From "Rose Wylie: I haven’t read a book in 15 years/The artist on why she had to put down Ulysses, the films that make her cry— and the fellow artist she would invite to dinner" (London Times).
Reading a book takes up time, so it's something to do if you have time that needs filling. You can fill time with other things too. How is reading a book different from those other things, and why do so many people seem to think that it's better than those other things? It's refreshing to hear Rose Wylie announce without shame that she hasn't read a book in 15 years. She prefers other things.
Here's her favorite poem.
Posts
65 comments:
Of all the books I have read and completed, Ulysses remains my least favorite. The Sound and the Fury is a close second.
If it's that bad, why read to the end? It's like asking what was the worst food I ever ate where I ate the whole thing.
I listened to that Gertrude Stein poem to the end. I don't know if I liked it, but now everything I write I feel is influenced by it, including the paragraph (in this post) that I wrote before I listened to it.
Listened to it and read too, but it's the audio that feels terribly influential!
I read and did not enjoy The Sound And The Fury when I was in college. I got an A on my essay about the book, but as I recall, whatever I wrote seemed like mostly bullshit.
"Ann Althouse said...
If it's that bad, why read to the end? It's like asking what was the worst food I ever ate where I ate the whole thing."
That's why I added the modifier "read and completed." There are numerous books that I've simply abandoned. In the case of both Ulysses and The Sound and the Fury, their place in the literary canon compelled me to the finish, hoping along the way that there would be some big payoff or epiphany. Alas, not to be.
...for so many reading fiction is like an advanced degree, offering an opportunity for self-promotion to upper class. Really, book club ends up as an excuse to drink on a Tuesday...
I love to read books. Every day. I spent most of my entire career reading legal opinions, legal briefs, motions, orders, etc. My conclusion is that most judges and lawyers are terrible writers. But maybe a lot of that has to do with the subject matter you are dealing with. But now I read great literature, and it brings me a tremendous amount of joy and knowledge.
Oh, and the worst food i ever ate and finished was Icelandic putrefied shark. Small portion, though.
I reread "Earthly Powers" recently, and got more from it than the first time--which isn't to say I didn't enjoy it the first time. I've got several more decades of life (and reading!) behind me now, so it was that much more absorbing.
I dropped "The Magic Mountain" early on, but got through "Death in Venice." My only Joyce is "Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man," and my only Faulkner is "Light in August.
I love to read. I think their are multiple reasons it is widely regarded as being "better" than other time wasters. First, reading can be somewhat divided between fiction and non fiction. I learned most of my history from reading rather than from classes. Also learned lots of other things from reading. Second, a lot of fiction is very well researched, and you can learn even from fiction. And even it it is poorly researched, then you get exposure to other viewpoints, and a lot more in depth than from a movie or TV show. But it is, indeed, as RAH put it, entertainment. Books are in direct competion with beer, boats and movie theaters. You better write damned well if you plan to make a living at it.
I gave up on Ulysses a third of the way through after having read A Portrait of the Artist twice.
OTOH, I've recently read, with pleasure and to my intellectual profit--
Holger Afflerbach, "On a Knife Edge" about the German war effort 1914-1918.
David Reynolds, "The Long Shadow" on the political, economic, and cultural legacies of 1914-1918.
Almost done with Rory Muir's "Britain and the Defeat of Napoleon, 1807 - 1815," and yesterday I bought Peter H. Wilson's "Iron and Blood: A Military History of the German-Speaking Peoples since 1500."
Plenty of good, readable academic histories from recent years and decades out there IYLTSOT.
Reading books is pretty much over and will disappear with the commentariat on this blog. Sure, some people will cling to them like grandma’s 78s, but for mass transfer of information, it’s done. And don’t think that reading non-fiction saves you - authors can generate bullshit just as well if only more slowly than AI. But think - did human culture and knowledge transfer end with the printing press? Nope, not the scrolls before that. It just changed the way we communicate. Accept it and move on. Get rid of your old books now so your kids don’t have to when you die.
“Listened to it and read too, but it's the audio that feels terribly influential!”
I listened to enough of it. It influenced me by enhancing my appreciation of good books.
I no longer read books, either. The things I choose to do are intriguing to me, but I can also step away for tasks and other endeavors. Reading, if I can find a great book, is a compulsion. I can't stop. When I was younger I didn't mind staying up all night or hiding under the covers, enrapt. I'm just not that interested anymore.
