How many books should one have read?
The more one finds out about, the less it seems one has covered. One realizes that one isn’t ever going to find the time or commitment to have another run at Proust, read Tolstoy, probably not Cervantes and highly unlikely to venture into those big early novels by Sterne or Fielding or Smollett. Having only gazed at the pages of Mansfield Park and no other Jane Austen, not got very far into Dickens and reading no more than the merest handful of all the new books that are published each year, the pile of unread books and the list of titles one really ought to know something about is increasing exponentially and in the end one’s conclusion, by which I mean mine, is that one has hardly read anything. I don’t mean you. You might have read everything.
Being qualified in a subject is often taken to mean that you know a lot about it but a degree in Eng Lit doesn’t mean you’ve read everything and postgraduate study only seems to take you deeper into more specialized areas rather than widening one’s remit.
Although three years of full-time reading suggests one might have found the time to read extensively, students have to write essays, get drunk and get off with each other, attend pop concerts, protest about things generally, take part in other extra-curricula activity and have all those formative experiences that set one up for a lifetime of work, these days in a call centre or delivering pizzas. The last thing one is likely to find on a campus is young people reading books.
Doing four or five courses a year but taking the summer out, it is not a 12 month reading year. Victorian Literature, on my course, allocated a week to Dickens in which I read the first few chapters of Bleak House, made a mental note of the symbolic fog, abandoned it and decided to negotiate the period without its most famous novelist. I struggled with but counted Middlemarch as a text I’d done, disliked Vanity Fair and did an essay on Matthew Arnold’s poetry. It wasn’t my strongest area.
Elizabethan Lit was dominated by Shakespeare, of course, which meant knowing little more than what I’d picked up about him, plus Marlowe, Ben Jonson and the poems in England’s Helicon. I was lucky that some courses overlapped with others, Aesthetics with Stylistics and Criticism, and a concentration on C20th literature that meant I left anything pre-Shakespeare unconsidered, missed out the C18th and avoided an exam in C17th lit by doing a dissertation on Marvell.
The more one finds out about, the less it seems one has covered. One realizes that one isn’t ever going to find the time or commitment to have another run at Proust, read Tolstoy, probably not Cervantes and highly unlikely to venture into those big early novels by Sterne or Fielding or Smollett. Having only gazed at the pages of Mansfield Park and no other Jane Austen, not got very far into Dickens and reading no more than the merest handful of all the new books that are published each year, the pile of unread books and the list of titles one really ought to know something about is increasing exponentially and in the end one’s conclusion, by which I mean mine, is that one has hardly read anything. I don’t mean you. You might have read everything.
Being qualified in a subject is often taken to mean that you know a lot about it but a degree in Eng Lit doesn’t mean you’ve read everything and postgraduate study only seems to take you deeper into more specialized areas rather than widening one’s remit.
Although three years of full-time reading suggests one might have found the time to read extensively, students have to write essays, get drunk and get off with each other, attend pop concerts, protest about things generally, take part in other extra-curricula activity and have all those formative experiences that set one up for a lifetime of work, these days in a call centre or delivering pizzas. The last thing one is likely to find on a campus is young people reading books.
Doing four or five courses a year but taking the summer out, it is not a 12 month reading year. Victorian Literature, on my course, allocated a week to Dickens in which I read the first few chapters of Bleak House, made a mental note of the symbolic fog, abandoned it and decided to negotiate the period without its most famous novelist. I struggled with but counted Middlemarch as a text I’d done, disliked Vanity Fair and did an essay on Matthew Arnold’s poetry. It wasn’t my strongest area.
Elizabethan Lit was dominated by Shakespeare, of course, which meant knowing little more than what I’d picked up about him, plus Marlowe, Ben Jonson and the poems in England’s Helicon. I was lucky that some courses overlapped with others, Aesthetics with Stylistics and Criticism, and a concentration on C20th literature that meant I left anything pre-Shakespeare unconsidered, missed out the C18th and avoided an exam in C17th lit by doing a dissertation on Marvell.
It has to be said that poetry was a clever option to do essays on when one could conjure and mumble a few thousand words based on a handful of poems- very closely read, of course- when having to get the grasp of novels ostensibly took much longer to do.
Even with a 52-week year, it’s not usually possible to read a book per day, so even if one read one book for each course each week, that would be 13 texts on which to base one’s experience of, say C20th American Literature. So let’s not assume that a degree is any guarantee that anybody’s read anything. Not the B.A. they gave me anyway.
Once one leaves behind the requirements of education, one is free to follow one’s particular interests and so, yes, I’ve read all of my favourite poets, and several novelists but the dutiful pursuance of developing any comprehensive knowledge of literature as a whole long since stalled.
Having been impressed by the depth and breadth of reading of some professional academics whose job it is to know about their areas of expertise, and having compared notes with others whose knowledge is far greater than mine, it is obviously possible to do a lot better than me if gifted with the necessary desire, acuity and avidness. But I’ve also met respected figures, reviewers of books in high places and, no, they haven’t read that. Or that. And not that, either. So I’m not alone in some of my failing.
So, how many books should one have read? More than me. It might be polite not to ask if I’ve read this, that or the other because, nah, I’m sorry, but I probably haven’t.
Even with a 52-week year, it’s not usually possible to read a book per day, so even if one read one book for each course each week, that would be 13 texts on which to base one’s experience of, say C20th American Literature. So let’s not assume that a degree is any guarantee that anybody’s read anything. Not the B.A. they gave me anyway.
Once one leaves behind the requirements of education, one is free to follow one’s particular interests and so, yes, I’ve read all of my favourite poets, and several novelists but the dutiful pursuance of developing any comprehensive knowledge of literature as a whole long since stalled.
Having been impressed by the depth and breadth of reading of some professional academics whose job it is to know about their areas of expertise, and having compared notes with others whose knowledge is far greater than mine, it is obviously possible to do a lot better than me if gifted with the necessary desire, acuity and avidness. But I’ve also met respected figures, reviewers of books in high places and, no, they haven’t read that. Or that. And not that, either. So I’m not alone in some of my failing.
So, how many books should one have read? More than me. It might be polite not to ask if I’ve read this, that or the other because, nah, I’m sorry, but I probably haven’t.
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