Literary Pursuits

Over the last couple of weeks I've found literature came up in my conversations more often than normal. For some reason or another a coworker and I started into an in-depth conversation about Dickens last week while waiting for an inspirational speaker at our campus wide employee training. I enjoyed talking with her and was a bit relieved too, because I was beginning to suspect that the office's foray into literature began and ended with Harry Potter.

Thanks to a family birthday and funeral, I had the chance to talk extensively with my cousin David, who doubled majored in English and German and now is a PhD student in German and working for a local teen magazine. Admittedly he is more conservative than I am when approaching the question of "what is Literature" and how to analyze that literature, but we still enjoy our conversations. One of the points he brought up, which I agree with, is that students become English major because they enjoy reading books, but leave with their degree enjoying to read books about books. It reminded me of an essay I read by an English professor, who talked precisely about that problem. When she was an English major, it was more important to know literary criticism than literature, and in fact she had to cultivate an air disdain for those who enjoy reading. So she had to hide from her colleagues in graduate school and later as a professor that she was a member of the book of the month club.

This reminded me of a conversation Matt and I had once, wondering why when a book becomes popular it is immediately disdained by the intelligentsia? The recent example is "The Da Vinci Code," but this includes older authors, like John Steinbeck. He shocked many academics when he received the Nobel Prize because he followed traditional narrative patterns, instead of the more inventive and celebrated (and lets face it, less popular) Faulkner and Hemingway. The day after Steinbeck's death the New York Times published a scathing review by of his life and works Charles Poore, who rejected him for his preachiness and claimed he didn't deserve a Nobel Prize but grudgingly admitted he had secured a place in American literature. Well, that place, like other American narrative writers (Mark Twain and Jack London come to mind), has been securely relegated to the high school and makes only rare appearances at the university.

Matt and I had other conversations about literature this week, about Shakespeare and whether the author is dead, for example, and it got me thinking about my summer reading list. My public library when I was little had summer reading contests for children. So I decided to create one for myself. I haven't decided the prize is, but the rules are as follows: for every English novel I read, I have to read one piece of German fiction and one piece of non-fiction. And since our motivational speaker said we should write things, down here's my list of books from "Literature" and "literature" which I want to read:


English

Slaughterhouse-Five Kurt Vonnegut
Evelyn Waugh
Douglas Adams
Terry Pratchett
Agatha Christie
"The Alexandra Quartet" by Lawrence Durrell
Eclipse by Stephenie Meyer
John Steinbeck
I Claudius by Robert Graves
Charles Dickens
Thomas Hardy
Tony Hillerman
Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame
The Aubrey-Maturin series by Patrick O'Brian
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows by J.K. Rowling
Jonathan Strange & MR Norrell by Susanna Clarke
Neal Stephenson

German

Hugo von Hofmannsthal (to show solidarity with Carolyn)
Arthur Schnitzler
Other Fin de Siecle Vienna writers
The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann
The Tin Drum by Guenter Grass
Faust part two by Goethe
E.T.A Hoffman
Heinrich Boell
Ernst Juenger
Some abortion novels I didn't finish
Parzival by Wolfram von Eschenbach

Foreign Literatures

The Odyssey by Homer
Myths by the Greeks
The Count of Monte Cristo by Dumas
Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky
The World is Not Enough by Zoe Oldenbourg
Poetry by the Persians

Non-Fiction

A World Lit Only by Fire by William Manchester
A History of the English-Speaking Peoples by Churchill
The Guns of August by Babara Tuchman
The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich by William Shirer
A Mighty Fortress: A New History of the German People by Steven Ozment
The Bürgermeister's Daughter by Steven Ozment
Reading Lolita in Tehran by Azar Nafisi
Eleanor of Aquitaine and the Four Kings by Amy Ruth Kelly
1215: The Year of Magna Carta by Danny Danziger and John Gillingham
The Ghosts of Berlin: Confronting German History in the Urban Landscape by Brian Ladd
Hugh Nibley


I don't know how much of this list I'll get through, but I'm open to suggestion. What do you think I should read?