How to find common literary ground: Dostoevsky vs Rick Riordan
July 25, 2021 8:59 PM   Subscribe

Without a bunch of unnecessary back story, I used to be an avid reader, read many of the classics, but these days I tend to only enjoy teen drama/sci fi with quick pacing like Hunger Games, the Magicians, Percy Jackson, etc. I always preferred more contemporary stuff as soon as I was far enough in college to specialize (e.g. Thomas Pynchon over Austen), but now I feel like my taste is not on par with my education, and mostly I don't care about that because I like what I like, but part of me does care, and I wonder about trying to get back to some more literary/learned media. I say "media" because ideally I'd like to expand my tastes for tv shows and movies also.

I am not sure how to go about this. I don't want to read higher brow stuff just to impress others or have a conversation about it, but I do wish I was able to connect with the part of me that cares about it.

Because part of me does care about the foundations of literature, but most of me thinks a lot of it is colonial crap. Aside from that, people in my life appreciate it, and I would like to be able to enter the world of their interests without being so bored, because I hide my boredom badly and I don't feel that I'm following social expectations fairly when we always defer to my taste in entertainment.

Even when I was in a graduate program for English, I tended towards postmodern, pop culture, hip hop, over classics. I find Faulkner dreadfully boring, and Austen is okay but I read things like that out of obligation for years in school, so I don't particularly feel drawn to them now.

Do you have suggestions for either how to improve interest in consuming this type of media, or specific texts that might vibe with my current taste?
posted by crunchy potato to Media & Arts (22 answers total) 15 users marked this as a favorite
 
I would ask the others in your life what you should watch, pretty much how you asked us. "Friend, I need a new show and I need something more thought-provoking and deep than (current show.) what have you liked lately and why?" Most people will fall all over themselves to suggest something. If my friend told me what you wrote, I would be happy to help (and also reassure you you're not alone. I have been having similar troubles.) And then you know they're going to ask you about it, so you have to watch it...

Also, you could try one of those "best 100 movies of the last 100 years" lists and just start there. You can see all those movies that people are always name dropping, like Casablanca or whatever. Or, ask at your library. I've had a handful of reference questions that are basically this, and it's delightful to work with those people to get them out of a reading/watching rut.

(Have you read any Robertson Davies? What's bred in the bone is pretty much the sweet spot for this. It's the middle of a trilogy but read it first.)
posted by blnkfrnk at 9:09 PM on July 25, 2021 [4 favorites]


Is there a reason why you focusing on classics in your question, and not contemporary "serious" literary fiction? Classics are classics for a reason, but there's tons of good literature published every year. These books would help you avoid "colonial crap" (well, not always, but more often than the classics) while also challenging you a bit more than the median YA book. And while there is some truly "difficult" stuff around now, mainstream literary fiction is often shorter and easier to read than the classics, so they might be a better place to start for someone for whom reading the classics feels like eating their greens.

Here are few recent examples that I mention because they all deal in some way with youth, so they might be particularly appealing to you given your current YA tastes: Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro, Real Life by Brandon Taylor, Sally Rooney's books, Hamnet by Maggie O'Farrell, A Children's Bible by Lydia Millet, Elena Ferrante's My Brilliant Friend series, etc.
posted by caek at 9:16 PM on July 25, 2021 [4 favorites]


Response by poster: Is there a reason why you focusing on classics in your question, and not contemporary "serious" literary fiction?

Yes, this is what my loved one is into, and what they would like to be able to share. Books, movies. They want me to enjoy Robinson Crusoe, Swiss Family Robinson, Hemingway, Faulkner, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Austen, British dramas, etc.

I'm intelligent but not cerebral, so I am not a big fan of heavier work unless the writing itself is especially interesting. (e.g. Ava by Caroline Maso).

I am thinking of asking my loved one if they will take a journey into decolonized literature with me (which will necessarily involve some more contemporary work at least in part), and see if we can find common ground that way. Your specific suggestions along those lines are appreciated.
posted by crunchy potato at 9:23 PM on July 25, 2021 [1 favorite]


You may find some overlap in the steampunk genre, specifically the gaslamp subgenre, since they are sort of a combination of modern fantasy stuff in a Victorian era England setting. Some stories will be slow, but others will be more your speed.
posted by soelo at 9:30 PM on July 25, 2021 [1 favorite]


A few disjointed pieces of advice, as a person with a graduate degree in English who never really read as much as he wanted to even during school but now spends most of his free time doing it. All this stuff worked for me, but obviously it is neither the only nor the best way to do things.

