Old Books Versus New Books

I’ve been working on my website, ClassicBooklists.com, that attempts to identify the best all-time books through comparing recommendation lists and looking for consensus.  As a byproduct of this endeavor, I’m reading a lot about classic books.  The obvious question comes up:  Should I read the old highly-praised books or should I read what everyone else loves to read at the moment?  For example, the last two books I bought from Audible.com were The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton and The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, the new Pulitzer Prize winner by Junot Díaz.  If I followed Harold Bloom’s advice, the sage of western lit, the choice is always between known quality writing and untested new stories, but then I’d miss out on one of the most exciting novels I’ve discovered in years.  There could be dozens of canon-worthy writers getting published today but we won’t know that for decades, until the academics give us the signal to start reading.

Bestsellers

Most books are sold hot off the presses and people love to read the latest books on the bestseller lists.  Personally, I consider it great fun to read a book that I can discuss with other bookworms and this usually means keeping up with the new.  And I take gleeful pride in my rare discovery of a book before Entertainment Weekly puts it on their The Must List.  There is certain pleasure in keeping up with pop culture, and I think people naturally prefer the new in things.  And that’s okay.  Besides, sometimes a movie or Oprah will make an old book a bestseller again, and throw the past a bone.

If you track such things, most books disappear as they age.  Their best shot at finding readers are when they are new.  Classic books are like bestsellers of time, but few actually make the hit parade compared to all the titles that slip off into oblivion.  Classic titles come and go out of fashion and damn few stay permanently in print.  By reading an old book you help keep it on the All Time Bestseller List.

Academics

Without the demands of an English teacher, would anybody read the classics?  Would anyone be reading James Joyce, John Steinbeck, Charles Dickens, William Faulkner, and other literary oldies if it wasn’t because they were forced-fed them in high school and college?  Jane Austen and William Shakespeare have major fan clubs that keep their stories popular with the public, but how many people discover Milton or Dante on their own?

And why do books get so much academic support over music, dance, paintings and other art forms from history?  We’re made to read old books in school but old music and paintings don’t get equal blackboard time.  Sure, we force years of English classes on our kids so they will master language, writing and communication for practical reasons, and maybe the English teachers just sneak in as many of their old favorite inspirations as possible, like promoting Catcher in the Rye.  How active would university English departments be if they didn’t have technical writing, creative writing, ESL majors, and the basic freshman courses?

Can you imagine what our culture would be like if our schools only taught job skills?  Okay, film majors and aspiring writers taking creative writing courses would study old books a bit because it’s practical to recycle the classics occasionally.  Brad Pitt was a great action hero in Troy, and Reese Witherspoon showed off a range of acting talent in Vanity Fair, but they did much better job-wise with Oceans Eleven and Legally Blonde.  And when Will Smith got people to watch I, Robot, they didn’t bother to film the actual classic SF stories.

The Movies

And speaking of the movies, how many people read old books because they saw the film first?   I know films have gotten me to read several library shelves of books.  I have no proof, but I would bet that Hollywood has gotten more kids to read classic books than English teachers.  How many people would go out and read James Joyce if HBO converted A Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man and Ulysses into several seasons of television with the production quality of The Sopranos?

Movies may be the best salesmen for books, both new and old than any other form of literary promotion, except television.  Little Women and Pride and Prejudice get remade almost once a decade.  Movies brings the classic words to the screen along with visuals that help us see the classics, and that’s a big sell.

The question is:  Do seeing the classics on the big screen equal reading the classics on the little page?  You know how I vote, but am I right?      

Superstar Writers

Many people buy new books by their favorite writers, and some writers become superstars of the reading world.  Again, I’m not against this because I want my favorite writers to get rich and keep typing out books I love to read.  How many millions of us are now anxiously awaiting J. K. Rowing’s first non-Harry Potter novel?  And if you haunt bookstores you know there’s always hordes of new writers to discover.  But here’s the problem, why waste time taking a chance on a possibly bad book when there are so many Perfect-10 tomes waiting to be read? 

Time and waiting helps.  If you wait until the end of the year then reviewers will make their best-of lists and if you compare enough lists, the year’s best books will be revealed.  If you wait longer, you can catch The Best Books of the Last 25 Years lists, or The Best Books of the Century.  But who wants to wait.  Most people buy books by following their favorite authors or trying books written by superstar writers that catches the public’s attention..

