Is being "well-read" important to you? Why or why not? We touched on this in another topic, but what do you consider the basics of being well-read?

-- Anonymous, March 14, 2001

Answers

I think your last entry did an excellent job of explaining why it is important to be well-read, especially if someone is interested in writing.

The world is in desperate need of a Renaissance period.

Not only does being well-read come in useful for reading and writing, but for studying art, psychology, and sociology. I think it was Sars who mentioned reading the Bible. Knowing those stories always comes in handy later on. YOu don't have to know everything, but it's good to have the basics.

It's important to me that the people I socialize with be well-read, or much of what I say is going to go zipping right past their ear.

-- Anonymous, March 14, 2001

I don't care especially about being well-read. I don't want to look like an ignoramus, of course. It bothered me a little bit that I didn't remember the creation imagery from Paradise Lost, even though I dragged myself through it shortly after college.

I like reading, but now I'm in a nonfiction phase. I like hearing from experts and great people on the topics that they want to address. Even with dry material, it fascinates me to hear the distillation of someone's life's work.

-- Anonymous, March 14, 2001

I care about being well-read, but I'm not doing much about it in my own life. I had an advantage in that my dad was about the most well- read person I've ever known, and talked to me about literature all the time, so I know about a lot of stuff even if I haven't actually read it myself.

I have sort of a mental list of what a well-read person needs to read, and it seems similar to your reading list. I know it when I see it but I can't explain it.

-- Anonymous, March 14, 2001

Tom, it's a very short bit in Book VII, not something that's usually focused on:

Let the Earth bring forth soul living in her kind,  
 Cattle, and creeping things, and beast of the Earth,  
 Each in their kind. The Earth obeyed, and straight  
 Opening her fertile womb teemed at a birth  
 Innumerous living creatures, perfect forms,  
 Limbed and full grown: Out of the ground up rose,  
 As from his lair, the wild beast where he wons  
 In forest wild, in thicket, brake, or den;  
 Among the trees in pairs they rose, they walked:  
 The cattle in the fields and meadows green:  
 Those rare and solitary, these in flocks  
 Pasturing at once, and in broad herds upsprung.  
 The grassy clods now calved; now half appeared  
 The tawny lion, pawing to get free  
 His hinder parts, then springs as broke from bonds,  
 And rampant shakes his brinded mane; the ounce,  
 The libbard, and the tiger, as the mole  
 Rising, the crumbled earth above them threw  
 In hillocks: The swift stag from under ground  
 Bore up his branching head: Scarce from his mould  
 Behemoth biggest born of earth upheaved  
 His vastness: Fleeced the flocks and bleating rose,  
 As plants: Ambiguous between sea and land  

And for you uber-geeks, the corresponding part of The Magician's Nephew is when Aslan is singing the animals into existence. The animals come up the same way, called out of the earth, with the dirt crumbling around them like moles. The stag comes up horns-first so the children think he's a tree. The lions have to paw their way out, and then shake off the dirt. It's actually really cool image, and it's not from Genesis.

And of course, big geek Beth was reading her Milton trying to write a paper on Eve as a lesbian or something inane like that, when I got to that section and said, hey, I've seen this before.

Did I mention that Milton was my favorite class in college?

-- Anonymous, March 14, 2001

I dislike the idea of reading something Because It's Good For Me, or Because One Should. I have the same problem with movies, which is why I'm supposed to be this huge film geek and I've never seen Taxi Driver or Schindler's List. I read stuff that interests me, and I seem to do well enough with that mix. It doesn't bother me that I can't recall all my Milton or Dante, or that I can't do a scene-by-scene comparison of The Odyssey and O Brother, Where Art Thou? I figure as long as I keep learning something or other, and keep growing, the sources aren't so important.

Two notes to Beth on her reading plan for the next few months:

1. Emma is funnier and much more entertaining than Sense and Sensibility, which is my least favorite Jane Austen book (it's downright depressing). When Douglas McGrath wrote/directed the film Emma, he realized it had a lot in common with The Philadelphia Story and the film reflects that.

2. If you can squeeze it into your schedule, it's an excellent time for you to dig up a copy of Florence King's When Sisterhood Was in Flower, a novella that relates what happened to some well-read young women in the Seventies. The book is out of print but it's reprinted fully in The Florence King Reader. Not only will you laugh your ass off, but it will round out your cultural/literary experience to be familiar with at least one of Ms. King's books. And you can test your knowledge of various great works of literature by figuring out all the literary references (the book begins "Call me Isabel."). It's a quick read, too.

