While She Knits - Lists!
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queensthiefHeading to the beach tomorrow (woohoo) so this is a day early.
From Zero to Well Read in 100 Books - The folks at Book Riot dare to define the term "well-read" with a list of books created with these criteria: "a familiarity with the monuments of Western literature, an at least passing interest in the high-points of world literature, a willingness to experience a breadth of genres, a special interest in the work of one’s immediate culture, a desire to share in the same reading experiences of many other readers, and an emphasis on the writing of the current day."
Which titles do you agree with? Disagree? How many have you actually read?
And this next one is really interesting. NPR's 100 Best-Ever Teen Novels, which were voted on by over 75,000 people. So...part good literature, part popularity contest? You tell me.
What's cool about this site is that you can click on the titles to tally how many you have read.
Discuss!
From Zero to Well Read in 100 Books - The folks at Book Riot dare to define the term "well-read" with a list of books created with these criteria: "a familiarity with the monuments of Western literature, an at least passing interest in the high-points of world literature, a willingness to experience a breadth of genres, a special interest in the work of one’s immediate culture, a desire to share in the same reading experiences of many other readers, and an emphasis on the writing of the current day."
Which titles do you agree with? Disagree? How many have you actually read?
And this next one is really interesting. NPR's 100 Best-Ever Teen Novels, which were voted on by over 75,000 people. So...part good literature, part popularity contest? You tell me.
What's cool about this site is that you can click on the titles to tally how many you have read.
Discuss!
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Date: 7/25/13 02:58 pm (UTC)The second list, I've read 53. I thought it would be higher as I was clicking through them. Huh.
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Date: 7/25/13 04:10 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 7/25/13 05:00 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 7/25/13 05:17 pm (UTC)Both of them have weird elements. Why does the Book Riot list have The Hobbit but not The Lord of the Rings? Whether their criterion was 'which is a more accomplished piece of literature', or 'which had a greater influence on later writing', or 'which draws most significantly upon cultural history', or 'which had the greatest impact on the zeitgeist', The Lord of the Rings wins every time. Also I don't think cheap erotica makes you well-read, even if it is popular.
The second list - the definition of 'young adult' that the voters seem to have been using is 'books I enjoyed when I was a teenager', because there are many books on that list that, while accessible to and often read by teens, are by no means young adult books. Also heavily swayed by what's currently popular: so, so much John Green.
Not to sound really negative. These sorts of lists are always engaging exercises.
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Date: 7/25/13 05:58 pm (UTC)I've read 60 of the books on that list, started but not finished 3 (I don't know why, but I just could not get into Catch 22 -- and I blame the translation and my age for Don Quixote, but I haven't gone back to it -- and I just did not like Nabokov's style), and read other books but not that particular book for 8 authors. A few of those books have been on my "to read" list for a while, but life's too short to read more than two pages of Dan Brown or E.L. James, and having read 50 Shades of Grey would not make me any more well read.
I've read 33 on the Teen Novels list, and it's making me feel old.
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Date: 7/25/13 06:27 pm (UTC)And my scores were 38 and 59.
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Date: 7/26/13 01:18 am (UTC)The inclusion of books written for adult audiences on young adult lists is really common. I'm frustrated by how often LOTR shows up on young adult lists, or even children's lists - it makes absolutely no sense. At my old library, LOTR was shelved in the children's section, in young adult, and in fantasy. While I'm pleased with the wide exposure, it's a completely misguided association. LOTR is the one book where I will shift from 'well, that's not really accurate' (my reaction with, say, The Princess Bride) to concern that it will cause people to view it incorrectly and dismiss it on that basis.
Another purely nutty one that appears frequently is Pride and Prejudice. Yes, the principal characters are in their twenties and therefore the exact definition of a 'young adult', but that is not what the label means.
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Date: 7/26/13 01:30 am (UTC)I like your definition of well read. You are absolutely correct that extensive reading of the Accepted Literary Canon without reflection does not necessarily broaden one's mind or make one worthy of the epithet. I also think there is such a thing as being well read within a specific genre. I consider myself decently well read within young adult fantasy, and maybe children's (middle grade) books, particularly ones published before the nineties or so. That indicates, to me, that I've not only read many works in that category, but that I've read or have familiarity with many of the 'important' ones, and have a sense of the topology of the genre. Having said that I'm immediately uncomfortable, because the sheer breadth of knowledge one would need to truly earn the title is so great as to seem unattainable.
