If I have one tiny quibble it's that of the twenty two contributors only two are women.
Now I don't want to start a war out there but surely the cover picture says it all, (Reading in Bed - Bascove 1994) it's surely women who have perfected the art of reading in bed (well it is here) and are therefore best placed to elaborate on its pleasures and Mary Azarian know that too.
Anyway setting that grumble aside I pick this book up with great regularity and dwell on another essay and it is Italo Calvino and Why Read the Classics who has had my attention this last week.
Despite a good education, that degree and a lot of reading I often feel hugely inadequate when it comes to my experience of reading the classics. Somehow I always feel I've missed out having come to so many for the first time in my forties and fifties.
Perhaps I'd love to be able to say,
''Ah yes, read Jane Eyre when I was fourteen, it left an enormous impression on me'
Well I got it as a school prize when I was thirteen, read the first chapter and cast it aside as far too like something I'd be made to read at school and went back to my Jean Plaidys. I didn't read it until I was in my forties.
Or how about,
'Yes, well this is my twenty-eighth read of Pride and Prejudice first read it when I was fifteen and I see something new every time.'
Italo Calvino agrees in principal,
'A classic is a book that has never finished saying what it has to say.'
but I'm not sure I could ever read a book that many times, twice has been plenty of Pride and Prejudice for me because there are so many others I want to read for the first time.
If I'm not careful it could all feel like a steady round of catch up so words of comfort from Italo Calvino in the first sentence
'...we need only observe that, however vast a person's basic reading may be, there still remain an enormous number of fundamental works that he has not read ... even the great nineteenth century cycles of novels are more talked about than read.'
More reading solace follows because it seems there are benefits to those shelves full of of the great unread and I'm warming to this essay considerably,
''....to read a book for the first time in one's maturity is an extraordinary pleasure, different from (though one cannot say greater or lesser than) the pleasure of having read it on one's youth. Youth brings to reading, as to any other experience, a particular flavour and a particular sense of importance, whereas in maturity one appreciates (or ought to appreciate) many more details, level and meanings.'
Going on to say
'In fact reading in youth can be rather unfruitful, due to impatience, distraction, inexperience...and inexperience with life itself.'
Don't you just want to hug the man, I feel so much better already.
I knew that, but somehow there's this feeling that really you've missed out terribly if you didn't read these 'classics' when you were young, and whilst I agree there are some things that can never be recaptured about that reading time, it's good to know that reading in maturity can be equally productive.
Italo Calvino proceeds to offer fourteen nicely malleable definitions of classics; malleable in that I found I could tweak and make most of them fit my reading life and ambitions, ideas he has planted in my mind which will bear fruit as I read more I'm sure
'The classics are books, which upon reading, we find even fresher, more unexpected, and more marvellous than we had thought from hearing about them.'
and you can read them all here though be warned the page colours do threaten migraine.
And there's more sage advice about context too because I definitely have to mix in the old with a lot of the new,
'To be able to read the classics you have to know 'from where' you are reading them; otherwise both the book and the reader will be lost in a timeless cloud. This then why the greatest yield from reading the classics will be obtained by someone who knows how to alternate them with a proper dose of current affairs.'
I should probably thank Italo Calvino for writing this post today because there seem to be more of his words than mine but here's the best bit
'There is nothing for it but for all of us to invent our own ideal libraries of classics.I would say that such a library ought to be composed half of books we have read and that have really counted for us, and half of books we propose to read and presume will count - leaving a section of empty shelves for surprises and occasional discoveries..'
I decided to focus on the 'propose to read' end of the shelf and within five minutes had gathered in a pile that I feel sure 'will count', that's a few of them on the table in the picture...and a glimpse of a gorgeous tiny table with two tiny drawers that Bookhound found in the market last week. It fits that neat little space in front of the bedroom window perfectly, a lovely new contemplative sitting and writing place.
I don't want to hold myself to which of my choices I will actually read because I don't want this to become a challenge or a burden, just reading for pleasure, but I have decided to try and read three of them at least through this year.
Might it be Daniel Deronda or The Grapes of Wrath?
Some more Zola or Balzac?
Perhaps Raymond Chandler's The Big Sleep?
I have a great deal of Truman Capote lined up, might he become a classic for me?
Tolstoy's Anna Karenina is becoming an urgent 'must', perhaps a few of us will read that together as Team Tolstoy through next winter?
This isn't prescriptive, there's no 'should' or 'ought' about it either; I can decide whether these will become my classics or not and this is the essence of Italo Calvino's argument,
'Your classic author is the one you cannot feel indifferent to,
who helps you to define yourself in relation to him (or her, Mr
Calvino, or her!) even in dispute with him.'
So I wonder what you might put on your 'propose to read' shelf ?
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