1. Everyone should read the sacred scriptures of their own faith tradition. And if they feel capable of reading the sacred scriptures of other traditions, as well, that would be a good thing. And if they can learn the original languages in which these sacred texts were written, that would be better still. Sacred scriptures are now published in the same shape as ordinary books but they're not ordinary books, are not read like ordinary books...This is a list of ordinary books.
2. Lots of people have sentimental attachments to the picture books and "primers" with which we learned to read. We enjoy sharing these books with younger people. The first books I was positively known to be reading, as distinct from reciting from having heard adults read them aloud, was the four-volume set of Disney movie stories that Roy Disney published as a memorial to Walt; they didn't have huge print and tiny vocabularies, so for most children they'd come after the very first books. My brother came along in time to enjoy Hop on Pop and my natural sister started with the Arch Books versified versions of Bible stories, then progressed to the big-letters-and-easy-words paraphrases of Bible stories in Volume 8 of The Book of Life. We still had those books when The Nephews came along, Guess what I most enjoyed sharing with them. But I don't think people who already know how to read need to go back to Hop on Pop, or even Disney. Though some of my favorite books were addressed to children, the ones on this list range from "over the heads of people under age 16, or maybe age 25" to "lock this book in a storage barn when middle school children come to visit."
(Note that not all reviewers interpreted "youth" as "generally between ages 15 and 30." Some posts do recommend books for beginning readers.)
3. Some classic works of literature are on school reading lists, which spoils the enjoyment of them for many people. Shakespeare intended people to shudder at Macbeth, not sit around discussing the phrases that have fallen out of use and writing tedious little essays about how this play teaches us that murder is a bad thing (which we already knew). I would like to see people in their twenties revisit those reading list books, for themselves, and discover why so many people have liked these books for so long. This list is not about reading list books--at least, not the ones that were published before 1950 and were on reading lists of the 1970s and 1980s. I don't know what new books some teachers may be putting on reading lists these days. I will say that, if you plodded through Huckleberry Finn in some classroom and hated it, you might enjoy reading Mark Twain's other books. And Shakespeare's other plays, too. And, for all I know, Herman Melville's other books.
4. Sharing books across generations works both ways! Aunts, librarians, etc., traditionally want to share the fun by reading books younger people like. Parents and teachers are missing a lot of fun if they don't take this approach, too. One of the reviewers participating in this link-up actually said something like "I just want to see young people reading...anything." Yes, for the sake of the future of writers and booksellers, we all want that, and we also need to know what they like and why.
So, some books that have been out for a while, are in most libraries, and are fun to discover or to watch someone else discover...at whatever age the person may be. Well, after age 16 or 18 anyway. Ten novels for adults that came to mind first, not necessarily my "top" ten, alphabetical order:
1. Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid's Tale
The difficult part is remembering that the kinky sex is only put in to get attention, that this is really a story about what's certain to happen within a few years after any society really does "go paperless" or "go cashless." When trading on identity becomes compulsory, inevitably some people will use it to punish, oppress, or enslave other people. Public-spirited people always carry cash.
2. Charlotte Bronte, Shirley
After publishing their uninspired Nice Girl poems, the Bronte sisters wrote Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre and then, having survived long enough to have got the sentimental "romance" fantasies out of her system, Charlotte Bronte wrote Shirley, which I find wears better than either of the first two novels. Shirley is well off, and the only improbable thing she does is hold out for a really congenial husband.
(Oh all right, I discovered the intellectual stimulation of Shirley in my mid-thirties, so for "youth" I'll propose Douglas Adams' Hitchhiker's Guide quintet as an alternative.)
3. Pearl S. Buck, The Good Earth
Pearl S. Buck was brought up by expatriate hillbillies living in China. (At the time no one would have called them hillbillies; around the turn of the twentieth century, when that term was coined by a North Carolina newspaper, it was used to mean shiftless people as distinct from hill farmers. Hillbilly pride came along after Buck's lifetime.) The people she knew, other than herself and her parents, were Chinese. So she wrote this novel about Chinese people.at the time and place she remembered them. Change the historical setting and it'd be a good, realistic novel about a lot of other times and places, including ours...but writing about America would, at the time, have taken more research for the author than writing about China. If this be cultural appropriation, make the most of it.
