On Reading Literature

Cafe Society
1

Trying to keep this post as general as possible and see where it leads.

I got a book for $2 on Kindle called 50 Masterpieces to Read Before You Die which is straight up 50 full-length classic literature novels. Some I have read and most I haven’t, so I’ve decided to dive right in sight-unseen and discover some new books.

So I am about 10% into Honoré de Balzac’s Father Goriot, an author and book I know nothing about. It’s about a bunch of boarders in a French boarding house, and a sad old man they treat badly. The central mystery of the novel seems to be who this Father Goriot guy is and how he got this sad. But at present I am watching an earnest young man who is the last hope of his family desperately trying to suck up to rich people and failing miserably. He’s really over his head, this guy. It’s what the kids would call cringe.

I was describing it to my husband and I came upon this truth I’ve found about literature, which is that what I’m doing right now is not exactly what I would call hedonistic pleasure. I’m a huge proponent of reading for pleasure, whatever you please, and I read broadly. I am after all a writer of speculative romance novels.

But there are different ways to read, I think, because when I am reading Father Goriot I feel like I am working out a puzzle. I’m trying to work out the puzzle of what is French culture at this time, and what the author is meaning to tell me by dropping me into the middle of it. I don’t particularly enjoy watching this kid get stomped all over by rich assholes, but - is this weird? - my enjoyment is not the point.

If someone had asked me, “Hey, do you want to read a novel about a sad man at an impoverished French boardinghouse?” I would have said, “Not particularly, that sounds quite boring” and yet here we are. And the thing is… I’m not bored.

There is something about literature that transcends pleasure. I already sort of know this because I am a writer, and writing a novel isn’t exactly a euphoric romp, either. But the result is something altogether more complex and satisfying than just doing something fun. There’s effort here. The book is demanding something in return from me.

I think there is room for both kinds of experiences and I think they are not mutually exclusive - there are wildly entertaining reads that are also complicated and demanding (I’m also reading LeGuin’s Lathe of Heaven right now.) I’m not trying to pigeonhole reading – on the contrary, I want to explore the different things it can be.

So I’m curious to hear anyone else’s experience of reading literature, and what you get out of it. Are there any specific works that opened your eyes to something about the nature of reading itself? Unexpected insights or benefits? Define literature as broadly as you like.

2

I think you have put your finger on a lot of the appeal of literature, the kind of writing that has lasted for decades and centuries. Complexity, reflecting the complexity of real life but more carefully selected and put together than real life ever is, allowing the reader to get the most out of it instead of being overwhelmed. Effort, the effort of creativity, the analysis of what people are and what makes them interesting.

I’ve read a lot of literature in my life, especially Victorian authors like Trollope, Dickens, Thackeray, the Brontes, Hardy (didn’t like, too gloomy), and others. Jane Austen (pre-Victorian) goes without saying. Also French authors, I’ve read Pere Goriot in translation, although it was a very long time ago and I don’t remember much about it, and Victor Hugo and Dumas. I was one of those introspective kids for whom reading was a substitute for not having any social life to speak of. I meet so few people now who have read deeply and with understanding, who have any idea who any of the above authors even are. I’m thrilled to see anyone starting down that path, who recognizes the value of that kind of writing. I don’t read much of it any more, you are inspiring me to get back into it. Thank you.

3

Yeah, I’m a reading addict and read literary works along with most other stuff I can get my hands on.

I think genre fiction and popular fiction tend to hit in a somewhat different way from literature. They can absolutely be just as enjoyable, but ISTM that a genre fictional character like your favorite detective or romance heroine or YA protagonist is appealing partly because they’re in some way familiar. They’ve got mannerisms or traits or resemblances that comfortably fit them into their particular space in your brain, and it’s fun.

A literature character who really resonates with you, on the other hand, stands out because they’re unique. Sure they may be similar to many other characters in some ways, but they have an individual reality that makes them seem at the same time localized and timeless/mythical.

I’m not expressing this well, but the example I always think of is the quiet horror of the character development of the beautiful elegant young Rosamund Vincey in George Eliot’s Middlemarch. What absolute hell and havoc a seemingly perfect (and not even ill-natured or particularly evil) girl in a very gender-stereotyping society can wreak on the lives of those around her because she’s a flawed human with more will than integrity.

We gossip happily about our favorite genre-fiction characters and argue for what they should have done differently and wonder what they’ll encounter in their next book. The best literature characters, IMHO, just are. They make us think about things we hadn’t realized before.

4

I went through a period of reading a lot of 19th century literature (from Project Gutenberg), and I definitely got some satisfaction out of piecing together what society was like back then. For instance, a lot of books deal with money as a plot point (e.g. hoping for an inheritance, or trying to find a financially stable husband, or getting into debt after living beyond one’s means) which gradually gave me a picture of how precarious people’s lives were before any social safety net. And how (relatively) expensive clothing was before it was made on a massive scale by workers in poorer countries.

