Classics for Pleasure

People dig this dude. Ellie and NE are both high on him, so that's pretty good recs.

I was expecting this to be a 10; it barely scraped in at a 7. I could not wait for it to be published; I stopped by the bookstore three times, hoping to find a copy before the official publication date. And then when I actually got the copy and started to read it? You must be kidding me. Who would read these books? The summaries did not even intrigue me. I, who have been known to write down titles recommended by first graders, wrote down a single recommendation from the scores Dirda mentions. Big disappointment. ( )

(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted here illegally.)

For those who don't know, Michael Dirda is a Pulitzer-winning literary critic, author of several of those "guides to challenging books for those who don't usually like challenging books;" and now we have his latest, 2007's Classics for Pleasure, essentially more of the same, this time picking even more obscure works precisely because they haven't been featured yet in any of his previous books. And as far as that's concerned, I suppose it's fine for what it is, although I always seem to have the same problem with guides like these: they tend to be more valuable to me as simple laundry lists of books I should check out, instead of for the essays explaining why I should be checking them out in the first place. And so as a result, I found only some of the short (three- to five-page) write-ups here interesting, mostly when he looks at titles from antiquity and is merely explaining what exactly is going on in them to begin with; but I found other large sections of the book dull and pretentious to the point of being unreadable, especially when he's trying to convince us to care about this or that highly obscure Victorian poet or modern academic novelist. Also, despite his many exhortations to the contrary, be warned this is a book primarily designed for academes who already have a broad knowledge of literature going into it; Dirda in fact has a bad habit of referencing hundreds upon hundreds of other writers in these essays without giving us even a clue about who they are or how the comparison is apt to begin with, for example like in this throwaway line from his write-up about French author Marie-Madeleine de la Fayette -- "This short book is, in some ways, the novelistic equivalent of a tragedy by Racine, and the agonies felt by the princess are no less acute than those of Titus" (a great observation if you happen to already know who Racine and Titus are, utterly f-cking pointless if you don't). It's one of those books that will immensely appeal to some, and you know already if you're one of those people; if you're not, it can be very easily skipped.

Out of 10: 7.2 ( )

Well worth reading and following up. Sometimes an introduction to authors not yet known to the reader.

You won’t find a lot of the usual suspects written up in this collection of essays on classic literature. People already know about Dickens, Hemingway, Austen, and the Brontes. They don’t need Dirda to point the way. Dirda believes that it’s “more useful—and fun—to point readers to new authors and less obvious classics.”

One of the best things about this book is Dirda’s broad approach. He doesn’t confine himself to one era, genre, or style. He also doesn’t expect every book to be profound and meaningful. His interest is in the pleasure we can get from reading, and sometimes we just want to be thrilled or amused, not “educated.” Many of the books he profiles have the potential to both entertain and illuminate (think Frankenstein and The Time Machine), but they don’t have to. Dirda covers Lucian and Lovecraft, Spinoza and Stoker. There are poets and playwright, essayists and novelists from a variety of nations and eras.

See my complete review at my blog. ( )