Joe McWilliams
In some circles, you have to be well-read to be taken seriously.
Or so I hear. My personal social orbit so far hasn’t intersected with the literary elite, but I plan on being ready if it ever does.
Maybe that’s why I forced myself to read James Joyce’s Ulysses a few years ago. You never know when lack of familiarity with ‘the world’s greatest English-language novel’ might get a door slammed in your face.
Or for that matter, when possessing the knowledge might dazzle just the right person. Hey, I did get invited to a literary soirée (possibly the first in the history of Slave Lake and also possibly the last) because the organizer knew I was reading Joyce’s Really Important Novel.
If I had been reading Say Cheese and Die by R.L. Stine, I probably wouldn’t have been invited!
This presents a problem. There are the classics and then there’s what we really enjoy, in books as in art as in music as in pretty much everything.
Who decides what’s a classic and what isn’t? And who do they think they are, making us feel inferior just because we prefer Ken Follett to Joyce and Dostoyevsky?
In politics, such rebelliousness put an end to monarchies and gave us democracy. In a democratic society, the opinions, tastes and attitudes of the average Joe are counted as being as valid and worthwhile and those of any elite. Nobody in an ivory tower is going to tell us what’s good for us! That’s the theory, anyway.
Back to the point, there’s always this conflict between what the experts say is good literature, and what most people are actually like reading. A couple of years ago a British bookseller did a poll of about 25,000 readers, and came up with a list of the top 100 novels of all time. It seems to be a mixture of genuinely popular titles and books that are reputed to be brilliant, but which few have actually read.
Of course, I could be underestimating the sophistication of the British reading public, but I can’t believe anything James Joyce wrote was or is broadly popular. Reading Ulysses, I can testify, is a lot like torture – it feels really good when it’s over.
Nevertheless, there’s Ulysses at fourth spot on the Waterstone’s top 100 of all time. Its reputation probably had a lot to do with it getting all those votes.
It’s easier to see why some of the other titles made the list. J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings was in top spot. Winnie the Pooh is on there, as is the great children’s story The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe by C.S. Lewis.
But Albert Camus, Aldous Huxley and Franz Kafka? Hugely popular with professors of literature, no doubt, but I can’t see them flying off the shelves.
In fact, many bookstores sell paperback editions of the classics or half or less than half the price of the latest potboilers. This tells me there is still a demand for the great books of yore, but it falls far short of popularity.
It’s good that they are available, though, just in case you want to find or what makes the classics classic. You never know when it might come in handy.