On the first day of my editing class at Loyola University Maryland, I asked the students to provide some basic information--class year, hometown, phone number where you can be reached. (I once woke a student with a call in early afternoon to inform that the final examination had started fifteen minutes previously. She showed up and passed.) And, out of idle curiosity, I asked them to give the title of the most recent book they had read that was not assigned in a class. The results were seldom inspiring.
I have been out of the classroom for seven years, and today I would probably be advised that that last question is irrelevant. No one reads. The schools, after all, have been emphasizing STEM to the exclusion of all other subjects, teaching to state-administered tests rather than exploring texts. The universities, reduced to sports facilities with attached trade schools, are eliminating humanities courses and whole departments. And we are barraged with articles informing us that the era of reading is over.
I have been an omnivorous reader since childhood. When I worked at newspapers I read a lot of murder mysteries, because they were easy to get through at night after a day of editing (and showed disagreeable people meeting violent death). The leisure of five years of retirement has opened the possibility of engaging more challenging stuff.
In previous posts I have occasionally mentioned books that I have read and enjoyed, always wondering if doing so was merely showing off what a great reader I am. No more of that. Now that the era of reading is over, I take writing about books I've read to be an act of defiance.
So, in the hospital being treated for a violent attack of vertigo, I was able to finish reading Emily Wilson's translation of The Iliad. I liked that she chose iambic pentameter, which feels right for English, and made for straightforward reading. I thought the narrative powerful. Some of the word choices struck me as prosaic, but I have no Greek and therefore no authority. I chose to read straight through to get the effect, rather than consult her formidable apparatus of notes, but when I occasionally looked at a note, her choices looked reasonable.
One of April's books was Ian McEwan's What We Can Know, a sophisticated look at our time from the perspective of a post-apocalyptic future, combined with a witty perspective on literary research. This month I got hold of The Keeper, the third in Tana French's Irish mysteries, following The Searcher and The Hunter. All three are solidly plotted works, with characters who have depth and showing a literate command of the language. Carl Hiaasen's Fever Beach entertained, but I sensed somewhat less oomph than in previous novels. Right-wing nuts may be a challenge even to his imagination.
Nancy Isenberg's White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America appealed because I am from Appalachia and have long been accustomed to the looks I get when I say that I am from Kentucky. What I had not realized is how much of the early settlers of the United States were "waste people"--vagrants, drunks, prostitutes, bankrupts, all manner of people whom the English upper classes explicitly labeled as useless and determined to expel. The larger recognition is how much our current society is built on the assumption that there are whole categories of people who are worthless or at best marginally exploitable.
David Stuttard's Hubris: Pericles, the Parthenon, and the Invention of Athens describes how the Parthenon was built, in the context of the political situation in which Athens presented itself as the foremost of the Greek city states. Its combination of art history and political context is deftly managed.
And Stephen Budiansky's Oliver Wendell Holmes: A Life in War, Law, and Ideas presented a rounded picture of Holmes's life, but I found it a little thin on the Supreme Court opinions that are the basis of his fame. So I'll look next for a biography heavier on the law than the life.
If you are a reader--and it is only that as a reader you are following these dispatches--I urge you not only to continue reading but to proclaim what you have read that you found useful or gratifying. Stand against the tide.
