Ars longa, vita brevis, said Hippocrates—more or less: time’s a-wastin’. The worst corollary of this aphorism, to my mind, is that we are not going to have time to read everything. In fact, we’re going to be able to read only the tiniest little bit. Some thousands of books—that is it.
A difficult novel, let’s say, “The Brothers Karamazov,” will take most readers a matter of weeks to “read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest” (as “The Book of Common Prayer” has it). You can go faster if you just want to be told a story. You can also go faster if you already know a lot about nineteenth-century Russia. But curiosity might easily lead the ordinary reader to look into all kinds of subjects related to the novel—to search out a photograph or a painting of a Russian Orthodox monastery—or to learn something more about the aspects of Christianity (redemption, sin, expiation) that are addressed in the book. These things take time.
How many serious books can even a dedicated reader conquer in a year? No more than forty, I should think. Twice that, maybe, for a professional critic, academic, or journalist who is going at it hammer and tongs.
But the late Susan Sontag claimed at the age of fifty-nine that she’d mowed through the whole of her own fifteen-thousand-volume library “over and over.”
That would mean, had Sontag learned to read at the age of three, two hundred and sixty-eight books per year (counting each one only once, not “over and over”). Give or take. She has to have started off more slowly during her toddler years and gradually stepped up the pace. That’s two days, tops, for each Elias Canetti! And she wasn’t even counting library books, textbooks, or books borrowed from friends.
Here is a sad reflection for the ordinary reader, faced as he is with lifetimes upon lifetimes worth of books on entering even a small public library or a reasonably well-stocked bookshop. Since we can’t have very many, we must husband our time and attention carefully. But how to choose? The melancholy may lift a little when we realize that so many wise souls who have come before have been willing to serve as guides. And by guides, let’s be clear that I mean fellow-enthusiasts, not poseurs.
The fire of personal enthusiasm is what really makes for the best advice on what to read next, a quality rarely found in an ordinary book review. That burst of incandescent awareness and pleasure that only a good book can give us often becomes an uncontrollable desire to grab complete strangers by the lapels and demand that they, too, read this book, right now, on the double. Drop everything. Do it.
The best guides, then, aside from one’s intimates, whose tastes and habits are known and loved, are the authors whom one admires. So I am especially grateful to George Orwell, George Bernard Shaw, and Henry Fielding, all favorites of mine whose recommendations in essays and criticism and occasional lists saved a lot of room on my dance card. Library card, whatever.
The phrase “good bad books,” Orwell says in his essay of the same name, was coined by G. K. Chesterton, though Orwell’s view of the best “low” literature is decidedly less condescending than Chesterton’s “Defence of Penny Dreadfuls.” (“The poor—the slaves who really stoop under the burden of life—have often been mad, scatter-brained and cruel, but never hopeless. That is a class privilege, like cigars. Their drivelling literature will always be a ‘blood and thunder’ literature, as simple as the thunder of heaven and the blood of men.”) By contrast, Orwell: “The existence of good bad literature—the fact that one can be amused or excited or even moved by a book that one’s intellect simply refuses to take seriously—is a reminder that art is not the same thing as cerebration.” He goes on to describe that quality of literary art, the thing that makes you want to read on, as “some indefinable quality, a sort of literary vitamin.” Let’s just go ahead and call it Vitamin L.
One doesn’t often encounter Orwell’s playfulness or sense of fun, and it is a delight to find that his humor came in shades other than black.
Through Orwell I met with two lifelong favorites, Ernest Bramah and Father Huc. Orwell recommends Bramah’s Max Carrados stories, which are not his finest work, yet still engaging. (Carrados, a blind detective, is portrayed in a manner that is too fanciful for me. For example, he can read the newspaper with his fingertips, as if it were braille. My carefully suspended disbelief collapsed like a dying soufflé.) But then I came to find that Bramah also wrote the Kai Lung series of chinoiserie novels that I do read over and over and always will, the way I do Wodehouse. They are magical and hilarious, guaranteed to dispel even the most stubborn case of the blues.
Father Évariste Régis Huc is the author of “Travels in Tartary.” At least, that is the title of the popular Hazlitt translation mentioned by Orwell (not the nutty essayist Hazlitt, a different one). Father Huc is a great philosopher and raconteur, and this is a rip-roaring book, either in French or in the far, far better English translation by Mrs. Percy Sinnett, published under the title “Recollections of a Journey through Tartary, Thibet and China during the Years 1844, 1845 and 1846.” Not easy to find (though there’s a condensed version at archive.org), but man, it is the greatest.> Samdadchiemba cut off some slices of the venison, and began to fry them in stale mutton fat. This manner of preparing kid was not perhaps very conformable to the rules of culinary art, but it was the best of which circumstances permitted. Our regale was soon ready: we were seated in a triangle on the turf, having between us the cover of the saucepan, which served us for a dish, when on a sudden we heard a loud rushing in the air over our heads: and in a moment a large eagle made a rapid descent upon our supper, and carried off some slices in his talons. When we had recovered from our fright, we could not help laughing at the adventure,—that is to say, M. Gabet and myself; but Samdadchiemba was in a fury, not on account of the purloined kid, but because the eagle, as he rose, had given him a box on the ear with the end of his wing.
