The Joy of Reading: A Passionate Guide to 189 of the World's Best Authors and Their Works

546 Pages·2008·2.12 MB·English

by  Charles Van Doren

JoyofReading_fullcover2:Layout 1 2/22/08 4:13 PM Page 1
Literature/Critisism $24.95 U.S./$29.95 CAN/£12.99 UK
T
T H
“ his book is the fruit of a lifelong
E THE
love affair. Reading, I believe, is
C V D “This book is as contagious as it
HARLES AN OREN
is my favorite thing to do; books
was intended to be.”
the coauthor of the classic How to Read a Book and I have been inseparable almost as long as I can
—Mortimer J. Adler
with philosopher Mortimer J. Adler; the remember … To this day, I become distressed if I am
author of A History of Knowledge (which sold anywhere without a book, a magazine, a newspaper,
L
ike a professor whose enthusiasm
30,000 copies in hardcover and 150,000 in any scrap of paper to read …. I like the smell of books,
inspires his students, Charles Van Doren
c ertainly the feel of them. Life without books
paperback); and the author or editor of The
OF explains what’s wonderful in the classic and
would be, for me, a vacant horror.”
Idea of Progress, Great Treasury of Western Thought,
contemporary books you’ve missed, and
The Annals of America, Second Chance: An American
—Charles Van Doren R E A D I N G
awakens your desire to reopen the works
Story, as well as several novels for young
you’ve loved. This engaging love letter to
p eople and Webster’s American biographies. O
reading explores the work of the authors who
He is an adjunct professor at the University “Nothing recommends the joy of reading better than the
189
F transformed the world: from Aristotle and
of Connecticut, Torrington Campus. His communication of it by a person who has spent a lifetime A Passionate Guide to

Herodotus in ancient Greece to Salinger and
enriched by the delights of reading. Charles Van Doren is that R
father was Mark Van Doren, a Pulitzer Prize-
kind of reader. He has laid a feast before us that is irresistible.” of the World’s Best Vonnegut in 20th century America.
E
winning poet and professor at Columbia.
—Mortimer J. Adler, author of How to Read a Book Divided chronologically by the eras in
A
Authors and Their Works
which these books were written, each work is
D
“Mr. Van Doren is that rarity, a truly well read man who reads
put in historical context and brought to life
not for professional purposes but for pleasure. I
N by Van Doren’s sometimes surpising and
His book spurs us on to explore more deeply and joyfully the
always insightful comments. The Joy of
infinitely varied t errain of good books.” G
Reading delves into a wide range of genres —
—Clifton Fadiman, author of The New Lifetime Reading Plan:
The Classical Guide to World Literature fiction, poetry, drama, children’s books,
CC VV DD
HHAARRLLEESS AANN OORREENN
philosophy, history, and science. Also offered
C
HARLES
Author of A History of Knowledge and Co-Author with is a unique ten-year reading plan, made up of
V D
AN OREN
ISBN-13: 978-1-4022-1160-7 Mortimer Adler of How to Read a Book
a grand variety of the world’s greatest books.
ISBN-10: 1-4022-1160-0
C
P N
U A
E
www.sourcebooks.com
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THE
OF
READING
A Passionate Guide to189
of the World’s Best
Authors and Their Works
C V D
HARLES AN OREN
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Copyright © 2008 by Charles Van Doren
Cover and internal design © 2008 by Sourcebooks, Inc.
Cover photo © Getty Images
Sourcebooks and the colophon are registered trademarks of Sourcebooks, Inc.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any
electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval
systems—except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or
reviews—without permission in writing from its publisher, Sourcebooks, Inc.
All brand names and product names used in this book are trademarks, registered
trademarks, or trade names of their respective holders. Sourcebooks, Inc., is not
associated with any product or vendor in this book.
Published by Sourcebooks, Inc.
P.O. Box 4410, Naperville, Illinois 60567-4410
[phone]
Fax: [phone]
www.sourcebooks.com
First published in the United States of America by Crown Publishing, Inc., 1985
Van Doren, Charles Lincoln.
