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| Hearsay: |
No, not the advance for your latest book—the classic books you haven’t read. Every few years this comes about, a round of laughing aloud at what we fake our ways through. I know a prof who got a degree in American Lit without ever reading Moby Dick. She teaches it, but hasn’t read it to this day. It’s a point of pride now. I also once won Michael Ondaatje’s shirt from Andre Alexis while at Michael Redhill’s house simply because I admitted I’ve never read Proust. Easy score, that one. Robert McCrum fesses up. What’s your weak spot?
In his 1970s campus comedy, Changing Places, David Lodge invents a memorable literary parlour game called Humiliation in which players confess to embarrassing gaps in their reading. One of the characters in the novel, in his determination to succeed, becomes so obsessed with winning that he admits to never having read Hamlet – as a result of which, he is promptly fired.
Let’s face it: when it comes to reading, everyone lies a little. Mostly, we exaggerate. Yes, we’ve read Robert Musil’s The Man Without Qualities. No, we prefer Proust in the Vintage not the Penguin translation. Yes, we’ve read the latest Booker prize short list … and so on. Full disclosure: I’ve certainly referred, in newspaper copy, to books with which I have, shall we say, a fairly distant relationship. Now I’m going deeper into the confessional.
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July 20th, 2010 at 10:49 am
Oh, great! Thanks for reminding me of David Lodge’s campus novels. I’ve definitely read them, and they are so hilarious! An absolute must read.
July 20th, 2010 at 11:15 am
I can do a 30 minute rant on Jon Krakauer’s Into the Wild and Thoreau’s Walden. Never finished the latter – never even bothered to crack open the former.
July 20th, 2010 at 12:38 pm
i like that comment after the article(which i didnt fully read) “you can’t really play this game unless you’re dead”
July 20th, 2010 at 1:05 pm
I’m embarrassed to say I didn’t read the article. But only because I read when Slate ran with the same idea (and Lodge reference) in 2001:
[link above]
I’m woefully under-read, but I haven’t lied about it since college.
July 20th, 2010 at 5:15 pm
Here’s one that gets me glares: I have appreciation and respect for the “classics,” but they’re all a yawn, NOW. because language has evolved, sentence-level writing has changed, it is a different world. There, I said it. (There are exceptions of course. Darwin killed God, for God’s sake. And Thoreau bitchslapped us all liek no one else ever could so genuinely, and Orwell, I like Orwell …)
July 20th, 2010 at 11:09 pm
“They” say that it takes 10,000 hours to get good at something.
I think there is some truth to this. After years of reading Stephen King, Michael Crichton, and various comic books, I am finally starting to read The Iliad, The Divine Comedy and Moby Dick. I am actually understanding and enjoying them! There is nothing wrong with old books, it just takes a lot of reading, and perseverance to appreciate them.
July 20th, 2010 at 11:10 pm
That said I just don’t get or like Shakespeare. I can watch it, I just can’t read it.
July 21st, 2010 at 1:52 pm
Shakespeare was not written to be read silently, but to played on the stage, so,Chris, you’re right with the program.