I think the "Ulysses" is the greatest novel ever, is probably the biggest con job ever done. HG Welles, Ezra Pound, and George Moore all told James Joyce they couldn't through Ulysses. Here's what HG welles told Joyce;
Your last two works [Ulysses & FW] have been more amusing to write then they ever will be to read. Take me as a common reader. Do I get much pleasure from this work? No. So I ask: Who the hell is this Joyce who demands so many waking hours of the few thousands I have still to live for a proper appreciation of his quirks and fancies and flashes of rendering?
I think of Ulysses as a mixed bad. Lots of great writing. And lots of skippable stuff. I have the novel, but I dip in and out.
The Computer has caused me problems. Its made reading books, not on the computer, very difficult. Thats especially true of fiction. And when you throw in audiobooks - its very hard to sit down and read a novel in a book format.
As for not reading fiction, I think anyone who hasn't read the great novels and classics is missing out on something important. But I don't think skipping James patterson or Philip Roth is any great loss.
I use to read like a rabbit. Today like a snail. The race is over.
I'm not throwing out my books to make life easier for my kids, and I have a lot of them, include my college and law school textbooks. My late, beloved wife had even more books than I do, she was a voracious and rapid reader. Her collection includes some rare foreign language books that should be our family treasures. No one has volunteered to take custody of them, alas.
But having said that, I too have largely moved to audiobooks for new entertainment.
Really, book club ends up as an excuse to drink on a Tuesday...
Wednesday. Though, interestingly to me, fully half of my book club has given up drinking since COVID. And fully half (though not with full overlap) now do the audiobook thing "so they can do other things" while "reading" the book, an approach that doesn't work at all for me unless the "other thing" I'm doing is driving across west Texas. If the slightest bit of alert attention is required of me by the "other things(s)," I find I'll lose the thread of the book.
The books are usually pretty bad - sometimes an engaging story but poorly written, very occasionally well written but boring. But my appetite for long-form reading has diminished dramatically in the past fifteen years or so; I'm not really sure why.
I passed on Ulysses and FW because I read Portrait of the Artist. That convinced me that this guy would have nothing to say that was worth deciphering.
I haven't read a book of fiction in over 4 years now, but I spend my free time studying math the last 4.4 years. I spend a lot less time on-line the last 4.4 years, too, because of that.
Who stole from who, Abbott and Costello from Gertrude Stein, or the other way around. Or think of it as inspired by each other’s way with words. - NOTUS
I just finished a multi-day road trip, and one of the days I listened to "The Great Gatsby" in one go, from beginning to end, read by Tim Robbins. My traveling companion didn't like the way he read the women's dialog, saying it was disrespectful, and I can see her point, but I definitely recommend the experience of hearing it in one sitting. I felt like I heard stuff I missed while reading.
Then she was watching some Jane Austen novel movie adaptation to go to sleep, and I noticed that Austen and Fitzgerald have remarkably similar approaches to creating characters and dramatic situations. I think that Austen was probably a strong influence on Fitzgerald.
I think that the next novel I will try to listen to in this way, in a single sitting, will be The Big Sleep. Or if I find myself alone and driving for days, I might try The Iliad. But Ulysses? I am not Catholic, and a lot of the references are utterly lost on me, too many to make it possible to follow the story. My older sister recounted admiringly how a friend of hers in college at Michigan read it in a weekend straight through. OK. Good for him. But no, I don't read like I used to. We are many of us too addicted to "layering" dopamine, scrolling our phone while watching TV, etc.
"But I don't think skipping James patterson or Philip Roth is any great loss."
Portnoy's Complaint? Goodbye Columbus? Those were great.
BTW, at the end, despite her complaints about how Tim Robins did the voices for several characters, she pronounced the experience of listening to the book "much better than the movie" and she loved the movie, at least the one with Robert Redford.
"Reading books is pretty much over and will disappear with the commentariat on this blog. Sure, some people will cling to them like grandma’s 78s...."
The big readers are chewing through genre books: romance, thrillers, sci-fi, fantasy, mystery.
Nothing about that is more impressive or accomplished or nourishing than playing video games or scrolling through TikTok. Once you know how to read there's nothing special about it compared to looking at and understanding anything else. Rose Wylie is choosing high quality films plus her own painting and drawing — understanding visual depiction. That's admirable.
