Beowulf on the Beach: What to Love and What to Skip in Literature's 50 Greatest Hits

by Jack Murnighan

Feel bad about not reading or not enjoying the so-called great books? Don’t sweat it, it’s not your fault. Did anyone tell you that Anna Karenina is a beach read, that Dickens is hilarious, that the Iliad ’s battle scenes rival Hollywood’s for gore, or that Joyce is at his best when he’s talking about booze, sex, or organ meats?

Writer and professor Jack Murnighan says it’s time to give literature another look, but this time you’ll enjoy yourself. With a little help, you’ll see just how great the great books how they can make you laugh, moisten your eyes, turn you on, and leave you awestruck and deeply moved. Beowulf on the Beach is your field guide–erudite, witty, and fun-loving–for helping you read and relish fifty of the biggest (and most skipped) classics of all time. For each book, Murnighan reveals how to get the most out of your reading and provides a crib sheet that includes the Buzz, the Best Line, What’s Sexy, and What to Skip.

Genres: Nonfiction, Books About Books, Classics, Literature, Reference, Literary Criticism, Education

374 pages, Paperback

First published May 19, 2009

About the author

Smalltown Hoosier by birth, central-Illinoisan till college, then some semiotics at Brown, an Orwellian stint in Paris, a Ph.D. in Medieval Lit from Duke, and finally New York's Chinatown. And now that i've hauled all my books to my 6th-floor walk-up, i'm staying put.

Reviews

[Valeriu Gherghel · Rating 3 out of 5]

Jack Murnighan este un publicist fără inhibiții, cum ar trebui să fim toți, la urma urmelor. Seamănă prin îndrăzneală cu Sandra Newman (cea cu Kitul de supraviețuire în literatura occidentală), chiar dacă este mai didactic și, firește, mai puțin zeflemist.

Murnighan ne arată nu numai ceea ce trebuie să ținem minte dintr-o carte, nu numai pasajele erotice (și găsește astfel de pasaje în toate cărțile enumerate), dar și ceea ce putem sări fără să ne simțim vinovați. Eu n-aș putea citi o carte sărind de la capitolul II la IV și apoi la ultimul, dar nu neg că se poate și așa, există digresiuni, descrieri, există cititori foarte grăbiți...

În finalul cărții, Jack Murnigham propune 13 reguli de lectură. Să le examinăm:

1. Nu uita să ții între degete un creion.
Subliniază enunțurile care îți plac, scrie pe margine sau deasupra paginii (cînd e loc), dacă ai spațiu în carte (poate ai norocul să găsești o pagină albă chiar la început, deși editorii sînt tot mai zgîrciți cu hîrtia), fă-ți un index de materii.

2. Citește cît poți de lent / de încet.
Fii meticulos, răbdător! Nu te grăbi niciodată, nu sări peste rînduri, pasaje, chiar dacă e vorba de un roman polițist și dorești să-l prinzi pe odiosul criminal înaintea detectivului. Unii cititori evită descrierile și nu urmăresc decît dialogurile. Greșesc...

3. Recitește.
Este ceea ce a făcut cel mai bine Borges însuși toată viața lui și nu doar cînd și-a pierdut complet vederea. Într-o epistolă către Lucilius, Lucius Annaeus Seneca a spus o vorbă decisivă: „În loc să răsfoiești într-o zi o mulțime de cărți și să nu-ți rămînă aproape nimic în minte, alege mai degrabă un singur volum, citește cîteva pagini, memorează un fragment și apoi meditează asupra lui”.

4.Caută lucrurile istețe, sugestiile cu privire la viață, la sensul ei. Găsești în marile cărți învățături care te privesc numai pe tine, îndemnuri și exemple menite doar ție. Dacă le eviți, vei păți ca Stefano din povestirea lui Dino Buzzati, Monstrul Colombre. Primești „Perla mării”, cînd ai ajuns în pragul morții și nu-ți mai folosește la nimic.

5. Ia aminte la pasajele ironice, la umorul personajelor, la jocurile de cuvinte, la modul în care curge o frază, la ritm.

6. Nu rata chestiunile care par lipsite de importanță, lexicul, jocurile de cuvinte.

7. Nu te enerva.
Dacă nu pricepi imediat o afirmație, semnificația unui pasaj, miza cărții, nu-i nici o tragedie, n-a intrat timpul în sac. Înțelegerea este un proces anevoios, cere timp, răbdare, nu vine niciodată printr-o intuiție subită, de ordin mistic. Intuiția se petrece (dacă se va petrece) abia la sfîrșitul lecturilor. Nu poți înțelege totul dintr-odată. Principalul e să „smulgi” cît mai mult dintr-o singură lectură.

8. Fă-ți o antologie, o colecție de citate, „a commonplace book”.
Așa a procedat și Lev Nikolaevici Tolstoi (ca să nu vorbim de alții), în A Calendar of Wisdom, cînd s-a decis să devină înțelept. A adunat 365 de citate (nu foarte lungi) pentru fiecare zi din an și reflecta la fiecare din ele, cu o energie sporită pe măsură ce se apropia de sfîrșit, de gara din Astapovo.

9. Alege-ți ediția potrivită.
Evită edițiile ieftine, sînt publicate de pungași. Este de preferat să fie una cu note în subsolul paginii (să le poți consulta imediat) și nu așezate la finele cărții. Saltul înainte și înapoi e plictisitor.

10. Alege-ți traducerea potrivită.
(Aproape) întotdeauna, traducerile recente sînt mai bune decît versiunile mai vechi. Există, desigur, și excepții. Faust în traducerea lui Blaga mi se pare mai bun decît Faust în traducerea lui Doinaș.

11. Fugi ca dracu de tămîie de traducerile care circulă pe internet.
Sînt de cele mai multe ori foarte vechi, neîngrijite, inexacte. Cel mai prost lucru este să-l citești pe Boccaccio într-o ediție din secolul al XIX-lea, din care traducătorul a eliminat toate pasajele erotice.

12. Nu privi mai întîi ecranizările.
N-ai făcut nici o scofală dacă ai văzut Adela, dar n-ai citit Adela. Mai ales dacă filmul e prost. Riști să nu mai deschizi cartea. Subtilitățile de limbaj se pierd cu desăvîrșire, sensul cărții e deturnat (drama devine melodramă, ca în Human Stain, după romanul lui Philip Roth), nu mai pricepi nimic. În plus, nu poți trece filmul la bibliografie.