The joy of reading : a passionate guide to 189 of the world's best authors and
their works / Charles Van Doren.
p. cm.
1. Best books. 2. Books and reading. I. Title.
Z1035.V26 2008
011'.73—dc22
2007043270
Printed and bound in the United States of America.
BG 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
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For my colleagues, friends, and students at the University of Connecticut
and
For Gerry
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Author to Reader
O
Reading is my favorite thing to do. When I was ten and
supposed to go to sleep at a certain time, I read under the
covers with a flashlight until my father told me I would ruin
my eyes. I didn’t stop; I was willing to risk my sight to enjoy the pleas-
ures of reading. In fact he was wrong; after seventy years I can still
read, even without glasses if there’s enough light.
I have had many teachers. I’ve learned something important from
each of them. This book is partly my attempt to repay them.
My mother first taught me to read, I remember very well. I was not
in school; we were living in the country, and she and I had lessons
every morning. My first book was The Little Fir Tree. It was about a
little forest tree that was glad it was cut down for Christmas and taken
to the home of a nice boy and girl. I would not let any child read that
book now.
Once the door was open, I pushed through eagerly. By the time I
entered high school I had read a good deal; more, probably, than
most kids my age. My father had fostered my reading (when he
wasn’t prohibiting it, thinking I should go outdoors and get some
fresh air) by suggesting a wide variety of titles and giving me all
kinds of books as Christmas and birthday presents. He didn’t care if
I read them all; he just wanted me to be acquainted with different
kinds of books and not to be afraid to read any particular kind. He
kept giving me books as long as he lived. I still have many of them,
especially those he sent me when I was serving in the Air Force in
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vi Author to Reader
World War II. I carried for months in the breast pocket of my
fatigues a hard-bound copy of Palgrave’s Golden Treasury. A tough
little book with hard covers, it was a kind of talisman that I thought
would stop a bullet and save my life. Maybe it did; at least, no one
ever shot at me.
During my senior year in high school I began trying to read some
of the classical authors my father said I would have to read in college:
Plato, Homer, Sophocles. A friend already in college to whom I
revealed that I had read the Apologybelittled my achievement, saying
it was “easy.” I’ve never forgotten my chagrin, but to this day I believe
he was wrong. Plato’s Apology isn’t easy, though it’s more interesting
than many of his other dialogues. Scholars struggle to understand the
meaning of the more difficult, later dialogues, but in the long run
they are less crucial for the way we live our lives than the humanity
of Plato’s account of the trial and death of Socrates.
In 1946, I returned to college from the war to find myself in a class
conducted by Richard Schofield, who taught me to appreciate
Baudelaire and William Blake, among others. I could read French but
I was as yet unable to forget it was a foreign language. I learned that
language is both a means of and an obstacle to communication—
foreign languages, obviously, but one’s own language if one’s not
careful. Blake’s utter simplicity can be misleading, hiding depths of
profundity that most poets never sound.
I learned other lessons at my college, St. John’s in Annapolis. The
most important was that I was free to read any kind of book; my
father’s mentoring many years before was now validated. I gained the
confidence to attempt almost any book, in almost any Western
language, employing almost any set of symbols. (Of course, I often
failed!) For years I thought everyone shared this confidence, but now
I know that not too many possess it. One of my main goals in writing
this book is to try to instill that confidence in other readers.
I was for a time a professor at Columbia University, where among
other subjects I taught the famous “Humanities” course that was then
required for all freshmen. That was a whole new lesson in reading, but
I didn’t stay at Columbia for long. I soon found myself headed for
Chicago and Encyclopaedia Britannica, where for twenty-five years I
studied under and worked with one of the great teachers of reading,
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Mortimer J. Adler. We wrote and edited books together and also
taught together a seminar that had originated in the 1940s (when
Adler led it with Robert Hutchins). Over the years Dr. Adler and I
read about two hundred books together for this seminar, and I never
ceased to be astonished by his ability to arrive at the central question
a book asks, or that it requires a reader to ask. He died ten years ago,
but his spirit still hovers.