Harold Bloom came down almighty hard on J. K. Rowling and Stephen King, where he claimed thirty-five million book buyers can be wrong about Harry Potter, and that giving Stephen King a National Book Award tarnishes all the rightful past winners.  I’ve read the Harry Potter books twice, and will probably reread them again in the future.  I’d hate to have missed out on them.  From the long list of Bloom’s Western Canon I hope I can pass on a few classics to have time to enjoy Harry Potter.  Of course, the fact is I don’t always know what I’m missing.  What if there are old and forgotten books far more exciting than the Harry Potter novels?

The Great Books

I keep throwing out the name Harold Bloom, but that’s only because he’s the point man for the philosophy that believes knowledge of the great books equals quality education.  He calls his best-of-list, The Western Canon. That idea has been around a long time, and was especially promoted by Mortimer J. Adler, one of the editors of The Great Books of the Western World put out by the Encyclopedia Britannica.  Their theory is simple – knowledge of the great books equals an Ivy league education, and one publisher even produced The Harvard Classics to promote the idea.

There was a serious backlash to this idea because these canonical books were mostly written by old white men.  And many people didn’t cotton to this reading list because the books were old and musty – and just not much fun to read.  But is reading old books like eating spinach and broccoli, and reading J. K. Rowling like eating Ben and Jerry’s?  If you want your mind to grow up strong and fit, should you put so many old titles into your reading diet?

Are the seven plays by Sophocles really that much more deserving of my reading time than the seven Harry Potter books?  Bloom thinks our culture is going down the drain, and if you’ve ever seen the Jay Leno skit, Jaywalking, you’ll probably agree.  If people actually tried to study Bloom’s Western Canon they’d have little time for any other kind of reading, and publishers should just as well stop cranking out new books.  But what if Bloom is right?  Would America be better educated if CBS, NBC and ABC only showed Shakespearean plays and other dramas from the Western Canon?

Hell, I don’t know, but it’s an interesting idea, but that’s all it will ever be, just an idea, because our culture will never exchange pop culture for classic culture.  Maybe it shouldn’t even be an either or thing.  If all you ever read is fantasy and science fiction, you’ll never know much about contemporary culture, or history.  But if all you read is the Greek and Roman classics, then you’ll still be ignorant of contemporary culture and speculation about the future and the creative universe of fantasy ideas.  Also, there might even be value in reading bad writing.  How can you understand the American West without knowing about the dime novel?

The obvious answer is to be well-rounded in your reading, and read from all time periods.  But do the hard core classics of The Great Books get equal time with the latest Charlie Stross novel or the latest YA fad like the Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight Series?  And what if you flat out hate the classics?  Should you be forced to read them like taking bad tasting medicine, telling yourself that it’s good for you cultural health?  Recently I tried reading The Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon, a title on Bloom’s list, but I found it unbearable.  And how many people really want to read Socrates, Plato and Aristotle for fun?

My reply requires an analogy, and one many people might not even be familiar with, but I will try anyway because I think it’s very apt.  Throughout the twentieth century we have found places in the world where tribes of primitive people still live.  It happened just recently in the Amazon.  Anthropologists do not like it when we pollute their pristine lost cultures with modern ideas because it usually shatters these lost tribe’s psyches.  The green jungle folk who have hidden out from civilization know so little of history and science compared to us modern folk who live in concrete jungles.  But do we really know that much more? 

But this is a perfect analogy to cultural literacy because the half-ass educated of our population have primitive minds compared to those who are well educated.  And it is no less mind-shattering to the tiny world view souls living in the big modern society to be hammered by mind-blowing ideas of a bigger universe.  Why do you think fundamentalists of any religion act the way they do? 

No one living in America believes they are ignorant and backward, because how can that be when we’ve got five hundred TV channels and the Internet stuffing our minds?  As long as you just read pop genres like science fiction and mysteries, your knowledge of the larger world of literature is no bigger than believers in cargo cults.  Most science fiction readers and computer geeks like to think they are Slans, but what if that’s the blue pill path, and the Western Canon is the red pill?  A twisty bit of weirdness for sure.

