Great time when the Classics or the Great Books are offered in the schools. We can discuss the common themes with other people we meet. Good starting points.
I think of Great Expectations as the great English novel because just as the English sent irony into battle and over a few centuries stripped a near absolute monarch of all his substantive powers using nothing more than making the words with which he was addressed increasingly ironic, increasingly meaning the opposite of what they once meant, so too the basic plot of Great Expectations involves Stella betraying Pip to save him. She knows she has been programmed to destroy Pip, and so the only way she can save him is to leave his love unrequited, though we readers know that, in another way this is the truest way to reciprocate his love.
So funny— I was all ready to check out your wife’s substack since we clearly have some big things in common (reads Dickens for fun, homeschools) but…I’m already a reader of hers! Small world.
Audiobooks (and a 30-minute commute) helped me get into the more daunting classics like A Tale of Two Cities. Then I went nuts for Thomas Hardy and Edward Rutherford books for a while. All free from our fabulous local library system!
Dorothy Parker wrote in the New Yorker as its resident “Constant Reader” back in the 1920s. Not sure if that’s the same as a Common Reader, but she was pretty funny (Woolf’s essays are also funny, just not laugh out loud).
Two 19th century works I read with much pleasure on my phone (a first) during Covid were The Moonstone, with its innovative narration from the point of view of several characters, and The Shaving of Shagpat, a little-loved (except by George Eliot) “entertainment” by George Meredith.
I only discovered the latter by following up a reference in T.S. Eliot’s “Reflections on Vers Libre” that didn’t register with me. In the conclusion where Eliot meditates on the advent of rhymeless verse (it concludes with his famous dictum that “there is only good verse, bad verse, and chaos”), I also read this: “Any rhyme forbidden, many Shagpats were unwigged.” Say what?
I am somewhat shamed by the fact that I have yet to read Great Expectations, despite using a passage in my wedding and keeping a quote from it above my desk. I have always been a voracious “common reader” and continue to do so even as a writer in my adulthood, but something about “the classics” has always felt so unreachable to me. It’s a mental block that I desperately wish to overcome.
I think the greatest curse of my life is how there are millions of books I’d love to read and not enough time to read them.
Interestingly, Catherine and I crossed paths earlier this year when I wrote about homeschooling trends in the U.S. She disagreed with my analysis, but I see from this essay that we have a great deal in common. If she was indeed "astonished by Willa Cather," then we must be kindred spirits!
Henry, I really enjoyed this. Like your wife, I am a Common Reader. I have no training or literary degrees. I have spent my adult life in the military but I made the decision years ago to self-educate through reading. I invest a good amount of time in curating my reading list each year. It has been such a rewarding practice. On a side note, I am reading David Copperfield at the moment which is one of my favorite Dickens novels. All the best to you and your wife.
Good read, thank you ... i think the classics i would share tho, would be the likes of Mailer, Peake, Burroughs etc ... so much good literature around!
No harm in being a common reader for sure! We need more of them. Always have a lot of catching up to do with the English, but in terms of the novels people usually mean by English classic it's Frankenstein all the way, followed by the very minoritarian choice of the Vicar of Wakefield.
I read Bleak House 10 or 15 years ago, and I expected it to be good, but I was surprised at how really great it was. I am open to the argument that it is the greatest English novel, but there are many contenders. Is one of many that really cries out to be re-read, but the ones I haven’t read yet cry all the louder!
Great time when the Classics or the Great Books are offered in the schools. We can discuss the common themes with other people we meet. Good starting points.
I think of Great Expectations as the great English novel because just as the English sent irony into battle and over a few centuries stripped a near absolute monarch of all his substantive powers using nothing more than making the words with which he was addressed increasingly ironic, increasingly meaning the opposite of what they once meant, so too the basic plot of Great Expectations involves Stella betraying Pip to save him. She knows she has been programmed to destroy Pip, and so the only way she can save him is to leave his love unrequited, though we readers know that, in another way this is the truest way to reciprocate his love.
Just a conceit of mine.
Interesting to see Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont pop up here. I had never heard of it until its addition to the Close Reads list for this year.
So funny— I was all ready to check out your wife’s substack since we clearly have some big things in common (reads Dickens for fun, homeschools) but…I’m already a reader of hers! Small world.
Audiobooks (and a 30-minute commute) helped me get into the more daunting classics like A Tale of Two Cities. Then I went nuts for Thomas Hardy and Edward Rutherford books for a while. All free from our fabulous local library system!
Dorothy Parker wrote in the New Yorker as its resident “Constant Reader” back in the 1920s. Not sure if that’s the same as a Common Reader, but she was pretty funny (Woolf’s essays are also funny, just not laugh out loud).
https://bookmarks.reviews/in-which-winnie-the-pooh-makes-dorothy-parker-throw-up/
Two 19th century works I read with much pleasure on my phone (a first) during Covid were The Moonstone, with its innovative narration from the point of view of several characters, and The Shaving of Shagpat, a little-loved (except by George Eliot) “entertainment” by George Meredith.
I only discovered the latter by following up a reference in T.S. Eliot’s “Reflections on Vers Libre” that didn’t register with me. In the conclusion where Eliot meditates on the advent of rhymeless verse (it concludes with his famous dictum that “there is only good verse, bad verse, and chaos”), I also read this: “Any rhyme forbidden, many Shagpats were unwigged.” Say what?
Both are on Gutenberg. Here’s Meredith’s:
https://gutenberg.org/cache/epub/4405/pg4405-images.html
I am somewhat shamed by the fact that I have yet to read Great Expectations, despite using a passage in my wedding and keeping a quote from it above my desk. I have always been a voracious “common reader” and continue to do so even as a writer in my adulthood, but something about “the classics” has always felt so unreachable to me. It’s a mental block that I desperately wish to overcome.
I think the greatest curse of my life is how there are millions of books I’d love to read and not enough time to read them.
Interestingly, Catherine and I crossed paths earlier this year when I wrote about homeschooling trends in the U.S. She disagreed with my analysis, but I see from this essay that we have a great deal in common. If she was indeed "astonished by Willa Cather," then we must be kindred spirits!
Here is one of my personal essays about reading that you both might like, featuring Chaim Potok and Willa Cather: https://joshuadolezal.substack.com/p/literature-is-a-cord-that-draws-us
Henry, I really enjoyed this. Like your wife, I am a Common Reader. I have no training or literary degrees. I have spent my adult life in the military but I made the decision years ago to self-educate through reading. I invest a good amount of time in curating my reading list each year. It has been such a rewarding practice. On a side note, I am reading David Copperfield at the moment which is one of my favorite Dickens novels. All the best to you and your wife.
Good read, thank you ... i think the classics i would share tho, would be the likes of Mailer, Peake, Burroughs etc ... so much good literature around!
No harm in being a common reader for sure! We need more of them. Always have a lot of catching up to do with the English, but in terms of the novels people usually mean by English classic it's Frankenstein all the way, followed by the very minoritarian choice of the Vicar of Wakefield.
I read Bleak House 10 or 15 years ago, and I expected it to be good, but I was surprised at how really great it was. I am open to the argument that it is the greatest English novel, but there are many contenders. Is one of many that really cries out to be re-read, but the ones I haven’t read yet cry all the louder!