Awhile back, we read an essay by James Collins in the New York Times Book Review. In the essay, Collins makes a damning admission: Despite being a professional writer and prolific reader, he has immense trouble remembering the details--and sometimes even the grand arching themes--of many of the books he reads. When we read this piece, we were shocked, appalled. . . and thoroughly relieved. "Thank God!" we thought. "We're not the only one!"
The fact is, despite the fact that YNSHC majored in English in college, receiving both bachelor's and master's degrees, we, too, have immense difficulty recalling even the broad strokes of many of the books we have read. In some cases, this is because the books were lethally dull or written by George Eliot (yes, we know: same thing). But even when we enjoy the books we read, we very often have great difficulty remembering much of anything about them. We remember distinctly READING the books; in many cases, we explicitly remember ENJOYING the books; yet if someone were to quiz us on even the most basic facts, we would often have to smile, shrug, and come up with a very good excuse--or just make sweeping, critically-astute-sounding comments. "Ah, yes, well. . . Ulysses. . . Magnificent book. . . .Joyce's radical experiments with narrative form are just. . . great."
On Facebook, we often see lists of "Great Books" or "Top 100 Books of All Time," and we enjoy checking off the ones we've read. Of course, the number of books read far outstrips the number of books remembered. Here, therefore, in no particular order, is an extremely partial, more-or-less random, but ultimately honest list of some classic and not-so-classic books we've read, divided into three sections. How does your own personal list measure up?
BOOKS THAT WE'VE READ AND CAN ACTUALLY DISCUSS IN SOME DETAIL
Hamlet: Maybe it's because this is a play, or maybe it's because we've literally had to read it about ten times for different classes, but we can discuss the Melancholy Dane with barely conscious ease. The same goes for things like Macbeth, Othello, Romeo and Juliet, Midsummer Night's Dream, and several other Shakespeare plays.
[DIGRESSION: Speaking of, we've been watching reruns of "Dexter" lately. Watch season 4 (the one with John Lithgow). It's a total homage to Hamlet. EOD)
Plays are often memorable: A couple of others that stick with us are Waiting for Godot, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, and The Iceman Cometh. We actually wrote our master's thesis on the latter, so we SHOULD be able to remember it.
Catch-22
Slaughter-House Five
The Fortress of Solitude
The Odyssey
Pride and Prejudice
Most anything written by Stephen King or Harlan Ellison
BOOKS THAT WE CAN REMEMBER BITS AND PIECES OF, BUT FOR WHICH THERE ARE MAJOR GAPS
This is a considerably longer list:
Moby-Dick: The first 100 pages and the last fifty are terrific. It's those 600 pages in the middle about penguins that'll kill you. (We did, however, write a nifty paper on the chapter called "The Cabin Table.")
A Tale of Two Cities: Great opening line, great closing line, and that lady with the knitting needles.
Bleak House: Speaking of Dickens, we had to read and write about this book in grad school. So. . . Jarndyce v. Jarndyce. . . .And our paper was about the theme of altruism, so we imagine that comes up somewhere.
Gravity's Rainbow: "A pig is a jolly companion / Boar, Sow, Barrow, or Gilt / A pig is a pal / Who'll boos your morale/ Tho' others may topple and tilt. / / Though your friends may bamboozle and hoodwink you / Though they'll turn on you, Tory and Whig / Though you may be thrown over / By Fido and Rover / You'll never go wrong with a pig / A pig! / No you'll never go wrong with a pig."
Infinite Jest: Tennis academies, wheelchair assassins, corporate sponsorships of entire years. . . .
The Name of the Rose: Actually, we remember this one pretty well--better than Foucault's Pendulum, about which we mostly remember something about the Knights Templar--but we put it here because we STILL have no idea why it's called The Name of the Rose.
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Klay: Something about a golem.
1984: We love Big Brother
Crime and Punishment: The "Columbo" scene.
And many more.
And now, the most embarrassing. . .
BOOKS WE KNOW WE'VE READ BUT ABOUT WHICH WE DRAW A PRETTY MUCH TOTAL BLANK, including:
Madame Bovary
Vanity Fair
Sons and Lovers: We think we rooted for "Lovers."
Anna Karenina
War and Peace (For God's sake! We just read that!)
Anything by Virginia Woolf. . . .
OK, this is just getting depressing.
We take some comfort in the fact that, according to a psychologist quoted in Collins' essay, even if you don't remember a book, it still had an effect on you, shaping your neural pathways and building up your stores of knowledge and insight. At least that's what we THINK she said. We really don't remember the article that well.
Solipsistography:
"The Plot Escapes Me"
No comments:
Post a Comment