Remember those aborigines?  Just because we read books doesn’t mean our brothers and sisters living in nature have empty minds – yes, they would have a hard time surviving in our cities, but we’d have a hard time surviving in their habitats.  Reading in the Western Canon doesn’t make you a superior person.  Classics do not provide superior forms of fun and entertainment.  They aren’t even the best way to study history.  All they provide is a multiplex view so whether you’re a cool cat from Manhattan who hangs at the trendiest drinking holes, or a nature man living in the Amazon knowing all the best watering holes to hunt dinner, you’ll have a sense of perspective.

Artistic Knowledge 

Knowledge comes in all flavors.  There’s scientific knowledge, which tests reality systematically, and historical knowledge that evolves over time, and engineering knowledge that comes from necessity.  Artistic knowledge is one person’s inner view of how things work in reality.  All the old books are really is a series of people over time giving their opinions.  It becomes a collective view of reality.  Artistic knowledge isn’t like scientific knowledge – and one of the many weaknesses of the Western Canon is it doesn’t include paintings, dance, sculpture, fashion, music, and other crafts and cultural artifacts of the times.  And more than that, it doesn’t collect the knowledge from cultures outside of the Western world.

Reading Skill

Reading the old books isn’t easy.  Many are boring to the modern mind, and some are almost impossible to read.  You can’t just jump into Paradise Lost and get hooked on the story like you can with the TV show Lost.  It can be hard to identify with what’s going on in an old book.  I’m sure, to some kids reading To Kill A Mockingbird it’s too far a jump into the past to grok.  I love the book King Dork because the protagonist makes fun of all his teachers who believe the secrets of adolescence are in The Catcher in the Rye and try to force it on their students.  It’s like Dorothy Parker’s classic definition of horticulture, “You can lead a whore to culture but you can’t make her think.” 

Hell, I know plenty of kids from the youngest two generations that can’t watch a black and white movie, and it’s no wonder they can’t answer Jay Leno’s basic cultural history questions.  More than once I’ve heard a young person say they love old movies, and I’ll ask them to name a few, and they will throw out titles like Caddyshack (1980) and Back to the Future (1985) with great nostalgia.  Is it any wonder they can’t fathom Grand Hotel (1932) much less The General (1927).  Reading Charles Dickens and Jane Austen is probably like trying to read a book in a foreign language to these kids.

The Cultural Time Barrier 

Could it be, for some readers, maybe even most readers, just enjoying books from their own time is a good enough form of literacy?  To many parents, just getting their kids to read anything is a triumph.  Our own times are rich and diverse.  We know so much more about the universe now than people did fifty years ago, much less five hundred or five thousand years ago.  It is rather interesting that so many people can enjoy The Bible, a collection of stories that span centuries of pre-history but they won’t try to make up the gap between the first century and the twenty-first.

History is a boring subject for most people, and if you can’t enjoy a Cary Grant and Katherine Hepburn screwball comedy from the 1930s, it’s doubtful you’ll see the humor in The Pickwick Papers from the 1830s.  Maybe there’s a cultural time barrier like the old sound barrier and it takes a certain speed to break on through.  Why do so many young women today love Jane Austen when so many others don’t?

There’s always the theory that trying to force feed the classics on children when they are in school destroys any chance of those kids ever enjoying reading a book.  But has the Harry Potter fad ever proven to create a new generation of bookworms?  There are those who believe that books are a dead art form, and movies are the new art crown of creation for the masses.  Or maybe the bookworm gene only shows up in a small percentage of the population anyway.

None of this answers the question:  Should we read old books.  And should we believe Harold Bloom when he says certain books are far superior to modern reading fare and we shouldn’t waste our time on crappy writing?  Except for the first Harry Potter book, I couldn’t find any comments from Bloom on the later entries.  I thought J. K. Rowling’s writing improved with each new book.  I also have to ask if Bloom’s dislike of Harry Potter reflects a failure on his part to come forward in time and enjoy the current pop culture.

I could believe that Harold Bloom is right and that J. K. Rowling is a bad writer, except that there are books on the Western Canon list that I consider bad writing for one reason or another.  I thought The Crying of Lot 49 was particularly weak on characterization, plot and emotional conflict.  Bloom’s main nail to hammer regarding Rowling was her use of cliché phrases, but there are plenty of books on his list that would be guilty of that fault too.  Bloom likes to focus on word by word, line by line, paragraph by paragraph writing quality, but I think he forgets that storytelling always trumps writing ability.  I’d even say characterization trumps writing ability.  Shakespeare turned some catchy phrases but that wasn’t his skill that kept people coming to see his plays all these years.

