Alot of Toms, Dicks and Harrys are increasingly edgy about all those Thompson, Dickens and Hardy books they haven’t gotten around to reading just yet.
Blame it on the bookstores, those multilevel, couch-intense homes to millions of volumes. In malls and on Magnificent Miles, offering cappuccino with Cather and armchairs for absorbing Armisted Maupin, it’s those Big Bookstores, darn it, and All Those Books that must be held responsible for the new malady of the ’90s:
It’s Readers Guilt, the Oh-Dear-I’ve-Never-Read-a-Lick-of-Henry-Miller Syndrome.
And Harold Bloom isn’t helping one bit.
Bloom’s recent best seller, “The Western Canon: The Books and Schools of the Ages,” focuses on 26 authors whose work he deems essential reading. But his four appendices include hundreds of other Important Authors and works, and-What? You haven’t read Wa Thiong’o Ngugi’s “A Grain of Wheat”? Oy.
With must-reads ranging from David Ferry’s translation of “Gilgamesh” to Tony Kushner’s “Angels in America,” Bloom’s list is more than enough to give a Henry VIII-size headache to the average person, who until now has felt a sense of accomplishment just finishing the Sunday paper.
Publishers Weekly estimates that 45,000 to 50,000 books are published in the U.S. each year, so even people who read as part of their jobs are constantly reminded of the tens of thousands of books still to go. David Kodeski, who works at Unabridged Books on North Broadway, knows the feeling.
“We’re supposed to read the new stuff that comes in so we can make recommendations,” says Kodelski, who obviously has to be pretty selective about his recreational reading. In his ongoing quest to tackle the classics, Kodelski’s current choice is ” `Tom Jones,’ because I felt I should. It’s big and hefty, and the satire is still just as funny now as then.”
Kodelski, looking through Bloom’s Chaotic Age appendix, stopped when he noticed “Berlin Alexanderplatz” by Alfred Doblin on the list. “Oh, I read that!” he said proudly. Why that somewhat esoteric selection? “I heard about the movie, but I didn’t see it because it was 15 hours long.” So he read the book instead.
Stacking up for vacation
Even adults with multiple degrees (and even several of their own books in print) are aware of all the stuff they haven’t read.
University of Chicago professor and prolific author Sander Gilman, president of the Modern Language Association at the U. of C., has more than 15,000 volumes in his personal library. During his working year, Gilman is able to get through several books a month by combining his penchant for bathroom reading with his love of murder mysteries, but he has perfected a vacation reading system.
“As interesting novels or biographies or history books appear during the year, I buy them, put ’em in a big pile, and read ’em on vacation. This isn’t escapist stuff, but the kind of books I’ve always wanted to read-like one on the Dead Sea Scrolls, a Martin Amis novel, or a new biography of Henry James.”
James was invoked again at Barnes & Noble on Diversey, where New Fiction reading group leader Rick Roecker is a “voracious reader” (three books a week). Roecker’s personal literary gaps include Henry James (“I’ve only read a couple”) and “Kipling, which I read, but mostly the childhood stuff . . .”
Roecker notices a growing interest in the classics. There have been, he said, “lots of requests” for a classics reading group in response to a customer survey form, even though the form doesn’t include classics among the interest areas listed.
Dave Houle works at the information desk of Waterstone’s Chestnut Street store and finds that readers who have decided to tackle the classics usually come in with a specific author in mind. They often head for the hardback classics section just inside the front door, where the Everyman’s Library revolving rack includes works by Edith Wharton, Charles Dickens, Mark Twain, D.H. Lawrence, Thomas Mann and Homer. The store’s paperback section also has thousands of classics.
Personal trainer Tim Day is one Chicagoan who recently decided to start playing literary catch-up. The transplanted Englishman feels there was such an emphasis on sports in the British school system that “I’m sure a large part of my intellectual background is missing.”
He began with “Last of the Mohicans” (“I liked the movie, so I thought I might enjoy the book”), and followed with “Catcher in the Rye” (“I hear everyone in America read it in high school”). Next step: a daunting list of 109 must-reads given to him by a client who picked it up at a bookstore.
How to tackle the classics
So what’s the best way to tackle the classics, if one is so inclined?
Taking literature classes is easiest, according to Suzanne Gossett, head of the English department at Loyola University. But self-education is a viable approach, and literary anthologies are the easiest way to begin.
