It started with two things as I headed into the middle of my mid-30s: reading John O'Hara, and the announcement of Penguin's publication of Malcolm and Ursula Lyons' fantastic translation of the Arabian Nights.
John O'Hara is one of those authors who, while both bestselling and critically acclaimed in the past, has become mostly forgotten apart from a handful of works (Appointment in Samarra, Butterfield 8). He was, not that I knew this yet, absolutely the master of the novella. When I first read him, various aspects of his work reminded me of Fitzgerald -- which is misleading and has more to do with my frame of reference at the time -- but it made me reflect on the pattern that my reading tended to take, which was to read everything about or by XYZ, but little or nothing about or by the thing right next to it. I had read everything by Fitzgerald (except The Beautiful and Damned, for no real reason), and I mean everything - his novels, his short stories, the first draft of Gatsby called Trimalchio, his letters to Zelda and to Maxwell Perkins, all of Zelda's works, several biographies.
But the REST of the Lost Generation?
Well, I'd read a little Hemingway, a little Sherwood Anderson, a little Faulkner. I'd obsessed over T.S. Eliot's poetry in high school before I even discovered Fitzgerald, though I had no historical context for it. But I hadn't read John Dos Passos, and of Steinbeck I'd only read Of Mice and Men and The Red Pony, both as a kid.
Thinking of Steinbeck reminded me of Salinger, the other large-looming JS, and the fact that I hadn't read Catcher in the Rye until I was in my twenties and felt too old for it to hit me the way it would have if I'd been younger -- I felt like I'd already read everything derivative of it, and that for that matter I'd read Franny and Zooey first, which might've been a mistake. But what I hadn't done was read the rest of Salinger.
So anyway, that line of thinking went on for a bit. And I thought, well Bill, there are a lot of things you know you've been MEANING to read -- a "decent translation of the Arabian Nights" being one of them, and here what do you know, Penguin goes and announces an enormous one, one Robert Irwin seems excited about -- and on top of the things you've been meaning to read, there are a lot of things you probably ought to mean to read. Like, conceptual gaps in your reading.
So I came up with my first five-year curriculum. A conceptual reading list -- not a list of specific titles, or rather not JUST specific titles, though it did include some, but rather, just like a college curriculum is category-based but various specificities can satisfy those categories, so too with my curriculum. The main focus was on fiction -- the things I'd been meaning to read and the things I should have been meaning to read, which together constituted an unconscious kind of canon -- plus shoring up my reading on social and physical sciences and my field(s). Originally the nonfiction reading broke down more specifically than that -- but the books on that side of the curriculum are both more expensive and often longer, and over time that had an accretive effect on how things went. It's easy to get through five novels in a light week, for instance. The same is not true of mathematics books, even at my best or most flush.
Anyway, obviously given the amount of time I originally chose for the reading list here, the subtext was "this is the shit I want to have read before I'm forty," though like I said, I tacked that extra year on because I just wasn't done. So, with things winding down -- I am finishing up the last stack -- some notes on what I've read:
Some of those authors I'd read only a token amount of were absolutely worth revisiting -- Steinbeck's East of Eden is one of my favorite books, as it turns out, as are ... well, all of Salinger's books, but particularly Nine Stories. Similarly, I had only read Walker Percy's The Moviegoer before, but the rest of his books are just as fantastic. And although I had read some of Wallace Stegner's nonfiction, I'd never read Angle of Repose, which turns out to be one of the best novels I've ever read. Again: I'd always meant to get around to them. I finally made time to do so.
There was some genre stuff included here, because this wasn't a generic "things people should read" curriculum, this was "things I should read," and I'm a genre writer. I either hadn't read A Wrinkle in Time before or couldn't remember if I'd read it (I'd seen an adaptation of some kind - a play? a movie on PBS? I had a vague sense of the story, but only vague), so I read it, and it's fantastic. I read Ursula K Leguin's amazing Earthsea books, Thomas Tryon's The Other, Jim Thompson's The Killer Inside Me (and quickly discovered that as much as I like it, I shouldn't read too much other Thompson, because his misogyny and unpleasantness works best when the viewpoint character is MEANT to be a sociopath), T.H. White's Once and Future King, Octavia Butler's Kindred, David Gerrold's insane The Man Who Folded Himself.