Now we are back home from Chicago, Gerry and I. The children
have gone away and have children of their own, and we have settled
into a life of leisure, which means I have more time since I retired to
read than I ever did. I still love reading, best of all when Gerry and I
or someone else read the same book, which often happens these days
for professional and other reasons (we are both teachers now). When
that happens I’m always surprised at the difference of our reactions,
even though we have read the same words. The fact that the other
reader may be a woman has something to do with this, but not every-
thing. Their minds grasp things mine never will, and vice versa,
which is right and proper.
This book contains fifteen chapters, each of which gathers discus-
sions of a group of authors and their works. The chapters are arranged
in chronological order, from “The Golden Age: In the Beginning” to
“Only Yesterday.” All told there are 182 entries, each one about the
work or works of a different author (or authors, in some cases).
Entries, too, are arranged in chronological order, starting with Homer
and Hesiod and ending with Patrick O’Brian and J.K. Rowling.
Occasionally it wasn’t possible to stick strictly to chronological order
within the period covered by a given chapter, since some authors may
have had long careers, and others quite short ones; or I may have
chosen to discuss a number of books by some authors and only one or
two books (or essays or poems, etc.) by others. Nevertheless, the
general direction of the book is chronological, as you can see from a
glance at the table of contents.
Saying that, I have to admit that my knowledge of and interest in
many very recent and popular books and other writings isn’t infinite.
I have not forgotten Ralph Waldo Emerson’s injunction: “Read no
book that is not a hundred years old.” A century is needed, he
thought, for good books to emerge from the throng of titles which,
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viii Author to Reader
then as now, presented themselves. I have disobeyed him in a few
cases but really not many, and when I have done so I may turn out to
have been wrong. Will anyone be reading about Jack Aubrey and
Stephen Maturin or Harry Potter a hundred years hence? I hope so,
but I’m not at all sure. I’m not sure that anyone will be reading
anything a hundred years hence—but that is another question.
HOW TO USE THIS BOOK
There are, I suggest, four different ways to use The Joy of Reading. The
first is as a reference in which a given author or title can be
researched, perhaps because it is mentioned in something else you
may have been reading. You could look it up elsewhere—on the
Internet, for instance—but the book might be more convenient if it’s
sitting on your desk next to a dictionary and a thesaurus. If you
looked up a writer or a work in my book, you would also be assured of
the authority of the information, something the Internet does not
always provide.
Second, it can be used as an introduction to the history of literature
(taking that word in its most general sense, to include history, philos-
ophy, even mathematics and science up to a certain level, as well as
fiction, drama, and so forth). Used in this manner it need not be read
straight through. The table of contents alone may suggest all you want
to know about what I believe to be a reasonable history of literature (in
that sense). Or parts of it, for example the Golden Age of Greece or the
Romantic Age, might especially interest you, in which case you could
read some or all of the entries in those chapters and leave the others for
another day. If I myself were new to this book, I might turn first to a
chapter about the seventeenth century, if there was one, because that
is a period I like and know quite well. (And if I did find such a chapter,
I might be annoyed because the author had left out this or that figure.)
Third, the book can be read from cover to cover. I know this is
unlikely. My editor, Hillel Black, may turn out to be the only man who
has ever done it. His reasons were professional, but he pleased me by
saying he enjoyed doing it. (The book has been read from cover to
cover by one other person: my computer guru. Her name is Laurel
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McKiernan and she too said she enjoyed it. But she may have just been
polite. In any case, I owe her a great debt for all she did to make the
manuscript presentable.)
Fourth and finally, the book can be used as the basis for a reading
program that can be followed for a number of years. In the Afterword
that follows the text, I present a program covering ten years. It includes
ten books a year, or one hundred all told, which may be too many or
too few—that depends on you. If you undertake this program, I wish
you the best. I can assure you that almost all the books that are
included are really good, so you will not be wasting your time.