By daring to compare the practices of the Bouddhiste Lamas of Tibet with those of the Catholic priesthood, Father Huc incurred the wrath of the honchos at the Vatican, who put this wonderful memoir on their tiresome list of banned books, the Index Librorum Prohibitorum.
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Though my tastes have wandered away from his own books, I am forever indebted to Henry Miller, whose “The Books in My Life” led me to fantastic discoveries as a teen-ager, books I might otherwise have never found. I used to carry his list “The Hundred Books Which Influenced Me Most” around in my wallet (carefully reduced on the Xerox machine) in case I found myself in a library or bookshop.
The literary wild man Miller was sort of a cross between George Carlin and Marcel Proust, with a large dash of Hemingway, as is clearly demonstrated by this list, which features boys’ adventures, such as the works of G. A. Henty, “Robinson Crusoe,” and “The Three Musketeers,” together with Dostoevsky, Strindberg, Emerson, and Rimbaud. I believed Miller to be the real McCoy as far as intellectuals went, and here he was, saying that he loved “Huckleberry Finn” and “Alice in Wonderland”—just as I did, though he had read such a lot! And Miller was willing, too, to admit that he hadn’t yet read “Tom Jones,” though he still meant to. What a revelation. So here are my favorite books that Henry Miller introduced me to, all of which I can recommend most heartily:
“The Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini” (a terrific liar, the very portrait of entertaining braggadocio). “Looking Backward,” by Edward Bellamy (at which point I started caring about politics). “Crime and Punishment,” by Fyodor Dostoevsky (the first novel to make me barf). “The Decameron,” by Giovanni Boccaccio. “Journey to the End of the Night,” by Louis-Ferdinand Celine (depressing! riveting). “She,” by Rider Haggard (oh, man, “who must be obeyed”). “The Magic Mountain,” by Thomas Mann (couldn’t make heads or tails of it yet, but there were certain stirrings). “The Satyricon,” by Petronius. “Gargantua and Pantagruel,” by Rabelais (so freaking weird). “Letters to Theo,” by Vincent van Gogh. “Star of the Unborn,” by Franz Werfel.
Miller went in for the wonderfully bizarre and outré. For instance, “Star of the Unborn” is a long novel of speculative fiction by Franz Werfel, the author of “Song of Bernadette.” Published in 1946, it’s set a hundred thousand years in the future and opens with the raising of the narrator, known as F.W., from the dead. It uncannily anticipates thorny questions about mankind’s troubled relationship with technology, and has thrilling episodes of astral travel, philosophical riddles, and fantastical political allegories something like those later to be found in “Battlestar Galactica.”
Through Miller I also had my first crack at Joyce, and Gide, and Balzac. But not all of his recommendations fared as well with me. I would forever detest Mencken, that bloviating old windbag, as well as “Peck’s Bad Boy,” and James Fenimore Cooper. It was with a terrific thrill of vindication that I came across Mark Twain’s famous takedown of Cooper. Thus I discovered that even a writer whom I greatly admired, as I did Miller, might sometimes have really terrible lapses of taste. This, too, is a comfort.
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There’s been a lot of handwringing lately about “curation” (the original meaning of the word has morphed into something else entirely; maybe we still lack a needed word). It has come to signify sifting through the ever-increasing avalanche of “content” in order to identify the things that are worthiest of our attention, and bringing those things to an interested audience. In fact, there should be no question about this at all; with our time and attention being limited as they are, it’s crucial that we have skilled cultural guides.
Books come to us by many twisty channels: reviewers, editors, bloggers, anthologists. Who is to be trusted with the question of that precious spot, among only a few thousand, to which one will dedicate the next book? When you feel hammered down by the incessant blaring about the new new new new thing, it is salutary to return to authors long dead. But then, there are lively list-makers in our midst nowadays.
The movie director John Waters appeared a couple of years ago on the radio program “Bookworm,” with Michael Silverblatt. Surprisingly, Waters turned out to be exactly the kind of literary guide I’ve been describing: blazing with passion, a born lapel-grabber. He, too, had totted up how many books he had: eight thousand and eighty-nine. I think it is amazing that he could know this (credible) number exactly.
Waters had just published “Role Models,” and he was doing a publicity tour. He bragged about going to Gstaad and hanging around with this and that fabuloso, but then he said, “But what I like best is staying home and reading. Being rich is not about how many homes you own. It’s the freedom to pick up any book you want without looking at the price and wondering whether you can afford it.” He went on to recommend Christina Stead, Jane Bowles, and Ivy Compton-Burnett (whom I also love). He talked effervescently, a pleasingly fizzy counterpoint against the amiable and earnest honking of Silverblatt.
Shortly after revisiting Waters’s “Bookworm” broadcast, I had occasion to visit the library, and there I hunted down Denton Welch’s “Youth is Pleasure,” on his recommendation. (“So precious, so beyond gay, so deliciously subversive.”) It looks really, really good.
Photograph of George Orwell: Popperfoto/Getty Images.
