I was inspired by this, frankly, not at all bad list.
In fact, it’s something of a dialogue with that list. But this is a reading list for over-read, over-intellectualized people under thirty. It won’t give you the broadest possible liberal education, but it’s still a damn fine list. And I’m going to keep it under thirty. Maybe just ten. And you should just read them this year. Even if you’re over thirty, like me.
Besides the classic American mania for list making, I have thought about the idea of a group books, that if you read them, would allow one to pass one off as a well rounded individual of the mind. Many years, there was a series called Great Books of the Western World and it was conceived of as a course of study for businessmen to help turn them into well-rounded, intellectually aware thinkers, something similar to when Bell Labs sent a group executives to a crash course in the liberal arts, culminating in a reading of Ulysses.
A more extreme instance is L’abbé Faria of The Count of Monte Cristo who determined that by reading 150 books, he could acquire virtually all the knowledge available to a man of his day (granted, this was in the very early 1800s, arguably the last time a person might acquire a relative expertise in all the knowledge generally available). In truth, it was that scene from The Count of Monte Cristo that inspired my own mania for putting together such a list and when I was younger, I filled up pages with my own estimates of what a modern day list of that nature would look like (my own lists were rather light on math and science, though).
Steppenwolf , Herman Hesse
You should read this instead of Siddhartha because every cool, intellectual kid will be reading Siddhartha and reading Steppenwolf instead will be give you a world weary cachet that a young man’s book like Siddhartha just can’t pull off. And though the Steppenwolf himself is a man in his late middle age, I still think of it as a young man’s book – a young man asking what is the value of all this education and reading that just makes me question my existence, my choices, and my meaning? How can I escape the Hamlet-like paralysis of the educated person in the modern world?
1984, George Orwell
I shouldn’t even I have to list this one. You should have already read it. Someone should have shoved it in your face at age 12 and then someone should have made you read it again at ages 16 and 24. And no, reading Animal Farm does not excuse you from reading 1984, so don’t even try to wiggle out of it. Geez. Lazy little bastards.
A Farewell to Arms, Ernest Hemingway
Hemingway is such an important figure in American literature and his style is still enormously influential. But For Whom the Bell Tolls is crap. Hemingway will never be known for his portrayal of female characters, but Pilar is just a masturbatory fantasy. I like The Sun Also Rises best, but A Farewell to Arms represents the logical conclusion of the Hemingway style. And though, in many ways, Katherine is as much a fantasy as Pilar, so much of what makes the book great is the intensely limited narrative point of view. The main character has no idea who Katherine is or why she does what she does, so all these questions get turned around and flipped upside down into issues of epistemology and the limits of knowledge, rather than getting stuck on gender politics in the first half of the twentieth century.
Great Expectations, Charles Dickens
Because, for heaven’s sake, you ought to read some Dickens. And if you’re going to read only one book Dickens, you should absolutely read Great Expectations. It’s a no-brainer. And don’t get fooled into reading A Tale of Two Cities because here’s what no one tell you: it’s not that good. Dickens should have stuck with nineteenth century England. Sure, go ahead and memorize that ‘far better thing’ line from it, but actually read all of Great Expectations.
The Wasteland and Other Poems, T.S. Eliot
That other lists recommends Four Quartets but that’s just silly. Four Quartets is very, very good. It’s genius. But The Wasteland is on a whole ‘nother level. It the defining poem of what one might term ‘high modernism’ (the modernism of Joyce, Proust, Woolf, Pound, etc). So just read it, already.
The Great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzgerald
He hit right on the nose with this one. I think The Great Gatsby is the ‘Great American Novel.’ The way it captures how class and ‘old money’ insert themselves into our supposedly egalitarian, ‘pulled up by your bootstraps’ society is as fractured and class-ridden as any old world monarchy. In the current age, when America is one of the most economically unequal societies you’ll find outside of tinpot dictatorships, it rings with more truth and more sadness (and when you read the final chapters, as the illusion of the American dream collapses for Nick, you’ll feel a deep pit open in your stomach, like you’ve just been punched by life harder than any junior high bully could have done) than we like to admit.