1. Find authors you like and read straight through them until you're bored, rather than trying to get a survey-type view of the landscape. The hardest thing to do—as you're dealing with right now—is find the next book you enjoy, and the best information you have to work from is knowing you liked another book by the same author just recently.

2. The second-best-information you have to work from is that you recently liked a book like the book you just read. Years ago I got really into a couple of Victorian novels, and rather than worrying about whether I was reading widely enough I just read Victorian novels, probably a hundred or so, mostly all in a row. When I ran out of an author I'd do a little reading (I love biographies, which makes this easier) and find out who they were reading, or who they thought their competitors were, and start right away. (I was lucky I liked books that are now in the public domain, because this was incredibly easy in addition to being free.)

3. It might be colonial crap to think of reading the classics of primarily European and American writers as understanding the "foundations of literature," but personally I see it as understanding the "foundations of primarily European and American literature of the type recently called 'literary fiction'" and am still plenty interested in it. If I were writing a syllabus for a course I would engage with all this differently, but I'm basically just reading for pleasure and digging around for veins of books I like, which are sometimes classic "dead white man" lit and sometimes not.

4. My memory is so bad that I rarely access it involuntarily, so this might be easier said than done for normal people, but I was such a bad reader in high school and college that "the classics" that might have been ruined for me were totally vivid and incredible when I read them as an adult with no pressure. Mentioning this specifically because you mentioned Austen and her mature work, in particular, totally blindsided me when I tried it. Having dug back through the novels that influenced her (and her own earlier work) since, Pride & Prejudice feels like a total quantum leap in terms of... emulating human brains in prose fiction from even the work she was doing herself in Sense & Sensibility. It's like watching someone break the high-jump record by 200 feet. But your mileage may vary, and let it! Nobody will be grading you.

5. Make it as easy as possible to get to your book—for me this has meant doing a lot of reading on my phone. I am totally a "romance of the printed page" person, but push comes to shove I am probably going to be looking at something on my phone, so if I want to read a book I'd better have one sitting on it.

6. I want to make it as clear as possible that I am not saying this in a normative way and I don't care what anybody else reads or watches, but my sudden ability to read was correlated with, if not caused by, an increasing lack of interest in TV. TV was (and is) really tempting for me because I can ostensibly have it on while I do something else; if you're a person who hesitates to commit a block of time to anything, like I am, you end up doing a lot of things that leave you a little plausible deniability like that. ("I can clean the house while I watch TV"—I can, but I won't! But I can't even pretend I'm going to clean while I read.)

7. Don't worry about What Reading X Says About You. If I see one more viral tweet or Buzzfeed article about how Only Bros Read Infinite Jest or if you like To Kill A Mockingbird you're basic or whatever I will... it's tempting to say quit Twitter, but obviously that's a hollow threat. People write this stuff out of a universal urge to gatekeep and be a little mean that asserts itself even in those who believe they are acting for the greater good. You're no less "allowed" to like whoever's out of intellectual fashion than you are the Hunger Games; don't let those people—who somehow think they are working to include you by saying that i.e. Pynchon is lame and his fans are bad—choose what you're allowed to read.
posted by Polycarp at 9:38 PM on July 25, 2021 [18 favorites]


Something that really worked for me in terms of getting into classic literature is finding audio versions read by exceptional narrators. For example, Juliet Stevenson's reading of Austen's "Emma" taught me how to enjoy the subtle humor and layers of that book.
posted by Zumbador at 9:45 PM on July 25, 2021 [5 favorites]


Best answer: Ok so it sounds to me like you want to read the Western Canon in order to connect with a loved one who loves that stuff, plus you used to love it. But you also don't have the mental bandwidth now/anymore. And you (rightly!) are like, the embedded cultural values of these Dead White Guy texts don't align with my values, so... why bother.

Did I get that right?

