Just to try to keep myself motivated here, I'm just going to give a quick rundown about what I have up next on my reading list. Ever since I started wanting to read the classics of world literature (which was about a year ago), I had decided that my first year of this reading plan would be devoted to building a solid foundation with some of the most important and alluded to classics. The father of Western literature is Homer, the supposedly blind bard of ancient Greece. The two epics attributed to him (I say attributed to since scholars know essentially nothing about the man the Greeks dubbed Homer, and there is and has always been a great debate about if one man wrote both poems, or if either was even written by a single person) are the
Iliad and the
Odyssey. I read the
Iliad last year, which took a while but was definitely worth it. The next book I plan on reading is the
Odyssey, which I think most modern readers like more than its predecessor. It is the single quintessential adventure story of all time, just like the
Iliad is the original war story. I think it's fairly important to read the
Iliad before the
Odyssey, since there are many characters in both, and reading the
Iliad first gives you a solid bedrock of narrative understanding that will aid you in the looser, more meandering
Odyssey. The
Iliad is almost overpowering in its graphic and gigantic descriptions of war. I have started to read the
Odyssey before, but kept getting sidetracked by other things. It is a lot easier read than its big brother, but based on the approximate half of it that I've read before, I would have to disagree with the modern audiences who like it more than the war epic
Iliad, which documents a couple days in the ten-year Greek struggle to lay siege on Troy (ten years and untold amounts killed over a husband trying to get back his wife who left him for the Trojan prince Paris!). The
Odyssey has lots of magic and interesting stories, but it cannot compare to the sheer power of the colossal descriptions of war and human suffering in
Iliad. One of my favorite parts of Homer is his use of gigantic similes, using lines and lines to compare warfare to nature's power. Those parts are the heart of Homer to me, and they do not pop up often in the
Odyssey. But I will give it another shot, since it clearly is not a bad book. In fact, it is one of the central works in Western literature for all time. (Note: I am reading the Richmond Lattimore translations of both works. He has long been considered the gold standard for Homer--especially the
Iliad--since his
Iliad came out in, I believe, '61. If others were to start reading Homer, I would recommend to them the Robert Fagles translations, which are a little newer and undoubtedly easier to read, while still capturing the elemental power which makes Homer so special and universally loved.)
After I finish that--and since I think religion will most likely be the next topic of the month on DIMB--I will begin an even harder struggle as I attempt to tackle
the central work of Western literature: the Holy Bible. Since I think trying to tackle the Bible head-on and slogging through the entire work in one go is a bit suicidal, I will see how things go, but probably I will end up reading the Bible a book or two at a time. After all, the Bible was not written by one author or considered to be a chronological, seamless narrative. It is a piecemeal collection of different writings by a whole lot of different authors. From everything I've ever read about it, the Bible is often considered to be one of the
weirdest books in existence. I think probably the majority of Christians have never read the entire thing, and I think there are large swathes of it that Sunday school teachers probably never teach to their students. It's full of sex and violence and all kinds of other weird things. I want to read it because first-off, it's considered to be one of the greatest works of literature in all of existence. Despite having pages and pages of unreadable lists and other esoteric passages, there are moments of raw sublimity that perhaps surpass all other works in literary history. I would say its only peers are Homer's epics, Dante's
Divine Comedy, Milton's
Paradise Lost, the best plays of Shakespeare, Cervantes's
Don Quixote, and perhaps Proust's long narrative
In Search of Lost Time (or, alternatively titled,
Remembrance of Things Past). You can't really call yourself a literature fan without having read it. And certainly I don't think you could call yourself a really wise Christian or Jew without having read the entire book that your faith is based upon. But I do understand its difficulties, as my version of the Bible clocks in at over 1,600 pages. Note that I am going to read the King James version, which is again the absolute gold standard. Along with Shakespeare, the King James Bible helped shaped modern English as we know it. This is the version with the most powerful language, in part because even when it was written at the beginning of the seventeenth century, its language was pretty archaic. This helps lend weight to the weightiest of all narratives--the creation of the universe that begins with Genesis and ends with Revelation and the Apocalypse. Again, I imagine the KJ version will make it a harder read for me, since it was written in the seventeenth century. But that is the price you pay. In literature, as in many other things, the harder you work, the deeper and more profound pleasure you get as a result. This is going to take me a while to read, and I will probably intersperse other works between the books of the Bible.