13. Înainte de orice, implică-te în lectură, dă dovadă de îndrăzneală.
Intră în dialog cu autorul, încearcă să răspunzi la întrebările lui și, de asemenea, să-i pui tu însuți întrebări. Îndoiește-te, fii mefient, critic, sceptic, interoghează fiecare propoziție, fiecare cuvînt. Dar nu uita să-ți păstrezi deferența. Unii autori chiar au scris cărți bune, nu mint...

[Nicky · Rating 2 out of 5]

It's perhaps inevitable that I wouldn't get on with this book, for three reasons. One, I'm an academic type. Two, Beowulf genuinely is my idea of a beach read. Three, in his words, I sit down to pee.

No, no. I don't mean that in a derogatory, 'women always argue' way. I mean that Jack Murnighan keeps going on about 'Man Lit', and how amaaaazing it is that he managed to find anything worth reading in Pride and Prejudice, and how all women are going to be all starry-eyed over Darcy, and whatever.

The very idea that there has to be something 'sexy' about the books to keep a reader's interest strikes me as quite guy-centric -- or not so much that as it's a very consistent idea of what's sexy, or even more generally, what might draw a reader. No mention is given to the compelling nature of David and Jonathan's love for each other, for example.

There's possibly a fourth point, in that this is the literary canon of primarily dead white men. It's European to the extreme. It perhaps wouldn't be such a dealbreaker for me if it advertised itself as such, but considering the title is 'Literature's 50 Greatest Hits'...

Naturally, I disagree on other levels with his ideas of what to skip, and I don't really get on with his flippant tone. About all I credit this book with is encouraging me to pick up some of the classics I previously gave a miss -- but I already had that vague intention in mind anyway.

(Oh, and if you don't want to view the Bible as a literary document, avoid.)

[Jain · Rating 3 out of 5]

Alternately engaging and infuriating; I talked back to this book a lot while reading it. Murnighan has an unfortunate tendency to reduce works to male and female literature. (Men won't like Pride and Prejudice, especially the last third of the book; women won't like Beowulf. [Okay, to be fair, he doesn't actually come out and say the second bit, but here is what he says: "If there's such a thing as Man Lit, this is it: a plot-driven, action-brimming, hero-of-heroes story line, man vs. monster, battle to the death--just the thing to get your blood flowing and make you feel a little like a rampaging medieval Viking."])

He's a little too self-consciously slangy in the "this character was a righteous dude" vein, particularly towards the beginning of the book, though he thankfully calms down in the later chapters. He also has an unerring talent for recommending my least favorite translations.

Only two of the discussed works are non-American and non-European: the Bible and One Hundred Years of Solitude. (Murnighan cites his ignorance of Eastern Canon as partial explanation, but that doesn't excuse the absence of African writers and the near-absence of Central and South American writers.)

And, to round out my criticisms of the book, the first four chapters (on The Iliad, The Odyssey, The Old Testament, and The New Testament) are boring, and I disagree pretty fundamentally with his reading of Wuthering Heights and have issues with how he reads certain characters, including Catherine Barkley from A Farewell to Arms and Casaubon and Celia Brooke from Middlemarch. (Not to mention that he misspells poor Rosamond's name twice, with a different misspelling each time.)

More important than any of my problems with Beowulf on the Beach, however, is that it works. I now have nine books on my to read list that I'd previously dismissed as not being worth the effort. Murnighan's great at drumming up enthusiasm for his favorite books, and even better at letting you know the parts that can be safely skipped.

Despite my frequent eyerolls at some of the slang he uses, overall his half-chatty, half-lecturing tone works very well. It felt like a return to the best parts of college, sitting in the classes of those few but precious professors who could make almost any topic fascinating.

And I thought I could get through this review without ranting a little about Moby Dick, but I really can't. Murnighan has, to my mind, a very proper attitude towards Moby Dick: namely, he thinks it's awesome. He also has some great things to say about why he thinks it's awesome, as well as explaining a joke Melville makes that went completely over my head when I read the book on my own but that made me hoot with laughter on reading the explanation.

However, Murnighan also has a serious bee in his bonnet regarding the were-they/weren't-they relationship between Ishmael and Queequeg, and he wastes the chapter's "What's Sexy" section on attempting to debunk the semi-popular argument that Ishmael's and Queequeg's sharing a bed was not only emotionally but sexually intimate. I don't have a horse in that particular race (I think the way Melville wrote their relationship definitely has homoerotic overtones, but I don't care one way or another whether it was actually consummated.), but I do feel that Murnighan would've done better by quoting this (not sexual, but deeply sexy) passage, in which Ishmael and the other sailors of the Pequod are manipulating crystallized sperm from a slaughtered whale into oil:

"As I bathed my hands among those soft, gentle globules of infiltrated tissues, woven almost within the hour; as they richly broke to my fingers, and discharged all their opulence, like fully ripe grapes their wine; as I snuffed up that uncontaminated aroma,--literally and truly, like the smell of spring violets; I declare to you, that for the time I lived as in a musky meadow...

"Squeeze! squeeze! squeeze! all the morning long; I squeezed that sperm till I myself almost melted into it; I squeezed that sperm till a strange sort of insanity came over me; and I found myself unwittingly squeezing my co-laborers' hands in it, mistaking their hands for the gentle globules. Such an abounding, affectionate, friendly, loving feeling did this avocation beget; that at last I was continually squeezing their hands, and looking up into their eyes sentimentally; as much as to say,--Oh! my dear fellow beings, why should we longer cherish any social acerbities, or know the slightest ill-humor or envy! Come; let us squeeze hands all round; nay, let us all squeeze ourselves into each other; let us squeeze ourselves universally into the very milk and sperm of kindness."

Whew!

[Cheryl · Rating 2 out of 5]

Well, I'm glad I didn't read it with the intention of adding any of these 'classics' to my to-read lists. The author actually turned me off of the few that I had been considering, as he made sure to brag on all the gory violence, skanky sex, and self-indulgent despair so prevalent in most.

I did read it to see if I could be persuaded that any are ones that I should feel a twinge of guilt for not reading, or any that I would consider recommending to friends who want to accomplish the reading of a classic. I didn't get so much of that, either. These are definitely *L*iterary reads, and my friends and I are neither pretentious nor academic.