Really great stories are timeless, just look how often ancient tales are recycled for modern movies.  The classic science fiction novel Dune is set in the far future, but the characters feel like people Homer knew, and I don’t mean that cartoon Homer.  The reason why so many young women love Jane Austen is because she tapped into the psychology of women at a level unaffected by time.  The reason why Charles Dickens can even make atheists feel teary-eyed over Christmas is because he could play his readers’ emotions like a Geek playing Halo.  Ditto for J. K. Rowling and Stephen King.  I think that’s a skill that Bloom doesn’t credit enough in his tally of writing talents.

And this may hint at why most people can’t read outside of their time.  The writing reflected in the works of the Western Canon represent great feats of intellect, but they communicate little emotionally to the modern reader.  To enjoy reading older books requires emotionally resonating with people from the past, and that’s not easy.

Escapism

If your goal in picking up a book is to escape the worries of daily life, then it doesn’t matter when the book you select comes from.  If you have a lineup of favorite mystery writers that consistently keeps your mind off things then why try anything new?  For pure entertainment, contemporary writers can’t be beat.  I feel the best new writers have distilled the writing techniques from the past and have truly honed the art of storytelling to baroque levels of diversion.  Many of these writers are using all of history for their storytelling canvas.  Some even have the writing chops that would impress Harold Bloom.  Both in creative writing and creative non-fiction, some of the best writers are surfing the breaking waves of literature.  There is always more great contemporary writing, both literary and genre, than any bookworm yet born can handle.

I bet you didn’t think I’d say that?  I’m trying to be real and honest here while promoting the reading of old books.  I’d go so far as to say if you’re only going to read a few books, try and read the best contemporary books first, even if they’re just escapist nonsense as long as they get you to read for fun.  It’s my theory that learning to read for fun is more important than reading for an education.  If you get hooked on books it will be like other drugs, eventually you’ll crave the harder stuff.

Scholarship

Most people do not want to be English professors and turn their fun hobby into ghoulish book autopsies.  However, many readers often enjoy becoming amateur scholars on pet subjects.  If you’re a fan of mysteries you might eventually want to learn how they evolved starting with Edgar Allan Poe.  I have had a lot of fun learning about the Classics of Science Fiction.  If you enjoy Masterpiece Theater on PBS, it’s easy to take up the study of the English novel.  If you like to argue then studying the Greeks and rhetoric will help you win more verbal battles with your friends.  You have to have zero curiosity about life not to wonder how various ideas and practices got started.

Take the current oil crisis.  Our society is shifting from cheap energy to expensive energy, and hopefully renewable energy, but it’s a stressful time, and we may have to experience a terrible economic downturn.  Surely, there must be other times in history where people had to endure quick economic and social change – so how did their society handle it?   Try reading The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck.  Or read Sister Carrie by Theodore Dreiser for a story about someone trying to shift from simple rural life to living a new life in the big city.

The thing about studying the past, even for fun, is that it teaches a lot about living in the present.  Read the Old Testament, it was never about religion, that’s a later interpretation, but about nation building and the psychology of creating an organized society.  The history of books is about mankind striving to get somewhere, and that somewhere is now.

Jim  

The Potential of Possibilities

I’ve had this restless unease my whole life about wasting time, always feeling a nagging guilt I should be doing something constructive instead of having so much fun.  I’ve always been a why do today what you can put off until tomorrow kind of a guy.  Bumping along this way, I’ve finished college, got married, kept a good job and basically done the essentials, but I never pursued those ambitions I dreamed about in youth.  Well, obviously everyone can’t be an astronaut or rock star, two careers ill suited for my personality even if I had had the natural aptitude, which I didn’t.  On the other hand, if I had applied myself I could have been an astronomer that occasionally wrote science fiction novels.  I was just too lazy.

When you’re thirteen and thinking about your future you feel you have endless time.  Just five years later when I had to fill in the forms that declared my major I wasn’t in the mood to buckle down to math and physics classes because by then all I could think about was majoring in the opposite sex.  Oh, I started the classes and got decent grades, I just didn’t have the discipline to keep taking them for eight straight years.

