Classical Bookworm

Re-reading

Further to my post on spoilers, do visit Dorothy's blog for Vladimir Nabokov's view on why reading a book for the first time is an inadequate artistic experience.

Suspense and Spoilers

There is a conversation going on at Book Chase about readers who like to flip to the end of a novel to find out what happens versus those who prefer to be held in suspense until the end. The latter definitely dominate the litblogosphere, to the point where there is an unwritten rule that the endings of books, even classics, are not to be revealed. The only way out of this stricture is to prominently post spoiler alerts, and risk having your post ignored by anyone who is reading or planning to read the book in question. This is such a universal point of netiquette that even Wikipedia did it right after the last Harry Potter book was released.

This idea that a book is "spoiled" if the ending is known bothers me. I enjoy a good plot twist as much as the next person, but to me a book should have a lot more going for it than an exciting plot. The point of reading a novel shouldn't be just to find out "what happens," but to find out what the author is trying to convey though plot, setting, characterization, diction, imagery, and everything else that goes into a story. If knowing the end makes a book less enjoyable, then it probably wasn't a very good book to begin with.

What Would You Like in Your Maletín Literario?

Sam (Book Chase) blogged about a new program in Chile which aims to give books to poor families to promote literacy and education. Next year they will be delivering a maletín literario ("book bag") to 133,000 families, and the program will continue until they reach their goal of sending books to 400,000 of the most needy families in Chile.

The maletínes will contain up to 9 books of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry suitable for children and adults, plus an encyclopedic dictionary, and possibly an atlas (earlier news stories mention the atlas but later ones leave it out). They wanted to include both domestic and world literature, and represent a variety of cultures and viewpoints. People were encouraged to submit possible titles for these book bags, and a committee has narrowed the list down to 49. Since I know there are one or two book list lovers out there, here it is:

Happy International Literacy Day!

Information Overload, 16th Century Style

...But there are other scholars who remind us that we are not the first to wrestle with the problem of "information overload"—and there may be lessons for us in how some of our predecessors dealt with this issue. Perhaps the most interesting of those scholars is Ann Blair of Harvard, who is working on what promises to be a fascinating book about information overload in the 16th century—the early days of the printing press and the Protestant Reformation. (You can find a copy of a preliminary article on the subject here: scroll about halfway down or search for the name "Blair.")

Blair shows that many scholars, starting in the 16th century and continuing for another hundred and fifty years or so, were—how shall I put it?—freaked out by the sudden onslaught of texts. In the 17th century one French scholar cried out, "We have reason to fear that the multitude of books which grows every day in a prodigious fashion will make the following centuries fall into a state as barbarous as that of the centuries that followed the fall of the Roman Empire." That is, "unless we try to prevent this danger by separating those books which we must throw out or leave in oblivion from those which one should save and within the latter between what is useful and what is not."

Read Like a ROMAN

Last week, teacher Nick Senger of Literary Compass released his new e-book, ROMAN READING: 5 Practical Skills for Transforming Your Life through Literature. You can download the book for free in either pdf or mp3 audio format from the ROMAN Reading blog.

ROMAN is an acronym for five basic reading skills:

• Read: ...the book through once before drawing any conclusions.
• Outline: Divide the book into its natural parts and describe what happens in each part.
• Mark: Underline, circle, and write in the margins.
• Ask: "What does it mean?" and "What difference does it make?"
• Name: ...your experience, that is, record your thoughts about the book.

As Nick writes in the book, these skills are not new—I've come across them before on my own reading on reading—but he has packaged them together in a clean and simple format, interspersed with inspiring literary quotes. He also includes tips for people who might be intimidated by the classics, and lists some helpful books on reading and as well as a selection of classic books that most often appear on "great books" lists. And did I mention it's free? Anyone looking for a quick reading tune-up, or perhaps wanting to inspire a new reader, should have a look at ROMAN Reading.

Disclaimer: Nick linked to my blog in the book, but I didn't know about it in advance and it doesn't affect my opinion of the book. I'm already biased towards anyone who teaches people how to get more out of reading the classics!

How I'm Reading Don Quixote

Fellow windmill-tilter Danielle has been considering the possibility of taking notes while reading Don Quixote in order to better organize her thoughts about the book. I wrote in saying there is no way I could say anything about the book without taking notes, and thought I'd post something on exactly how I'm reading Don Quixote.

My long-time blog readers may recall that I've been tinkering with my reading technique for... well... since the beginning of this blog. I should say "techniques" because different books and different depths of reading demand different techniques. For this first (but not last) reading of Don Quixote, I am underlining in pencil any words or passages that seem important. I'm using pencil not because I might want to erase it some day but because pen is so dark that it would disturb the flow of future readings.