(Don't get me wrong; some of you have probably read or at least tried to read some of these. And you might like the book if you're the target audience. Good on ye'.)

I did get sideways rec's of a few short stories for our Group Reads in Gaines' group featuring same.

The Chapter "Snow" from Mann's The Magic Mountain.
Faulkner's novellas "The Bear."
Hemingway's "The Snows of Kilimanjaro."
Possibly Baldwin's "Giovanni's Room," if it's as short as Murnighan says ("an afternoon").

And I did get this guide to Don Quixote, which is already on my to-read list:

"Part I, Chapters I-VIII (getting to the windmills) and LII (the last chapter); then read Part II, I-V and the scenes of Sancho governing the 'island,' Chapters XLV, XLVII, XLIX, LI, and LIII. All told, that's less than two hundred pages."

And I read an interesting quote from the 2nd Epistle of Peter, which, if I leave out the links irrelevant to atheists, is advice we can all accept:

:Add to virtue knowledge; Add to knowledge temperance; and to temperance patience; and to patience brotherly kindness; and to brotherly kindness charity.:

And from One Hundred Years of Solitude I learned a helpful tip (from the character of a blind old matriarch). If you lose something, check where your routine had varied when you last remember having it. Checking along the route where it belongs is unlikely to be fruitful. Check instead the route of deviation from pattern.

And then we get to the very last sentence of the last appendix (leaving only acknowledgements and works cited): "Instead of worrying so much about what we teach, let's worry about how." Given the prior paragraphs, and given that so many of the 50 'classics' covered in the book are from white western males, I take that to mean that I have the author's permission to chuck the book in the bin, and read carefully any book written carefully... good thing I already do so....

And yet, I won't chuck this, or even rate it with a bomb. It was ok, and I don't feel that I totally wasted my time with it. And as I said earlier, you might well find even more of value in it.

[Sasha · Rating 3 out of 5]

Murnighan is also the author of a book called The Naughty Bits: The Steamiest and Most Scandalous Sex Scenes from the World's Great Books, and that tells you a lot about him. Murnighan is the guy who considers himself "the cool professor" at your college. His mission here is to take some books traditionally considered old, crusty, impenetrable and boring, and convince you that in fact they are cool.

This is a lovely idea, and of course he's right. Sometimes. I mean, no, the Old Testament is not cool. The Aeneid and Tom Jones: not real cool. But Paradise Lost is cool, and the Decameron is both cool and filthy.

But still. There's a section in each chapter of this book called "What's sexy", which you can imagine how labored that is when he gets to Blood Meridian. If you had a professor like this in college, you probably felt the same way I did about him: he could be fun; his class was engaging; but sometimes he was kindof a dork.

You know that one friend of yours from work who's always like "This year, I'm going to read some classics!" and then gets like four chapters into Wuthering Heights and quits? This book might be of interest to her. If you already know who your favorite Bronte sister is, you don't need it.

[John · Rating 1 out of 5]

Read a few chapters and was turned off. It's like listening to someone on a barstool puffing their chest after a few drinks and giving you the "in your face" scoop on something. In this case, some classics of literature. Superficial looks at books with no insights I could discern as being helpful to what makes a work great. I'm glad I wasted only five bucks on it.

[Beth · Rating 1 out of 5]

I really, really wanted to like this book. As a reader, and a reader of the classics, I thought that it would be fun and interesting to read about which books the author deemed worthy and to read why he thought others were unworthy. A mistake I made, and it was my mistake, was to misread the title. I thought the author would tell me which novels as a whole to skip from his list of 50. Not so, instead he tells you which parts within the works to skip. I cannot even begin to say how offensive I found this. The author wants to lure people back to reading the classics, yet turns around and tells them what passages, chapters, parts to skip? Who is to say that a part he hates, or thinks unimportant is one that I might love? I am so glad that the author decided to do my thinking for me. What makes this even worse, in my opinion, is that there really isn’t any thoughtful insight as to why you should skip these parts. I won’t get into his questionable choices as to what constitutes literature’s 50 greatest hits. We all have out favorites, and there is really no need to get angry about favorites being left off the list. It is what it is. I also didn’t care for the author bringing up film versions, and how great they are, in a few chapters. If one of the points of this book is to get people to read it is counterproductive to tell them how great the movie is.
This book made me so angry that I found myself taking notes on it, something I never do. Here are the things that made me angry, or that I took issue with:
1. The author goes on and on about how great the Aeneid is and how he wanted to underline the whole text as to what the reader should definitely read. Then goes on and tells you to skip random parts.
2. I love how the author tells us to take the time to parse out Hamlet’s words. Thanks, I didn’t realize Hamlet, the character, was such a big deal in Hamlet, the play.
3. The author seems to really dislike MacBeth, and I am assuming he included it because it’s a popular High School read? It’s a shame that he didn’t leave it off the list and put in something by a contemporary of Shakespeare. Marlowe, Michel de Montaigne, Machiavelli?
4. Along the same lines as above…Included Tom Jones, but states that there are better literary works from the same time period out there.
5. In his passage about Faust the author laments the translations available and then goes on to tell us that great works require you to “think” about how great they are in their native language to get through them. I’m sorry, but why would I want to read Faust like this? I also can’t believe the author resorted to the horny, little guy pun when talking about the devil.
6. Jane Eyre too much for you? Don’t worry; you can skip at least 10 chapters.
7. Anna Karenina a beach read? Come on, that book was unwieldy and I could barely muster the energy to finish it. The author neglects to mention that half the book is the Levin plotline, until his cleverly titled “what you should know, but don’t”. That plotline is a pretty big chunk of the book.
8. Complains that Ulysses is a pain in the ass of a book, but don’t worry he’ll tell you which parts to skip. Now you too can be a literary snob.
9. I’ll forgive the random typo or two, but there is no excuse for confusing Porfiry Petrovich (the detective) with Ilya Petrovich (police functionary) in Crime and Punishment. Nor is there and excuse for spelling the name of Faulkner’s character Benjy from The Sound and the Fury as Benji. I find the latter hysterical seeing as how the author has called Faulkner the finest American novelist. Where are the editors or proofreaders?
10. Speaking of the Sound and the Fury…the author complains that it is confusing and will scare people away from reading any of his works. Why then would you include it in a list of books designed to lure readers to the classics?