There comes a time when you realize you have to choose between chasing a dream and settling for being ordinary.  Becoming an original like Neil Armstrong or Bo Diddley takes a kind of focus that few people have, and being ordinary is a natural pursuit for those people who love variety.

But I can’t help but think of those five years of adolescence when I felt the potential of possibilities.  It’s a time when I viewed a vast vista of time and dreamed of all the ways to spend it.  That’s how I’m now feeling about retiring – I have an expanse of time that’s full of possibilities.  People often talk about young ambition, but what about old ambition?  Why is retiring seen as a time of withdrawal from life?

Everyone talks about what they want to be when they grow up, but why don’t people talk about what they want to be before they die?  How come when people retire they don’t go off to college and major in something for their retiring years?  If I can retire with thirty years before I’m sixty, and I could live to be ninety, then I have thirty more years for a second career.

Well the cruel answer of the fates is at sixty we don’t have the health and energy we did at eighteen, but is that a show stopper?  Once again, it’s a question of discipline and focus, and choosing between having general fun and pursing specialization.  Has anyone at age sixty ever set out to do something new like become an engineer, doctor, actor or pop star and succeeded?  I can understand you can’t pick becoming a major league baseball player, deep sea diver or fighter jet pilot because of the physical limitations, but what about thinking careers?  Isn’t old age supposed to be for the wise?

On one hand I think of retirement as catching up on reading all those books I bought and never read, and pursuing quiet activities like watching television and listening to music, and just plain relaxing after years in the rat race, but on the other hand why don’t I expect more of myself.   We ask kids what they want to be when they grow up, as if being grown is just achieving full physical height.  If growing is equated to mental development, then asking someone what they want to be when they grow up is like saying, what do you want to be doing when you die, because unless we’re attacked by some brain plague, we can keep growing to the end.

Jim

History versus Historical Fiction

I just finished listening to a new novel by Emma Bull called Territory.  It’s a historical fantasy novel that takes place in Tombstone, Arizona during the legendary year of 1881.  Now I have read many non-fiction books about Wyatt Earp, read many fictional accounts, and I have seen most of the major film stories about Wyatt Earp and the gunfight at the O.K. corral.   Territory was entertaining enough that I wanted to stay plugged into my iPod every free moment last week.  Part of this is due to my love of the Tombstone myth, and part due to a good story with good characters.  The narrators were excellent.

Emma Bull seems to know most of the essential facts and speculation about the famous event, and she invents new theories about the how and why of the known facts, especially about the stagecoach holdup on March 15, 1881.  What she does different is add fantasy elements to the story, and I don’t mean she makes up false accusations, but adds fantasy, as in magic, to the storyline.  I love fictional accounts of real people, and I love a good fantasy story that uses famous people for characters, like Philip Jose Farmer’s Riverworld stories, which featured Mark Twain (Sam Clemens) and Sir Richard Burton.  In Riverworld there was no attempt to recreate an actual historical event, whereas Territory does build a plot around “true” events, so in that regards it attempts to be realistic.

Emma Bull stays on the periphery of the most famous characters, dealing more with the Earp wives and Big Nose Kate, than with the Wyatt Earp & brothers, except for Doc Holliday, who is one of three point-of-view characters.  The other two are fictional POV characters, Jesse Fox and Mrs. Mildred Benjamin.  I think this was a good choice – too many of the Tombstone stories follow the Earps, and seeing history from the sidelines is a good vantage point.

Now I don’t know about the magic element.  I suppose if you’re a fantasy writer you always feel compelled to throw fantasy elements into your writing recipe, but this story could stand strong and tall without magic.  In fact, I think with more history and less fantasy it would have been a better novel of any type.  Obviously, Ms. Bull mined Tombstone’s history for rich historical ore and found plenty to refine.  Her addition of magic creates a non-historical plot thread but that hole in history is also later plugged by the same magic.

There are two types of historical novels – the authentic and the romantic.  Now the romantic historical novel can be very realistic to its time, but it’s ultimate goal is to tell a fun story, often with made-up characters.  Of course, the authentic historical novel seeks to recreate everything as realistic as possible, matching all known facts, and often focuses on real people from the past.  Both are fantasies in essence, because non-fiction history is a kind of fantasy too.  Even our own personal memories are fantasies.  I think when science fiction readers got tired of space opera, many genre writers turned to fantasy, and in recent times, turned to blending historical fiction with science fiction and fantasy.  Readers and movie fans often love a good costume drama, so I think this type of story is growing in popularity.

