Reading Is About Much More Than the Classics

I'm feeling sick today, which (in my case) always seems to carry a cloud of depression with it. Any quick prayers appreciated.

I've just been reading a book which I won't identify, given that the author might not be terribly complimented that it prompted these thoughts. A very meat-and-potatoes book, a biography of an outstanding (albeit rather obscure) Irish priest of the nineteenth century. There's nothing wrong with it at all, but I'm guessing it's not a book that anyone will consider a classic.

It occurred to me, reading it, that I've probably taken far more pleasure, by orders of magnitude, from ordinary books than from classics of any kind.

The pleasure of reading, to me, has a lot to do with the activity itself. It's as likely to be stirred by a local history book or a magazine article as it is by 1984 or Lord of the Rings or Mere Christianity or any of the books that get called "classics".

It's often occurred to me that a diet of classics would be almost unbearable. I think it was the historian Paul Johnson who said that a taste for the second-rate and the third-rate was an infallible sign of a genuine appreciation of any given subject.

Occasionally you hear people praise a reading regime of "good books, but few". For instance, read Plato's Republic, but none of the commentaries on it. Then presumably read the Prelude by Wordsworth, and then doubtless The Faerie Queene.

One problem with this approach that's always occurred to me is this: how is any book to become a classic, unless people read it before it's a classic? (The same thing occurs to me about poetry. These days people only read "classic" poetry, like Yeats or Paradise Lost or The Divine Comedy. We don't have much poetry in our lives, so it might as well be the classic poetry-- I think that's the theory. But those poems only became classics because generations of ordinary people read non-classic poetry.)

Another problem, though, is that we can't live on the mountain peaks all the time. Who would want to? I wouldn't.

(I've just googled "read only good books", and I've discovered that it's nearly always used by people arguing against this philosophy. So that's good, I guess, even if it makes my blog post a bit pointless.)