At the end of the day I am not sure if this book was meant to be funny or scholarly. The author uses plenty of big words, to the point of being obnoxious yet has a section within each chapter telling us what is “sexy” (a term I hate when applied to literature, food, and music) in the work being discussed. About half way through the book I took the author’s advice and started to skip parts of each chapter.

[Lisa]

OMG...I don't know if it is my teaching background or love of classics, but it doesn't matter. This book is making me giggle madly. I am cornering my children and reading sections aloud to them. I'm only a little ways into it, but I have a total crush on this book. Each section is about a classic summarized, broken down, digested and spit back out in a way you've never heard before. For instance, on The Old Testament under Quirky Fact:

The Old Testament is probably the greatest compendium of quirky bits this side of Ripley's, but one of the primary stories struck me as odd in a larger and more significant sense. We are told that Israel means "he who has wrestled with God" and and was the name give to Jacob (he of the ladder) after he wrestled with an angel. What's strange , though, is that at an earlier point, Israel (still called Jacob at that point) agreed to give his brother Esau -- who was dying of hunger -- a bowl of soup, but only if Esau surrendered his inheritance to him. Damn, bro! Then he tricks Esau out of their blind father's blessing by wearing goatskins to simulate Esau's he-man hairiness. Am I the only one who thinks that's a strange and rather shady history for someone who has a nation and a people named after him? Who says the antihero is a modern invention?

See what I mean?! OK...Maybe I'm just a big geek after all. :P

[Deb (Readerbuzz) Nance · Rating 2 out of 5]

I do not think there could be a person on earth (1) who obviously loves reading as much as I do, yet (2) who has completely and totally opposite reading tastes.

Let me make one thing clear: Jack is a GUY. He is looking for action in books. Plot. Fighting. Killing. Plunder. You know. That sort of stuff.
I could care less about plot. I want to get inside people’s heads. I want to understand people. A group of intriguing people, sitting around in chairs, talking? Excellent book for me.
So Beowulf at the Beach had nothing for me. Jack looked at fifty classics and showed all the violence and action you didn’t know was there.

The good news is that I think I can safely cross about twenty books off my list of Books to Read Before I Die. I’m just not interested in ever reading Blood Meridian or Lolita or Tropic of Cancer or, really, Faulkner. I can get that on the six o’clock news or the latest blockbuster movie. So that is a kind of usefulness, Jack. Thank you for that.

[SL Reads and Reads · Rating 4 out of 5]

I've been reading this one for nearly a year and will probably finish this summer. I think that's the perfect pace for this book; if I read too quickly the chapters merge together in my mind I begin to confuse James Joyce with Thomas Mann. This is a fabulous book and I might loan out my copy but I'll never give it away.

[James Payne · Rating 1 out of 5]

The author's voice made me miserable. He is fond of perpetuating gender stereotypes and does so throughout the book. For example, and I'm paraphrasing here, "Woman like Pride and Prejudice and dudes totally don't!" I guess I'm pretty embarrassed that I read this. I feel like I debased myself in some way. The author also repeatedly referred to how arduous the writing of the book was, which to me seems sort of inexplicable. No entry is very in-depth, and it's rare to read something in it that a Wikipedia article couldn't tell you. Except with Wikipedia you would be spared his increasingly hard to stomach personal preferences (One Hundred Years of Solitude is the BEST THING EVER, EVER, EVER, EVER etc). And perhaps it's just me but the whole idea of encouraging readers to 'skip' sections of books that you just spent 2,000 words effusively praising seems confusing. Then again, I could stand to learn to skip reading sections of books, like all the sections of this one.

In addition, the author uses the word 'especial' a mind-boggling amount of times.

Oh, one other thing: the author often implored the reader to 'one-up' his caricature of a person, apparently 'snobby', who mentions parts of books in conversation. Apparently that behavior is 'bad' and/or 'annoying'. But one-upping them by referring to an even more obscure part of the book is somehow good, and we should be happy we can do this. This oft-repeated line of thought made me sad for humanity.

[Jen B · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book has found its way onto my bookshelf at school alongside To Kill A Mockingbird, Romeo & Juliet, and the other high school staples I teach. I have loved using it to teach literary criticism and analysis this year. The author has such a funny, modern voice that most of my students really enjoyed reading his interpretations of books that they (and sometimes I) thought were boring. I have not read all of the books listed in Murnighan's 50 greatest hits, but I'm going to add a few of them to my list based on his recommendations.

[Nick · Rating 3 out of 5]

WHAT TO LOVE: The "Best Lines" sections
WHAT TO SKIP: Any section with the label "What's Sexy?" (ugh), any section where the words "Gabriel Garcia Marquez" appear, the weird and completely unqualified rant against neuroscience lurking somewhere in the middle of the book
WHAT TO KNOW: Murnighan doesn't tell you what books to skip, but what passages to skip within each book, which for most of the entries was unnecessary and frustrating

[Kam · Rating 4 out of 5]

One of the most common assumptions people make about my choice of career is that I am as well-read as my job description implies, and because of that, I have a reason to be - even an obligation to be - snooty about my reading choices, and make equally snooty declarations regarding any literary work I come across. These people look at me and titter, and say that I must have read the Russian novelists and enjoyed them, or that I must find Joyce and Woolf exceedingly enlightening reads.

But I do not like a classic simply because it is a classic, and as a professor I'm supposed to like them. As a matter of fact, there are certain classics that I hate with a passion. Finnegans Wake is my favorite example. A lot of people assume that I must love it, because I teach literature, but in truth, I absolutely abhor the thing. My relationship with James Joyce and his work is ambivalent at best, and my stand on Ulysses (the only long work of his that I was able to tolerate enough to read to the end) is a bit wobbly. But I hate Finnegans Wake, and personally believe that Joyce was either trying to be an absolute prick, or had drunk a little too much whiskey or absinthe (or both!) while writing it. The same can be said of The Catcher in the Rye, which I hated when I was made to read it in high school, and though my dislike has faded somewhat, I still wouldn't say that I like it because it's a classic.

