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Five classics that ought to capture you from page one

I feel great, like extremely good. It's unaccountable, since I've felt pretty not-great for most of the past two months. Can't explain it. Anyway, early in the history of this blog I used to do lists! My most popular one was eight writing manuals that aren't a total waste of time. And last night as I was falling asleep I started thinking about the classics, and how most of the time when you sell them to people, it's kind of like, well you've just got to stick with this. But really it's not always like that. My most favorite classic to recommend is Anna Karenina, and people are usually like, "Oh well I tried starting that, but I didn't get far...maybe I'll try again."

To which I'm like, "No! What're you talking about? The first page of Anna Karenina is one of the most charming and timeless pages of fiction in all of history. If reading the book isn't effortless, then don't force yourself to. Wait until you can appreciate it."

So Anna Karenina is obviously a classic that should not be work. But what're some others? It seemed like cheating to use books that were too modern (Catcher in the Rye comes to mind. I mean it's easy to read, but that's because it basically invented the modern novel, so in essence we've been reading it all our lives). Number two on the list, for me, is clearly Pride and Prejudice. Now this is a book I had to read in tenth grade and found unbelievably boring. I stopped halfway through and just used the Cliff's Notes instead. But when I came back to it ten years later, I was surprised by how funny it was. This is a book that ought to hold you right from the beginning.

Okay, now here is where it started to get more difficult. Finally I decided that number three would be The Warden by Anthony Trollope. I love Trollope. I've read something like twenty books by him. But he's frequently long-winded and boring. The Warden doesn't have that problem. It's a hundred thousand words long--relatively compact, by Trollope standards--and the plot also isn't quite so paint-by-the-numbers. Most Trollope novels concern some guy who's slowly going broke and/or a woman who's married or about to marry the wrong dude. This one is more complex: it's about the warden of church-run old folk's home who comes under fire by a crusading journalist, who says, look, this home only takes care of twelve people, but the warden is earning eight hundred pounds a year! It's essentially a sinecure! And the whole time you're like, but Rev. Harding (the titular warden) is such a nice guy! Except...he also really doesn't do very much for his money. But, on the other hand, nobody has ever asked him to do much. Anyway, it's a great first introduction to Trollope.

So that's five novels that are marvelous from page one. What's a fourth one? Preferably one written before the year 1900? I'm going to go with the Count of Monte Cristo. That's an easy one. A fantastic and morally complex adventure. It's like a thousand pages long, and I wished it was twice the length, Afterward I tried to read The Three Musketeers and found it very dull, couldn't finish it.

And for my fifth book, I dunno, maybe I'll choose...Dangerous Liaisons? That's an eighteenth century novel! Bonus points there. It's an epistolary tale whose plot should be vaguely familiar to you either from Cruel Intentions or from the movie with John Malkovich. But it's witty and brilliantly structured. I've looked for other epistolary novels with a fraction of its complexity and have never found one.

You know what, I'm gonna keep going. You know what book was shockingly non-boring? Romance of the Three Kingdoms, a Chinese novel from the 14th century, detailing the events surrounding the dissolution of the Han Dynasty in the 2nd and 3rd century. I read the unabridged Moss Roberts translation, and it's romp. It's like nothing else you've ever read: it's the Annals of Tacitus except not horrendously boring (love you, Tacitus, but you are a dull writer). Time moves rapidly, events succeed events, heroes arise and die the next page, and everything is reported flatly, without moral judgement. The only difficult for a Western reader is keeping track of the thousands of names. For my part, I started developing mnemonics for each character. I'd say the name phonetically (mispronouncing it horrendously of course) and then think what english word the name sounded like, and then I'd relate that word to whatever the character had done. Like if the character was named Cao Dai, then I'd be like..cow died. And maybe the character had made a last stand on some bridge, so I was like "Cow dying on a bridge." It's really dumb, and potentially racist? It's hard to say. But it really helps. If you can keep the names straight, this is an easy read. I mean the easiest thing would just be to have an index of characters, but I couldn't find a good one.

Other readable classics...hmm...Plato's account of Socrates' trial and death, as presented in Eurythro, Apology, and Crito, is some of the finest prose literature from before the 18th century. It's actually deeply affecting. Read the Benjamin Jowett translation you can find for free online. Definitely worth reading as fiction, even if you don't care for the philosophy.

Well I could keep going, but would just make me look bad, because it'd be a bunch of white guys (if I hadn't limited myself to before 1900 there would've been more women, I swear). But although their works aren't quite effortless, I certainly recommend a trio of Japanese ladies: Sei Shonagan, Lady Murasaki (author of the Tale of Genji), and the anonymous author of the Sarashina diary. The last writer, whose book I read under the title As I Crossed The Bridge of Dreams, out from Penguin Classics, has probably had as large an impact on my style as any other writer in the language. There's something about the way she plays with time that's really artful and affecting. I get chills just thinking about it.

As I Crossed A Bridge Of Dreams, by Sarashina

0140442820.1.zoomYears ago, I read Sei Shonagon's The Pillow Book, and found it to be thoroughly delightful. It's not quite a diary, more like a series of anecdotes, lessons, and complaints by a courtly woman in Heian Japan and was written in about the 11th century AD. What came out most strongly from the book was just the personality of the writer: short-tempered, irritable, but also charming and perceptive.

Anyway, I recently realized that The Pillow Book was not an isolated document. It was part of a whole genre of Heian-era courtly memoirs. I checked a few out of the library, but the one that caught my eye immediately was the one by an unknown author who's only known as the Sarashina lady. I mean, look at the first lines of the book:

I was brought up in a part of the country so remote that it lies beyond the end of the Great East Road. What an uncouth creature I must have been in those days! Yet even shut away in the provinces I somehow came to hear that the world contained things known as Tales, and from that moment my greatest desire was to read them for myself.

This document is also not quite a diary, since it was not written as a daily chronicle. Instead, it was written towards the end of the author's life, as a sort of memoir. I say "a sort of memoir" because it's actually quite strange. The book spends pages upon pages talking about a man who she met on a rainy day and discussed trivialities with…but mentions her husband and three children for a total of maybe three sentences.

In fact, that's most of the book: a succession of pilgrimages, hotels, windy nights, and fragments of poems.

It seems random, but it's obviously not. The book isn't a traditional memoir. It's not about doings. Instead, it's more like a novel. It's about a person's emotional development. This is a woman who was obviously very sensitive. A woman who, from the very earliest part of her life, had a strong sense of what was right and beautiful. For instance, she rights of her recurring fantasy, during her teen years, that a man would come along and shut her up in a distant tower and then visit her for only one day a year, and leave her, the rest of the time, to walk alone along the windy battlements. Which is a beautiful image (partially derived from the Tale of Genji) but also a bit perverse.

And the book is about how that person--the girl who dreamed that dream--survived and changed throughout a lifetime that didn't really include very much that was beautiful or Romantic.

I find that most ancient documents (at least those that are in prose) don't have the virtues of modern literature. They don't describe sights and sounds and smells and emotions. They're about great doings or adventures or amusing incidents. Only in ancient Japanese literature, really, is there that fine-grainedness to the perceptions that strikes me as very modern. I highly recommend this book. It's also really short, maybe 80 pages long.