I very recently saw someone's list of the best 200 books that I needed to read. These were classics. I'm betting you could name some of them off the top of your head.
Maybe you've read them, too. If you have read all 200 of them, you might be one of the smartest people in the world. We're talking eight billion of them, so being in the top, say, thousand would be pretty neat.
I counted ten that I actually, even partially, read. And I don't consider myself unintelligent. I just read lots of other things.
During the pandemic, I probably did what you did to pass much of the time: Read books at a greater rate than ever. I used to have a collection of more than two thousand books, most of which I actually read at least partially. I assure you, I read none of the books listed in the top 200. Was that a waste of time?
Very few of the above list have been published in the last thirty years. What does that tell you?
It tells me that someone has decided that the latest knowledge is too much upon us, that time factors into wisdom. The Chinese know this. Their civilization has been around a heck of a lot longer than ours has. I'm not fond of their present authoritarianism, either, but you have to admit they have different perspective on things.
When Nixon visited China in 1972, Henry Kissinger accompanied him. Kissinger got into a conversation with Chou En-lai, who garnered the respect of all who met him, political positioning notwithstanding. Kissinger asked him the effects of the French Revolution, which of course began in 1789. Chou's response? Too soon to tell.
I mean, what do you do with that, argue? What do you do with a list of the top 200 books ever--argue?
Well, yes. There are just 200. Think of the number of books that have been written, ever. Why were they written? There have to be really good ones. How do the top 200 books make it into such a list?
I get a daily listing of books to be absorbed electronically, which I don't do (I believe books are meant to be held in one's hand and the pages sniffed) but it allows me to see other lists of what people think are good choices. Many are the subject of rave reviews. How come they aren't "classics?"
Besides, if "classics" are "classics," how did I miss them amongst the hundreds I have already read? And since I'm 69, how long would I have to live for me to read all of them now?
The list also misses some that I think might be included, just off the top of my head:
- Bartlett's Familiar Quotations
- How to Win Friends and Influence People, by Dale Carnegie
- The Autobiography of Malcolm X
- Public Opinion, by Walter Lippmann
- Political Man, by Seymour Martin Lipset
- The Boys of Summer, by Roger Kahn
- Silas Marner, by George Eliot
Now, you may think of me as either (a) horribly underinformed; (b) somewhere out in left field; or (c) really arrogant to suggest that these books are drop dead, gotta read stuff. And you might be right. But I'm not approaching my own annexation of such a list with that attitude.
Hey, I know there's a lot to learn in the world and I won't learn it all. All I'm saying, all I mean, is that I think people would learn as much from these as they would from reading Middlemarch or 1984. And that while someone's top 200 might make it universally, there's no way anyone could make a definitive list of the best literature created, ever. And if they could, it would take several lifetimes to read them if they were doing other valuable things like raising kids or making a living.
Besides that, there's not one in here that hasn't been written in either the U.S. or the United Kingdom. That leaves out the best of the rest of the world, which says that nobody has ever written anything superior anywhere else, which is absurd and incredibly narrow.
Someone is going to keep doing this, which is plenty of food for conversation. In colleges, they've already done it. My own college, Lawrence University, is one. They make freshmen read important works they've chosen, and they've been doing it for more than half a century (and probably got the idea from Columbia University, which made students do the same thing starting back in the 1930s). The Republic of Plato is one of them that hasn't budged from the list. Even someone like me, who's hard-wired for politics, found it tough to dive into. Truth be told, I never finished it.
Neither did I manage to acquire the Cliff's Notes for it, since I listened much too well to the professors who told us not to use it, that we'd rob ourselves of the true flavor of it if we fell back on its usage. Yeah, but it would have saved great time and sometimes, you need things like that to kickstart or continue interest if you get bogged down or lost. Like anything else, it depends on how you utilize it. I find nothing wrong with shortcuts, since the tests you usually take make you read the whole things anyhow. One way or another, you pay the price.
Now there is Wikipedia and Google to help you understand the main point of some books like that. Does that mean that kids are smarter than we were? With additional crutches like that, does that open doors that most of the rest of us kept closed because we got tired of the incessant challenges and fell back on Mad and Cracked magazines instead? The lawyers kept reading, I suppose; the rest of us found other things to do.
Maybe I should read it now. I might get a sore neck nodding my head, having learned many of its lessons in a practical, experiential sense: Not just sitting in an ivory tower college thinking great thoughts that, in the end, never work quite the way they're presented. There's a place for that, true, at the start of life. There's also a place where you can look back at the role of the "classics" and ask: Did things really turn out like that?
Be well. Be careful. With some luck, I'll see you down the road.
Mister Mark
No comments:
Post a Comment