On the other hand, there are also quite a few classics that I do enjoy. Homer's epics are absolute gems, and I love reading them. The same goes for Shakespeare's work, though I am more of a fan of his comedies than his tragedies. Pride and Prejudice is all right, but I think Jane Eyre is superior (and I have thought this way since I was sixteen, when they were required reading - and at the time, I couldn't stand Pride and Prejudice). Lady Chatterley's Lover is a heartbreaker, in more ways than one, and the same might be said of Don Quixote. And there are so many other classics besides: the swashbuckling adventures of Alexandre Dumas; the intricate logic-puzzles of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle; the twisted dreamland logic of Lewis Carroll. And this is just the Western side of things: I have not yet gotten into the delicate meditative beauty of the Genji Monogatari, for instance, or the aching longing for home in Bienvenido Santos's works (as best exemplified in the short story "The Day the Dancers Came").

Unfortunately, not a lot of people (nor a lot of my students) share the same enthusiasm as I do about the classics - or about reading in general. I feel this points to a fundamentally incorrect handling of the teaching of literature, particularly at the grade-school level: reading must be taught not only because it is an essential skill, but also because it is one of the greatest pleasures one will ever know.

This, I think, is the core mission of Jack Murnighan's Beowulf on the Beach. He seeks to promote reading in general, but reading of the classics in particular, as a pleasurable endeavor, something that the reader does because he or she thinks it is a worthwhile effort, and not because he or she is required to read. Murnighan selects fifty classic texts from the Western canon (no surprise, since he is speaking primarily to an American audience), and then proceeds to offer a combination of cheat sheet and enticement, telling them the naughty bits and which chunks to skip, all in an effort to get the reader to at least try his recommendations.

In a way, the book reads like a collection of reviews, since what Murnighan does is what any book review tries to accomplish: point out the best bits, point out the worst bits, and then explain why or why not the book is a worthwhile read. And, like all reviews, Murnighan's opinions are really rather personal. At the end of the book he explains how difficult it was to narrow down a list of fifty books for this particular project, and in that explanation he also adds that the true factor that determined whether or not he used a book for his project was whether or not he liked it.

This, I think, certainly goes a long way towards explaining why Murnighan chooses the books he does. Note that he includes Joyce, but recommends Ulysses and not Finnegans Wake, even though higher authorities (other professors and literary connoisseurs) generally declare Finnegans Wake to be superior to Ulysses. But Murnighan openly thumbs his nose at this opinion, and makes no bones about why, precisely, he thinks Ulysses is better than Finnegans Wake. In this, at least, I agree with him: just because "authorities" declare a work to be superior to another, does not automatically mean that the "better" work is a "better read."

It also helps to keep in mind the personal nature of the selections, as well as the opinions regarding them and the audience for whom the book was intended. A lot of the statements Murnighan makes throughout the book will undoubtedly grate on many readers, particularly the way he distinguishes between "manly" literature and "girly" literature, something which is particularly prevalent in the early part of the book, but which is present all throughout. There is a rather "douchebag" feel to Murnighan's writing, something which will undoubtedly put off more than a few readers. But then, one must remember that he is probably writing for an audience that appreciates such an approach - or perhaps, Murnighan himself believes it is the best approach, and so uses that instead of many other possible ways he could approach the subject at hand. This is certainly a good way of explaining why he dedicates a section of each entry solely to the "naughty bits" of a chosen book (though he also has another book solely about the naughty bits in books), and it also explains why he includes a section about what to skip in a particular work. While some people might disagree with this section entirely, I find that it can be useful when getting through some works like Homer's epics, where entire chunks of the epic are nothing more than lists and so have very little to contribute to the storyline itself. The reader may disagree with Murnighan about what (or what not) to skip in a book, but it must be admitted that there are very few classics (particularly early ones) that do not have chunks one can conveniently bypass without doing damage to one's understanding of the story - unless, of course, one is utterly enamored with the novel in question. That certainly seems to be the case with Murnighan and One Hundred Years of Solitude.

But for all that his writing makes him sound like a godawful douchebag, I will say quite a bit of it is humorous and very easy to read. There were quite a few times when I found myself laughing out loud over some line or idea, and it certainly helps in lightening up the ostensibly "serious" reads that Murnighan is trying to promote. While the jokes do grate on the nerves on occasion, there is a lot more there that is genuinely funny without being mildly offensive.

On the whole, Beowulf on the Beach is not entirely a bad read: it is rather entertaining, and really does try, in its own way (which may or may not be pleasing to the reader), to get the reader to try the classics Murnighan writes about. And although this is not a book about pedagogy, it does point out what is fundamentally wrong with the way literature is often taught in grade school and high school, and offers an alternate method of teaching it: get them to love it first by showing them what they can love about it, and all the rest will follow.

[Heather · Rating 5 out of 5]

Rating: A-

Summary: Dr. Smarty Pants (aka, the down-to-earth Jack Murnighan) gives you a low-down on 50 of the world's greatest books. He tells you what's sexy, what's skip-able, and why this book will rock your world if you'll just give it a chance. He aims to bring the lofty and esoteric of literature down to the huddled masses of the world so we can enjoy it too.

Review: I do admit that I have a fondness (and maybe a little bit of a crush) on this author. I mean it, let's get real, what guy was born a Hoosier, has a PhD in Medieval Literature from Duke, has read the Bible of his own free will (more than once), and writes insanely interesting and sexy articles for Nerve.com? I'm pretty sure you can't find that combination anywhere else on that planet. (Plus, the guy's an involved donor-dad and not bad looking to boot. Too much.)

But lest you think I gave this guy an above-average grade just because I've got the hots for him, let me clarify: this book is really, really good.

Here's why this book is good: it does what it's supposed to do. Accomplishing your objectives goes pretty far in my opinion. Did I agree with everything he said? No way. Do I think at times his irreverence can go a bit far? Sure. Does that make this a bad book? Not too much.

Here's how I approached this book (which I don't think should be read as a cover-to-cover read... let it be your guide):
1. I started out by reading the intro (which is generally a good place to start); this let me get a feel for his style, his writing, and his take on literary things in general. Up to this point, I was with him.
2. Next, I checked out a couple of chapters on books I'd previously read (including, but not limited to, Pride and Prejudice, Beloved, and The Bible--Old and New Testaments--all of which are books that I have loved reading at one time or another); this gave me a frame of reference for his views on literature a little more specifically as I compared and contrasted with my perspective on things.
3. Finally, I read a couple of chapters on books I had wanted (but been reticent) to read (Don Quixote, Wuthering Heights, Paradise Lost, and Middlemarch) and decided to test his opinions in real time.