A couple of quick tips here for those wishing to delve into the awesome world of literature: please, if you are picking a book written in a foreign language to read, research which translation you want to get. This can make or break whether you like a certain work. There are atrocious translations out there, there are ones that are great but don't adhere too closely to the original, and there are ones that are just right. Please research what translation you are getting, and also what edition. Some editions have great notes, which can really add meaning to your experience, as well as great introductions or other essays. For instance, if you are planning to tackle Chaucer's
Canterbury Tales, you can choose to read it in the original Middle English (I have read parts of it in this, and it's a unique, invigorating experience once you get the hang of it) or you can read a modernized version. Personally, I would suggest a version that has the original on one page and the modernized version on the facing page, since this way you can tackle the more challenging Middle English while having a helping hand on the other side in case you get stuck.
Another tip is to please read slowly. Growing up I had a tendency to skim along at a very rapid pace. I got away with it since I was mostly reading easier works, like
Harry Potter or Stephen King books or Crichton thrillers, but when you are reading great works of literary art, you gain so much more by taking your time. I personally look up all the words I don't know as I'm reading, so this adds a lot of time. I also like to take notes or underline sometimes. Again, the more you put into a work of literature, the more you get out of it. You are doing a great injustice to an author like James Joyce or William Shakespeare or Dante Alighieri or Marcel Proust or especially all of the poets by reading their works at a rapid pace. They are considered the absolute greats because they pack so much into their works. Something like
Hamlet is so dense with lyrical beauty, with complex metaphors, with pulsing rhythm, with alliteration and puns, and with irony that it takes a lot of effort to dig even moderately deep into its den of dark beauty. People don't read great literature just for the plot, which can of course easily be discerned with speed reading or skimming; they read it for the writing itself.
It is also good to reread stuff. Great literature gets better the more you read it. You uncover new layers and discover things you never saw before. This is especially true with the more challenging works--say,
Ulysses or
Moby-Dick or
The Sound and the Fury or Spenser's
Faerie Queen. And it helps to really try to wrestle with your book. Don't just read it, but try to really get inside of it. Try to think about everything going in--why is the author writing in this specific style and how does it relate to the work as a whole? Etc. Try to do more than just read a book to find out who dies at the end. A couple tips here from Jack Murnighan's
Beowulf on the Beach (an excellent starting guide for 50 of the world's classics--this single-handedly made me want to tackle the great works of world literature): don't see the movie first! I really can't stress this enough. It's so much better to read the book first, because as much as I love movies, I think that truly breathtaking literature has a more profound effect on us (at least me) than do movies. You really live with a great book. I will try to start doing this from now on, although sometimes it's hard (and sometimes the movies really are better than the books, such as
The Godfather or
Psycho or
Jaws or many others). Another tip of his is to keep a "commonplace book," which I've started doing, to write down your thoughts on the work, new words, great quotes, or just chains of thought that you started on because of the book.