Territory is a lightweight romantic historical fantasy that entertains with quite a few good facts.  Readers unfamiliar with the Tombstone myths of 1881 can still follow the story, but I’m not sure if they can really enjoy it like it should be read.   Tombstone of 1881 was about law and order, Republicans versus Democrats, American West mythology, guns versus gun control, survival of the fittest, greed, revenge, murder, love, redemption, and every element of a great story.  Shakespeare would have loved the material, and could have written a play more complex than Hamlet with the famous ambiguous characters of Tombstone.  That’s why the story gets filmed so much and used for background for novels.

The most interesting speculation Emma Bull conjures regards the stage holdup and its motivation on Wyatt Earp for later events.  Most of the glamorous stories about Wyatt Earp make him into a frontier hero, but if you dig deep you know that he was involved on both sides of the law.  I wished that Emma Bull had jettisoned the fantasy elements to make more room for the story to be an authentic historical novel because she showed a lot of talent for that, and I also wish she had even added fifty-percent more to her word count.  I think having Mildred Benjamin be a typesetter and cub reporter was enough of a fantasy element for this story.  Her current approach to this classic western is what I would call Deadwood PG.

Overall, I enjoyed this story, but ended up wanting more.  Of course, the additional words I want might bore the average reader, because I’d like to see a lot more history and facts painted into the story.  Really great authentic historical fiction makes the reader feel like they are walking through the past.  Every significant detail adds to the beauty of the work, and you feel like you are learning from first-hand experience.  What really sets off the feeling of reality is the voice of the characters and narrator.  Ms. Bull throws in quite a few archaic words and phrases from the time, but her characters have the tainted feel of the modern mind.  It’s never obvious, but I kept asking myself would a person from 1881 think or say that.

Authentic voice is very hard to pull off.  One way to test modern historical fiction for voice is to compare it to works of fiction written from the time period, but to go even deeper, you have to compare the modern sound to letters and diaries of the time.  It’s not just the period vocabulary, but the popular phrases, topics of interests, the pop culture of the time, common philosophical opinions and so on.  Territory doesn’t go very deep in this regard.

Unfortunately, there is no Pride and Prejudice or Sister Carrie quality novel written by someone who lived during the time in the old west.  About the closest thing we have is Roughing It by Mark Twain, written about ten years earlier about his 1861-1867 trip out west seeking his fortune in a Nevada silver mining camp.  Of course, this might be like learning about contemporary France from the essays of David Sedaris.  Another source is Isabella Bird, who traveled through the Rocky Mountains in 1873 and wrote about her adventures in A Lady’s Life in the Rocky Mountains.  

The true western novel didn’t evolved until well after the west was tamed, and in many ways western fiction is often more fantasy fiction than historical fiction.  If you really want to know about Tombstone you need to read non-fiction books like Inventing Wyatt Earp: His Life and Many Legends by Allen Barra.  The trouble is, reading one book is like eating one chocolate chip cookie.  That’s the thing about history and historical fiction – you run the chance of getting bit by the what-really-happened bug.   Emma Bull takes a particularly strange photo of Wyatt Earp that shows a sinister evil side.  If you read wide enough you’ll find Wyatt Earp detractors who will back this view, but is it the correct take?  You’ll have to read about six history books to get a decent idea.

Jim

Reading Beyond Science Fiction

Years ago I wrote an essay about what where the classic books of science fiction.  I later made it into an web site called The Classics of Science Fiction.  I always meant to use the same techniques to build a web site that reveals the all-time classic books of general literature, and not just limit the search to one genre.  I finally got that site started at Classic Booklists.  It’s just a baby step, because my friends and I hope to do a lot more with the idea.

Until I was fifty, I mostly read science fiction books.  Sure, I sampled far and wide, but I stuck to the tried and true genre I grew up with, always looking for my new sense-of-wonder fix.  Then I discovered audio books at Audible.com and my reading habits completely changed.  Back then, there just wasn’t that much science fiction offered on audio, and so I had to be open to new kinds of books.  I started listening to classic English novels, best sellers, modern American literary works, works of history, biography, science and philosophy, anything that was promoted as a great book.  I quickly discovered sense-of-wonder doesn’t have to be about rocketships. 