In a different sense well read could simply mean broadly read, with evidence of discerning taste.
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Date: 7/26/13 02:07 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 7/26/13 04:12 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 7/26/13 04:25 am (UTC)Well-said!
I don't have much to add, besides this one wee thought: that discussion should somehow factor into being 'well-read'. This community has spoiled me in that regard. There is so much to be gained from discussing books with other readers. I'm always a little sad when I meet someone who has read the same book(s) but has nothing to say about it. At the very least, tell me what your reading experience was like! Did you enjoy it? Were you reading strictly out of boredom? An attempt to be in-the-know? Did you get anything at all out of it? Did you try typing it into (gasp) Wikipedia?! (Confession: I've done this. I can't say a book's plot/message/relevance has never eluded me, and I can't rest until I have at least an inking of what I missed.)
I average about 50-60 books per year, but I've only read 15-20 of the books on each of those lists. I was kind of surprised.
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Date: 7/26/13 09:23 am (UTC)I definitely agree that there's a such thing as "well read in a genre". I'd consider myself pretty well read in "classics", drama, Science Fiction and Fantasy, Irish literature, well read up to a point but not very knowledgeable about contemporary children's and YA, and not well read at all when it comes to contemporary American "literary" fiction.
It's definitely not unattainable, it just takes reading a lot and thinking about what you've read. And it's more of a lifetime thing than a "four years and you're done" thing. But, the same goes for an undergraduate education. If you've had a proper liberal arts bachelor's degree, you should come out of it with an understanding of the basics and how things connect and a realization that you've barely scratched the surface, so "two books a week for four years to make you well read" is a laughable proposition to begin with.
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Date: 7/26/13 09:28 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 7/27/13 12:05 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 7/28/13 05:15 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 7/28/13 06:27 pm (UTC)ETA: Whoa, I'd forgotten how much dreck is on that YA list. Shameful. I'm surprised that works by Tolkien, Diana Wynne Jones, Robin McKinley, Susan Cooper, Sherman Alexie, Bradbury, and Salinger even made it, as you actually have to use a few brain cells to read and understand their books.
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Date: 7/29/13 03:24 pm (UTC)My scores are embarrassingly low =( But what can I say? I spent my childhood reading Harry Potter, my middle school years reading Tamora Pierce, and my high school years reading Juliet Marillier and MWT. And nowadays I just reread all of those. There is no time to pick up the Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson!
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Date: 7/29/13 03:29 pm (UTC)My friend kept on stressing how hilarious it was, but it seemed to me that all the jokes masked something else (the depravity of war), and to me the book was sad. Not funny at all.
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Date: 7/29/13 07:08 pm (UTC)I haven't read Catch-22, though, so I can't chime in on it specifically.
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Date: 7/29/13 07:16 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 7/29/13 07:20 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 7/29/13 08:22 pm (UTC)And the books were light, pleasing colours, with paintings on the front of the main characters sitting together or riding horses or peering down dark streets. And there was variety! Hardcovers, soft covers (more soft covers), big books, little books, long books, short books, series, stand-alones.
Now the Barnes and Noble YA section is where I go when I want to send a shuddering chill down my spine. Everything that could possibly be good has been relegated to children's (really, I found QoA in the children's section, along with Roald Dahl and things), and YA is a solid mass of glossy black-on-black with occasional splashes of bright red and frosty, mysterious white. There are books about sad vampires, books about miserable vampires, books about dangerous vampires, books about murderous vampires, books about harrowing vampires, vampires patrolling the aisles to ask you if you need assistance with your search. I took a friend there recently and said, "Let's play a game. Pick one of the best, most famous YA authors you can think of, one whom you would absolutely include in any YA section as a matter of course. Now scan the shelves and see if they're there. I guarantee you they're not going to be there."