I discovered some new favorite authors, chief among them Marilynne Robinson, whose Lila and Home are among my favorite books of all time; P.G. Wodehouse, who I am now obsessed with; and Graham Greene. I finally read Carson McCullers, and both The Heart is a Lonely Hunter and The Ballad of the Sad Cafe are just fucking brilliant books. Helen DeWitt's Last Samurai is one of those amazing books that I should recommend to more people. But hopefully everyone knows about it anyway.
Some books were just straight up fucking fun, like John Barth's Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor.
Having been familiar with Cheever mainly as a short story writer, I read his novels, and loved Falconer while the Wapshot books were all right but somewhat less compelling.
And finally having gotten to Dos Passos, the USA trilogy is ingenious, and it would have blown me away as a twentysomething.
There were disappointments, of course, too. Agatha Christie just isn't for me. I've never been that big a mystery fan, really, and certain styles of mysteries are even more inclined to leave me cold -- I suppose hers is that style. Nathanael West, so highly recommended by so many people, was a chore. I could not stand The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. The two novellas I read by Jim Harrison left me uncertain whether to read more -- one was brilliant, the other absolutely tiresome.
So the question is obviously what's next, and the answer to me is just as obvious -- though I'm not drawing specific attention to it here because it wasn't much of a highlight, this reading plan involved reading a lot of those Old White Guys, the Updikes and Mailers and Yateses and so on (this is why I had so little patience for the second Jim Harrison novella), and I need an antidote. I didn't explicitly set out to read a bunch of old white guys, or a bunch of guys or a bunch of whites, but it worked out that way because when you're a well-read thirtysomething white guy and the reading list you cobble together is "stuff I've been meaning to read forever," it stands to reason that the list will reflect an American literary culture that's been dominated by and that has primarily canonized white men and the concerns of white men. At the time I had no aims beyond "getting around to reading the things I'd been meaning to read," and wasn't thinking of what "the list" represented in any sense beyond that -- nor do I regret reading anything on it.
But reading so much of that, even punctuated by the occasional Leguin or Robinson, is a bit much. I didn't even read nearly as much Updike or Mailer as I intended -- and I like Updike! -- because this turned out to be a poor context in which to appreciate either. (In the end I'm not sure I would be a Mailer fan anyway.)
So the fiction component of my next five year curriculum is to read primarily works by authors who are either not white or not men, or works in translation. A curriculum to balance out the last six years. Who knows, this one may take me seven.
For the record, my favorite books coming out of these six years:
Marilynne Robinson, Home, Lila, and Gilead - It's hard to pick one from this "trilogy" (it's not important what order you read them in). Lila is probably my favorite and the most ambitious, though perhaps not in the way that people always mean when they use that word for books.
John Steinbeck, East of Eden - The fucking epic.
J.D. Salinger, Nine Stories - I'm kind of glad I didn't read this as a kid so that I'm not sick of it.
Ray Bradbury, Dandelion Wine - a reread, but rereading it made me realize I might love this book even more, reading it as an adult, than Something Wicked This Way Comes
P.G. Wodehouse, Leave it to Psmith - Wodehouse's best, though not necessarily his most representative. Wodehouse writes farce of a very specific tone; what makes this stand out is that it's also legit romantic comedy. However, one of the things that makes it better than his other books is the way that it plays with his usual structures, and that comes across better if you're familiar with those structures, especially with the other Blandings books.
Wallace Stegner, Angle of Repose - A novel about a middle-aged history professor reconstructing/narrating the life of his grandmother in frontier-era mining communities. AREN'T YOU EXCITED? But it is awesome.
Ursula K Leguin, the Earthsea books - I don't know how to pick one, and while they don't have to be read as a series in the same way that modern fantasy series like A Song of Ice and Fire do, they still work best informing one another.
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