My only real excuse for posting today is to record these two quotations on the subject, I really should create myself a database of some sort for these, but blogging them is far easier:
“A classic is a book that has never finished saying what it has to say.” – Italo Calvino
“The light that radiates from the great novels time can never dim, for human existence is perpetually being forgotten by man and thus the novelists discoveries, however old they may be, will never cease to astonish.” – Milan Kundera
“Classic,” in this context, is a bit of a misnomer. It wasn’t all that long ago that reading “the classics” meant reading the classics of Greek and Roman literature in their native tongues. But I use it in the modern sense, to mean the classics of world literature in English or in translation. I read some contemporary novelists (e.g. Graham Swift, Julian Barnes, Don DeLillo). But, for the most part, when I get a chance to read for “pleasure,” I end up picking some classic novel or other that I always wanted to read–or felt I should read–but never have. Even the ones that I don’t end up enjoying, like Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment, are useful to me, in that they generally teach me something interesting about a point in history that I didn’t know well, or at least in that they expand the web of literary allusions I can pick up on.
It’s challenging to mount an argument on the importance of reading classics on anything other than snobbery. There’s really no moral imperative to read for entertainment at all, much less to choose one genre over another. I should read the classics and the smattering of contemporary literary writers I like because that’s what I tend to enjoy reading, and I haven’t seen a compelling reason to spend much time with other genres (outside of the bit of fantasy and science fiction that I enjoyed in high school). I’m sure there’s truth to be learned and enjoyment to be had in all genres, even those that aren’t generally referred to as “literature,” but I’ve never spent much time trying to confirm that. I keep thinking I might put my toe in those waters. But, as my reading time is fairly limited, I find find that, whenever I start to do so, I think, “yeah, but I’ve never read X.”
It may be that the guilt of not being better read that I amassed in college is the prime motivator. Or it may be that I prefer books with a proven track record (they’ve served me pretty well up to this point, after all). Whatever the case, I find that I stick with the well heeled books and occasional suggestions on more contemporary offerings from a few trusted friends.
This is one of the problems with a liberal education: it makes you aware of a great many fascinating things that you’re never going to have time to explore. And, the older I get, the longer the list grows. So, if you’re in the mood to comment (and mind that you don’t use any apostrophes–or that you escape any that you do use with a backslash, as there’s still a bug in the commenting system), in addition to whatever other point you feel like making, name at least one book you’ve always thought you should read but haven’t and/or one book that you never were told you should read but are glad that you did.