In that case it might be easier to parcel this out into different causes and different solutions:

1. Read with your loved one! (Duh). Read aloud to each other. Let them choose! Have a little book group where you discuss weekly. If it's an act of love to read Dostoyevsky with your boo it's an act of love to read Dostoyevsky with your boo!

2. Mental bandwidth: Read something Literary but Easy. I read a lot of "contemporary literary fiction" for this reason as suggested above. Piranesi was my last 5 star rec. Just astonishingly good imo. If it has to be from the past.... Dickens (lol). Also forever a Dumas stan, the Count of Monte Cristo is a masterpiece and a genuine page-turner.

3. There is a whole world of Indian/African/Caribbean/not-the-colonizer fiction out there which is just as "serious" and "literary" as the authors you name (....obviously).

Might worth thinking why "classics" as you write necessarily excludes such texts (spoiler alert: it shouldn't, it does because canon-building is white-supremacist / empire-building)

Anway we're talkin Walcott, CLR James, Coetzee, Narayan, Danticat, Kincaid, the omnipresent Salman Rushdie Arundhati Roy Amitav Ghosh etccccccc not to mention the whole Black American canon which is like, you could read Faulkner but you could also just read Beloved, you know?

3a. Something I do when teaching to offset the "ughh you gotta read Shakespeare" quotient is to teach colonial/postcolonial responses alongside. So like Cesaire's Tempest is the classic example. Taneja's We that are Young is a Lear adaptation in India, Unmarriageable is a Pride and Prejudice adaptation set in Pakistan, there are obviously loads of books/films/media like these.

Happy reading! I hope you get your groove back. There is also absolutely nothing wrong with reading the Hunger Games over and over. <3
posted by athirstforsalt at 10:22 PM on July 25, 2021 [21 favorites]


Given the particulars of your situation, y'all could read a 'classic' and then a postcolonial response to that classic: Jane Eyre + Wide Sargasso Sea; Robinson Crusoe + Foe; Wuthering Heights + Windward Heights; Frankenstein + Frankenstein in Baghdad; "The Nine Billion Names of God" + "The Negation of the Negation of the Negation," etc.

Personally I find that reading heavy/dry/dull/oddball stuff attentively is just sort of a skill that will fade or improve like any other, depending on whether I give myself a reason to do it, and I suspect that having any sort of focus helps. Like, someone who just says "You know, I like ghost stories, so I'm going to read a ton of them" probably will do that, even if a lot of them would otherwise seem kind of boring. And that's great? It's how people discover the 'deep cuts' of their fandom, whatever it is.

Same goes for TV/film. Y'all might like having a Criterion Channel subscription for the latter though--plenty of classics you're 'supposed' to appreciate (meh) but also so many random old movies and so much contemporary world cinema that just sampling it from time to time will eventually turn up some niche you never guessed you'd like.
posted by Wobbuffet at 10:40 PM on July 25, 2021 [5 favorites]


My One Weird Trick (if you do the thing where you read a bunch of stuff by the same author all at once) is to find publishers that you like.
posted by aniola at 10:49 PM on July 25, 2021 [5 favorites]


Best answer: Have you read Dostoevsky? It's unclear from your question so apologies if you have and you hated it.
For me he's in that sweet spot where he was popular at the time, not impenetrably written, a good yarn, not preachy, and critically acclaimed. Also a great conversation provoker if part of your aim is for "book club"-style bonding with your partner.
Crime and Punishment is long but is more psychological thriller than high brow "mm I am a bored but deep thinker". It's readable, suspenseful, addictive, and explores an interesting moral question as all good psychological thrillers should. The Grand Inquisitor from the (very long) Brothers Karamazov stands alone as a short and compelling philosophical novella (with the great elevator pitch of being described as the best argument for atheism despite being written by a Christian).
Pevear and Volokhonsky translations have been praised for maintaining the levity of the originals.
posted by hotcoroner at 1:52 AM on July 26, 2021 [8 favorites]


Some things that strike me as approximate halfway points between the books you’re describing:

-short stories/novellas/plays/essays/poems/other shorter work that is part of the more literary canon. Plenty to talk about, less of a time investment.
-Recent literary fiction award winners that are outside the old white male paradigm that you aren’t so interested in.
-Recent adult sci-fi/fantasy award winners. There is a lot of real meaty work out there that is still deliciously readable.
-Modern work that explicitly engages with classics. I loooved the recent Headley translation of Beowulf for example, and there are a lot of great recs upthread.

