A Handful of Books

When I was a teenager, I used to read blog posts by people in their 20s and 30s who complained about how they don't read anymore. Reader, I scoffed. I had a pretty clear list of things that might happen to other people as they grow up, but would never, could never happen to me. Soul-killing jobs. A passion for running, cooking or, if God was really unkind, both. No reading. My job is okay, my legs unexercised, my mind still in shock after it discovered one can actually overcook pasta last month. I don't read much. 

Or perhaps I should say that I do read. It's only that books became what theater used to be for me. Something I enjoy but rarely go to, because it seems to require so much effort when so many alternative sources of entertainment can be had for no effort, and every time I do go, I tell myself, "This was worth the effort. I should do it more often." and then don't come back for another year or two. And so I've only seen a handful of plays in my life and read only a handful of books this year. It comes back to the same thing: easier entertainment to be had elsewhere. And yes, if we are to express everything in terms of entertainment and steer clear of categories like "learning," "self-improvement" or whatnot entirely, in most cases inferior entertainment too. I know that reading that Ishiguro novel would bring me more pleasure than refreshing tumblr for the 250th time today. That's not the point.

Book blogging is a double-edged sword here. Knowing that I will have to write about a book adds more to the cost of reading it, a cost that my mind is already reluctant to shoulder. And because I'm bad at focusing on two things at the same time, it also creates a break between books that allows my mind to wander off into the world of the refresh button again. "No more books for you until you write that post about Their Eyes Are Watching God!" usually leads to no books instead of leading to a post. (Witness the life of this blog so far.) But blogging can be a tool as well. I have taken to carving time for reading. I'm not at the stage where I ride trains for it (yet), but this summer I've started to develop little strategies to trick my mind into reading. I'm hoping to add bragging to that list. I'm proud of the few books I read so far, snatched from the jaws of the internet, so I will make a list of them here. I am not sure which one of these I am going to write more about. So far the best strategy has been not to stop reading, to go from book to book with no pause. I'll have to figure out where writing about things and remembering them fits in this scheme. 

So here's my handful of books from August and July.

What About Philosophy?

Let's kick off July with a discussion.

I'm curious about the concept of well-readness and what it covers. Amanda of Dead White Guys & Book Riot had a post exploring this concept a while back. The takeaway seemed to be that you should read widely and thoughtfully to qualify as well-read. The conversation was recently rekindled by Jeff O'Neal's list of 100 books that will take you "from zero to well-read" and the debates over his post neatly illustrated how difficult it is to define and apply labels like "well-read." So far, so good. I admit that I'm not very invested in this debate as concerns literature, but I was wondering whether it should include only literature. 

Quint Buchholz, Book Scales

I sort of get why the sciences are not mentioned here. It's not only about the two cultures divide, about the way in which the humanistic and scientific worlds are constantly portrayed as apart and incompatible, and the ideal of the cultivated or well-educated mind is more often associated with the humanistic side (think of how not knowing who Shakespeare is carries a greater intellectual stigma than not knowing the Second Law of Thermodynamics). When it comes to sciences, there's also the fact that it is not very productive to read the original works as opposed to studying their main ideas from a textbook (I mean, good luck with reading Newton's Principia if that's what you want to do with your life, but still...). So the sciences are not easily-included in the well-read conversation.

But if the goal of being well-read is to be able "to think and converse about the human experience intelligently," shouldn't philosophy qualify? Not as an afterthought ("of course, non-fiction is important too"), but as an essential part of the canon. After all, much of the world (and literature) we know now would simply not exist without philosophy. Whether you want to have an idea of the history of human thought, or to understand a piece of literature in context (sometimes to understand a piece of literature at all), you need to have some knowledge of philosophy. And this is not to talk about the tools and frameworks literary theory borrows from philosophy. 

This raises the question of how far we should go, though. How much and what philosophy should you read to qualify as well-read? Most people would probably agree that Plato's Dialogues are indispensable (or, more accurately, a selection of them is). So is Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, but it's long and dense, so should you read it if you don't have a special interest in philosophy? Most people would probably agree that you should have some knowledge of Sartre and Existentialism if you want to understand the 20th century in literature. Fair enough, but what about other strands of philosophy? Should you be familiar with Carnap or Quine?

So what do you think? Would you include philosophy in the endless stream of stuff you have to cover to be "well-read"? Do any particular works or criteria for selecting them come to mind?

A Timeless Present Contemporaneous with Every Other Present

Giorgio de Chirico, The Return of Ulysses

Apropos Joyce and the Odyssey having the most beautiful, human, all-embracing theme of all, here is a quote from Gadamer's Truth and Method:

The “classical” is something raised above the vicissitudes of changing times and changing tastes. It is immediately accessible, not through that shock of recognition, as it were, that sometimes characterizes a work of art for its contemporaries and in which the beholder experiences a fulfilled apprehension of meaning that surpasses all conscious expectations. Rather, when we call something classical, there is a consciousness of something enduring, of significance that cannot be lost and that is independent of all the circumstances of time—a kind of timeless present that is contemporaneous with every other present.

I have this stupid habit of jotting down quotes I want to discuss in posts along with cryptic comments on them, and then never write those posts and forget what I was going to say and what those comments meant. In this case, I think I wanted to take advantage of the fact that, by his own admission later in the text, Gadamer's criterion applies to any kind of classic, not just those of the classical antiquity, and talk about the tension between being timeless and being historically bound in classic literature. 

But I am unlikely to write such a post because I'm a. lazy and b. much more interested in "that shock of recognition" that Gadamer claims we get with contemporary literature (and how it applies beyond that), so... enjoy this rather nice quote about what makes a classic on its own.