A stack of books to read
08/03/14 04:37
It has become a bit of a joke with my friends who say that I am culturally deprived. In the musical, West Side Story, Action has a line in the midst of the “Gee, Officer Krupke” song that goes, “Hey, I’m depraved on account I’m deprived!” I don’t think that I am actually depraved or deprived really, but the cultural deprivation to which my friends refer is that I don’t watch very much television and I rarely go to movies. I have no objection to these forms of entertainment, I just find that I have other things that I enjoy. I like to read books in the evening instead of watching television. Much of what is played on television bores me. I find myself not paying attention to the television at all and engaged in something else around the house. When we do go to movies, i enjoy myself. I just don’t go very often because I don’t think about it. I always have other things that I’d like to do. We enjoy concerts and community theater and events at the church. Our lives are full and busy and we rarely have any time when we are sitting around thinking, “Gee, what should we do now?”
So I never know the characters or the story lines from television programs and I rarely have seen the latest movies. I never know who has won an oscar or what performance inspired the award. I just don’t pay much attention to those things.
As is true with most teases, however, there is a bit of truth somewhere under the humor that we share. I do feel that I missed out on part of my cultural education somewhere along the line. We were talking about it today. There are so many classical books that I just haven’t read.
I think that I got behind in my reading when I was in high school. In those days, our school didn’t have any “advanced placement” courses. There were AP classes offered int he larger urban schools in our state, but in the small town where I lived we took the same English classes as our peers all the way through high school. There were only 4 English classes offered: 1, 2, 3 and 4. There might have ben a literature class offered to seniors, I’m not sure. I only attended three years of high school and missed out on all of the “senior” classes.
I was in what was called the “college path” in my high school. That meant that for electives I took Latin and typing. I also signed up for band and chorus each year. I made my way through “Latin Grammar and Exercises” books one and two in my freshman and sophomore years of high school. I got reasonable grades in Latin. I assumed that we were learning Latini as it had been used by the Romans. It is, after all, a classical language. Little did I know that the Romans never had grammar books. They didn’t even know the concept of grammar. There was no Latin grammar for students to learn in ancient Rome. The grammar that we were learning had been translated from the German, and developed in the 19th century. It was a system of rules that were developed to explain the usage of the language centuries after its height as a world language. Real Romans didn’t employ good grammar at all. The speeches of Cicero that we read and translated had been heavily edited in the 1800’s. Cicero himself said and wrote all kinds of sentences that didn’t have verbs. He had no knowledge that the pluperfect tense even existed, let alone tried to employ it.He probably wouldn’t have gotten the joke we used to make in Latin class about the imperfect tense being my strong suit.
But I digress.
The point is that there are many classics of English and American literature that I simply have never read. Give me a paragraph of Jane Austin and another by Emily Bronte and I might not be able to tell you who wrote which. I’ve never read Pride and Prejudice or Wuthering Heights. I know that Emily Bronte had a sister Charlotte, but I don’t know anything about who wrote or edited which texts.
I’ve been meaning to read those books to catch up with the texts that others read when they were 17, but I haven’t gotten around to it yet. I guess once you’re 40 years behind in your reading, you shouldn’t expect to catch up in a few weeks.
So while I’m on the subject of reading the classics, I suppose it might make sense to speculate on what makes a book a classic. Italo Calvino wrote, “A classic is a book that has never finished saying what it has to say.” In his book The Uses of Literature he speaks also of books that people are re-reading as opposed to the books that they are reading. There are a few books that I have re-read, but not that many really. I haven’t caught up with the ones I haven’t yet read.
I re-read the Bible, of course, and Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea and Thoreau’s Maine Woods. I’ve re-read Matthew Goldman’s Journals of Constant Waterman and, of course Dickens’ Christmas Carol. The urge to re-read a tale of two cities or David McCullough’s biography of Truman has not seized me, however. I love reading Dave Eggers and David Sedaris and John Sayles, but I want to read their new stuff more than re-read the books I’ve already read. The same probably goes for much of the philosophy and theology that I have read as well. I pull the books from the shelves to find quotes, and re-read sections, but the desire to start at the beginning and read to the end captures me with very few books.
