Wednesday, September 08, 2004
Random Acts of Reading
Jeff posted something thoughtful about reading, and my comment for his weblog got long-winded, so here it is as a post. (Note to self: Add the link to Jeff's site already!)
I majored in English and Russian undergrad, and I took enough English classes to meet the requirements for the major twice over. (Lots of room for electives in my schedule and no one encouraging me to finish college in three years instead of four.) The English Department offered a three-course Irish lit cycle - a survey of Irish literature, James Joyce's major works, and Joyce's Finnegans Wake; I took them all, naturally.
Flann O'Brien was a lot of fun. At Swim-Two-Birds is still one of my favorite novels. That was also the semester that I took a couple survey courses - Irish lit, African American lit, and some Russian stuff. Between the two classes offered through the English Department, I had something like 21 books to read. Big, heavy books. But it was a blast. The themes and motifs that overlapped from one literary tradition to the other fascinated me.
I think that "The Dead" tells a tale that you appreciate more as a reader as you grow older and gain more experience in life. Some things are just like that.
My favorite story from Dubliners is "Eveline" - and I love it more because of the situation told in the story than because of any prose that stands out to me as particularly lyrical. I used it as a text in a class I taught on the character of The Dangerous Woman in literature, and I found myself really fighting with my students to make the case for Eveline as dangerous. I guess they were expecting femme fatales to be recurring figures.
I read Ulysses from cover to cover. We devoted most of the semester to it in the major works class. I wouldn't have wanted to read it on my own or in a class with a different professor at its helm as Mark Hawthorne was simply wonderful. He gave us reading notes for each chapter to affix to the book (and mine are still stapled to the first page of each chapter), and this helped so much with understanding the text. I'd still rather sit down and re-read Ulysses than try to contemplate some of the crap that passes as the experimental and avant-garde today.
Say what you will about how Tolstoy near-flawlessly depicts the feminine voice in Anna Karenina, I was more impressed with Molly's chapter in Ulysses. (Check out Kate Bush's musical version of those infamous 8 paragraphs.) Joyce then so neatly outdid himself in Chapter 8, the washerwomen's chapter, of Finnegans Wake. That prose just blew me away when I first read it - and then repeatedly as I re-read it - and it still makes my list of greatest things I've ever read.
I majored in English and Russian undergrad, and I took enough English classes to meet the requirements for the major twice over. (Lots of room for electives in my schedule and no one encouraging me to finish college in three years instead of four.) The English Department offered a three-course Irish lit cycle - a survey of Irish literature, James Joyce's major works, and Joyce's Finnegans Wake; I took them all, naturally.
Flann O'Brien was a lot of fun. At Swim-Two-Birds is still one of my favorite novels. That was also the semester that I took a couple survey courses - Irish lit, African American lit, and some Russian stuff. Between the two classes offered through the English Department, I had something like 21 books to read. Big, heavy books. But it was a blast. The themes and motifs that overlapped from one literary tradition to the other fascinated me.
I think that "The Dead" tells a tale that you appreciate more as a reader as you grow older and gain more experience in life. Some things are just like that.
My favorite story from Dubliners is "Eveline" - and I love it more because of the situation told in the story than because of any prose that stands out to me as particularly lyrical. I used it as a text in a class I taught on the character of The Dangerous Woman in literature, and I found myself really fighting with my students to make the case for Eveline as dangerous. I guess they were expecting femme fatales to be recurring figures.
I read Ulysses from cover to cover. We devoted most of the semester to it in the major works class. I wouldn't have wanted to read it on my own or in a class with a different professor at its helm as Mark Hawthorne was simply wonderful. He gave us reading notes for each chapter to affix to the book (and mine are still stapled to the first page of each chapter), and this helped so much with understanding the text. I'd still rather sit down and re-read Ulysses than try to contemplate some of the crap that passes as the experimental and avant-garde today.
Say what you will about how Tolstoy near-flawlessly depicts the feminine voice in Anna Karenina, I was more impressed with Molly's chapter in Ulysses. (Check out Kate Bush's musical version of those infamous 8 paragraphs.) Joyce then so neatly outdid himself in Chapter 8, the washerwomen's chapter, of Finnegans Wake. That prose just blew me away when I first read it - and then repeatedly as I re-read it - and it still makes my list of greatest things I've ever read.