Kate and I are in the same department. If I read a riveting fiction, I can't stop. To moderate myself, I now read biographies since they are interesting but not arresting. I am on the biography of Gustave Flaubert. It is in an interesting time after the Enlightenment, French Revolution and Restoration in quick succession.
"The big readers are chewing through genre books: romance, thrillers, sci-fi, fantasy, mystery."
Oooh, she said it! Making popcorn...
"Jaq said...
...I might try The Iliad. But Ulysses? I am not Catholic, and a lot of the references are utterly lost on me, too many to make it possible to follow the story..."
Jaq: Leopold Bloom, the utterly boring protagonist of Ulysses, is Jewish.
She sounds like my grandmother, another woman born in the late 19th century, and the poem sounds like one I read in a book once and memorized.
Rented a tent, a tent, a tent.
Rented a tent, a tent, a tent.
Rented a tent
Rented a tent
Rented a, rented a, tent. —Tent Rentals, Kurt Vonnegut
I think it was in The Sirens of Titan.
"The big readers are chewing through genre books: romance, thrillers, sci-fi, fantasy, mystery.
Nothing about that is more impressive or accomplished or nourishing than playing video games or scrolling through TikTok. "
Nonsense. You've just not read good genre work. Science Fiction/Fantasy (we used to call it Speculative Fiction) can be as "nourishing" as anything else. It's an older genre than that realist stuff, after all, which was only invented in the 19th century, and, as you noted, can be very tedious; enough to drive you to Tik Tok.
Gene Wolfe, for instance, is nearly as complex as Joyce. There are at least three podcasts I know of dedicated just to analyzing his work (so somebody is still reading).
Or, to name just currently working SF authors: Catherynne Valente, China Miéville, Jeff VanderMeer, Kelly Link, for example, are far more interesting than high end soap opera slop like, say, Jonathan Franzen.
Maybe this is the passage that lost me, I didn't hang out long, I just picked it up and put it down when I knew that I would never have a prayer of understanding it without constantly looking stuff up, but scanning the book over it again, I might try it again.
The proud potent titles clanged over Stephen’s memory the triumph of their brazen bells: et unam sanctam catholicam et apostolicam ecclesiam: the slow growth and change of rite and dogma like his own rare thoughts, a chemistry of stars. Symbol of the apostles in the mass for pope Marcellus, the voices blended, singing alone loud in affirmation: and behind their chant the vigilant angel of the church militant disarmed and menaced her heresiarchs. A horde of heresies fleeing with mitres awry: Photius and the brood of mockers of whom Mulligan was one, and Arius, warring his life long upon the consubstantiality of the Son with the Father, and Valentine, spurning Christ’s terrene body, and the subtle African heresiarch Sabellius who held that the Father was Himself His own Son. Words Mulligan had spoken a moment since in mockery to the stranger. Idle mockery. The void awaits surely all them that weave the wind: a menace, a disarming and a worsting from those embattled angels of the church, Michael’s host, who defend her ever in the hour of conflict with their lances and their shields.
I was a kid at the time.
I'm probably in the minority here, but I liked The Sound and the Fury, chiefly because Benjy has a cognitive disability and I saw some commonality with how our Down Syndrome daughter perceived things at the time. Whether it was as common as I thought remains to be seen as our daughter continues to surprise us with her creativity.
As for Ulysses, here's Allan Sherman:
"Hello Muddah, hello Faddah
Here I am at Camp Grenada
Camp is very entertaining
And they say we'll have some fun if it stops raining
I went hiking with Joe Spivey
He developed poison ivy
You remember Leonard Skinner
He got Ptomaine poisoning last night after dinner
All the counsellors hate the waiters
And the lake has alligators
And the head coach wants no sissies
So he reads to us from something called Ulysses..."
@Jaq. That's just Stephen. He's supposed to be a bit insufferable. Hang in there and Mr Bloom will be along shortly. He's much more relatable.
This is a small snippet of what ChatGPT finally spit out about it.
On the surface, these allusions seem esoteric, but symbolically they speak volumes about Stephen’s character and his internal conflicts. Stephen is a young intellectual and lapsed Catholic struggling with guilt, rebellion, and the search for identity. Joyce uses Stephen’s recollection of creeds and heresies to dramatize the clash between religious authority and personal freedom – reflecting Stephen’s evolving relationship with his faith, his role as an artist, and his profound sense of alienation. In this literary analysis, we will unpack these references and show how they function within the novel to illuminate broader themes of orthodoxy versus heresy, authority versus rebellion, and spiritual struggle.
