Inspired by this comic by Fun Home's Alison Bechdel, I've been thinking about the big important books I really ought to get to reading. As an aside, I find it pretty liberating to confess that I haven't read this established classics but that I have actually trudged through each and every Harry Potter book and the accursed Da Vinci Code just so that I'd have some moral authority when I trash them.
Wuthering Heights has always appealed, but when I tried to read it at the age of seventeen I was pretty tired of overwrought gothic prose so I put it back down. The same issues struck me when trying on Dracula, but any desire I had to read that slips away more every day. A shame, but not unexpected.
Ulysses has a big reputation, but it sounds marvelous. I just hope I'll have time for it. Sheer size is what put an end to Don Quixote after all, and that's a fine book that I always mean to get back to. Gravity's Rainbow remains a work in progress, and I always enjoy it when I drag myself back to that end of the bookshelf. It's dense and wordy, but poetic and the dystopic setting is right up my dingy end of the street. Reading big books shouldn't be hard though, lord knows I had no trouble with Lord of the Rings or The Stand. Perhaps a film or TV show would help with them, but since the three books I just listed are allegedly unfilmable I suppose I should just get cracking those spines again.
After recently making the acquaintance of Kerouac and Bukowski, combined with a long-standing affection for William Burroughs, I've decided that I could stand to try some more American fiction. I enjoyed Of Mice and Men so why not The Grapes of Wrath. The same applies to some stuff by Neal Cassaday, Allen Ginsburg or Tom Wolfe, and Michael Chabon has really spiced up jewishy fiction for me in a way Phillip Roth never managed. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is apparently a work of genius, but doesn't fire me up like the mid-to late twentieth century stuff, and it certainly doesn't have the political edge of the Russian greats I'm missing.
Russian greats like Crime and Punishment or Anna Karenina sit on my shelf to this day, intimidated by the poor reception I gave to Resurrection and the high esteem I have for somewhat lighter titles such as Lolita and The Master and Margarita. I also have a strange uneasiness reading translated novels, with the nagging suspicion that I'm missing out by not getting the author's original text ever hanging over my head. I loved Things Fall Apart, but I've so far managed to avoid No Longer At Ease and Arrow of God for no real reason at all. The same motivation applies to my stockpile of Gabriel Garcia Marquez's entire catalogue, even though everything I've picked up has delighted me. Reading the translators notes on my Kafka short stories is like reminding myself I'm a terrible person for not speaking enough German. I thoroughly blame the Americans for this fact, as if it weren't for them we'd all be fluent apparently. Bastards! I've been racking by brain for a good French book to add here, but I can't actually think of one. This pleases me though I can't work out why.
So let this be my explanation as to why I'm reading Hamlet in between classes, and why I enjoy long-haul travel and frequent train journeys. Make sure that when I pause at the bookshelf on my way to the bathroom you realise that it's not a weird quirk, it's a conscious choice to spend this time furthering myself. Finally, if you ever see me reading some disposable airport fiction before I buy a copy of The Alchemist, you rip it from my hands and remind me that I still have a long way to go.
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