Over at Unfogged, they're talking about books people are embarrassed about not having read. For me this usually comes up (nowadays I mean -- ten years ago I was incessantly feeling embarrassed about my lack of intellectual achievement) in the context of books which I should have read in order better to understand the book that I am reading at the moment, and enjoying, and I'm feeling like the enjoyment is a false consciousness because I don't have the background necessary to actually enjoy the book. Like last night on the way home from the Truman Sparks show, I was reading Pamuk's marvellous introduction to the Turkish edition of Tristram Shandy, and my dormant feelings of embarrassment about being unable to get through Sterne were reawoken -- I thought I had gotten over that during the group read at Is There No Sin In It?* last year. Other authors Pamuk is making me feel bad about my lack of acquaintance with: Dostoevsky, Stendhal, Victor Hugo. But Pamuk also gives me hope that I may pick Shandy up again someday: Behind the smoke and noise of his anger, there is the knowledge that great literature is what gives man his understanding of his place in the scheme of things, and so, reminding himself that writing is one of the deepest and most wondrously strange of human activities, he picks up the book again in a moment of solitude.
*What is the standard formatting to indicate a no-longer-active web site? It seems kind of weird to italicize the name of a blog, but a link would not be appropriate.
posted afternoon of Sunday, November 11th, 2007
➳ More posts about Other Colors
➳ More posts about Orhan Pamuk
➳ More posts about Readings
➳ More posts about Tristram Shandy
➳ More posts about Classics
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