So, apparently when I said I had had enough of Don Quixote that bit of personal mutiny extended to the entire Great Book Adventure. It’s been nigh on a month since I’ve picked up a classic book and I don’t have a bit of regret about blowing my plan right out of the water. I haven’t been especially busy or distracted, just disinterested. Frankly, I think the break’s been good for me and, hopefully, will be good for the rest of the series.
When I started this experiment, it struck me that I was entering a sort of self-imposed graduate class. I would spend a year reading through the classics, in search of meaning and relevance, and and then write about my findings. I think it seemed like such a great idea, such a nice challenge, mainly because I am not actually in graduate school. So it was that I was flipping along pleasantly until the summer hit and I started feeling the need for a holiday. Long about the start of The Three Musketeers, I found myself resenting the time I spent reading the great books. Nothing good could come of that I realized and, since I am both student and teacher here, I canceled class indefinitely.
With my extra hours, I dove into the books I had been setting aside for months. I read a history of the pirate captain Henry Morgan, called Empire of Blue Water. A relatively recent development in my reading life, I more and more pick up non-fiction books for entertainment. That truth can be stranger than fiction, I am firmly convinced. It may be a cliché to say that, but that’s only because it’s true. I also raced through three novels, The Traveler by John Twelve Hawks, Wraith Squadron by Aaron Allston, and Stephenie Myers’ brilliant Twilight. It was in the course of reading these books, especially the last, that I had a bit of an epiphany.
The books I love the most, regardless of genre or age, are great stories. They are stories told with beautiful and concise language. You know, Stephen King once said any word you get out of a thesaurus is the wrong word. In a lot of cases, I think he’s right. Good stories are also complete. There aren’t any characters left unaccounted for, threads of plot left drifting at the end. The world created in the book should exist in enough detail to make it convincing and worth caring about, but not so much that Yellow Pages gets a writing credit. These are things I have always known about my own expectations and tastes when it comes to reading, but I never applied the same standards to the great books.
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