A Confession

It is time for me to make a confession. It is a difficult confession, and one I have articulated to a few of my friends, but I feel it ought to be made. I have for most of my life kept it even from myself. This confession is prompted by my wife's post on her curriculum, with its primary emphasis on literature. As I make this confession, it is with the deepest apologies to my many friends and relations to whom this may come as a shock.

I don't like literature, or at least what some people call literature. There I said it. Mark Twain once defined classics as books “everybody wants to have read, but nobody wants to read.” That is how I feel about a lot of literature. There are few things that bother me more than a book that seems to be more concerned with making its point than telling a good story. If I wanted to read philosophy, I would (of course, closely related to this confession is the confession that I don't usually 'get' philosophy either). A good example of this is Wild Duck. There were some few good parts in it, but eventually they were lost in whatever weird point Ibsen was trying to make. It is funny, I feel as though by admitting these things, I am admitting to some sort character deficiency. It is sort of like saying that one prefers hamburgers to fine cuisine (which is probably true of me as well, so there you go). I feel as though I am somehow admitting that my tastes are not refined, and for a man who has spent most of his life attempting to refine his taste, and assume that he lived and thought at a certain imaginary level, this comes a powerful blow. So, dear reader, I think that perhaps this post is mostly written for my own benefit, with you taken along for the ride. I suppose that is the price you pay when you read something as idiosyncratic as a 'blog.

I love reading, both fiction and non-fiction, and indeed, reading is my chief hobby and one of the greatest joys in my life. However, I am afraid I am somewhat crass in my tastes. My wife will often tell me how much she loves to read classics, and she really does. She will often pick up a classic book (however such a thing is defined—in my field classics usually means something written in Greek or Latin) and read it. Now I enjoy many books that can be termed classics. I love Shakespeare. I have enjoyed Pride and Prejudice, and other books from that genre. I thought that Don Quixote was one of the best books I had read in a long while. However, I sometimes feel that when I like a classic book it is usually in spite of its classic status, not because of it. La Morte d'Artur by Sir Thomas Mallory may indeed be a classic, but it has knights, and chivalry and courtesy, and many wonderful beauties. Homer's Illiad is classic in any sense of the word, but I love it because it full of heroism and gods and fights, because it fires my blood. It almost makes me want to be a classicist (I wonder how many classicists were made by Homer. Probably innumerable). Basically, when I read a classic, I am reading a story, not literature, even if the book has literary merits. My point here is that for the most part the 'classics' I have enjoyed have not appealed to my intellectual snobbery (which unfortunately is there—ask me about television archaeology some time), but to the little boy who still lives inside me.

Perhaps that is it. Reading was my chief activity when I was a younger man. Maybe I grew up in everything else, but in this thing I have not yet grown up. Twain once compared the great books to wine and his to water. It turns out I prefer water to wine. This isn't really a bad thing. It just tends to limit what books I choose to read, and makes me feel guilty about the books I am not reading. So, to my dear friends who majored in literature (a frightening portion of my readers), I am sorry. I hope you understand. I certainly try to when people I know say they don't like the Old Testament. Maybe someday I will fully grow up, and find that I like Ibsen or Hunger, or other books of their ilk. But in the mean time, I am afraid I will continue to read for the little boy inside of me.

Excelsior!