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...

[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!

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

[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]

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.

[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*

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.

[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.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

And that's fair.

The Dead Zone is there because it's an extremely tightly plotted late twentieth century tragedy in which (rarely for Stephen King) all the huskies are pulling in the same direction. But I fully appreciate not wanting to read Stephen King, even before the slow grinding trainwreck that has been his career since about the mid-nineties.

How about, as a replacement (and to gesture in the direction of redressing an imbalance in my own list which I only noticed when replying to Alkujhal, because I am a pot bouncing up and down yelling insults at a kettle), Beloved by Toni Morrison? Morrison is so doomed to be the Token Black Woman in this genre of lists, but Beloved is an amazing book, and it fills the same niche as The Dead Zone.

[coffeeandink.livejournal.com]

9 out of 9! Yes! I am Officially A Well-Read Person! *bouncing up and down*

Then again, lists, well, well-read persons should have read more than nine books. I'm not sure I have an alternate canon to offer.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Oh, I can play this game all day.

But, on a more philosophical level, I think the idea of a canon is a pernicious one. Even this tiny exercise in canon-building shows how easy it is for certain groups to be left out or misrepresented. And if a list is narrow enough to be a canon, that means BY DEFINITION that there's as many or more books not on the list that you should be reading.

My syntax got awfully tangled there, but you know what I mean. I hope.

[leadensky.livejournal.com]

Try The Gunslinger and the sequels. Or Eyes of the Dragon. I really am not impressed with his more mainstream horror. Boring, in the way that he goes for the most freaky thing just 'cause it's freaky.

- hossgal

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)

Re: We are twin souls...

[penmage.livejournal.com]

Oh, I loved Moby Dick. He's prose is just so beautiful...I could sit there reading him aloud, letting the words roll off my tongue.

There's nothing quite like Moby Dick.

[rliz.livejournal.com]

I love Beloved. I wanted to teach it side by side with the "Angels" section of A. S. Byatt's Angels and Insects, because I am crazy.

I should read The Dead Zone, I guess. I've only read a couple King novels, from when I was younger; since then I've kind of deliberately not read any of his stuff because I was so annoyed by his book about writing.

[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?

[coffeeandink.livejournal.com]

The one that freaked me out was Pet Sematary. The one I tried after that was Eyes of the Dragon. I didn't like it, so I stopped there.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

His writing advice is perfectly dreadful. But then, even leaving aside the terrible accident, On Writing is a product of his career since The Waste Land, which has been slowly but steadily turning my love for the man's writing to pain and suffering and woe. (Partial exception for Bag of Bones, but nothing since The Waste Land has lived up to my eager expectations of The Next Stephen King!!! At this point, traduced and betrayed by the unrelenting ghastliness which is Dreamcatcher, I've given up trying.)

I personally think The Dead Zone is an amazing novel. Me. Not anybody else. That's all this list is, after all. My choice for nine books every creative writing student should read, as decided upon at quarter of eight this morning when I was feeling particularly assertive and self-righteous.

I should, of course, have stuck YMMV all over that post, but damned if I'm going to go back and do it now.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Pet Sematary would freak ANYBODY out. It's on my Will Never Read Again, Not Even For Money list, along with the collected works of David Wingrove.

And, (sorry, leadensky), The Eyes of the Dragon is a self-indulgent, platitudinizing little fable which has nothing whatsoever going for it except Flagg--and that's only if you've read The Stand and will walk through, well, the unambitious pile of crap that is The Eyes of the Dragon to get even a hint of Randall Flagg, as I would when I was sixteen. (Can't remember the actor's name they cast for Flagg in that rather appalling TV miniseries, but he was ALL WRONG. It was a pity, because he was an actor I quite liked, but just not Flagg. Any more than Corin Nemec, who I also rather like, was Howard or ... I'll stop now.)

If you don't want to read Stephen King, you shouldn't. If, on the other hand, you want to try again ... well, I don't know how squeamish you are, so I'm not going to make recommendations (I have a propensity for forgetting that other people's squick thresholds are much lower than mine, and this has gotten me into trouble more than once). But, truly, Pet Sematary is not the only kind of book he writes. Some (though not all) of them are better.

Re: also asians

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Yes. You're quite right. Basically, if you're not a dead white British guy (specifically from England or Ireland), or in a pinch dead white British gal, you're out of luck in Motion's world. Clearly he's got some kind of Anglocentric project going on here, and I disagree with that as vociferously as I do with his phallocentric project.

My list does not redress this grievance because I don't read non SF contemporary literature, and so have not read basically ANY of the people I should be reading in order to put forth an opinion. Somebody else (hint hint) should do so.

[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 ..."