5

I agree with folks here that some reading makes you work, and that work can be a pleasure. Sometimes that work is interpreting what is being written and all its nuances, sometimes that work is more like unpacking a puzzle.

I read Ulysses every two or three years, and while I enjoy empathizing with Leopold Bloom, a lot of the pleasure is in figuring out what’s happening and what the references are. I am also in the middle of Middlemarch right now…sometimes her prose is a thicket, and it’s fun to pick your way through it and understand not just the text, but the subtext.

As I get older, this gets more difficult. But it’s still a pleasure.

6

I think this expresses it very well! I came into this thread because I’ve just finished Middlemarch (as the start of a conscious effort to read more literature), and Rosamund is a terrific example of what this genre is trying to do. And I think it’s because while Rosamund could, from her actions, could be dismissed as shallow, spoilt and selfish (and to be honest, is those things much of the time), Eliot treats here with genuine sympathy, showing and discussing with the reader how Rosamund (and Mr Casaubon, and Mr Bulstrode, and Fred and other crooked timbers) are in fact complex, three dimensional people whose behaviour springs from motivations, ambitions, ideals, impulses and experiences just as real and multi-dimensional as ours.

And because she has created these actual people, she is able to use their lives and conflicts and experiences to illustrate some deep and recognisable truths about e.g. religious hypocrisy, misplaced ambition, the bonds of marriage, and the struggle to live a good life. (The last of which, at the age of 48, has resonated more than somewhat).

7

I seem to be drawn to this period as well. I’ve read Pride and Prejudice, Jane Eyre, Bleak House, and more recently, Sherlock Holmes and Howard’s End (which I believe is 1910 so just the turn of the century.) Also (and I do consider this literature) the graphic novel From Hell by Alan Moore, which is way more about the tragedies of London society than it is about Jack the Ripper.

I’ve noticed that too. And it’s particularly interesting to me how this played out for women.

Father Goriot is interesting because it shows the excesses of wealth, women in unhappy marriages having affairs while their husbands look the other way (that surprised me. These women have a kind of agency within the spheres of their own marriages, however restricted.)

Father Goriot has actually turned out to be quite a page-turner. I was up too late reading it, and the point of me reading classic literature before bed was so I didn’t stay up too late the way I would with, say, Stephen King. Sometimes it doesn’t seem to matter what I’m reading, though.

Howard’s End was interesting because I found the female protagonist surprisingly relatable. She was kind of an early feminist, intelligent, cosmopolitan, but she also had societal expectations to navigate and it made me wonder what I’d do in her situation.

(Spoiler ahead) Ultimately she chooses to stay married to a chauvinist hypocrite in order to form a blended family. I couldn’t fault her for it. And I read later that each character represented some faction of English society at that time and that the author’s point was that the greatest possible good was to facilitate connection between people of all kinds. Although that was a moderate stance that didn’t really address the root cause of poverty, I thought he made his case well. Not only that but the sympathetic portrayal of a woman pregnant out of wedlock also surprised me. I like that people were thinking about and grappling with these issues back then. It makes me feel we weren’t so far apart. It’s easy to think of people in the past as a monolithic entity, at least as far as morality was concerned, but a lot of literature puts the lie to this.

This might sound like a wild comparison but the raunchy and hilarious TV show Silicon Valley felt very Dickensian to me. You see the rise and fall of the protagonist’s fortune, how he works hard but also meets with luck, there are all these secondary characters striving for status, plenty of cautionary tales, sidebars that echo the theme, and in the end a morally satisfying conclusion. Behind the irreverence and dick jokes was a thoughtful analysis of capitalist society.

8

By the way, one of my favourite novels in Cranford by Elizabeth Gaskell. I highly recommend it, and you can get it for free from Project Gutenberg. Another one of my favourites is The Ladies’ Paradise by Emile Zola.

Middlemarch I found kind of humourless compared to similar “slice of society” novels from the period.

9

This is a reread for me, and I do find it funny, it’s just different. There’s much less of the saucy dialogue (except maybe Mrs Cadwaller), and Eliot’s humorous observations about people are pretty forgiving.

I will also note to the thread that like every work of capital-L Literature I read, I am experiencing it pretty differently this time. Among many other things, a little more sympathy for the stiff, didactic Casaubon.

10

I have to think about that description.

I’ve read Sherlock Holmes, Frankenstein, War of the Worlds, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, and a handful of other early Sci Fi. Does that count as “literature”?

I’ve also read Tom Clancy, Jack Reacher, Bob Lee Swagger, C.J. Box (Joe Pickett), Heinlein, and the Dune series. And “The Lord of the Rings” series.

I agree there are puzzles when reading period writing: understanding slang, nuances of culture, etc. But those challenges exist in other genre reading. Dune is a very complex alternate society - it’s a “period piece” if you consider imagined future a period.