I picked up a mega-used copy of Middlemarch at my local 1/2-Price Books retailer and set about to read it in a matter of months over the summer. I was persuaded to participate in this little experiment because of the associated B on the B Summer Reading Challenge hosted at Books on the Nightstand (because the idea of challenges with no rewards gets me excited).

Let me say this: I believe with fervent conviction that, had I not read the Middlemarch primer in Beowulf on the Beach, I would have had a ridiculously hard time enjoying this book. But, since I did pre-read the B on the B cheat sheet, I loved (loved, loved, loved) this book. This is earning a spot on my all-time-faves list. Beyond my heart-felt adoration of Ms. George Eliot (for publishing a "woman's book" in a man's world), this book knocked my socks (and shoes) off. I didn't start out loving Dorthea (and the idea that she was going to be a primary protagonist made me put the book down for about a month), but by the end she was gorgeous. She didn't change significantly; rather, the situation around her became more accomodating to her personality and I began to see that her beauty was really beauty and not posturing.

And speaking of personalities, there was plenty to go around. I did put this book down for a month, but when I came back (because the lure of no reward at the end of the challenge pushed me to do it), I picked right back up and the characters were all still vivid. The way that Eliot populated an entire city, letting you peek at the high and the low, was phenomenal. I think that my favorite character was probably Farebrother--his sacrifice for the youthful (and enduring) love of Fred Vincy and Mary Garth actually brought a tear to my eye and a lump to my throat.

But getting back to Murnighan and B on the B, I didn't give my current-author-crush a perfect grade because I didn't think he was perfect. In the example of Middlemarch, I think his assessment of Mr. Casaubon was off (he was being a little too 21st-Century American in his critique, I think). In the example of The Bible, I think his assessment of the book (in general) was off. Sure, The Bible is a piece of literature, but it's also a sacred text, and he didn't treat it as such (the snark got to be a bit much and dumbed down the actual review of the texts, in my opinion).

Now, I'm not so naive as to assume that everyone who comes from Indiana is a Christian of some stripe, but to be more balanced, I'd like to have seen him review texts from other faiths, just to see if his cynacism is directed specifically at Judaisim and Christianity, or if it's more generally applied to all religions. I'm sure that neither The Book of Mormon nor The Qur'an has risen to the level of The Bible (in terms of generally-accepted literary opinion and/or general readership), but his slights of The Bible were something that made me wonder (and put a grain of salt in how blindly I accepted his opinions on other books). And lest you think I'm just a religious nut, check out this quote as evidence that I'm not alone in this opinion.

"Many of Murnighan’s conclusions are off-base (see, for instance, his chapter on Balzac’s Père Goriot). But as with the collected writings of Pauline Kael, disagreeing with the critic can be more fun than turning to the work itself."
--Very Short List (June 1, 2009)

Recommendations: If B on the B seems like something you'd like, check out other great books that help reading the classics become more fun, such as How to Read Literature Like a Professor and 13 Ways of Looking at the Novel.

[Joanna · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book was not quite what I had expected. It did serve two purposes for me-- a review of lit. that I don't actually intend to re-read, and some teasers that encourage me to read some that I hadn't read yet. Otherwise, I found myself irritated a lot of the time. The author doesn't seem to have a grasp of his audience really. He includes a "What's Sexy" category in each review, and honestly, he uses that section to reveal when and if there is sex happening in the work. I submit to you, the fact that there is a Sex Scene in many Greek myths is neither a surprise nor what I would call sexy. I highly doubt that anyone who is thinking of re-reading the Classics would care, and it especially bugs me that he seems to feel that segment belongs in every single review. I was also somewhat shocked to find that the "What to Skip" refers to individual pages, chapters, or sections of each individual work. I was expecting that to tell me "this work isn't worth the time" but no, he says "this work is fabulous, but don't bother with Chapter 2, and pages 45-53 are also unimportant." What?!? This is crazy to me, except perhaps for a work like Remembrance of Things Past, 'cause, well, you know. The most egregious example--- Pride and Prejudice. Crazy. Anyway, I didn't totally hate reading this book, and it did inspire me to add Bleak House to my to-read pile. It also confirmed for me that I really don't want to read James Joyce. At least not yet.

[Kaylee Burns · Rating 3 out of 5]

Well this certainly was a very interesting novel. I learned a little bit about several of the "50 Greatest Pieces of Literature" but it was really only his opinion on things. It gave an adequate description of the novels and made even some of them sound interesting, but all in all I was thoroughly bored. The book was easy to read but I felt like I was just reading it page by page just to get through it. The bible review did intrigue me a bit. His fascination of the Songs of Solomon really seemed funny to me, I've read parts of the bible and I found the most informitive chapter of the old testament to be Psalms, but it is his opinion not mine. This book is like spark notes meets Jay Leno. It does have language that any teenager or young adult could relate to and it also had a certain charm to it, but I wouldn't want to read it again. Unless in college i have to read one of the novels in the book then I will definitely use it as a "study guide".

[Elizabeth · Rating 3 out of 5]

By the end, I felt it was worth reading this book because I managed to get a couple good points, the beginning was painful. Despite the marketing of essentially bringing classic literature to the masses, the author is constantly making difficult word choices in his writing (I read quite a bit and there were a lot of words that I had never seen before, let alone just didn't know what they meant). I agree with the another reviewer that his choices left something to be desired on the whole and that they are heavily weighed toward "male" action stories. As far as the humor of the book, to me, it felt like he was trying to hard. Bottom line, while there are some good points in this book, I urge readers to take his advise to skip the chapters on the books that don't interest you; you really won't regret it.

[Sue · Rating 4 out of 5]

Although he sometimes becomes rather too enamored of his own vocabulary, Murnighan pretty much hits the nail on the head with most of the books he reviews. And he's funny and easy to read. I was rather relieved to hear a PhD in Medieval and Renaissance Literature say that there are parts to the "great" novels that aren't so great; especially when he called the main character in James Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, a "simmpering dork". I'd always thought of him as an annoying twit, so we were obviously on the same page. If and when I revisit some of those classics; in some cases read them for the first time - I'll probably reread the chapter in Beowulf first to put me in the right frame of mind. And I'm so glad he called Finnegan's Wake, "gibberish"!

