Van Doren - The joy of reading: a passionate guide to 189 of the worlds best authors and their works

THE

OF

READING

A Passionate Guide to189

of the Worlds Best

Authors and Their Works

CHARLES VAN DOREN

Copyright 2008 by Charles Van Doren

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First published in the United States of America by Crown Publishing, Inc., 1985

Van Doren, Charles Lincoln.

The joy of reading : a passionate guide to 189

of the world's best authors and their works / Charles Van Doren.

p. cm.

1. Best books. 2. Books and reading. I. Title.

Z1035.V26 2008

011'.73dc22

2007043270

Printed and bound in the United States of America.

BG 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

For my colleagues, friends, and students at the University of Connecticut

and

For Gerry

Author to Reader

Reading is my favorite thing to do. When I was ten and supposed to go to sleep at a certain time, I read under the covers with a flashlight until my father told me I would ruin my eyes. I didnt stop; I was willing to risk my sight to enjoy the pleasures of reading. In fact he was wrong; after seventy years I can still read, even without glasses if theres enough light.

I have had many teachers. Ive learned something important from each of them. This book is partly my attempt to repay them.

My mother first taught me to read, I remember very well. I was not in school; we were living in the country, and she and I had lessons every morning. My first book was The Little Fir Tree. It was about a little forest tree that was glad it was cut down for Christmas and taken to the home of a nice boy and girl. I would not let any child read that book now.

Once the door was open, I pushed through eagerly. By the time I entered high school I had read a good deal; more, probably, than most kids my age. My father had fostered my reading (when he wasnt prohibiting it, thinking I should go outdoors and get some fresh air) by suggesting a wide variety of titles and giving me all kinds of books as Christmas and birthday presents. He didnt care if I read them all; he just wanted me to be acquainted with different kinds of books and not to be afraid to read any particular kind. He kept giving me books as long as he lived. I still have many of them, especially those he sent me when I was serving in the Air Force in World War II. I carried for months in the breast pocket of my fatigues a hard-bound copy of Palgraves Golden Treasury. A tough little book with hard covers, it was a kind of talisman that I thought would stop a bullet and save my life. Maybe it did; at least, no one ever shot at me.

During my senior year in high school I began trying to read some of the classical authors my father said I would have to read in college: Plato, Homer, Sophocles. A friend already in college to whom I revealed that I had read the Apology belittled my achievement, saying it was easy. Ive never forgotten my chagrin, but to this day I believe he was wrong. Platos Apology isnt easy, though its more interesting than many of his other dialogues. Scholars struggle to understand the meaning of the more difficult, later dialogues, but in the long run they are less crucial for the way we live our lives than the humanity of Platos account of the trial and death of Socrates.

In 1946, I returned to college from the war to find myself in a class conducted by Richard Schofield, who taught me to appreciate Baudelaire and William Blake, among others. I could read French but I was as yet unable to forget it was a foreign language. I learned that language is both a means of and an obstacle to communicationforeign languages, obviously, but ones own language if ones not careful. Blakes utter simplicity can be misleading, hiding depths of profundity that most poets never sound.

I learned other lessons at my college, St. Johns in Annapolis. The most important was that I was free to read any kind of book; my fathers mentoring many years before was now validated. I gained the confidence to attempt almost any book, in almost any Western language, employing almost any set of symbols. (Of course, I often failed!) For years I thought everyone shared this confidence, but now I know that not too many possess it. One of my main goals in writing this book is to try to instill that confidence in other readers.

I was for a time a professor at Columbia University, where among other subjects I taught the famous Humanities course that was then required for all freshmen. That was a whole new lesson in reading, but I didnt stay at Columbia for long. I soon found myself headed for Chicago and Encyclopaedia Britannica, where for twenty-five years I studied under and worked with one of the great teachers of reading, Mortimer J. Adler. We wrote and edited books together and also taught together a seminar that had originated in the 1940s (when Adler led it with Robert Hutchins). Over the years Dr. Adler and I read about two hundred books together for this seminar, and I never ceased to be astonished by his ability to arrive at the central question a book asks, or that it requires a reader to ask. He died ten years ago, but his spirit still hovers.

Now we are back home from Chicago, Gerry and I. The children have gone away and have children of their own, and we have settled into a life of leisure, which means I have more time since I retired to read than I ever did. I still love reading, best of all when Gerry and I or someone else read the same book, which often happens these days for professional and other reasons (we are both teachers now). When that happens Im always surprised at the difference of our reactions, even though we have read the same words. The fact that the other reader may be a woman has something to do with this, but not everything. Their minds grasp things mine never will, and vice versa, which is right and proper.

This book contains fifteen chapters, each of which gathers discussions of a group of authors and their works. The chapters are arranged in chronological order, from The Golden Age: In the Beginning to Only Yesterday. All told there are 182 entries, each one about the work or works of a different author (or authors, in some cases). Entries, too, are arranged in chronological order, starting with Homer and Hesiod and ending with Patrick OBrian and J.K. Rowling. Occasionally it wasnt possible to stick strictly to chronological order within the period covered by a given chapter, since some authors may have had long careers, and others quite short ones; or I may have chosen to discuss a number of books by some authors and only one or two books (or essays or poems, etc.) by others. Nevertheless, the general direction of the book is chronological, as you can see from a glance at the table of contents.