Barry’s Comments (group member since Nov 25, 2019)

Barry’s comments from the #ClassicsCommunity 2021 Reading Challenge group.

OK — Krisztina. Got it.

Timár — I gather you are reading Gargantua first. I had started reading the Urquhart and Motteux translation (which is the free eBook from Project Gutenberg) and the Raffel translation (which is the physical book I have had for a while). These both place Gargantua first because it is the first in the narrative’s timeline even though Pantagruel was the first written. I grew frustrated with these: the first because of its archaic 17th century English, the second because of its small print, and both because of their lack of notes. I finally broke down and spent $15 on the more scholarly Penguin Classics eBook edition translated by Scrrech, which follows the publication order.

Timár — thank you for your recommendation of Bakhtin’s book. I picked up a used copy of it and have just started it too.
Don’t worry about going too slow; I’ll be getting off to slow start too. Something possessed me to sign up for buddy reads of Proust’s I Search of Lost Time, The Tale of Genji, and The Brothers Karamazov. The first two of these seem more ambitious to me than Rabelais, but I expect to get through everything by the summer, along with some lighter fare as it comes along from my hold list at the library.

I’m through the Introduction and the first 3 chapters.
At the risk of appearing pedantic to those who already know this, keep in mind that this work is a product if a culture which is remote in both time, space, and cultural assumptions. Much context is usually omitted in Japanese language and literature, it being expected that the listener or reader can fill in the details from their cultural knowledge. This may not work so well for 21st century Western readers unfamiliar with Japanese culture from more than a millennium ago. Pay particular attention to the Introduction and notes if you want to understand what’s going on.

Melymbrosia by Virginia Woolf.
It’s a reconstructed early draft of her first novel, The Voyage Out, which I finished a little while ago. I was interested to see what changed.
I’m about half way through, have run out of renewals at the library, and it’s due back Friday.

It’s not 2020 yet here in Cleveland.
I have 1 hour 45 minutes left to finish another book in 2019!

I’m interested. This is another book I’ve been meaning to read for over 50 years. I remember that I checked out of the library when I was in high school, got a little way into it (as far as the use of ducks), but didn’t really have time for it then.
I have both print and eBook versions that I’ve purchased relatively recently (i.e., in this century).
I think I’d like to start in February or March. I’m estimating that I’ll probably read it in less than 2 months, even with other reading going on. I’ll be reading it in English. Probably better to save the reading of it in French for my third or fourth reading, which means I’ll probably be dead by then.

Maybe I should join in. I read this in 1970 during a very trying time in my life and enjoyed it. Next year would be a good time to reread it.

Ah, another book I’ve been meaning to read for over 50 years! I might as well get around to it.

Sounds good to me.

Caitlyn wrote: "Anyone have any tips with how to approach Les Miserables? Because it is so scary to me with the size of it"
The Readers Review: Literature from 1714 to 1910 group
(https://www.goodreads.com/group/show/...) is currently doing a read of Les Misérables. You might like to check out the discussion there.

Rachel wrote: "I am looking to get into poetry more. The poets I am familiar with now are Plath, Dickinson and Whitman as well as Shakespeare’s sonnets. I know a little bit of Robert Frost as well. Besides them, ..."
Important 20th century poets I would include are Wallace Stevens, Carl Sandburg, E. E. Cummings, T. S. Eliot, Theodore Roethke, and Ezra Pound.

I can't say that I have a favorite that I want everyone to read. Literature should be thought of as more like a buffet than an obstacle course. Not everyone enjoys the same dishes. We do not want to eat the same foods all time. Foods we could not stand as children are our comfort foods now. When someone asks me what my favorite food is, I usually reply, "Something wonderful that I've never had before."
One of my favorite poems by Walt Whitman is Crossing Brooklyn Ferry. He speaks directly to us from the past:

"It avails not, time nor place--distance avails not,
I am with you, you men and women of a generation, or ever so many generations hence,
Just as you feel when you look on the river and sky, so I felt, ... "