The Odyssey, by Homer
The Iliad is, in many ways, a much more foundational document. It was certainly a much more important document to the ancients and was a religious document in a way that The Odyssey was not. But as tale with contemporary pyschological meaning, you should really read The Odyssey. It inspired books like Ulysses and movies like Ulysses’ Gaze (my favorite movie) and is great metaphor for things like the journey towards adulthood or the return home after a traumatic event or even the failure to truly go home again (hat tip to Thomas Wolfe).
Ulysses, by James Joyce
Yes, you should read this book. Yes, I know it’s a hard read. But damn it, you’re supposed to be an educated person! It’s a critical work of twentieth century fiction and it’s either Ulysses or Remembrance of Things Past and the latter is something on the order of four or five times as long, at least, so consider yourself lucky.
The Count of Monte Cristo, by Alexandre Dumas
Because it’s a more focused novel than the brilliant but rambling adventure of The Three Musketeers. And because reading a nineteenth century French novel should be de rigeur but I don’t want to subject you to Balzac. And it’s a ripping good yarn. It’s a great, old fashioned adventure, so you can use phrases like ‘ripping good yarn’ when talking about it.
Democracy in America, by Alexis de Tocqueville
I thought putting something in the tenth and final spot by Emerson or Thoreau or perhaps The Federalist Papers but it seemed that Tocqueville’s stranger’s eye view of America is something that one should read and be familiar. Many of his insights remain valid today and it provides much needed perspective that a book by an American cannot offer.
Who really runs to Republican Party and the right wing in America? Check this handy-dandy chart!
I can buy everything in the article but this statement:
…[Bernard-Henri Lévy] was once an important [philosopher].
Seriously? When was he ever an important philosopher? Is this during the same period when Newt Gingrich and Paul Ryan were ‘intellectuals?’
Is Jurgen Habermas experiencing an intellectual conversion to religion/spirituality?
Religion seems to be creeping more and more into his thoughts.
But don’t let that think he’s no longer constantly wrestling with the nature of a just and rational society.
The Paris Commune is a bit of history of great importance in Europe but seldom thought of over here. Until the seventies, one of the legacies of the Commune was that a mayor of Paris could not become the president. But if it is discussed here, it is as a small sidebar in the history of the unification of Germany.
I agree with this article that the Commune has some lessons for and parallels to the Occupy movement, though I could do without the moralizing about the Museum of Modern Art.
The question of John Rawls and the Occupy Movement has already been asked.
I guess, now it’s Herbert Marcuse’s time.
Of the leading figures of the Frankfurt School, also known Critical Theory, Marcuse, like Theodor Adorno and Erich Fromm, wrote much of his most influential writing well after the group’s first gathering in the thirties. Indeed, it seems like only Walter Benjamin and Max Horkheimer peaked before the fifties – and Benjamin died in 1940 and Horkheimer was of a slightly earlier generation than the others.
Anyway, yes I was one of those college students who read One Dimensional Man with trembling awe. I devoured books by the Frankfurt School (and tried to understand them to the best of my ability) as a young, would be rebel (revolutionary?), but now I have mixed feelings about most of the original Critical Theorists, Adorno excepted.
With the exception of Adorno and, yes, including One Dimensional Man, there is something too facile about them. Too much polemics and too little critical philosophy. One Dimensional Man, like Fromm’s Escape from Freedom, seems too much written to appeal to the growing counter culture movement. Trying to tie into the zeitgeist artificially, rather than organically. Or perhaps trying to latch onto it, rather than create or drive it.
The poet Robert Hass, in particular, got some press for his involvement in an Occupy protest in Berkeley. He probably got more press than other poets who participated by virtue of his status as a former poet laureate.
But this piece asks the question: would we have paid as much attention to what he had say if he had said it, not as he did, in a newspaper op-ed, but in a poem?
Depressingly, I think we all know the answer to that.
James Longenbach on ‘The Resistance to Poetry’
This article appeared at a rather fortuitous time, as I have been re-reading Plato and writings about Plato and his objection to poetry. But like the idea of poetry and resistance. The immediate assumption, when you hear ‘poetry and resistance,’ is that speaker is talking about political resistance and poetry’s role and potential within activism. But there’s also poetry as resisting simple meanings, as resisting language itself, as resisting being assimilated or co-opted by society and culture.
the coffee philosopher 