We read these so you don't have to!

That seems to be the idea behind a post over here called "Fired from the Canon." It lists books that usually make "the classics" list that you can safely drop, ignore, and forget about. It is pretty funny actually, and I am glad to say I have only wasted my time with one of them, A Hundred Years of Solitude.

After posting that post about children's literature that garnered more suggestions of books to read than anyone could get through in a lifetime, forget about childhood, I thought I should link to this as a public service. Here, for example, is its final word on A Hundred Years etc.

Magical realism wasn’t much of a trick to begin with – Gabriel García Márquez riding round in circles on a smallish tricycle, cigarillo clamped between teeth, occasionally raising his panama for people to throw coins – and is now thoroughly clapped out. Also, people who like it seem to have little or no sense of humor. No one knows why, but it’s true. Instead it inspires a sort of insufferably pious stupefaction. Perhaps if you were to read Solitude, you too would be borne aloft on its miraculous wings, transported by its spellbinding portrait of a world which is part exotic paradise, part nightmare, etc., etc., etc., but I wouldn’t risk it.

So set back, relax, and try to remember the worst book you ever read after being told "it's a classic. You have to read it!' You know, the one you couldn't finish but claimed you did anyway.

Some Hard Questions for my Profession

In The American Scholar Thomas Mallon has some tough questions about the future of the humanities. Here's one:

How can the contemplative mind survive in the multitasking, ADD-inducing world of digitization? Are we willing to face the downside of this great electronic boon? Do we really want students reading electronic texts of the classics that are festooned with more links than a Wikipedia entry? Aren’t a few moments of quiet bafflement preferable to an endless steeplechase across Web page after Web
page?

For the other nine, click here.