To read or not to read

In partial and perhaps inadequate response to Ann Patchett's lament in the NY Times that the Pulitzer Prize for fiction committee failed to select a finalist this year--"it is infinitely ... galling to me as a reader," writes the novelist Patchett, "because there were so many good books published"--I offer these related thoughts from Atlantic magazine's B.R. Myers, who recently disemboweled, devastated, dismembered and demolished "the latest hyped-up work of staggering [and fizzling] genius," The Art of Fielding:

In an effort to offer something, anything, that is not already on Facebook, our [contemporary] writers seem less likely to go big than to go small, writing in great polished detail of the most trivial thoughts and deeds.

Later came Myers's coup de grace:

As long as the classics remain more deeply relevant to our lives than the novels our own time produces, we should remain "untimely," in Nietzsche's still-dangerous sense of the word.

And that, I would argue, especially to young readers, looms as the insuperable criticism and critique: "As long as the classics remain ..."

The sight of roving tribes of youthful clutchers of, say, Hunger Games or Twilight, mystifies the literary bejesus out of me, given that for instance Homer, a few years back, already enshrined ultimate human thrill and inhuman fickle in the Iliad, or, a few years later, Shakespeare produced dozens of masterpieces that to this day stand unparalleled in the penetrating exploration of human vices and love.

Not enough to keep you busy and your brain active, boys and girls? Well, then, still in print are Tolstoy, Dickens, Dante, Swift, Moliere, Stendhal, Hugo, Chekhov, Austen, Balzac, the Brontes, Dostoyevsky, Proust, Wilde, G. Eliot, Conrad, Waugh, as well as a few struggling colonials such as Steinbeck, Bellow, Styron, Faulkner, Updike, Hemingway, Nabokov, P. Roth, Doctorow, Mailer, Twain ...

Nevertheless yesterday, having read, studied, reread and parsed every bloody word of Hunger Games in "literature" class for a month, my daughter's entire 7th-grade contingent attended the movie "Hunger Games."

I guess there's just not enough good stuff to read, nor neither enough classic films to watch.

Comments

[Robert Lipscomb]

Those are gateway books to communism.

[Infidel753]

Yeah, but the good stuff is too hard.

[Infidel753]

http://dayofwoman.blogspot.com/2012/03/i-dont-want-to-live-on-this-planet.html

[Tom]

Some small percentage of young readers may graduate from "Hunger Games" to other dystopian literature and find their way to Orwell, Huxley and other classics. Some my follow "Twilight" into the vast starry field which contains Stoker, Poe or Hawthorne. Or they may take a dead end detour into Rice and fan fiction. But popular YA fiction is just a starting point, it's not a map.

I began my reading career with Danny Dunn, boy genius, and ended up at all sorts of odd corners in the universe of text. Hell, I even found myself looking at this blog eventually, and that's been fairly rewarding so far.

[tamiasmin]

Back in Homer's day, the kids probably all wanted to hear nothing but the Odyssey, "because it's the latest thing and it's awesome. That Iliad stuff is for old people."

Fortunately, some of those kids got to be old people.

[Peter G]

Interestingly you've rhymed off a goodly portion of my English language reading list. But, as a sign that it has been ever thus,I'll offer this anecdote. My grade 11 teacher announced one day, with a leaden world weariness, that the next student who proffered the "novel" Love Story for their oral book report would get a failing grade. This came after the twelfth such report.

[Peter G]

And I wouldn't care to repeat what she had to say about a certain seagull named Jonathan Livingston. Teachers earn their pay imo.