Alright, back to my upcoming reading list. Being me, I decided to go all-out and try to read William Shakespeare in his entirety in chronological order. What the fuck is with my obsession with chronological order lately? This is a rather ballsy move, considering his worst plays are the first ones, but I want to grow with the world's greatest author, so that by the time I get to the sheer masterpieces of
Hamlet,
King Lear, and
Macbeth, I will be a much more mature and intelligent reader, ready to engage with the most technically gifted and soul-stirring writer out there. The Bible and Shakespeare are I think the two edifices of literature where it's most important to read slowly and try your motherfucking hardest to really dig deep into these monumental monoliths of human art. But so much of literature and indeed our entire human culture itself is based on these two things that I decided to get them out of the way early in my quest to master world literature. But I am ready to be fucked mercilessly by these things, so expect to see a tired Edward in the upcoming months. At least according to my massive
Riverside Shakespeare, his first play is
Henry VI (not to be confused with the much better
Henry IV and
V). This is of course the subject of much scholarly debate, since there is very little known about the world's greatest writer, and of course there is even the endless debate about whether the plays were even written by William. But that is another story for another day. Unfortunately,
Henry VI is considered one of his absolute worst plays (it has three parts), but you have to start somewhere. I simply cannot wait until I get to his second period (out of four, at least by my standards), which includes such timeless masterpieces as
Julius Caesar and
Romeo and Juliet. For any other writer, these would be the absolute pinnacles of their career, but for Shakespeare these were mere warm-ups for his dark and truly spectacular tragedies:
Hamlet (whose protagonist many consider to be the greatest literary character of all time),
King Lear (perhaps the most tragic of all works),
Macbeth, and
Othello. These are usually considered to be the masterpieces of Shakespeare. But it will be a long time before I get to those (unfortunately, but then again, I don't think I'm ready as a reader for them yet).
The Bible, Homer, and Shakespeare: these are the centerpieces of Western literature. After them, I'm not sure what I will work on. There are just so many routes. I will probably intersperse all of these works with lighter fare. I really want to read
From Hell, often considered to be one of the greatest graphic novels of all time, about Jack the Ripper and written by the author of
Watchmen (please read this if you haven't already--love it). I could attempt Dante, who is considered to be perhaps the finest writer there is after Shakespeare. I worry about the difficulty of his absolute masterpiece,
The Divine Comedy, though, so I might wait until later to attempt him. The same goes for Milton's
Paradise Lost. These are genuinely challenging epic poems, but as I said before, the harder the work, the deeper its pleasures. I also want to tackle the central works of the American canon, which are as follows: Melville's
Moby-Dick; Twain's
Huckleberry Finn (due for a reread); Thoereau's
Walden and the works of his friend Emerson; the poetry of Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman; the novels of Thomas Pynchon, Cormac McCarthy, Don DeLillo, and Philip Roth (these are the central American authors who are still cranking out books); Hawthorne's
Scarlet Letter (I don't think I ever finished this); the novels of Henry James and William Faulkner (America's two greatest novelists); and the works of Hemingway and Fitzgerald. Faulkner and Henry James are both particularly challenging, and it'd be cool if we did some sort of discussion group to give us motivation to slog through their big lists of masterpieces. This is just a blueprint as you can see, but these are all authors I plan to tackle eventually.
There are some nonfiction writers I wish to experience as well. Plato and Montaigne (the great French writer who basically invented the essay single-handedly) are just as much the cornerstones of our culture as Dante and Shakespeare are. I would like to read some Freud, as well as some of the great philosophers. Two things I'm interested in tackling are drama and poetry. I don't have much experience with either, and I find the latter particularly challenging (reading epic poetry like Homer isn't too bad compared to read lyric poetry, at least for me). Poetry really takes concentration and experience to even begin to master. One day I would like to write it, but I definitely need more experience reading it first. In terms of drama, I think I really need to read the Greek classics first (and of course Shakespeare), since this is where it all came from. Sophocles, Euripedes, Aristophanes, and Aeschylus--these are the masters. It is interesting to note, as I have read about, that oftentimes the first examples of specific genres are often considered to be to this day the greatest. A lot say that no one has surpassed these Greek tragedians at their art (except for Shakespeare--his plays are often considered to be a different genre than traditional Greek tragedy, and no one has surpassed Shakespeare at the kind of tragedies that he invented). Homer wrote the first--and many say best--epics. The novel as we know of it starts with Miguel Cervantes's
Don Quixote, and you could make a strong case for saying that it is the greatest (at least until Joyce and Proust wrote their masterpieces at the beginning of the twentieth century, but even then....could they offer more than the Don and Sancho gave us?).