This actually helps me to remember why I put the book down. I just found the characters struggle with his lapsed Catholic faith un-compelling. It reminded me of the time I got dragged by a Catholic friend to a show in Boston called "Nunsense;" I found the show totally un-relatable, while my friend, who went to Catholic school, thought it was great.
OK, I will try it again on your word.
"But Ulysses? I am not Catholic, and a lot of the references are utterly lost on me, too many to make it possible to follow the story."
Not a catholic - neither was James Joyce. LOL He wasn't a Jewish convert either - his "Jewish" Hero might as well be a Episcopalian who liked bagels.
Tim Robbins line readings of women wasn't "disrepsectful" - just bad. Its hard for male narrators to do women well. And vice-versa.
No accounting for tastes--you couldn't pay me to watch classic old B&W movies.
There are topics I want to know about, and I have found that books are the best way to learn about them. There are good things on the Intertubes also, of course--especially lectures by the kind of people whose books I read.
Oh God, SF. Some of its good. Lot of it is bad. I suppose it has one thing going for it, its "Not of this world". Lot of SF writers have turned out to be sex perverts. The lastest one is Neil Gaiman. A woman from New Zealand has filed three civil lawsuits accusing best-selling British author Neil Gaiman of repeatedly sexually assaulting her.
Asimov was a sex pest. Arthur Clarke had a thing for young boys. Heinlien had a lot of weird ideas about women and sex in general.
As for Sound and Fury that's the one great Faulkner novel i haven't read. Liked Absalom, Absalom. Liked parts of A Light in August. Was pretty meh about Intruder in the Dust and Pylon.
"his "Jewish" Hero might as well be a Episcopalian who liked bagels." Well.... Leopold Bloom is ethnically Jewish and his father seems to have observed some Jewish ceremonies (Seder, maybe, IIRC?), but Bloom's father officially converted to the Church of Ireland, and Bloom was baptized. So he really is kind of an "Episcopalian who likes bagels". Well, what he really likes are organ meats, including, ahem, pork kidneys.
RCOCEAN II said...
"But Ulysses? I am not Catholic, and a lot of the references are utterly lost on me, too many to make it possible to follow the story."
Not a catholic - neither was James Joyce. LOL He wasn't a Jewish convert either - his "Jewish" Hero might as well be a Episcopalian who liked bagels."
And Joyce's "Irish" hero drank French wine (Burgundy) and ate Italian cheese (Gorgonzola). At least he did on that ONE day chronicled over >700 pages. Oy!
90% of everything is crap.
I just came up with that.
"Oh God, SF. Some of its good. Lot of it is bad."
I'll just quote Sturgeon's Law: "ninety percent of everything is crap".
Only Faulkner I’ve finished was The Reivers. It’s fun. Couldn’t get through S&F—kept thinking, “How does Faulkner know what it’s like to be retarded?” Almost as bad as a white man writing about the Black experience— Styron took a lot of flack for that.
When people say they don't read books, do they mean that literally, or that they don't read novels, or don't read sequentially but skim for content, or that they never read anything to the end?
When I left graduate school, I stopped reading novels. I was still listening to them on tape and later CD, possibly getting through more than I had ever read. A reason for quitting was that I was tired of having to pay attention to style and symbolism, structure, characterization and all the things we were supposed to read for. I didn't want to bother with what the author (or the language) was trying to do. Audiobooks cut through all that and got me straight to the story.
To tell the truth, though, I sort of had to be forced to read novels by courses and assignments. I enjoyed it, but it was hard to rise up or sink down into a novel on my own. Hard also to put the book aside, pick it up again and repeat the whole process, and hard to push through hundreds of pages to the conclusion. Soon enough, the internet came along and that gave me so many distractions that novels weren't of interest anymore. I still read -- non-fiction, and on my computer or phone.
"Not a catholic - neither was James Joyce."
Maybe, but he was educated by the Jesuits for most of primary school, high school and university.
The article is a Proust-style questionnaire. Seems like everybody does one now: Vanity Fair, the New Statesman, and now the Times of London.
Prof, what would you think of an Althouse Questionnaire? You could be the first subject, followed by other bloggers (Glenn Lowry?) and then notable commenters (you could charge for access to the Laslo Questionnaire!).
JSM
It's ok if you don't like to read.
It's ok if you do.
Some people can't enjoy or understand James Joyce the way others just can't get into Philip Roth.
It's ok.
