For the past week or so, I’ve been reading Jonathan Wild by Henry Fielding. I picked it up at a used book shop for a few cents, and the back copy looked intriguing. Sort of taking the wee out of politicians and such by expounding on how being a great man and being a good man are incompatible and making a mockery of such low and base attributes like, um, love, friendship, and honesty.

And it is a funny book, both for the reasons it was meant to be, and for clever little turns of phrases that manage to crack me up though I can’t remember them by the time I’m near a computer and hubby wouldn’t get it so… Anyway.

I have this thing about classics. I feel like I have to read each and every one of them at some point in time just so that I know what I’m missing by reading all my modern literature (even when by “modern” I mean the 1920′s, or even Jane Austen). I suppose it’s also a point of pride for me, having been one of the only half dozen or so in my English classes who actually understood Shakespeare (as well as you can without learning much about that time period), and one of the only two who actually liked Shakespeare.

The problem with some of these books, is that unless you’re a well versed historian (rather than someone who’s just into history), calling them classics is like a layman referring to the Hippocratic Oath as the end all be all of ethics. It may very well be, but we’ll never know unless we learn to read it in its original greek, and study all of its incarnations since then (cuz, really, if our doctors used the original Oath? A lot of things would be veeery different).

Without having the very basic understanding that the intended readers had, we’re just going to miss things. I could probably learn to understand Jonathan Wild in all it’s wonderful tricks, and layers, and hidden meanings. It would take me years, but I could do it.

I could do it, but I don’t want to. It’s bad enough that I’m a procrastinator to start with. With books that I love, I’m too wrapped up in the story to work on my own. With books I don’t love, I just want to get through them and to the end, and so that’s my excuse as well. The dull books don’t wrap up my creative mind the way well written modern novels do, but they give me something to latch on to in their own way.

Books are my addiction, and just like a drug addict, even the bad ones give me what I think I need. I just need to work on my gardening so I can share the homegrown.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 22nd, 2008 at 1:55 am and is filed under personal blocks, What I'm Reading, writing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.