How to Compile a Summer Reading List

Robert James Gordon, "A Woman Reading"

Robert James Gordon, “A Woman Reading”

The New Yorker recently had a fascinating article about “stunt reading.” As author Christine Smallwood describes it, stunt reading is reading a more or less arbitrarily defined set of books. The article focuses especially on The Shelf: From LEQ to LES, in which author Phyllis Rose describes reading all the books on a particular library shelf.

Smallwood’s article and Rose’s project raise very interesting questions about how to choose which books to read. A number of years ago David Denby decided he wanted to read the western canon’s “great books” (to cite the name of his book about the project) and so went back to school at Columbia University. On his list were classics that undoubtedly belonged, but equally striking were all the works that got left out, especially when he moved into the 17th century and beyond. The authors on Denby’s list—I mention just the ones coming after Shakespeare–are Hegel, Austen, Marx, Mill, Nietzsche, Woolf, Conrad and Beauvoir. Among those not on the list were Donne, Milton, Moliere, Goethe, Schiller, Swift, Dickens, George Eliot, T. S. Eliot, Tennyson, Browning, Balzac, Proust, Stendahl, Flaubert, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Hawthorne, Melville, Twain, Dickinson, etc., etc, etc.

I bring up Denby’s project here, not to criticize it, but to dramatically make the point that it too could be seen as a stunt. Any reading project, even one as seemingly lofty as Denby’s, has to set bounds that are more or less arbitrary. We can’t simply sit down and read all the “great works” because too many works compete for the designation. With English language literature alone, I can report that my department’s three required survey courses only dip into certain representative works. Every year the Norton anthologies get thicker and we’ve long ago given up on “coverage.”

Meanwhile, the thicker Nortons are now being described as only the tip of an even larger iceberg. For instance, here’s one project described by Smallwood:

In 2000, Franco Moretti, then a professor at Columbia, published “The Slaughterhouse of Literature,” an article that revealed his own fear of missing out. Moretti had always been interested in the history of literary form, but he found himself more and more uncomfortable making any claims about it, because he could no longer ignore the fact that his conclusions were based on only a handful of examples. The canon of nineteenth-century British novels, he pointed out, consists of, at most, two hundred works—half of one per cent of what was published in the period. How could anyone pretend to say what the novel is or does based on a sample size that small?

Rose is content with a random assortment, but for Moretti one shelf would never be enough. He didn’t merely want to study more books; he wanted to study all of them, or as many as he could. He began by “reading” in a targeted way, searching for specific motifs, and mapping and graphing what he found. In 2010, he stopped reading like a machine and started using machines. He and his colleagues undertook “distant reading,” feeding thousands of novels into computers and scanning the texts for patterns. How long are the titles of the novels written in the eighteen-twenties? Does the word “the” appear more often in gothic novels than in bildungsromans? What does the plot of “Hamlet” look like as a diagram of the verbal exchanges between its characters?

Moretti’s project may sound more sociological than literary—computer reading isn’t a way of determining worth—but it raises the question of how the canon is formed. Is it just a matter of a few readers’ taste that certain works enter into competition for canonical status while others don’t?

We know that certain historical currents elevate some works and downgrade others so that the canon changes from epoch to epoch. Even the sonnets of Shakespeare, so highly prized today, haven’t always been respected. We sometimes talk about applying “the test of time” to sort things out, assuming that certain works will draw rise to the top and others won’t, but how they rise or fall is not an infallible and unmediated process. The taste that prizes modernist angst at one point may well prize social realism at another.

And then, “test of time” leaves unanswered the length of time we’re talking about. Certain works pass that test very well, such as Homer and Shakespeare. Virgil, on the other hand, hasn’t done as well over the past three hundred years as he did in the 1700 hundred years prior to that. And then there’s Beowulf, which was seen as no more than an interesting historical artifact for a thousand years until a certain scholar (J. R. R. Tolkien) elevated it to the status of literature in 1936. Now we regard it as one of the world’s great epics.

Given the ever shifting landscape, a project mentioned by Smallwood that would once would have seemed self-evidently worthwhile now comes across as a reading stunt: I’m thinking of Christopher Beha making his way through The Whole Five Feet (his book title) of the Harvard classics. “Harvard” and “classic” seem to bestow a certain aura of legitimacy to the project, but some of editor Charles Eliot’s 1909 selections, appearing in 51 volumes, are quaintly anachronistic today. For instance, Richard Dana’s 1840 novel Two Years Before the Mast makes the cut while no novel by Jane Austen does.

So how is one to set up one’s summer reading? I like Susan Hill’s project in Howard’s End Is on the Landing (2010) where she reads only unread books in her library. (Jorge Luis Borges, himself a librarian, said somewhere that anyone who owns a large library will always feel somewhat guilty about the unread books.) But ultimately I recommend just keeping a running list of titles that happen to cross your radar screen.

This admittedly seems unsystematic, but I have a mystical belief that the works we need will somehow find their way into our hands. Jotting down titles that somehow sound intriguing is the best way I’ve found of finding those works.

For the record, the four works I’ve read so far this summer are Margaret Atwood’s MadAddam (I collect Atwood novels and this is the latest), Charles Brockton Brown’s  1798 gothic novel Wieland (I’ve always been intrigued by the author’s name and someone was cleaning out their bookshelves and gave me a copy), Fanny Burney’s comedy The Witlings (which I liked a lot but will not include in my 18th Century Couples Comedy course), and Anthony Trollope’s The Last Chronicle of Barset (my mother, who I’m visiting at the moment, is a huge Trollope fan). Also on my summer list are Wycherley’s Plain Dealer (I’ve always wanted to read it) and Donna Tartt’s Pulitzer Prize-winning The Goldfinch. I also want to read Haruki Murakami’s latest novel Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage (due out in English on August 12) because I collect Murakami the way I collect Atwood. And we’ll see what else floats up.

I know that there will be thousands of worthwhile books that I’ll miss out on, but I no longer let that fact haunt me. Rather, I now feel that if I keep my sensors on alert, I’ll have a chance of coming across that one novel that I’ve been waiting all my life for. It happened three years ago with The Brothers Karamazov and it could happen again.

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