Becoming "well read"
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pandalous.com
The core idea is really a by-product of the scientific age in which people came to believe that human knowledge can arrive at various forms of objective truth that are of lasting value and not merely of ephemeral appeal to a particular culture and for a particular time. It has come under severe assault in our post-modern era by those who claim that all such expressions of what is ultimately supposed to be true or good for everyone are in reality mere pretexts by which particular groups gain and keep power over others. In other words, a work of supposed lasting value is nothing more than something that is held out to be such by those who stand to gain from propagating the values it reflects.
This is far too jaded a view for my tastes and, unless we are to give up on the idea of human betterment by learning from the works of those who preceded us, the idea of a canon as a basis for self-improvement remains strong with me. By reading widely and variously across a spectrum of great minds, you will become much richer in knowledge and in your means of expression.
Harold Bloom is probably the best-known modern proponent of a Western canon and his list is large and varied, as chronicled here: http://www.interleaves.org/~rteeter/grtbloom.html.
A pretty good overview of "great books" lists (Western and Eastern) also appears here: http://www.interleaves.org/~rteeter/grtintro.html.
Anyway, as a consequence most people, with the exception of Harold Bloom and some other literary conservatives, don't know what should be in the canon, or would rather fight about what it means to have a canon than to read it. This is in part related to the larger question of how English and humanities types think; there's a decent book on that subject called How Professors Think, which deals with the legitimacy crisis in English.
That's from an academic angle. As for what I think, I'm not all that impressed by the idea of reading things merely because they have been read, and therefore going from Plato to Don Quixote to Austen to Dickens to James to Joyce to Roth; to my mind, being well-read means reading books that are interesting, unusual, show something new about the world, and so forth, whether they're canonical or not. To me, very little fiction is of real interest before 1900—yet a lot of it is part of the "canon," that I have to put scare quotes around. Do you want to read that, or excellent modern novels that have, in my view, improved on what has been, like Ian McEwan's Atonement, or most of Robertson Davies' work, or Ursula K. Le Guin's better novels (like Earthsea), or Carlos Ruiz Zafon's recent novels (which are very highly plotted and very fascinating), or Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose, or, or, or...
As you can tell from the way I've structured my response, I'd prefer the latter. To my mind, being well read means reading a lot and reading meaningfully—not reading a particular set of books.
I read the occasional fiction but because of my limited reading time and my reading speed not a lot, I can certainly appreciate well written text and love a good story but I find myself having zero interest in reading a lot of the classics of literature.
I tend to go in waves. Once upon a time, I was a Comparative Literature major, then a Classics graduate student. I read novels and scholarship about novels and then ancient philosophy and scholarship about ancient philosophy pretty much only. My days had only so many free hours. About five/six years ago, I became interested in programming, learned a first language, and now I devote most of my free reading time to programming books or books about programming. (With some breaks for this or that novel...)
The big constant for me is reading. In my experience, it's not so much a question of what you read but if you read. Readers read - a lot - even if their tastes vary over time. I remember literally running my middle school library out of books in five or six categories. The librarian would laugh and point me in a different direction when I finished a type of book. That part has never changed.
Concise summary: I used to think the same way but now I don't. Fiction allows you to experience situations that test your character by comparing your theoretical actions with that of the fictional characters. It's not only passive entertainment, but it's very active process of introspection.
I watch quiet a few TV shows, a well written TV production can give you a similar feeling to a well written novel without the time investment. Certainly not arguing that a TV show is a better form than a novel, just a good substitute in which a great story can unfold over time and only take up 45 minutes of your week.
When people ask me if I've read Robinson Crusoe or Wuthering Heights or Great Expectations, I can look them in the eye and say yes, but that's only because back in the '80s, someone took the trouble to publish them in comic book form :D
These days I read Pratchett.
For modern classics, you already have most of the context and history, so you don't have accessibility issues.
I'm not saying "Don't read the classics" I'm saying "Start reading modern fiction which is considered a classic, even genre classics". Once people catch the reading (fiction) bug, they eventually try a classic or two.
My favourites are Neal Stephenson and Iain Banks. I always feel like I gained far more from their books than I put into them. Everyone's different of course but they're two authors I can wholeheartedly recommend.
Homer: both the Iliad and Odyssey
Sophocles: Oedipus the King (read it - far better than you might think)
Plato: The Apology of Socrates
Sappho's fragmentary poems (the translation by Anne Carson titled If not, winter is especially good)
Dante: Inferno
Shakespeare: at least one tragedy, one history, one comedy and one of the final "problem plays"
John Donne: a bunch but if none else Elegy XIX To His Mistress Going to Bed
Philip Larkin: he didn't write much; read the complete poems (if nothing else, look at "Born yesterday")
T.S. Eliot: "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock", "Return of the Magi", "Hollow men"
Ernest Hemmingway: A Clean Well-Lighted Place
Herman Melville: Bartleby, the Scrivener
Joseph Conrad: Heart of Darkness and The Secret Agent
Gustave Flaubert: Madame Bovary
George Orwell: Any and all of the essays, but especially "Shooting an elephant" and "A hanging"
Stendahl: Red and Black
James Joyce: A Portrait of The Artist as a Young Man
Andre Dumas: The Three Musketeers
Samuel Beckett: Waiting for Godot
Tom Stoppard: Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead
I'll shut up, except to say that although I agree with some of the people on the thread that reading "great books" just because they're considered great is stupid, these books were all a joy. I remember them each pretty happily and return to a few of them now and again and just browse through for awhile. Some "great" books really are great, and if you're reading for yourself (not as a forced assignment), they're often well worth the effort (because, yes, none of them reads like a magazine article).
