tia_tarina

Pulled from Greg Laden’s blog, the book meme presents a list of 100 books of which the average American has read six. I’ve read seven – what does that say?

I’ve only tagged the ones that I remember reading all the way through. I started but have not finished 6 and 13, I had 36 read to me in 4th grade, and I suspect but can’t confirm I read 30 and 87 cover to cover.

Call me a philistine but I’m not surprised that most Americans won’t score higher than six on this list. Where is Vonnegut or Twain? Pynchon? Hemingway? Steinbeck and Tolstoy each rate two entries, authors whose works fill me with more suffering than eating broken glass soaked in the Marburg virus and lye. Nothing against Dickens but why do his works rate 5% – one-twentieth – of the total list?

Why no credit for slogging through thousands of pages of Ayn Rand (arguably less tedious and depressing than Steinbeck, Melville, and Tolstoy)? No credit for Shannon and Weaver’s The Mathematical Theory of Communication which is vitally important in this age. No Lovecraft, no Dick, no Blake, no Ovid. No biography save Kerouac and Bryson. No mathematics, science, or history. No poetry. No Fear and Loathing.

Do I feel bad for not reading most of these? In the case of Tolstoy and Steinbeck – hell no – reading The Pearl in high school put me off Steinbeck in this life and the next and even reading a little Tolstoy in an undergraduate philosophy course makes most telephone directories and the CRC Handbook of Chemistry and Physics seem like jaunty giddy page-a-minute prose. Some of these works are significant, but on the whole the list seems lopsided. An example: 98 is a subset of 14 which is a freebie for the Shakespeare aficionados. 6 is a freebie to the Bible Belt (did you actually read it or just “study it” – if you didn’t equivocate Chapter 1 with the Worst D&D Adventure Ever, you didn’t actually read it.) And 42 and 68 and 88? Do I look like someone who spends that much time on the can at my aunt’s house? Honestly, I don’t shit that much. Why not throw in Left Behind or The Purpose-Driven Life or I’m OK, You’re OK while you’re at it?

Why do I even care about a blog meme? Well, for one thing, I actually read quite a lot. I just don’t read much fiction. My tastes tend to be deep rather than wide and I’m easily biased for or against an author (Steinbeck is dead to me while I will read every grocery list and parking ticket associated with Twain, Dawkins, or Philip K. Dick.) I’m reading more philosophy and science and mathematics rather than hand-wringing novels of nineteenth-century intrigue and those subjects aren’t represented anywhere on the list. And if I’m going to be baffled by similar-sounding terminology, I want something that expands my way of looking at the universe rather than leaves me playing a tedious game of connect-the-dots – I’ll pit my copy of Gravity’s Rainbow against your copy of A Thousand Years of Solitude any day. That should buy me some time to finish A New Kind of Science.

I don’t have contempt for literature but I just don’t see much value in reading a lot of these books other than to tick off boxes on a blog meme. They may have intrinsic value in exploring the human condition, but there are plenty of other worthy candidates that aren’t on the list that I may or may not have read. My criticism of the list is not so much that it’s arbitrary, but that it’s not arbitrary enough.

Series Title: Unfinished Symphony  3/?
Episode Name:Walking in My Shoes
Author: usmc75
Pairings: Everyone...mostly
Ratings: PG
Spoilers: “Doomsday,” “The Stolen Earth,” “Journey’s End”
Disclaimers: This is my take of Season 4.5 This is the second episode of that season
Summary:We learn of the crime in question...

Walking in my Shoes-Part Two