[Vanessa · Rating 3 out of 5]

I don't recommend reading this book front to back but it's fun to read in pieces. Murnighan provides a synopsis of each book and author and is kind enough to give lots of detail and what parts to skip over. I learned something in just about in all 50 segments. Unfortunately, I still won't be rushing to read Moby Dick or Proust but that's hardly his fault.

I will say read this book with a dictionary handy. I thought I had a reasonably wide vocabulary but Murnighan throwing around fancy words like "thaumaturge" had me feeling like an ESL.

(To save you some time btw, thaumaturge=magician. You're welcome.)

[Bernadette]

This is a really fun book. The author, a writer and professor, sets out to tell us why the books we read in high school or college, are so much better read as adults. Murnighan chooses 50 books from The Iliad to Toni Morrison's Beloved, with 48 classics in between.

With a wicked sense of humor, Murnighan gives us a challenge, "let's give literature another look, but this time we'll enjoy ourselves." He writes of Moby Dick that it is one of the funniest books of all time, and that "Chaucer gets a bad rap," from English professors. He notes that this is not a "Cliff's note" of the classics but more "...an attempt to show you what's in the great books that makes them really matter."

[Sarah · Rating 3 out of 5]

Really a 3.5 star book. I enjoyed this, and I appreciated the effort it took to put this together. I do not read as an academic, plot is almost always more important in my reading than the language and allegorical meaning, so I like the way he laid out ways to read deeper into the works. After reading this, I definitely have some classics to add to the list , and some to leave off. Not bad.

[Amy]

I heard an interview with the author on NPR one morning while heading to the farmer's market.

So far, I have enjoyed the book. I'm not sure that it's a "read straight through" book but is more of a reference to come back to at various times.

[Mark Oppenlander · Rating 3 out of 5]

Most of the time, I enjoy reading classic literature, so I don't really need anyone to sell me on the concept of picking up a famous book that's more than a few years old. But when I read the description of this book, it sounded entertaining so I added it to my list.

Jack Murnighan holds a PhD in Literature and has spent time as a college writing professor, columnist and blogger. He really, really wants to convince his readers that the classics can be read and enjoyed, so in this book he provides short overviews of 50 famous pieces of literature, ranging from Homer's Iliad to Toni Morrison's Beloved. In each case, he provides some history of the author and/or book, a synopsis, a discussion of what most readers see as relevant or buzzworthy, insight into what people don't know about the book, commentary on any sexy or salacious content and a quick guide to which parts of the book, poem or play to skip. If you've ever had a teacher who tried to turn you on to Shakespeare by pointing out how much sex and violence there was in his work, you have an idea of Murnighan's approach.

Murnighan writes his essays in a witty yet colloquial style that seems to be channeling his inner frat boy. He uses words and phrases like "cool," "awesome" or "that's incredible" far too often for my taste but his goal is to make these works accessible to a wide audience so I guess I can forgive him. Every once in a while though we get a glimpse of the college professor behind the frat boy - the educated literature buff who is in love with poetry and language. Once he's moved past the salacious material, he offers his favorite passages from these books, poems and plays with rapturous descriptions using words like "gorgeous" and "exquisite." It's not a bait and switch as far as I can tell; Murnighan really is entertained by the titillating material in say, Chaucer or Boccaccio, but he also dearly loves well ordered language and words. His own use of language can be at times clever and playful, especially when he's getting carried away with one or the other of his favorite works.

I have read almost half of the works cited in this book already. Several more were on my to-read list. After perusing Murnighan's descriptions of the ones I had not read and cross-referencing against his descriptions of the ones I have read, I added several new books to my reading list. However, I also crossed off a few items that I no longer feel the need to go out off my way to pick up; Murnighan's honest descriptions and synopses give me a sense for what I will personally enjoy and what I might find a waste of time. And as much as he loves the classics, he does not hold them up as precious.

In the end, perhaps that is the greatest gift this book has to offer. Murnighan does not see these works of great literature as items to sit on a shelf in a museum and be adored. They live and breathe and contemporary readers can be in dialogue with them now. Murnighan's hope is that more people will be brave and grab one of these works off the shelf at the library; he even offers advice on how to read a work of literature slowly and deeply, to really appreciate the quality of the material. As someone who already believes that the classics are worth my time, I didn't need to be evangelized. Nonetheless, Murnighan is an entertaining field guide and this is a fun survey of a number of important works.

P.S. Some people will want to argue about which works Murnighan has included and which he has excluded. But the author is very clear that he is not trying to create the definitive list, but a broadly representative one, covering the major authors and time periods of Western literature.

[Christina (Boupie) · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a very entertaining book (if you can look past his some what biases choice of classics). He did what he set out to do and entertained along the way. Like all good literature professors his aim is to get you to want to read the classics, to get excited about them, and ultimately take something away from them. His choice of classics I will relate at the bottom (more for me than for your benefit) and not all of them seemed like classics to me, but all of them sounded interesting enough I might be willing to try them (especially if I can get them free on the Kindle, no real commitment there). Note here: he only picked classics from America and Europe. More on this below.

Murnighan did an excellent job giving little bits of history on the author and the book (sometimes even the time period it takes place or was written in). It gave the books some more flavor and gave him a chance to gush (almost like a school-girl crush on some of these books, which helped me to want to read them). His sections on the buzz generally provided good come backs to snots who think they can make you feel inadequate, what people should know was insightful but not the best, loads of good lines (sometimes enough I am not sure I need to go read the novel), loads of sex (he has at least two other books reviewing sex in the classics, theme much sir?), and quirky facts could be fun but some were just not needed. Lastly, and most importantly, what to skip sounded realistic and really made many of the books more approachable, especially when you can drop them as soon as they get boring, which was his claim with many of them.

If you want a book that will get you excited about reading the classics and might even get you to actually read some of them. Plus the tips on reading good books is good for any book, so get to reading!

That said I do want a book like this but for the classics from more than America and Europe. I know he only has a background in Western literature but there has to be more than just dead white people to read (one black)... maybe an Eastern set of classics as I want to know what to read in the classics that make up the rest of the world.