Your description, though, also sounds like you’re not hiding your distaste about your partner’s interests, and that because they are better at hiding their distaste, they don’t get to watch stuff that interests them. I’d gently suggest that this is more of a you problem than a media problem, because this is not a great way to treat someone you care about. Which isn’t to say you need to suffer through 14 hours of Ingmar Bergman or whatever, but finding the pleasure in spending time with someone you care about and making them happy is a good skill to have.
posted by tchemgrrl at 4:42 AM on July 26, 2021 [2 favorites]


If you're attempting to curate personal taste, a basic method is just to try to work from an author through authors they've influenced or who have influenced them. This is a common tactic that fits music/art/lit any media, that will allow you to customize to truly develop your own sense of taste or style.

For music, I often used Allmusic (a map/aggregator(?) site), then worked outward from a web of projects or musicians. This technique is nice, in that there is never a supply shortage and the chain of influence is always direct. Wiki works too. If a piece/project doesn't suit your taste, you can skip it and find another.

More recently, it's possible to find artists of color or richer culture (without the colonialist twist) by doing this as well. You can skip around to find who or what you need. The most comparable alternative is to Allmusic for reading is Goodreads. Sometimes you can sift thru another person's profile to get a sense of their taste and use their perspective to build your own.

Agree with others in European lit. Unless literature is overtly racist, it would be a total tragedy to reject centuries of work because the authors were old white people. They should just be classified as classic European/similar.
posted by firstdaffodils at 4:50 AM on July 26, 2021 [2 favorites]


If Austen is close to something you enjoy reading, invite your partner to explore EM Forster, Edith Wharton, Katherine Mansfield, Charlotte Perkins, George Elliott, F. Scott Fitzgerald strikes me as particularly relevant for the now, Martin Boyd. In other words try new classic things together.

Also, your list is not all the same. I adored Swiss Family Robinson and Robinson Crusoe as a child and can’t stand them now. :)
posted by warriorqueen at 5:08 AM on July 26, 2021 [2 favorites]


Classic children's books would be more entertaining and easier to get through than adult classics. A lot of children's books that are considered classics - The Swiss Family Robinson or Little Women, for instance - aren't great literature, or even good literature. But generations of kids have found something entertaining in them and you might too. If nothing else, you'll understand what people are talking about when they refer to them. And there are some that are really worth your while - Winnie-the-Pooh, Peter Pan, The Jungle Book, Alice in Wonderland. If you want to try something more recent, Tove Jansson's Moomin books are wonderful. The later ones are really better appreciated by adults than by children.

You could also try short stories by people like Hemingway or Faulkner. Faulkner's Shingles for the Lord is funny and a quick read. I'm not a huge Hemingway fan but I often think of the soldier in whatever story it was who was afraid to fall asleep and kept himself awake every night as long as he could by walking his favorite trout river in his mind, picturing the details of every riffle and pool. You may come across something that sticks with you like that.

I would go into reading the classics with an attitude of curiosity and low expectations - not necessarily expecting to be entertained, just finding out for yourself what's actually in this famous book and seeing what you think of it. Thinking about what you don't like and why you don't like it can make it more interesting and could give you something to talk about with your loved one. Hopefully they will be okay with you not loving all their favorite books and will find it interesting to learn why you don't love them. And you may find some that surprise you by being more interesting than you imagined they would be. I've found George Eliot to be pretty readable and entertaining. I'd start with The Mill on the Floss. Dickens is also pretty entertaining if you can get past the convoluted old fashioned language. (I have a couple of loved ones who can't.)
posted by Redstart at 6:39 AM on July 26, 2021 [3 favorites]


If your loved one likes Bronte, but does not love it deeply in her soul, then you should definitely read and discuss Jayne Eyre, and Wide Sargasso Sea. I think it's a relatively easy way in to postcolonial literature, because the mad wife in the attic as a complete explanation doesn't resonate with contemporary readers, and so you can easily see that there is a companion character to explore.
posted by plonkee at 6:51 AM on July 26, 2021 [1 favorite]


You might find it interesting to go back to the origins of the English novel, before the conventions were established, because the effect can be delightfully post-modern. Tristram Shandy, for example.