Books speak to us with voices from other places and other times. We may or may not understand a writer's context; we may or may not be ready to understand the message when we first read it; or, we may understand more than the author and realize that it is gorgeous nonsense. Don't be afraid to reread a book, whether or not you finished it earlier. To paraphrase Heraclitus, "You can never read a book the same twice." It may speak to you later; you may understand more clearly why it is stupid nonsense.
All that being said, I will recommend a couple of books. More in the nature of meta-recommendations actually.
First is The Lifetime Reading Plan by Clifford Fadiman. Just a sentimental favorite of mine because I stumbled across it about 50 years ago and found it a generally useful guide at the time. Nowadays, of course, there is no shortage of lists of books you should read to be well read. Every BookTube channel implicitly presents one. Goodreads is a vast clearing house of such information. 50 years ago, Fadiman's book was a handy guide. As were almost every student, teacher, professor, and librarian I ever knew back then. All such guides are necessarily biased. Glean from them. Ignore them. Make your own necessarily biased guide that you follow and revise constantly: you have to, you have no choice.
The other book I can recommend is The Complete Harvard Classics (Eireann Press) Kindle Edition. It is from 1909, so it is a little dated, But it contains 51 volumes, compiled and edited by Charles W. Elliot, plus the 20 volume Harvard Classics Shelf of Fiction. Currently it costs 49 cents. Put that on the Kindle app on your phone or computer. Certainly not everything you'll want to read, but it will keep you out of trouble for a while.

Hi, I’m Barry, living in Cleveland Heights, Ohio.
I’m retired now, so I have a lot more time for reading. By my count, about 52 of the 113 books I’ve read so far this year are classics. Some authors: Allen Ginsberg, Sun Tzu, E.E. Cummings, Huysmans, Baudelaire, Benjamin Franklin, Washington Irving, James Baldwin, Josephus, John Woolman, William Penn, Sadahichi Hartman, Marlowe, Orwell, Norman Mailer, Anna Katherine Green, Omar Khayyám, H.G. Wells, Plato, Thoreau, Upton Sinclair, Homer, Hesiod, Ibsen, Victor Hugo, Zola, Aldous Huxley, Charles Darwin, Rachel Carson, Viktor E. Frankl, Quintus Smyrnaeus, Booth Tarkington, James Fenimore Cooper, Italo Calvino, Zora Neale Hurston, Virgil, Virginia Woolf, and Malcolm X.
I’ve bought a lot of the Delphi Classics complete works volumes over the past few years, so I have literally hundreds of thousands of pages of classics stacked up in the Kindle eReader on my phone, so I should be busy for a while.
I’m not really concerned with numeric challenges for next year. I’m more interested in reading for understanding and enjoyment.
One of the more challenging works I have been trying to understand over the past few years is the Bible. I’m an atheist, but its history and its role in society, both historically and in the present day, fascinate me. Since it was originally written by hundreds of people over more than a millennium in historical contexts unfamiliar to most of us, heavily redacted, stirred, misinterpreted, mistranslated, and lied about, it is one of the most difficult classics to read with comprehension. Natalie Wexler, in her book The Knowledge Gap, points out that our reading comprehension depends heavily on the prior knowledge about the subject area we reading about. Nowhere is this more true than in the Bible, where the authorship may change and original intended audience may change from line to line. I have read dozens of books in history, archaeology, and biblical interpretation and criticism to inform my understanding of its authorship, context, and meanings. I expect to continue that.
As for a challenge, after I completed my 100 book challenge this year, I asked myself what works I hadn’t read yet because I found them intimidating. A small one on the list would be Joyce’s Ulysses. I’ve reread Homer now, so I ready for that and will get to it soon. The scariest one for me though has always been Ezra Pound’s Cantos. But, I’m 71 now. If I’m not ready yet, I never will be. Besides, could it really be any harder than the Bible? So a bought a copy of the Cantos and a companion volume last month, as well as started on a biography of Pound and one of his earlier works. One thing about Pound that I’ve realized that makes him less intimidating is that he frequently was an obscurantist twit. What makes him interesting though is that he was a very erudite and sometimes insightful obscurantist twit. Trying to make sense of the Cantos requires a lot of collateral reading which is interesting in its own right. E.g., Canto I is based on Homer, which makes it fairly easy; Canto II though leads us to the Provençal poets, troubadour song, Sordello, Robert Browning, etc. Anyway, that makes for an interesting reading project.
For some other simpler classics I’d like to sandwich in this year and next I’ll name Gibbon, Camoes, and Proust.