Two things I would like to read soon are the first two major works by James Joyce, often considered to be the finest writer of the twentieth century. Known especially and infamously for the eternally challenging masterwork
Ulysses, Joyce is considered to be one of the finest technical writers of all time. Gifted with a tremendous vocabulary and intellect, Joyce did not go easy on his readers at all. While
Ulysses is almost universally hailed as the greatest novel of the century (it is literature's version of
Citizen Kane), it presents an almost impenetrable maze for its readers to try to weave through. There are dozens and dozens of books trying to explain or help the reader through it, but I think most still fail when attempting to read it. It is sad that books like that or Tolstoy's
War and Peace are seen as literary Mt. Everests instead of being the rich works of art which they really are. They aren't simply challenges; they should be works of great beauty and wisdom which enrich us. (If you think
Ulysses is hard, Joyce spent over a decade working on his final book
Finnegans Wake, which is perhaps literature's hardest and most impenetrable read, but some say it is the finest work of literary art of the century past. One day I'd like to tackle it.) Anyways, I don't want to start with either of those books. It is best with Joyce to start with his easier, earlier stuff, which lays groundwork to help you understand his later masterpiece
Ulysses (which is modeled on the
Odyssey and also
Hamlet--each section adheres to a passage from the
Odyssey, and is also linked to a certain branch of academia as well as a part of the body--very confusing book).
Dubliners was, I believe, his first published book, and is a collection of short stories. "The Dead" is considered to be one of the finest stories of all time. This is going to be what I read first, followed by
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, which is the autobiographical tale of his youth, adolescence, and young adulthood. Many of the characters from this recur in
Ulysses, which is another good reason to start with this first. I think both should give me a taste as to why Joyce is considered to be one of the finest authors of all time.
The other candidates for best twentieth century authors are Franz Kafka and Marcel Proust. I might read some Kafka coming up. He is known for being eternally weird and obsessed with themes like alienation and religious doubt. He is often considered to be a prophet who foresaw the atrocities of World War II and the Nazi regime. Several of his family members were killed in the Holocaust, but Kafka died before Hitler's rise. Proust is basically known for one book: the aforementioned
In Search of Lost Time. This is an extremely long (3,000+ pages) novel that basically tells the story of its creation. Like many Modernist works, it is heavily autobiographical and experimental. Proust's almost completely unnamed narrator (I believe he is called Marcel only a few times in this gigantic work) bears many similarities to his creator, and the climax of the novel is the decision to create the novel by its narrator. This more than almost any other work is a reason to read slowly and carefully. Probably no one even attempts to read this book anymore, so no one fails, but it is I would say definitely one of the hardest challenges in literature. It is incredibly slow and pensive, but I think if you read deeply enough in it, its almost endless riches will unfold themselves to you. Proust created a work that digs itself perhaps deeper into the complexities of the human mind then any other. Influenced by Freud and the groundbreaking quantum theory in physics, Proust writes a novel that is more metaphysical then plot-based. According to Clifton Fadiman, "Proust is less considered with these matters [story and characters, although Proust has been praised as being the equal of Shakespeare in terms of creating completely vital and memorable characters] than with dramatizing a metaphysical system. Metaphysics tries to answer the question, What is the fundamental nature of reality? Proust devoted his life to answering the question in the form of a work of art. Of course he answers only part of the question. He tells us what reality means to Proust. But the answer has enormous scope and range." Many consider this the finest novel of all time. It is something I don't plan to tackle for a long time--both because of its challenge and because I hear you get so much more out of it with more life experience and wisdom that comes with age--but when I do, it will definitely be something I record either on here or somewhere.
Anywho, that is just some of the things I want to read. There are billions more, and I only listed the works of "high literature" primarily. There are just as many popular books I want to read. This new craze of
Girl with the Dragon Tattoo books has made me want to read that series, so I'll be doing that sometime soon.
Also, don't think that video game month has ended just yet for me. I have an upcoming list sometime for the top 50 weapons of all time in a video game, so stay tuned.
--Edward