"It's just a lot of colonial crap" is a tough hurdle to overcome, though, because it's not an analysis, not even a political analysis--it's just an outburst of feeling. I'm not sure recommendations can overcome that.
posted by praemunire at 7:50 AM on July 26, 2021 [1 favorite]


Coming in to highly recommend George Saunders's A Swim in a Pond in the Rain as a way of reawakening your old reading chops from college and grad school. The book is more than a swim. It's a deep dive into great literature, via short stories, mainly Russian--Chekov, Gogol--as well as great non-Russian writers. It's a master class in literary appreciation at a very high level, an approach you can then bring to your reading of longer classics. Here's a review of it in The Guardian:
posted by Elsie at 9:10 AM on July 26, 2021 [3 favorites]


Is there a reason why you focusing on classics in your question, and not contemporary "serious" literary fiction?

Yes, this is what my loved one is into, and what they would like to be able to share. Books, movies. They want me to enjoy Robinson Crusoe, Swiss Family Robinson, Hemingway, Faulkner, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Austen, British dramas, etc.


It strikes me that the books you enjoy at the moment have aspects the ones on this lists lack, relatively speaking. Myth, magic, a sense of getting back to that thing that enthralls you when reading as a child. Would your partner be interested in reading something like The Odyssey, that is considered a classic but has those other things too? Or a novel like 100 Years of Solitude which is epic and fantastic and also has a lot of modern classic stature?
posted by BibiRose at 10:01 AM on July 26, 2021


How about some of the engaging and amusing classics written by women in the 30s-50s? Books by Barbara Pym in particular such as Excellent Women. You might also enjoy Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day by Winifred Watson, House of Mirth by Edith Wharton, and Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont by Elizabeth Taylor.
posted by hazyjane at 11:44 AM on July 26, 2021


The one thing to remember when reading classics that were not originally written in English (of the ones you mention, Swiss Family Robinson, Tolstoy and Dostoevsky) is that translations matter. I once tried to replace my ageing, beat-up copy of The Three Musketeers (another recommended entry point) with a newer Vintage Classics copy only to discover that the new translation had all the soul sucked out of it. It was like literature by Google Translate. A little pre-purchase internet research should help with this - either by looking up the translator to see how well-regarded they are and maybe find samples of their work (big clue: if no translator is listed, steer clear) or just looking up the title and "best translations" or similar.
posted by Athanassiel at 1:22 PM on July 26, 2021 [1 favorite]


persephone specializes in the books hazyjane mentions
posted by brujita at 2:45 PM on July 26, 2021 [1 favorite]


I came in to recommend A Swim in a Pond in the Rain like Elsie said. I just got it as a birthday gift, I do not normally like criticism, reading Russian classics sometimes feels like taking my medicine, but only 40 pages in the tone is so welcoming and the excitement for teaching the stories is infections.

I subscribed to daily emails from Literary Hub and I'm impressed with the breadth - they cover serious lit, classics, nonfat, and "genre" fiction with equal care. I have an ever-growing list of to-read thanks to them, and it's very easy to filter out, say, western white male leaning stuff and still have many options. I feel a little despair in realizing I'll never have time to read all they recommend, but also, like reading the box scores in the sports page, I like knowing that things are happening in the literary world, and I can cheer for the winning team's (author's) accomplishment without having watched the whole game, so to speak.

I loved Black Leopard, Red Wolf by https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marlon_James_(novelist) as one example. He has a podcast called Marlon & Jake Read Dead People where he talks with his editor about dead authors of the canon.

Lastly, I think that YA fiction has gotten really good. In one way, good YA surpasses most "Serious" literature: ruthless efficiency with the language, and therefore respect for the reader's time. I have been extremely time constrained for the past 18 months and I have read a lot of YA, particularly that aimed at male or boy-identifying YA's, and the authors know they are competing with Minecraft and Roblox and TikTok, and are therefore Not Fucking Around.
posted by sol at 5:49 PM on July 26, 2021 [1 favorite]


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