It may well be that I am culturally deprived. At least there are a lot of books that I haven’t read. But that gives me the best sense of the meaning of the classics that I know. Classics are the books on the list that I want to read that I haven’t yet gotten around to reading.
That is a list that I never want to complete. I pray that I will always have a stack of books that I can’t wait to read.
So I never know the characters or the story lines from television programs and I rarely have seen the latest movies. I never know who has won an oscar or what performance inspired the award. I just don’t pay much attention to those things.
As is true with most teases, however, there is a bit of truth somewhere under the humor that we share. I do feel that I missed out on part of my cultural education somewhere along the line. We were talking about it today. There are so many classical books that I just haven’t read.
I think that I got behind in my reading when I was in high school. In those days, our school didn’t have any “advanced placement” courses. There were AP classes offered int he larger urban schools in our state, but in the small town where I lived we took the same English classes as our peers all the way through high school. There were only 4 English classes offered: 1, 2, 3 and 4. There might have ben a literature class offered to seniors, I’m not sure. I only attended three years of high school and missed out on all of the “senior” classes.
I was in what was called the “college path” in my high school. That meant that for electives I took Latin and typing. I also signed up for band and chorus each year. I made my way through “Latin Grammar and Exercises” books one and two in my freshman and sophomore years of high school. I got reasonable grades in Latin. I assumed that we were learning Latini as it had been used by the Romans. It is, after all, a classical language. Little did I know that the Romans never had grammar books. They didn’t even know the concept of grammar. There was no Latin grammar for students to learn in ancient Rome. The grammar that we were learning had been translated from the German, and developed in the 19th century. It was a system of rules that were developed to explain the usage of the language centuries after its height as a world language. Real Romans didn’t employ good grammar at all. The speeches of Cicero that we read and translated had been heavily edited in the 1800’s. Cicero himself said and wrote all kinds of sentences that didn’t have verbs. He had no knowledge that the pluperfect tense even existed, let alone tried to employ it.He probably wouldn’t have gotten the joke we used to make in Latin class about the imperfect tense being my strong suit.
But I digress.
The point is that there are many classics of English and American literature that I simply have never read. Give me a paragraph of Jane Austin and another by Emily Bronte and I might not be able to tell you who wrote which. I’ve never read Pride and Prejudice or Wuthering Heights. I know that Emily Bronte had a sister Charlotte, but I don’t know anything about who wrote or edited which texts.
I’ve been meaning to read those books to catch up with the texts that others read when they were 17, but I haven’t gotten around to it yet. I guess once you’re 40 years behind in your reading, you shouldn’t expect to catch up in a few weeks.
So while I’m on the subject of reading the classics, I suppose it might make sense to speculate on what makes a book a classic. Italo Calvino wrote, “A classic is a book that has never finished saying what it has to say.” In his book The Uses of Literature he speaks also of books that people are re-reading as opposed to the books that they are reading. There are a few books that I have re-read, but not that many really. I haven’t caught up with the ones I haven’t yet read.
I re-read the Bible, of course, and Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea and Thoreau’s Maine Woods. I’ve re-read Matthew Goldman’s Journals of Constant Waterman and, of course Dickens’ Christmas Carol. The urge to re-read a tale of two cities or David McCullough’s biography of Truman has not seized me, however. I love reading Dave Eggers and David Sedaris and John Sayles, but I want to read their new stuff more than re-read the books I’ve already read. The same probably goes for much of the philosophy and theology that I have read as well. I pull the books from the shelves to find quotes, and re-read sections, but the desire to start at the beginning and read to the end captures me with very few books.
It may well be that I am culturally deprived. At least there are a lot of books that I haven’t read. But that gives me the best sense of the meaning of the classics that I know. Classics are the books on the list that I want to read that I haven’t yet gotten around to reading.
That is a list that I never want to complete. I pray that I will always have a stack of books that I can’t wait to read.