***SPOILER ALERT*** If like me you wanted to be surprised by each book as he presented them, than read no further. Beyond I have a list of books he recommends, mostly for myself since they would not all fit in the personal notes and because I thought it might be nice to know. Enjoy!

In no particular order (okay so the order I remembered them, sorry) they are:

The Iliad & The Odyssey, Holy Bible: King James Version, The Aeneid, Metamorphoses, Beowulf, Dante's Inferno, The Divine Comedy: PARADISO, The Decameron, The Canterbury Tales, The Faerie Queene, The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling, Moby-Dick, Don Quixote, Hamlet: By William Shakespeare, King Lear, Macbeth, Pride and Prejudice, Eugene Onegin, Bleak House, Great Expectations, Paradise Lost, Faust, Père Goriot, Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights, Madame Bovary, Crime and Punishment, The Brothers Karamazov, War and Peace, Anna Karenina, Middlemarch: A Study of Provincial Life, The Wings of the Dove, Remembrance of Things Past: Volume I - Swann's Way & Within a Budding Grove (all of the parts not just part 1), Ulysses, The Magic Mountain, The Sound and the Fury, Tropic of Cancer, Lolita, Blood Meridian, Beloved, A Farewell to Arms, To the Lighthouse, Native Son, The Trial, The Man Without Qualities, Giovanni's Room, Gravity's Rainbow, One Hundred Years of Solitude

[Jeremy · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book definitely accomplishes its goal of making the reader want to explore the classics. Before becoming too exasperated about the omissions from “Literature’s 50 Greatest Hits” (Count of Monte Cristo doesn’t make the cut?? Come on!!), I stopped myself and read the “Note on the Selections” in the appendix. There, Murnighan writes, “It was clearly an impossible task, and no matter what I chose, it still felt like taking spoonsful out of an ocean” (363). I calmed down a bit, but still would like to read a chapter from him on other favorites of mine.

The format of the topic headings within each chapter is great: The Buzz, What People Don’t Know (But Should), Best Line, What’s Sexy, Quirky Fact, and What to Skip. The other appendix on tips for reading is also helpful. I agree with the author that how we read is much more important than what we read.

Of Murnighan’s top 50, he made me most want to read The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling; Moby Dick; Great Expectations; Bleak House; Paradise Lost (the author loves Milton); War and Peace; and One Hundred Years of Solitude (I think this is the author’s favorite).

According to Murnighan, the message of Don Quixote is “that to see beauty and romance and adventure in error is better than to see the truth as it actually is” (134). The subtle crux of Crime and Punishment is that “the alternative to suffering is God, and redemption is always available – even when you don’t know it” (222). Dostoevsky also shows that “the desperate man wants to be broken, not to be able to endure… For at the end of hope, at least there’s cease” (222). The question asked by Proust’s behemoth Remembrance of Things Past is “what matters? And the answer is the self, only the self. And once you commit to memory, further experience becomes irrelevant. Each of us has already lived enough to know all and everything, if only we had been able to get the meaning out of the time we’ve already been alive. There’s no point in gathering more data; instead we should simply go back…” (261).

I also learned that Cervantes and Shakespeare died on the same day: April 23, 1616 (137).

Murnighan contends that Proverbs Chapter 8 “describes how we were part of God even before creation” (26), but when I looked it up the speaker of those lines is Wisdom personified, so I’m not sure this contention holds.

Overall, a great reference book that I will likely keep to review before starting any of the 50 classics covered here.



Potent Quotables:

From Moby Dick: Doubts of all things earthly, and intuitions of some things heavenly; this combination makes neither believer nor infidel, but makes a man who regards them both with equal eye (200).

Do kids today, when they call shoes “kicks,” know that they’re citing Joyce? In Chapter 10 [of Ulysses], a drunk is described as having “a swell pair of kicks on him” (278).

[Jay · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the all time best nonfiction books I have ever read! It was like reading 50 books, multiple times each, and then absorbing all that experience into my gut. Plus, being entertained by the descriptions with dollops of extra amusement. Wow! I wish he had chosen 500 books instead of a mere 50.

Also, this book significantly increased my library list of books on reserve (which wasn't short to begin with).

Also also, it was like having a conversation (or occasionally argument, for I stand very differently on Nabokov than he does) about these books. It's sometimes difficult to trigger a really good discussion about some of my favorite books, since it can be tough to dig up someone who has read them.

I think I'm going to use this book as a reference as I read or reread the books he discusses.

So, his tone is a bit flippant and I don't really agree with his choice of the 50 greatest works, but I do love his enthusiasm for the books he reviews. And while I'm not one to skip or skim, I do appreciate knowing where I might get bogged down in the reading.

There are definitely flaws in this book. I didn't need the sex scenes pointed out. On the other hand, the quirky facts were almost all fresh, and I liked knowing why each book is famous.

[Chris Cohen · Rating 3 out of 5]

It is a great premise, and the author is well-read and very astute.

However I don’t totally agree with his selection of “greatest hits” (especially modern classics). I know, everyone’s a critic, and lists are inherently flawed.

Additionally, I have a hard time saluting books that are best-known for their notoriety (and, often, hyper-sexuality to the point of sexual violence against women).

Finally, too few women, too few diverse/international/non-European authors, and way too much Good Old Boys. (Miller? Mann? Pushkin? And who the heck is Musil?)

[Anson Cassel Mills · Rating 4 out of 5]

The title of one of Murnighan’s earlier books, The Naughty Bits, gives you a clue about where he’s going to go in this treatment of classic literature. Even so, once you adjust to the chatty, “cool college prof” style, you may still be caught up in his contagious enthusiasm for literature. For all his methodical leering, Murnighan enjoys well-tuned prose and writes some clever lines himself. Not that I intend to read many of his recommended works of literature—certainly nothing written in the 20th century—but I’m glad I’ve encountered his passionate endorsements to know why not.

[Michael · Rating 4 out of 5]

I like this book a lot because it's like having a conversation with your friend who has read all the "great works" of literature that are in the Western canon and is just honest about what he really likes and doesn't like about all of them and can tell you why it's worth at least trying them.

Sample a few pages and if you like his style, and you find tomes like Ulysses and Wings of the Dove to be intimidating, I think this book will be useful for you.