Listening to The Bible, and The Bible is the bedrock of all classic books, is hearing the voices of primitive people, the voices of men and women at the dawn of history.  The Bible is a gateway to the mind of man before there were concepts like science, history, mathematics, astronomy and so on.  Sure, there’s the whole religious angle, but that’s the least interesting take.  Just listen to the stories and always remember to ask:  Who is telling this story and why?  You will experience The Bible as a series of evolutionary stories that do far more to explain our physical world than the metaphysical.  It was all about national politics. The Old Testament is very much like the Koran, in that it explains the psychology of radical fundamentalism, which isn’t about heaven or hell, but here and now.

When you read classic books always follow the motivation.  Whether fiction or nonfiction, there’s always a mind at work.  No matter how engrossing a story is, step back and look for the narrator’s slight-of-hand.  There are two narrators to watch for tricks, the one within the words telling story, and the unseen other, the actual writer of the words – and trust neither.  For example, within The Bible, who is telling the story about Moses and Aaron?  The Bible is often referred to as the word of God, but God doesn’t narrate this story.  Did Moses have a PR man cranking out press releases?  Did a BC Billy Graham tell stories about Moses in sermons?  Did the early chamber of commerce for Israel hammer out their tale for national unity?  

Reading Jane Austen will only take you back two hundred years, but she will teach you about the mind of women from any time.  Again, what is Miss Austen’s motivation?  Is Pride and Prejudice a timeless handbook for romance or for gold digging?  Hemingway, Faulkner and Fitzgerald tells us about the origins of the 20th century American mind at the ground level.  Every French, German, Russian, Chinese, Japanese novel opens up a mental beachhead into new culture.  This is all mind bending, and as mind bending as science fiction feels when you discover it at thirteen.  

Each classic is like time traveling to a place and time – for instance Theodore Dreiser’s Sister Carrie takes you to Chicago of the eighteen nineties and shows you a world as far out as any science fictional world.  Compare it to Empire Star by Samuel R. Delany and you will see what I mean.  They are both about rubes from the country, or in the SF case, a backward planet, struggling to survive in the big city.  

American history is really an extension of English history, and reading classic English novels is like working with an Freudian psychologist to explore our hive mind childhood.  When you read far and wide in literature and philosophy, you’ll realize that the history of humanity is like the evolution of one great being. 

We have to accept Isaac Newton when he said, “If I have seen a little further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants,” as not just true for scientists, but true for everyone.  How far you see across time and space depends on the pile of books from which you view reality.  Harry Potter novels might be the best of fun, but they won’t help you see very far.  On the other hand, they are great books because they aren’t about magic, but contemporary adolescence.

A classic book, a great book, a masterpiece of literature, will educate its readers about the past, and at the same time they reveal a timeless way of seeing the present.  A classic book begs to be read again and again, because each reading will reveal more secrets.  A classic novel will draw you into history and you will feel like your life is growing in two ways, one forward from your individual birth, and the second, a life that grows backwards, roaming further and further towards our cultural birth.  Reading books from the 1950s lets you grok the 1940s, that make sense of the 1930s – and after awhile it’s the 1790s, or the Italian Renaissance, or 400 BC.  Suddenly, all of history becomes your stomping grounds.

Reading classic books is like assembling a map of reality one jigsaw piece at a time.  In the early part of the 20th century people like Mortimer Adler came up with the educational philosophy of the Great Books, and colleges built liberal arts curriculums around The Great Books of the Western World.  This later evolved into Harold Bloom‘s idea of The Western Canon.  Of course, these lists of great books require a lifetime of study, more than most people ever want to pursue.

That’s when I got the idea of collecting many such booklists of recommended reading of classic books, hoping to find the essential volumes revealed through consensus.  I’m just starting with ClassicBooklists.com.  With the help of my friends Mike and Heather I hope to expand it in many revealing ways.  I’ve started reading books about books, such as, Leave Me Along, I’m Reading by Maureen Corrigan, 1000 Books To Change Your Life by TimeOut.com, The Book That Changed My Life edited by Roxanne J. Coady & Joy Johannessen, and the epic, 1,001 Books You Must Read Before You Die, edited by Peter Boxall.