People who boast about anything -- reading, raising children, growing flowers, etc. are show offs (or trying to). They're not doing it for their own enjoyment...
True readers are ok. Just leave them alone.
Same with painters, photographers or otherwise. It's ok not to turn your enjoyment into a money maker. Life is so short. There's something for everyone. Thank god we're free to pursue our enjoyments here, if we are lucky.
Leave readers alone. Have I said that already? They don't want to hurt you, but will defend their ways. Let them die a natural death?
The whole point isn't that Bloom doesn't have some Jewish attributes, its that IN THE NOVEL the character isn't particularly Jewish.
90 percent of everything is crap. Well, that's leaves 10 percent to talk about.
"Reading a book takes up time, so it's something to do if you have time that needs filling"
I read books (and blogs!) to learn things and to be entertained, not to fill an otherwise empty schedule.
Duty of Inquiry@718--
Hear! Hear!
“ Nonsense. You've just not read good genre work. Science Fiction/Fantasy (we used to call it Speculative Fiction) can be as "nourishing" as anything else.”
Misunderstanding my point, you agreed with me. Great!
But why would you purport to know what I’ve read? What makes you think I haven’t read any mysteries or science fiction or fantasy or that if I had read any, I would’ve chosen the bad stuff?
My point about genre fiction is that the people who are into it read a lot of books. They read one after another. Sometimes one day. They read a lot. These are the compulsive readers. People who read literary fiction are, I think, less likely to plow through book after book.
“ But why would you purport to know what I’ve read? What makes you think I haven’t read any mysteries or science fiction or fantasy or that if I had read any, I would’ve chosen the bad stuff?”
The only rational answer I can think of is that you believe that the good stuff is so good that one becomes an addict. It wasn’t that good!
Thread did not disappoint.
Interesting... What did I miss? Ah, I see it now.
"Nothing about that is more impressive..."
I understood the antecedent of "that" to be "genre books", whereas, you meant the antecedent to be "plowing through genre books". Okay, fair enough. Personally, I think the effort required to realize the story in your imagination, even for purely narrative bulk genre consumption, carries a greater intellectual reward, is more stimulating, than Tik Tok, but perhaps I'm selling Tik Tok short.
Continuing in the context of my (mis?)reading, by "you've just not read good genre work" I meant to imply that if you had read, say, The Fifth Head of Cerberus or The Left Hand of Darkness for example, even if they weren't to your taste, I have enough faith in your critical judgement that you would see that they were operating in the same intellectual and aesthetic space as "literary fiction". But, of course, it seems you weren't making a comment on the general aesthetic potential of genre fiction after all.
I read a different Wylie's poem this morning, Elinor Wylie's 'Wild Peaches'.
... We’ll live among wild peach trees, miles from town,
You’ll wear a coonskin cap, and I a gown
Homespun, dyed butternut’s dark gold color.
Lost, like your lotus-eating ancestor,
We’ll swim in milk and honey till we drown....
I believe the 'Poetry Ancient and Modern' people sent it yesterday, though. Don't trust people who brag about not reading a book for 15 years (even if their last one was Buddenbrooks, and even if they create spectacles on TikTok); that Wylie may or may not be an otherwise reasonable and sensible person but I doubt it.
Gene Wolfe was not a 'sex pest'.
“Misunderstanding my point, you agreed with me. Great!”
Umm…doesn’t that actually mean he disagreed with you?
I just wanted to add that I've never been able to get through anything by Thomas Mann except for "Death in Venice" which was great. Maybe he's better in the original German.
Last Comment. The literary critics have turned more people off reading literature than anything else. I've plowed through the "Modern libraries" 100 best novels of the 20th century, and at least 25-35 of the selections were either mediocre, boring, or outright crap. Along side Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Faulkner, and Waugh, you have crap like "Ragtime", "WInsberg Ohio", "Arrowsmith", "Naked Lunch", "Gods little acre" and "the Color Purple".
I cant imagine many people in the 21st century being able to read dated stuff like Drieser, Virginia woolfe, or most of Sinclair Lewis, either.
Post a Comment
Please use the comments forum to respond to the post. Don't fight with each other. Be substantive... or interesting... or funny. Comments should go up immediately... unless you're commenting on a post older than 2 days. Then you have to wait for us to moderate you through. It's also possible to get shunted into spam by the machine. We try to keep an eye on that and release the miscaught good stuff. We do delete some comments, but not for viewpoint... for bad faith.