Where now are the horse and the rider? Where is the horn that was blowing? ... They have passed like rain on the mountain, like a wind the meadow; the days have gone down in the West behind the hills into shadow. Truly into shadow. Publishing was always a business, insofar as they needed to make money to sustain themselves, and had profit as a motive, but in the wake of The Franchises (Harry Potter, Twilight, The Hunger Games) it seems that craft has been almost entirely laid aside as a concern. It doesn't matter if it's good, will it sell? If it will sell, we don't need to edit it; heck, we don't even need to do a good job copy-editing it. Just slap it on some paper and send it out there to make money.
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Date: 7/29/13 08:27 pm (UTC)That's what's so daunting about education. I know so, so little, and so much of what I've learned isn't in active memory anymore; I only have impressions of what once was solid. And yet I went to a prestigious university and acquitted myself well. My interests are too broad for true specialisation to be attractive, and yet attaining respectable proficiency in multiple fields and maintaining those proficiencies simultaneously is so challenging.
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Date: 7/29/13 09:29 pm (UTC)I grew up without a TV, so I read a lot as a kid.
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Date: 7/29/13 09:48 pm (UTC)Crappy books that sell have always been there though. It's just that we usually forget about them after a few decades unless they're Nancy Drew or something by James Fenimore Cooper. All those "three volume novels" etc. that more remembered authors mentioned as detrimental to the moral development of their heroines . . . some of the horrendously written didactic children's literature that nobody remembers because there was a reason Lewis Carroll was making fun of them . . .
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Date: 7/29/13 09:49 pm (UTC)I tip my hat to you. Becoming an Irish citizen sounds very cool. I wish I could obtain EU citizenship (my father is American, my mother is Czech), but we missed a window of application when I was a child and now it looks like the only way I could become legally Czech is to renounce my US citizenship, which I don't desire to do.
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Date: 7/29/13 10:14 pm (UTC)Perhaps I'm making too strong a plea to exceptionalism. It just seems that my childhood and adolescence (the Nineties and the Naughts, respectively (because I don't age backwards, like some people)) were a golden age in terms of what was readily available to the frequenter of a large bookstore (in the US). Not only were good things being published, there was more of a willingness to reprint, and to offer books from previous decades that had been valued. Now practically everything that I see on YA shelves is new. There's no balance of new titles with older favourites, it's just new, new, new.
What I think is really fascinating are things that are astronomically popular in their time period, which everyone assumes will have a lasting place in the culture, and then they turn out to be blips on the radar. My impression is that Trilby is one of these: it influenced other things, but few people know of the original work anymore. Or maybe you'll correct me; I could be wrong about that one.
The three-volume novel thing always makes me a little sore because The Lord of the Rings is technically a three-volume novel. :P
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Date: 7/30/13 12:14 am (UTC)And isn't 50 Shades of Grey basically pornography? Why on earth would I want to read that?
Some of the books I've never even heard of before. And since I have a built-in dislike of huge chunks of 20th century literature, many of them of which I have heard I don't particularly want to read.
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Date: 7/30/13 04:27 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 7/31/13 12:02 pm (UTC)http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wanderer_(poem)
http://www.anglo-saxons.net/hwaet/?do=get&type=text&id=wdr (line 92...)
I agree about Teen fiction. The Teen sections in the library have become a mass of black.
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Date: 7/31/13 12:03 pm (UTC)Hah - I believe that is Tolkien, himself quoting in part an Old English poem the name of whose author has long been lost.
http://www.anglo-saxons.net/hwaet/?do=get&type=text&id=wdr (line 92...)
I agree about Teen fiction. The Teen sections in the library have become a mass of black.
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Date: 7/31/13 06:17 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 7/31/13 10:43 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 8/4/13 03:24 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 8/4/13 03:40 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 8/13/13 01:51 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 8/13/13 02:00 am (UTC)Image Cascade is a company that reprints old girls' series - Beany Malone, the Janet Lambert books, Catherine Woolley, etc. One of their authors is Sally Watson, who wrote children's historical fiction. She wrote a foreword for the Image Cascade edition of her books and said that she was living in Europe, quite comfortably, on the royalties from her books; just a nice, steady income; and then suddenly, BOOM! No more books in print and no more sold and no more money coming in.