After finishing a chapter I write a quick prose summary of what happened, just two to four sentences. I've found that summarizing the action in my own words and in complete sentences makes it stick in my mind far better than point form notes. After that I review what I underlined and pick out what still seems important and write it down as notes or quotes, as appropriate. So far, most of the chapters have required about a page in my trusty Moleskine, though the book inquisition chapter got a well-deserved two pages. When it comes time to post, I read over all my notes and the patterns and ideas start to form in my mind and I can start to write. I always mark down a page reference for all my notes and quotes so I can easily go back to the book if I need more detail, and the underlining helps me find the exact spot quickly.

This may seem like a lot of work, but if I didn't do this, what I read would go in one brain synapse and out the other. I do it because I have to if I want to get anything lasting out of the book. For me, reading is about learning, and learning is pure enjoyment. If it takes a little effort, so be it!

Colophon for stationery addicts (like myself):
I underline with a Staedtler graphite 777 0.5mm mechanical pencil, and write with a Pilot Hi-Tecpoint V5 Extra Fine black pen in my large ruled Moleskine.

Everyone's To-Read List

Newsweek recently asked readers what five books they most want to read. Here's the list of most popular wanna-reads:

The Aeneid, Virgil
The Bible
“Crime and Punishment,” Fyodor Dostoevsky
“The Fountainhead,” Ayn Rand
“The Grapes of Wrath,” John Steinbeck
“Gravity’s Rainbow,” Thomas Pynchon
“The Human Condition,” Hannah Arendt
“The Iraq Study Group Report: The Way Forward, A New Approach”
“Jane Eyre,” Charlotte Bronte
“Leaves of Grass,” Walt Whitman
“The Major Works,” John Donne
“Moby-Dick,” Herman Melville
“One Hundred Years of Solitude,” Gabriel Garcia Marquez
“Paradise Lost,” John Milton
“The Pilgrim’s Progress,” John Bunyan
“Remembrance of Things Past,” Marcel Proust
“Ulysses,” James Joyce
“War and Peace,” Leo Tolstoy

Interesting list! I'm sorry to say the only one of those I've read is Jane Eyre. I suppose Virgil (and not Homer) is there because of the recent publicity around Robert Fagles' new translation. And where is Shakespeare? It can't be any harder to read than Joyce, can it?

Is anyone up for a meme? What are your top five wanna-reads? Here are mine:

1. The Bible
2. The Odyssey
3. The Divine Comedy
4. Paradise Lost
5. Shakespeare (all of it)

Very predictable, I suppose, but it's hard to go wrong with books that have been revered for centuries.

sort of via Book World

The Pleasures and Mysteries of Reading on the BBC

I caught an interesting discussion on reading last night on the BBC World Service:

The Word: How to Read Special

Not the mechanical process, but how to understand what’s going on in a book; we examine what authors pass on to the reader beyond the story, the craft and techniques of the writer, and why poetry is essential to living.

The guests are Alberto Manguel, John Mullan and Josephine Hart.

The podcast will be up until next Tuesday. Enjoy!

Was That A Proposition?

One of the socially unexplainable books I'm reading these days is The Trivium: The Liberal Arts of Logic, Grammar, and Rhetoric. The sub-subtitle is "Understanding the Nature and Function of Language," which should probably be the title since it's the only part that makes sense to someone who doesn't already know what is meant by "trivium" or "logic, grammar, and rhetoric." Those are just a few of the very specific, technical terms that abound in this book. Even term is a term. Familiar words like form, matter, nature, passion, class, and accident all have different (sometimes very different) meanings in the world of logic, grammar, and rhetoric. One can easily run by one of these terms thinking "Oh ya, I know what that means" and end up in confusion when it turns out to mean something surprising.

It doesn't help that the book wasn't originally written as a book, but is a scantily prosified version of a teaching outline left behind by Sister Miriam Joseph. As such it gets straight to the point without much lead-in. I personally don't like a lot of hand-holding when I read, but this is more like being pushed unceremoniously off the diving board. Terms are often used before they are fully explained (if they are fully explained at all). It also assumes a familiarity with English grammar that I don't possess since I was in French Immersion during the years English grammar is usually taught.

This is sink-or-swim reading, and the way forward is often interrupted by treading of water as I re-(re-re-)read sections to make sure I understand them. It's such intensive brain exercise that it is actually physically exhausting (did you know the brain uses 60% of your blood sugar?). I haven't managed to get through one chapter in a single sitting yet. But, what can I say, I like a challenge. The reward is to finally get some of this stuff, to start taking at least some of the terms in stride, to be slowly building up a body of knowledge. I just had a great moment while writing a note in my moleskine. As I wrote, "compound declarative sentence: may symbolize two or more simple propositions or a disjunctive proposition," I realized: Hey! That's a disjunctive proposition!! And a contingent one at that! It's good to get it.