy Gavriel Kay
9. Beowulf (again, a dual-language edition)

Notes:
1. OK, this one I would cram down everyone else's throat, if I could. And repeat as required.
2. And everyone who has any interest in being a historian (or a novelist) should read this. Disillusionment may follow when you realize that Tey herself does some of the things she blames her straw historians for doing, and remember that people can and do sometimes do unaccountable and out-of-character things. But it's a good starting point.
4. Someday I shall learn Italian, mostly because I glanced over at the Italian text opposite "angel wings green as fresh leaves new-budded on a wand" and saw "verdi, come fogliette pur mo nate". As Sam says in Khazad-dum, "I like that! I should like to learn it."
6. I tried to pick just one, but lines from lots of different plays rushed through my head. And interesting things happen when you combine them, and wonder how things might have turned out differently if Duncan in Macbeth had been as manipulative as the Duke in Measure for Measure.
7. Possibly more of a personal favourite than an "everyone must read", because I was in the academic machine for eleven years.
9. Not because it's "the beginning of the canon" or any such stuff, but because if you can get into the original there's a rhythm and a magic and a glory to it. This is the Misty North of Legend, or rather, because the author probably lived some centuries after the events described, an attempt to recreate it, and there have been people trying to speak in that same voice ever since.

Cheers,
Sean.

Re: Another list

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Definitely yes to #1 and #6. I personally tend to think the more Shakespeare you read the better off you are. I'd go with Much Ado about Nothing over Midsummer Night's Dream and Coriolanus over Romeo and Juliet--I really dislike R&J, and Coriolanus is AMAZING. I am unspeakably pissed that in seven years of taking every Shakespeare-related course in sight, I never got to study it. I read it on my own for my PhD prelims exam and LOVED it. But which Shakespeare to read ... well, it's an embarrassment of riches. Steer clear of Timon of Athens and The Two Noble Kinsmen (which is only 2/5 Shakespeare anyway), and you really can't go wrong.

I haven't myself read nos. 3, 5, and 8, so can't comment there, and I think Dante and Beowulf really need to be saved for the Advanced list. You can't START there and be anything but mind-numbingly bored. But you definitely want the dual-language ed. for Beowulf, too. It makes a difference.

Possession is indeed grand, and I'd go with The Daughter of Time if this were actually a syllabus for a course I was teaching (which is, now that I think of it, a much better way to frame this whole discussion). TDoT, which I love, needs careful handling to keep the world from being overrun with passionate fans of Richard III.

Drat. Now I'm going to have to go back and recast my thinking in terms of a syllabus. I hated teaching, but making up the reading list for the syllabus (the times I got to do that) was always kind of fun.

[heresluck]

I find it enormously interesting that I have read 8 of Motion's 9 (and the Greene is near the top of my Things To Read list), and -- drum roll please -- am writing about three of them in the diss. And have read 9 of your 12 options. And love them (except for the Dickens, both of which make me want to spit; if one *must* read Dickens, and as far I'm concerned there's no such need, Our Mutual Friend is the way to go).

Of course now I want to make my own list. But then again I don't, because I have so many problems with the notion of "classics," let alone with the notion of canon.

The problem that I face all the time in my work, and that I struggle with daily as I write a diss that is so grounded in Books By Old And/Or Dead White Guys, is that I love most of the canonical novels I've read. I really do. Love them thoroughly, though not unambivalently. I have no problem with them being canonical. It's just that I want the size of the canon to be, at minimum, two or three times as large as it is now, and I want it stuffed full of all sorts of interesting books that are woefully under-read and under-appreciated, not least so that the wonderful books that now look like "tokens" (e.g. Beloved) could be fully appreciated as logical outgrowths of legitimate branches of the literary tree.

And of course that defeats the purpose; which is part of my goal, I suppose.

Drat. I really am going to have to make a list. But I think I'll have to wait until I get home, or I'll forget things.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

List-making is insidious. You know it's stupid and exclusionary and leads to bad thinking, and then you go and do it anyway.

At least, that's always what happens to me.

There was a huge debate in the English Dept. at the Undergrad about canon and books-everyone-should-read, and I came out of it feeling that, while the canon is horrid, there is a certain amount of necessity, if one's going to have a useful conversation about literature, that people come to the table equipped with some common ground. Because otherwise you spend your whole time reinventing the wheel, and those who have been roller-skating since they were seven are seriously contemplating clawing their eyes out just for something to DO. And because it would hurt less. (Not that I've ever in my whole life felt that way in a class. Nope, nope, nope.) And then you have to figure out what the "common ground" consists of, and things go downhill from there. But I do actually sincerely think that to understand a lot of modern literature, you'd better have read, for example, Shakespeare.

Actually, that's my canon: Shakespeare. Everything else is an elective.

(JOKE! That's a JOKE! Although I do mean it a little.)

Think of it as a syllabus, as I said in a comment somewhere else on this leviathan-like thread. Not a canon, just a syllabus. (I say this, evilly, because I know your weakness for syllabi.) And then figure out what it's a syllabus for. That's one big problem with Motion: he doesn't specify what he thinks people are going to get out of his list except being "well-rounded" whatever the fuck THAT means. Come on, Motion, how are your MFA students going to be better writers after they've slogged through your list?

*now resisting the urge to post ANOTHER list*