Never Read Ulysses? Or Another Classic?

 Positive reinforcement for those finding classic dull: Did Tolstoy really need 783 pages to get Anna Karenina to the train station?

 But there are certain orthodoxies when it comes to books, certain givens in the land of literature, perhaps the most immutable of which is that there are a small number of very special books called Classics, which are self-evidently Classic and beyond reproach and Ought To Be Read – and further, that a reader who does so will be ever so slightly a better person than someone who reads, for example, Dean Koontz.

I did manage Anna Karenina - part of my self-education program, and I will say two things stick out: how Tolstoy wrote about a horse race and the end. (Well, there is the thing about how Anna's story is about child custody, not the divorce as it would be in the West.)

How does a book become such a “classic”? Who decides? Are there people sitting in a room somewhere, right now, being snobs? The forces of consensus all seem so opaque; culture, class, creativity, history and fashion, all of them crunching together like the glacial tectonics that push up mountains.

It is such forces that create “classics” like Middlemarch, which is apparently one of the greatest books in English. But no one, ever, anywhere, reads Middlemarch of their own free will. In that sense, it’s no longer even a book. It’s an artefact.

So is Don Quixote. I consider myself a moderately determined reader with a fairly high pain threshold, but I tapped out at 120 pages. I attempted Anna Karenina four times before realising that it’s all downhill after that first line about every unhappy family being unhappy in its own way.

There is more. I agree with the writer on much of it, but I did enjoy Ulysses when I figured out Joyce is a great comic writer. I am not sure if that is how the academics and critics would like us to think of James Joyce.

sch 10/28/22