Hence the vampires, I suppose. (There's a series of mysteries set in a crochet shop/bookstore, by Berta? Betty? Hechtman (I think, and I'm too lazy to go look). Anyway, in the book there's a wildly popular series of books in which a vampire controls his bloodlust by crocheting. The brief descriptions are hilarious, but I confidently expect that someone will start writing that series and that the author and readers will take the books very seriously...)
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Date: 8/16/13 05:31 pm (UTC)Hee, I love crocheting. I found a series of knitting mysteries once, which I checked out from the library but didn't manage to read. Might those have been the same, or is there a specifically crochet series as well? The name seems familiar.
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Date: 8/16/13 05:34 pm (UTC)Hee, I've been looking for a personal expletive. I think I may have recently completed my search, however, as a friend and I decided 'Facebook' would be a very suitable one.
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Date: 8/16/13 05:57 pm (UTC)I found the semester system in college an arduous slog, because it was 6 or more subjects, with no end in sight. When I transferred to a university closer to home, it was on the quarter system. 3 classes for 3 months was much better.
[Actually, I did 2 classes per quarter year round, rather than taking the summers off. With two classes, I could work on-campus to pay as I went, still be a tax break for my parents, and make dean's list. Wins for everyone! When I finally graduated with that French degree, I told everyone it might be useless, but at least it was paid for.]
Also, your expletive choice rocks!
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Date: 8/16/13 07:58 pm (UTC)Six or more subjects on the semester system? Wow, were you constantly overloading? I almost always took four classes a semester, and even that was plenty for me to handle (though I could only do that because I brought in a lot of credit, and I always ended up doing summer school). It seems like we have reverse situations here, because when I was on the quarter system I had four classes and it was too much. Three would have probably been more manageable, but by that point I was gone.
Also, your expletive choice rocks!
:D Thank you. I'm rather proud of us. We experimented with a lot of different forms, and it's a very flexible expletive, though I think calling someone 'a Facebook' is quite harsh. One of the more entertaining possibilities is abbreviating to FB, so that you can call something 'total FB' instead of 'total BS' and achieve the same effect.
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Date: 8/16/13 11:58 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 8/17/13 01:33 am (UTC)On the semester system, 12 hours was officially full-time, going up to 18 hours. That's where the ferengi side came in. I had a scholarship for full tuition. Since 18 hours were the same price as 12, that's what I wanted to do. Most classes were 2-3 credits so, even if you kept it to 12 hours, you could easily have 5 or 6 classes. The only time I ever overloaded was my first semester ever. Trying to be careful, I'd only signed up for 16 hours but, while looking around the English department, saw a flyer for a science fiction class. It was 3 credits, so I had to get permission to take that extra hour. Given that one of the textbooks was an anthology I'd brought from home, that was a low-risk. I wound up getting a minor in English from taking science fiction classes. Fun!
Later on, I even took the kids-lit class [in the education dept.] to get credit for what I was reading anyway. When I transferred, my new school [much closer to home] credited it as a literature class. The 2-classes per quarter pace worked out much better. I was able to get great grades, join clubs on campus, pay for my degree as I went, & avoid burn-out.
Language is like food: part of enjoying it is playing with it and inventing new things, or using old things in new ways.
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Date: 8/17/13 06:53 pm (UTC)I'm not sure I take your meaning there.
Wow, your school had 2-credit courses? Our school had practically none. I got to the point where I was asking around just to make a general survey and confirm my suspicion that they were apocryphal. It was either one or three. The only two-credit 'course' I'm aware of was the situation where an undergraduate student had served as an undergraduate TA under supervision in a previous semester, and was approved to direct their own lab unit with more minimal supervision in a following semester, to earn two credits instead of one for the extra responsibility involved. My firm suspicion is that this circumstance occurred only a handful of times per year, if that.
Your school seems to have had a lot of genre-based English courses. That's neat; I don't think we had as many, though I actually never took an English course in college so I can't be sure.
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Date: 8/17/13 06:58 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 8/18/13 01:30 am (UTC)I've not been in college in a while, or looked at a catalog, but that was the situation when I was there.
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Date: 8/18/13 04:04 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 8/18/13 06:18 pm (UTC)From what I hear about continuous tuition hikes, it sounds like you're getting fewer classes for way more money, & that's not cool.
One of the great things about