-- Anonymous, March 14, 2001

As far as I'm concerned, just because I'm not up on every old classic doesn't mean I'm not well read. Especially since I often get the odd analogies even if I haven't read the text they're referring to. But since the people I hang out with tend to be writers or computer geeks, classic works don't come up in conversation. (With regards to the writers, I work at a newspaper.)

-- Anonymous, March 14, 2001

I'm fairly well-read....but I'm fairly democratic about it. My love of THOR comic books led to a love of Shakespeare. I've read a lot of Thackerey, but I've also read all the Doc Savage novels published. (Great fun, in an Indiana Jones-kind of way.) (Thackerey, BTW, Beth, wrote the best of historical novels, especially HENRY ESMOND and THE VIRGINIANS.) I'm a great believer in reading (readable) trash as well as "fine literature".

The Victorians had a great supply of fun literature---especially H. Rider Haggard, with his nearly two dozen Allan Quatermain novels (the hero of King Solomon's Mines) and his four books about She-Who-Must- Be-Obeyed and three novels with Umslopogaas, the black Conan (Actually, Conan was a white Umslopogaas). Conan Doyle's historical stories are great fun, especially the Gerard stories, and the two novels about Sir Nigel Loring.

I've loved the ILLIAD--but that's because I love Greek Mythology and those cheesy, ridiculous stories. I've loved PARADISE LOST---but I also love James Blish's BLACK EASTER, the best horror novel ever written. My tastes run from fine writing to hack writing and back again, and I have a ball with it.

My wife says I'm a readaholic...that I go into withdrawal symptoms unless I have something to read. I think she's right.

Al of NOVA NOTES.

-- Anonymous, March 14, 2001

asking yourself whether you are "well-read" just seems a way to make yourself insecure. i think there are people who've read a lot but not gotten much out of it and people who've read a little but take what they've read a long way.

xeney, were you being disingenuous with your reasons for reading? i thought they were really funny but i was assuming you were at least kind of kidding. if you read everything and then know you are well-read and understand allusions, then what? i liked the part of your entry when you wrote about literature being endlessly interconnected; doesn't that mean that you're reading out of some curiosity for the sake of curiosity, too? or even knowledge for its own sake? instead of knowledge to stop being stupid. i guess you say in your last reason that you want knowledge, but it still seems like you don't really want to admit that, since you say it to explain how you blew an opportunity.

anyway thanks for writing about all of this and your reading lists are kind of inspiring to me.

-- Anonymous, March 15, 2001

To be well-read is to come to understand and appreciate context: how we got here, why we value what we value (truth, liberty, beauty, freedom, etc.), why we have fought and died to protect these same things and why, throughout history, others have fought and died to protect them. Being well-read is not a case of 's/he who has read the thickest books wins'. A depth and breadth of reading allows you, should you be faced with the tiresome 'why read a bunch of dead white males?' argument, to explain just how wrong that belief is and back it up with historical proof. This is, I would think, preferable to cuffing the ignoramus upside the head and bellowing, "You dolt!" Although, perhaps, not nearly as fun.

If you have no interest in context and source, that is your right. I would maintain, however, that you will live a life lacking in texture and richness - and a number of really funny jokes.

-- Anonymous, March 15, 2001

I would say that I care about being "well-read" but in the sense that I don't want there to be a book out there that I would just love for eternity and not have found it.

I consider myself well-read because I read often and on a wide range of topics. I love popular fiction, have attempted three Oprah club books(ick) and read biographies. I also love European history and I own too many books on ancient Egypt and Rome. I've read countless classics, plays, short stories and poetry. I skip that which I cannot stomach even if it is a "classic".

I may not meet the criteria of someone else's idea of "well-read" but I know what I'm trying to derive from reading and I feel like I'm accomplishing it with every book I finish.

-- Anonymous, March 15, 2001

Of course reading is important, but what is to be gained from the "If It's Tuesday, This Must Be Belgium" school of great literature? Besides sheer data. Great literature is about more than data!

"I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound and stab us...We need the books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us." Faust, Othello, Hamlet, definitely Moby-Dick can do that, but in a day?