The more you read about books the more it’s obvious that no one person, or editors or scholars or poll of fans have an idea of what the perfect classic booklist should be.  The Classics of Science Fiction is built from 28 lists, and the resultant list is from any book that shares recommendations from 7 or more lists.  Those 193 books represent quite a consensus.  So far I have 12 lists for the Classic Booklist site.  It will take time to build it up.  I plan to add The Classics of Science Fiction list to it next, so we can compare SF books to recommendations for general literature.

So stay tuned.

Jim

Do I Embrace The Negative?

I told my friend Janis I had written what I considered a funny post called, “Retirement from Sex,” and she quickly replied, “Who’d wanna read that!”  I told my friend Marty at work about the movie Young @ Heart, a charming story about old people, and she quickly replied, “Who’d wanna see that!”  I love talking about global warming and the growing prices of gasoline, but I think I’m bumming my friends out.  My wife often tells me that I make her feel guilty.  Although I see dwelling on the negative as a way to pursue the positive, I’m starting to think I’m going to get nominated for Mr. Negative Man of the Year.

For example, when I hear the price of oil has hit a new record high, I know that it means economic devastation.  I know high oil prices are putting people in shipping and related industries out of business, that it causing food prices to skyrocket, and overall it covers the economy with a black cloud that depresses the whole population.  But I, in my weird Pollyannaish way, think, “great, this will force our society to invent new energy systems, create a green economy, and finally get us out of our dependency on buying oil from countries that want to blow us up.”   My friends see $5 a gallon gas at the pump and picture what it does to their budget.  I picture inventors all over the world getting busy and inventing new technology.  But I’m starting to realize that my friends are looking at me like I’m crazy.

While watching Young @ Heart I saw a crowd of Sisyphuses thumbing their noses at the Fates while rolling their rocks up the hill.  I figure Marty thinks about the horrors of time on the bodies of women and feels anything about getting old would be depressing.  I saw a movie that said, sure you will be old, wrinkled, hurting, diseased, dying but if you have the will you can rock on and give the grim reaper the bird when he comes to collect.

When I hear about global warming I think, “Wow, humans are powerful enough to change the whole global ecosystem, then we need to be smart enough to take responsibility for our actions.”  Sure, its a test of humanity.  We can fail, and civilization will go down the tubes, or we can transform ourselves and society and make a better world.

When I attack a book by my favorite author, like The Cat Who Walks Through Walls, it’s not because I want trash a great writer, it’s because I want to let people know that there are other Heinlein books that are much better.  There are Heinlein books that I reread every other year, and have been doing so for over forty years.  I’m trying to compare the two and see which qualities of writing make a book stand out as a classic.

I think I really freaked out my wife when I told her I wanted to give up cable TV.  Susan worships at the alter of the video icon.  And it wasn’t as if I was planning to forsake TV altogether.  I was merely wanting to cut back so I’d have more time for other hobbies, like writing science fiction.  I pointed out to her that we pay $120 a month and 95% of the time we watch ABC, CBS, NBC and PBS, shows that come to our high definition TV for free, and the other shows are easy to get with our 5 concurrent disc-out-at-a-time NetFlix subscription.

Of course, what are my alternative choices?  I could be depressed because gasoline prices are skyrocketing and pine away for $2 a gallon gas.  I could avoid any movies or social situations with old people, and pretend I won’t be ancient someday.  I could continue living like I’ve always have, and figure the problem of global warming belongs to the next generation.  I could play nice and say positive things about all books I read, as if all books were worthy of reading, each one a child you must love equally.  And I could give up any ambitions I have to be different and just accept I’ll be a couch potato addicted to TV shows the rest of my life.

I do think I see a pattern here.  I don’t think people like change.  They want to drive gas-guzzling cars until kingdom come.  They want to pretend all the conspicuous consumption they love so much doesn’t have any affect on others.  And most of all they want to feel forever young.  Well, my fantasy is to stop watching so much TV, give up reading crappy books, and learn to play the guitar so I can join a rock n’ roll band when I’m eighty-five. By then I also expect global warming will be turned around and we’ll all be using home-grown renewable energy, and the air will be clean, clear and cool.  I might be wrinkled.  My dick probably won’t work beyond peeing, and maybe not pee so well either, and I might need to truck around in a wheel chair, but I hope to play music like it’s 1965.

Jim