The Reasons for the Plan

I recently turned thirty, am married with an eight-month-old daughter, am the pastor of a Baptist church, and did my undergraduate degree in English at Saint Mary's University in Halifax. For all of these reasons, I've begun to think that I ought to have better reading habits. I've generally gone in spurts of reading well since my undergraduate days, but have not read a great many of the great works of literature.

During my years at seminary, as I became more and more interested in biblical study and theology, I wondered if I might have been better off with a classics degree, which might have given me a start in the ancient languages that would have been a good foundation for the biblical languages. Realistically I probably would have done the same thing with a classics degree as with an English one: enjoy the reading while there, but leave with terrible reading habits.

Last year at our local library I joined a Charles Dickens reading group, which got me to read Hard Times, A Tale of Two Cities, The Chimes, and half each of David Copperfield and Oliver Twist. Unfortunately, my poor reading habits had shown themselves again. I did, however, get a little more of a taste of good writing.

Over the past six months or so, I've enjoyed reading a number of great works: Jane Austen's Emma, the rest of Oliver Twist, a couple of Shakespeare plays, and several works by Henry James, including The Portrait of a Lady, Washington Square, "The Aspern Papers," and "The Turn of the Screw". Additionally, I've been part of another book club at the library that is reading William Faulkner, George Orwell, and Ernest Hemingway. I have found that I really don't like Orwell's vision of the world or his focus on ideas (paranoid ones at that) rather than people; Hemingway I enjoyed during A Farewell to Arms, but The Sun Also Rises seemed kind of empty to me (which I know is probably the point, but I didn't really like it); and Faulkner could easily become a big fascination. So far I've just read The Sound and the Fury and The Unvanquished, but we're going to read through Malcolm Cowley's famous collection
The Portable Faulkner over the next couple months, which will give us more of a broad spectrum of his work.

A former professor of mine has been a helpful guide through much of my reading over this past several months as we've reconnected and struck up an email correspondence and friendship. Helpful also has been Harold Bloom's infectious love of reading (and the importance of prioritizing reading because eventually everyone "reads against the clock") that comes through in his recent books. I know many people dislike him and find him too tradition-bound and annoying, but I have found How to Read and Why and The Western Canon both to be useful pointers written with a lot of excitement. An older book called The Great Tradition by F.R. Leavis, which I discovered from a quote on the back of an old Penguin edition of Washington Square, said that the great tradition in the English novel was to be found in four writers: Austen, George Eliot, James, and Joseph Conrad. I don't want to narrow myself down that far, but I have been selective as I've designed a plan for my reading over the next five years, trying to make sure I read the best things and am fairly well-read by the time I'm watching Emily start school.

An analogy from my earlier adulthood: I am a big music fan, and for a while spent a significant amount of time listening almost exclusively to the Beatles and Bob Dylan. It was not by design, but can't be faulted as a good place for a child of my generation to get acquainted with rock music. Later, when 60s-ish pop music became an obsession and I had worked my way through many of the great artists of the 60s and 70s, I started to listen to every obscure band that I could find in that style. Now, as I get a little older (and wiser!) it's easy to see how you can get cornered and find yourself missing the greats for all the minor works. In music I've tried to reverse this tendency of mine, and now plan to do the same thing with reading.

Wish me luck as I set out to read, read, read the very best, and feel free to make suggestions and have conversations along the way.