-- Anonymous, March 15, 2001

I like to read, but honestly, pop trash and the classics mean about the same to me. Happiness is sitting on a big fluffy blanket by the creek bank under a big oak tree with a fishing pole in one hand and a book in the other and being able to take a nap when you get tired of doing either one.

I don't subscribe to better reading through guilt and if I never read insert book title here in my entire life I'm sure I'll be able to take many a poleasant nap all the same.

-- Anonymous, March 15, 2001

Ian, I love that "axe for the frozen sea" quote. Where's it from?

-- Anonymous, March 15, 2001

I think it all depends on how your brain works, Ian. I speed read -- I can't help it, and I have to deliberately slow myself down. Even so, if I read a book too slowly, it doesn't matter how good it is -- I lose interest. The only way I can read a 1,000 page book is to take a weekend and read it all at once. With something short like one of Shakespeare's plays, I do best if I can finish it in one sitting.

I can immerse myself in a period or an author or a theme, but not in one work, not for more than a couple of days.

-- Anonymous, March 15, 2001

Beth, my question was basically what you answered just now - i wondered how the heck you were reading so many.

But my question still stands: How? What is your technique? I used to read pretty quickly and i read a lot. Now i take forever to finish reading anything. I blame part of it on my attention span defecit which has become horrid ever since i learned that i could go online, open three browsers and my email, and just click click click.

How do you read so quickly while retaining what you read? Advice por favor?

-- Anonymous, March 15, 2001

I don't think I could give you advice. I took a class that included speed reading when I was 12. (If Jetrock's still around, he remembers that class, because we took it together.) I'm actually somewhat annoyed by what that class did to my reading skills, because it's so hard for me to read slowly now.

But some of it is just practice. You have to remember, I read thousands of pages a week for my job, and before that I was a law student (which means tons of reading) while having a job that also required tons of reading, and before that I completed an English/Poli Sci double major in four years -- which means a ton of reading. If I weren't a fast reader I would have killed myself by now.

I also read about twenty online journals every morning while drinking my coffee. Practice!

-- Anonymous, March 15, 2001

The quote was from Kafka. I love it too.

-- Anonymous, March 15, 2001

I do think it is important to be well read, but I think that can mean a lot of different things. At the very least I think you should try to be well read on current events and make an attempt at understanding and learning about a topic before running around uttering opinions on it. (Nothing frustrates me more than someone spouting off about say Vietnam, after never having read a single word about the war.)

I think that in this context we are talking about being well read on literary works. I don't think you should read something because you feel like you have to, and let's be honest, sometimes a lovely "trashy" novel is the best medicine for a rotten day. (Nora Roberts has saved my sanity a time or two in the past I must admit.) But I think the great works of literature that have stood the test of time are still there for a reason...because a large portion of humanity has determined time and again that they matter, that they tell the tales of all us and not just some of us (like good old Nora.) Take Shakespeare for example. Romeo and Juliet transcends race, ethnicity, religion, every difference. The same with Hamlet, heck even Beowulf is about a monster that would terrorize anyone, no matter the location or century.

I'm sure that lots of you could poke holes in this, and I probably have stuck my head out too far, but I think the more well read you are, the more the chance that you will be a bit more understanding, a bit less judgemental. Or I'm just naive and dreaming.

Beth, you might enjoy a slim (100 pgs) collection of essays by Bernard Knox called the "Oldest Dead White European Males." He was the head of Hellenic Studies at Harvard and wrote these essays in response to questions about why anyone should study Plato and crew in the age of multiculturalism. It's quite good and interesting and provided me with a lot of insight into Greek literature, an area I'm woefully behind in.

-- Anonymous, March 16, 2001

I don't think that I will consider myself to be well-read until I have read a good deal of philosophy. I studied a bit in school, and I have read a fair amount of Nietzsche, Camus, Kierkegaard... and even made it through Kant's Critique of Judgement in graduate school. But I would love some kind of intense chronological survey, and I don't know when in my life I will have time to really sink my teeth into this.

As for world literature, I am only moderately well-read, in my own estimation; compared to most of my peers, I am exceedingly well-read. I keep reading the classics because it pleases (and humbles) me to do so. I suspect that this occludes a kind of pop culture awareness I once had -- I never watch television, for instance, because I "don't have time" and I know I am missing some things I would like.

-- Anonymous, March 17, 2001