Clancy is tech heavy and spy life.

Honor Harrington (David Weber) is a lot of politics and social status and cultural differences packed with more tech descriptions than Heinlein and Clancy combined.

These others also have a lot of high adventure, thrills, and action like you would expect in those genres.

So I’m not sure the description is precisely accurate, but maybe I get what you mean. But I don’t think those characteristics are limited to 19th century writers.

11

I picked up Great Books of the Western World and also subscribed to the addenda volumes for a while. They’re currently boxed up, and I keep meaning to unpack them and find bookshelf space for them.

12

Fun! Would you give us the link so we can see all the books?

13

I have those in first edition and was thinking about junking them, but your post led me to poke around and people are selling them for some value, though I don’t know if that means people are actually buying them. The last time I looked at them I found the print to be too small to read comfortably.

14

I think so. But I’m content to let anyone define it for themselves.

I tried Dune. It was a slog for me and I didn’t even really get to the sand worms which are the driving factor in my interest. Science fiction is my favorite genre and full of literary contributions. I have a harder time with the early stuff because I’m interested in character and I’ve not been impressed by the genre’s mastery of character, though Lois McMaster Bujold is one of my favorite authors for precisely the reason that she so heavily emphasized character. You don’t have to convince me that science fiction is worthwhile reading!

15

That well describes Tess of the D’Ubervilles.

16

I don’t know if you are asking me or LurkMeister. But here are the ones in the volume I’m reading:

Alcott, Louisa May: Little Women
Austen, Jane: Pride and Prejudice
Austen, Jane: Emma
Balzac, Honoré de: Father Goriot
Barbusse, Henri: The Inferno
Brontë, Anne: The Tenant of Wildfell Hall
Brontë, Charlotte: Jane Eyre
Brontë, Emily: Wuthering Heights
Burroughs, Edgar Rice: Tarzan of the Apes
Butler, Samuel: The Way of All Flesh
Carroll, Lewis: Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
Cather, Willa: My Ántonia
Cervantes, Miguel de: Don Quixote
Chopin, Kate: The Awakening
Cleland, John: Fanny Hill
Collins, Wilkie: The Moonstone
Conrad, Joseph: Heart of Darkness
Conrad, Joseph: Nostromo
Cooper, James Fenimore: The Last of the Mohicans
Crane, Stephen: The Red Badge of Courage
Cummings, E. E.: The Enormous Room
Defoe, Daniel: Robinson Crusoe
Defoe, Daniel: Moll Flanders
Dickens, Charles: Bleak House
Dickens, Charles: Great Expectations
Dostoyevsky, Fyodor: Crime and Punishment
Dostoyevsky, Fyodor: The Idiot
Doyle, Arthur Conan: The Hound of the Baskervilles
Dreiser, Theodore: Sister Carrie
Dumas, Alexandre: The Three Musketeers
Dumas, Alexandre: The Count of Monte Cristo
Eliot, George: Middlemarch
Fielding, Henry: Tom Jones
Flaubert, Gustave: Madame Bovary
Flaubert, Gustave: Sentimental Education
Ford, Ford Madox: The Good Soldier
Forster, E. M.: A Room With a View
Forster, E. M.: Howards End
Gaskell, Elizabeth: North and South
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von: The Sorrows of Young Werther
Gogol, Nikolai: Dead Souls
Gorky, Maxim: The Mother
Haggard, H. Rider: King Solomon’s Mines
Hardy, Thomas: Tess of the D’Urbervilles
Hawthorne, Nathaniel: The Scarlet Letter
Homer: The Odyssey
Hugo, Victor: The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Hugo, Victor: Les Misérables
Huxley, Aldous: Crome Yellow
James, Henry: The Portrait of a Lady

Feel free to recommend your favorites!

17

Thanks! I’ve read around 40% of those. I have the newer Odyssey translation and a newer Don Quixote on my list for careful reads, too.

A friend recommended The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins, and kept recommending it until I read it. Pretty good!

I enjoy reading lots of genres and book types, and prefer to write in a more literary style.

18

My experience is that “classics” usually end up being very enjoyable, but they often take a while to get there. My approach is to bring them with me on a long trip, when I won’t have many other entertainment options, to force me to get through the slow part at the beginning.

Though, this can backfire, in that some “classics” just aren’t very good, and never get to “the good part”, and then I’m stuck with a bad book.

19

I know I have a reputation as the science fiction guy on the SDMB, but I’ve read a lot of Sinclair Lewis (“Elmer Gantry,” “It Can’t Happen Here” (the basis for “V” - really!), “Main Street,” and “Babbit”), Hardy (“Tess of D’Urbevilles,” “Jude the Obscure,” “Return of the Native”), Austen (“Pride and Prejudice” and “Northanger Abbey”) and other classics (“Tom Jones,” and “Bleak House”). Good literature is good literature.

20

Not Henry James, that’s for damn sure.