4. James Cabell, Jurgen
When I was in grade nine, my English test scores so intimidated my teacher that about all she did was hand me a list of books a college teacher had told her everyone should read in high school. The list contained old favorites--English translations of the Odyssey and Iliad, Don Quixote, Huckleberry Finn. It contained classics I had yet to discover--Shakespeare, Milton, Austen, Melville, the Brontes. And it contained Jurgen, which wasn't in libraries under its own name, but a longish excerpt was in an anthology and gave me the idea. My first reaction was "What's this doing on a reading list? It's funny--and naughty! Did that old professor even realize how naughty it is?" Then eventually I read the whole book, and knew. The message of Jurgen is that a commitment not to make unwanted babies is not necessarily subject to any confusion with any effort to achieve "spiritual chastity" during the fertile years of a normal healthy life. There are a lot of other ways to have fun. Exactly what they are is left to the imagination. If readers are in a condition to benefit from this book, they can figure it out. An additional message the book clearly demonstrates: discretion is the better part of naughtiness.
5. C.S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces
By mashing up the Bible's mythic tale of Job and the Greeks' myth of Psyche, Lewis obtained probably the best female character ever written by a man. I don't know how many "youth" have lived long enough to absorb the main point of his story, but they ought at least to be able to admire his achievement.
6. George Orwell, Animal Farm
Probably more fun if you've read enough early socialist writing to know what the animals are misquoting, but fun, and true, in any case.
7. Ruth Ozeki, My Year of Meats
Jane has a good job, a real opportunity to show her talent by producing nice wholesome TV documentaries about food. The problem is that every time she tries to shoot a pro-beef documentary she learns about another thing that's wrong with the commercial meat industry. How do we react to the discovery that a fabulous job opportunity may not qualify as Right Employment?
8. Marge Piercy, Woman on the Edge of Time
This novel was about the most depressing trends of its time and anticipates the most depressing trends of ours, but what stays with you is the author's vision of a better alternative. (And I apologize to one of my sisters to whom I described it as a cautionary tale about a woman who likes too many different men too much and ends up in a mental hospital, during that sister's boy-crazy stage. It's that, too, but it's much more.)
9. John Kennedy Toole, A Confederacy of Dunces
Readers like it because it's funny. Young readers are supposed to benefit from it because it's about what becomes of people who don't work their way through college. And in the 1980s some people loved the fact that it contains at least five characters who are frankly and positively homosexual, though none of them is developed beyond the surface social personas in which they identify their sexuality by acting out stereotypes in a bar. I'm not sure whether Toole ever worked out the proportions of sympathy to revulsion in what he felt for these characters, or for the other characters, but what I appreciated at age nineteen was his skewering the callous way the Old Left exploited homosexual Americans...I was just starting to notice their exploitation of feminists.
10. Alice Walker, The Color Purple
The first few pages of this modern classic are disgusting. This was not the way Black American families lived in the 1920s; in fact, as an adult, Celie learns that it wasn't even the way her dysfunctional family lived. She didn't tell lies in her letters to God, but she repeated things she'd been told that weren't true. What makes the story a classic is not its this-too-shall-pass, "Celie had a worse life than yours and look how well her life turned out," message to the despondent young, though I'm not sure whether that message has ever been better expressed in a novel. It's certainly not the way Celie copes with her husband's cheating by seducing his other woman, which Alice Walker admitted was something she tried, in real life, and found not to work as well as she'd hoped it would when she was writing fiction. It's the honesty of the social/political message. Walker was and still is pretty far to the left (despite having a Real Liberal mind). Her friends would have liked it if her book had been another piece of Socialist Realism in which the characters either stayed miserable under the no-good capitalist system, or were saved by the leftward "progress" of the Roosevelt Administration. But it's not, and they don't. Gloria Steinem raved over the story of Celie's recovering self-esteem, and Walker mildly corrected her saying that the story was mostly about Celie's spirituality, but along with those things Celie improves her life by making useful things and selling them for personal profit. Reality has that tendency to promote capitalism. The trick is to keep our capitalism "enlightened," and Celie does.
There are some great books on your list Priscilla.
ReplyDeleteThank you, George.
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