More randomocity

[danuv]

There's a thunderstorm a brewin' so I'm in my favorite spot for viewing storms on my porch with a glass of white wine. I'm starting to think I really actually prefer white wine despite this nagging feeling that it makes me totally uncool in some way.

Recently I had someone else tell me I was well read. I've been told this by a few people and it always confuses me. Mostly I read a hodge podge of art history books and biographies with the occasional fiction tossed in when forced (generally related to one of the art history or biographies). I don't really think I'm well read, mostly I think I read a little bit more than the average housewife and chose peculiar books. But this has me curious... what is well read anyway?

I'd like to hear some suggestions. I know this is the sort of question that only usually would draw answers from four or five of you on my f-list but really I am very curious. What would you (YOU) say are your top five books that any Well Read person must read? Or if you'd prefer what Sort of books would a well read person read?

Comments

[http://users.livejournal.com/idlewild_/]

I'm not a big fan of canon. I doubt I've read the top five books I'd put on a list like that. I think being well-read is more about swimming in a sea of books and being able to synthesize ideas between different books and come up with a whole that's more than the sum of its parts, but I would think that because that's how I read.

I think you could grid the world out by time and place and subculture and if you'd read something out of each bucket that'd be well-read but it wouldn't necessarily give you a whole lot of depth. But I guess that's what I'd think of.

I like the way you, you personally, danuv, treat books like hypertext (ahaha, because no one was doing that before hypertext was invented, but it's a handy metaphor so bear with me) and take something from any given book as a leaping off point to read four or five more books.

I'd say you were extraordinarily thorough in your particular chosen field but clearly not ignorant of the existence of other fields which could definitely add up to well-read. One of the big tricks to being perceived as well read is to be able to make an intelligible but non-comittal (as to whether you've read it or not) comment should anyone bring up a book you're only passingly familiar with. The disgusting and also hilarious and fun thing is that this can be virtually a sport in lit-snobby circles.

As for five books -well, I can maybe manage five categories:
I'd LIKE everyone to plough through Robinson Crusoe because it's seminal and is also incredibly interesting to see how far the notion of extended fiction prose has come. But it's a bit of a slog. Don Quixote sort of for similar reasons. Also it's great.

I think a dose of the John Stuart Mills is handy for living in America although it's well to read with a critical eye for his biases. Upside for you: Not Fiction! It is handy though to have it on hand (mentally speaking...) to challenge or understand base assumptions beneath varying factions' arguments. Ditto some oh my god dry Adam Smith. And Mary Wollstonecraft definitely

I think a well-read person would be acquainted with some 19th-21st century playwrights but I'd be hard pressed to settle on one that would be worth reading rather than holding out for performances (yeah, like I get to those) or DVDs of performances. Chekov possibly for the revolutionary naturalism.

Salman Rushdie is in the running for author of the 20th century but I still haven't made it all the way or in fact most of the way through Midnight's Children. Better people than I say it's one of the must reads and it's on my bookshelf if you ever want to.

Points for Ulysses and/OR To the Lighthouse. I haven't finished either because I'm a slack cow. I never said I was well read. Ulysses is gorgeous though, it just ...uh... requires a lot of dedicated brain space. And time.

A.S. Byatt for short stories (yeah, I am so totally biased. She's fantastic though!) I think she's got a near perfection of the form and it's a form not to be ignored entirely. There are lots of other contenders for must-read short stories though.

So that's like, totally a liberal-Writerly list and I didn't even include Nabokov though he probably ought to be in there. There would be a dozen lists over if you were to insist that being well-read included the sciences or history or more political theory.

[danuv.livejournal.com]

Hrm, Rushdie has made both of your lists... there must be something there.

[http://users.livejournal.com/idlewild_/]

The man can seriously write! Plus he's sort of an avatar of postcolonialism which doesn't play as big in the US as in the Rest of World but is pretty important in the scheme of the twentieth century.