On the June 15 Read pages, William Grimes reviews "1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die" by Peter Boxall. In an excerpt trimmed for print space, Grimes tests the premise of the book:
"As an experiment, I picked three novels, more or less at random, to see how they might change my quality of life: “Castle Rackrent” by Maria Edgeworth; “Tarka the Otter” by Henry Williamson; and “The Invention of Curried Sausage” by Uwe Timm.
Two of the three definitely provided a lift. “Castle Rackrent” (1800), a rollicking satire about trashy English aristocrats who bring ruin to an Irish estate, is worth reading just for the name Carrick O’Fungus, although literary historians prize it for being the first regional novel. That’s fine. Bonus points for getting there first, but the real reason to pick it up is Edgeworth’s slyly vicious picture of slovenly aristos on the loose.
Uwe Timm, a contemporary German writer unknown to me, now flies very high on my mental Amazon rankings. “The Invention of Curried Sausage” (1993) is an offbeat quest novel. The narrator, seeking the origins of currywurst, a German fast-food specialty, quizzes an elderly vendor and winds up with a big, fat history lesson. The issues are big, the prose brilliant, the execution deft. Eternal gratitude to Andrew Blades, theater reviewer for Stage magazine, who convinced Boxall that this novel belonged on the list.
Tarka turned out to be too much otter for me, even though the back story is compelling. Williamson, returning from the trenches after World War I, took up a hermit’s life in north Devon, where he lived among the plants and the animals, observing closely and shunning humankind. “Tarka,” published in 1927, tells the story of a young male otter and its day-to-day struggles for food, a mate and security in a world populated by baying dogs and evil men. T.E. Lawrence loved it. I didn’t.
Since Boxall is keen to start an argument, let me oblige. Drop the bloated, self-indulgent “Ada” from an otherwise correct Nabokov list (“Lolita,” “Pale Fire,” “Pnin”) and insert “Laughter in the Dark” or “The Gift.” J.M. Coetzee, with 10 novels, can afford to lose 1 or 2. That would open up space for “The Cossacks” by Tolstoy and “A Hero of Our Time” by Mikhail Lermontov. There should be another five Balzacs. I could go on and on.
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Have you experimented with books that are "good" for you? Do share.
Books that are good for you...
Oh wow, I hadn't heard of this book, I'm definitely going to have to check it out. Thanks!
I'm always trying to read books that are "good" for me, the ones that were assigned to us in high school, the ones we all groaned at. I resolved to start reading those kinds of books a few years back, but wondered how on earth I could get through long winding paragraphs in fancy language when I had an infant son babbling at me. And then I realized the solution.
I read out loud to him. :) The infant is now about to turn six, and he's played while listening to Mom read Dickens, Hemingway, H.G. Wells, Steinbeck, Lewis Carroll, RL Stevenson, Stephen Crane, and many others. Don't worry, he still gets plenty of Silverstein and Seuss, too. ;) But at almost 6, he's got an impressive vocabulary, a fabulous grasp of grammar, and he's able to read chapter books on his own. I hope that some of my reading aloud has helped him to learn to enjoy all kinds of books.
What's next on our list? I'm not sure...He expressed interest in Frankenstein the other day, so maybe that will be it!