“I could imagine someone buying the Norton Anthology of English Literature or the Heath Anthologies of American and English Literature for a start,” Gossett said. “Heath is a fascinating collection, actually, meant to enlarge our concept of American literature, beginning with the diaries of Christopher Columbus.”
Gossett also recommends the Library of America series-“a wonderful thing for someone who wants to start reading American rather than British literature.” There are “volumes on everything from Walt Whitman to Harriet Beecher Stowe, they’re always the right texts, not terribly expensive, and a lot for your money.
“The other thing is that when people think of books they’ve heard about but haven’t read-whether it’s Shakespeare or `Huckleberry Finn’-there’s always the public library. And that doesn’t cost anything.”
According to professor Gilman, “When you get turned on to reading, it becomes an extraordinary place of escape. And people can develop that passion for reading at different times in their lives. I have a nephew who discovered he could read at 3 1/2 and has been reading a book a day ever since.”
And there’s even hope for folks who don’t take up reading until considerably later in life. Gilman tells of another friend, a man in his 60s, who discovered the joys of reading only after he retired. But there was a down side.
“He read all the time. He hardly ever went out, because he found he could get out of the house by reading books. The guy almost drove his poor wife crazy.”
THE `A’ LIST OF REQUIRED READING
You say the works of hundreds of authors listed in Harold Bloom’s “The Western Canon: The Books and Schools of the Ages” are just too overwhelming to consider? Why not try a starter list: only those whose names begin with A?
The Theocratic Age
Aeschylus: The Oresteia, Seven Against Thebes, Prometheus Bound, The Persians, The Suppliant Women
Aesop: Fables
Apuleius: The Golden Ass
Aristophanes: The Birds, The Clouds, The Frogs, Lysistrata, The Knights, The Wasps, The Assemblywomen
Aristotle: Poetics, Ethics
St. Augustine: The City of God, The Confessions
The Aristocratic Age
Joseph Addison and Richard Steele: The Spectator
Vittorio Alfieri: Saul
Agrippa d’Aubigne: Les Tragiques
John Aubrey: Brief Lives
The Democratic Age
Henry Adams: The Education of Henry Adams, Mont Saint Michel and Chartres
Sergey Aksakov: A Family Chronicle
Leopoldo Alas: Clarin La Regenta
Louisa May Alcott: Little Women
Matthew Arnold: Poems, Essays
Jane Austen: Pride and Prejudice, Emma, Mansfield Park, Persuasion
The Chaotic Age
Walter Abish: Alphabetical Africa, How German Is It, Eclipse Fever, I Am the Dust Under Your Feet
Chinua Achebe: Things Fall Apart, Arrow of God, No Longer at Ease
Leonie Adams: Poems: A Selection
Adunis: Selected Poems
James Agee: Permit Me Voyage, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men
S.Y. Agnon: In the Heart of the Seas, Twenty-One Stories
Conrad Aiken: Collected Poems
Anna Akhmatova: Poems
Rafael Alberti: The Owl’s Insomnia: Poems
Sholom Aleichem: Tevye the Dairyman, The Railroad Stories, The Nightingale
Vicente Aleixandre: A Longing for the Light: Selected Poems
Yehuda Amichai: Selected Poetry, Travels
A.R. Ammons: Collected Poems, Selected Longer Poems, Sphere: The Form of a Motion
Sherwood Anderson: Winesburg, Ohio; Death in the Woods and Other Stories
Carlos Drummond deAndrade: Travelling in the Family
Eugenio deAndrade: Selected Poems
Ivo Andric: The Bridge on the Drina
Jean Anouilh: Becket, Antigone, Eurydice, The Rehearsal
Guillaume Apollinaire: Selected Writings
Aharon Appelfeld: The Immortal Bartfuss, Badenheim 1939
James Applewhite: River Writing: An Eno Journal
Louis Aragon: Selected Poems
John Arden: Plays
Reinaldo Arenas: The Ill-Fated Peregrinations of Fray Servando
Ayi K. Armah: The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born
Antonin Artaud: Selected Writings
Sholem Asch: East River
Miguel Angel Asturias: Men of Maize
Margaret Atwood: Surfacing
W.H. Auden: Collected Poems, The Dyer’s Hand
Whew! One down, 25 to go.
