'The Classic, the Unusual, the Neglected'

I frequently find myself agreeing with Michael Dirda in spite of myself. His taste in books is remarkably democratic. He reads widely in genres I deserted long ago – science fiction, fantasy, mysteries and horror. Dirda is not exactly a populist when it comes to books but neither is he ostentatiously highbrow. He knows his Dante, Gibbon and Proust (who died one-hundred years ago today) but finds room for Sax Rohmer, Rafael Sabatini and M.R. James. I don’t understand such a laissez faire attitude to the books we choose to read but it makes sense for a newspaper critic who wishes to reach the public and hold on to his job.  

A friend sent me Dirda’s Thursday column from the Washington Post: “Why read old books? A case for the classic, the unusual, the neglected.” That’s a sentiment to endorse. Dirda is restating William Hazlitt’s thesis from two centuries ago in his essay “On Reading Old Books”:

 

“In reading a book which is an old favourite with me (say the first novel I ever read) I not only have the pleasure of imagination and of a critical relish of the work, but the pleasures of memory added to it. It recalls the same feelings and associations which I had in first reading it, and which I can never have again in any other way.”

 

I make no blanket dismissal of new books. That would be arbitrary and silly. Good writers are still at work out there, even in our sadly unliterary age. We can think of our reading lives as long strands of DNA, uniquely ours while sharing commonality with those who came before us. We are forever editing our own genetic code, endlessly renewing ourselves as we read old and new books. Dirda writes:

 

“[L]iterature’s Himalayan peaks can be daunting. As the Victorian classicist Benjamin Jowett once said, ‘We have sought truth, and sometimes perhaps found it. But have we had any fun?’ In reading as in life, fun does matter.”

 

For “fun” I would substitute “pleasure.” “Fun” sounds trivial, like bowling. I derive much pleasure from reading the Divine Comedy and King Lear but I wouldn’t describe those experiences as fun. Dirda closes his column like this:

 

“So, go ahead and pick up a few appealing 2022 titles, but don’t forget that there are other, older books worth reading, especially when the world is too much with you. As the weather grows colder, it is, for instance, a perfect time to settle in with Dickens’s The Pickwick Papers, Saki’s ironic short stories or Anita Loos’s immortal Gentlemen Prefer Blondes.”

 

Every year I reread the Christmas chapters in Pickwick (along with A Christmas Carol), and I’ve read a few of Saki’s stories, but never the Loos. Every reader knows a new book soon becomes old. Some of us know an old book can be dazzlingly new.