Also liked to know why people think whatever author or book should be read.
As for your counter-suggestions and additions, that's part of what makes this game interesting: we will all make different lists. (By the way, I love nearly all of Dumas.)
(More seriously, I'd put the Republic ahead of the Apology, and the Waste Land ahead of Prufrock, much though I like Prufrock. Also, for the benefit of anyone wanting to lookg things up: Hemingway; Stendhal; Alexandre Dumas. For the avoidance of doubt, I'm only bothering to quibble because I think your list is a good one.)
As for the Magi, I think I just had that title wrong. I am not enough of a Jedi fan for that to be it (unconsciously maybe...). As you can see from the spelling, I made the list too quickly and without checking things. But I think I've always had that title wrong. Here's my real guess: when I first studied that poem, our entire focus was on the finale (when the magi return home "no longer at ease."). So I guess that's what stuck in my head.
I picked the Apology over the Republic because I prefer Plato in his Socratic phase to him in his Platonic phase. Also, the Apology is about 20 odd pages, while the Republic is many hundred.
I think The Waste Land is completely overrated, but love Eliot's other poetry.
YES. Those are fairly short essays, and pretty entertaining; look on Google or something and I'm sure you'll find them. They're remarkable for showing you how government oppression feels to the oppressors.
I'm surprised that no one has yet mentioned any of Ayn Rand's works.
I highly recommend Atlas Shrugged, The Fountainhead, and her many nonfiction books. For an academic perspective on these ideas, I recommend two of Dr. Tara Smith's books (she's a professor of philosophy at UT-Austin) - "Viable Values: A Study of Life as the Root and Reward of Morality" and "Ayn Rand's Normative Ethics: The Virtuous Egoist."
EDIT: Why am I being modded down? I think these ideas are essential for any person to consider themselves "well-read". I am being voted down because a few people dislike (or misunderstand) the ideas that these books put forward.
Think about what these kinds of critics are saying, in essence: "If you read books containing these ideas, you will be reduced to some sort of miserable caricature."
To anyone that worries about this, I ask: do you think so little of yourself that you think that reading a few books is going to turn you into some kind of nutter? That your own reason and judgement is that powerless?
it is focused on personal attacks and smears
That said, the actual quality of writing in Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead is frankly god-awful. If you're making a canon full of books that exemplify the craft of written storytelling, Atlas Shrugged would be sitting somewhere behind the Twilight novels.
(I'm not trying to be sarcastic. If you're correct, you should be able to make your case with more specific examples.)
Besides that, generally purple prose, one-dimensional characterization, and way-too-exaggerated melodrama. I think I have a copy in the pile of books over there so I'll see if I can't find any passages that exemplify my complaints.
Anyway, I think there's a lot of people besides me who feel the same way, so if you search around online you should be able to find plenty of folks bitching and moaning about Ayn Rand's fiction.
EDIT: Atlas Shrugged, page 316 in my edition (I opened it randomly.) Dagny Taggart met Hugh Akston in the diner and is riding somewhere on a train. I did not italicize the following or quote it because it's quite ugly on HN, but it's verbatim.
It was the chance conversation of two men somewhere behind her that came beating suddenly against her closed attention.
"But laws shouldn't be passed that way, so quickly."
"They're not laws, they're directives."
"Then it's illegal."
"It's not illegal, because the Legislature passed a law last month giving him the power to issue directives."
"I don't think directives should be sprung on people that way, out of the blue, like a punch in the nose."
"Well, there's no time to palaver when it's a national emergency."
This impels Dagny to go grab a newspaper and read about the awful directives, and so on.
How inartful. Good fiction does not spoonfeed arguments like this to the reader; it leaves the reader to argue it out himself, in his own head. It presents him with a story, not a conversation. And it doesn't present half of the story as an endless series of straw men waiting to be knocked down, as Rand treats all her "evil" characters.
EDIT: Atlas Shrugged, page 567 in my edition. This is what Ayn Rand wrote about Counterfactual Rand's famous theatre production, Progressive Atlas Just Held It:
The man in Roomette 3, Car No. 11, was a sniveling little neurotic who wrote cheap little plays into which, as a social message, he inserted cowardly little obscenities to the effect that all businessmen were scoundrels.
Oh dear!
http://www.exploreaynrand.com/1957/
Have you seen Diana Hsieh's page and podcasts on this? If you don't have the time or interest in the podcasts themselves (I highly recommend them, however), the questions alone reveal depth that almost no one gets when they read her book the first time (this was certainly true for me!)
If you want to read and have both time and access to a library, becoming "well read" in some subject area is a given; just read. If you want to become well read in a subject area that does not interest you, think twice. So, what are your interests?