Among the many end-of-year items in The Washington Post on January 1 was a listing of the books reviewed by Jonathan Yardley in his Second Reading series since 2003. It wasn't entirely clear from the article, but I gather from the list that Mr. Yardley is stepping down from this task - a task in which he reviewed not new books but books that have been published for years, but deserve a "second reading." Good idea.
As a former English major - in fact, as someone with an M.A. in English - I would have thought that I would have read many of these books. In truth, I have read only three: Bleak House by Charles Dickens, The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen. And so I cut the article out of the paper and have decided that perhaps I will work my way through it. Because there's some books on the list that I have always meant to read but somehow have never gotten around to. Books like Giant by Edna Ferber, My Life and Hard Times by James Thurber, and A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court by Mark Twain. Interestingly, there are many authors on the list that I've never heard of: William Humphrey, Isabel Colegate, and John Phillips, who according to Yardley was the one who started the whole thing off. It seems that someone did a review of Phillips' short stories back in the '70s and Yardley was so offended by the review that he wrote a letter to the editor, which was not only published but Yardley was asked to start doing some reviews himself.
The concept of reading such books that might be deemed "good for you" is hardly a new one in my life. Obviously, I've read lots of books that have been dubbed "literature" by someone or another. But the other thing I've found over the years is that what is considered a "good" book, much like other forms of art, is extremely subjective. Though some would argue with the government's listing of what foods are "good for you" - and in fact, there was an article in yesterday's paper promoting the "caveman" diet - we do know that the body needs certain nutrients to be healthy. The definition of "good for you" can be argued scientifically.
On the other hand, the definition of "good for you" in art is harder to pin down. For example, there's no science fiction on Yardley's list. But you could make the argument that C.S. Lewis' Perelandra, Arthur Clarke's 2001: A Space Odyssey, and J.R.R. Tolkein's Lord of the Rings should be considered masters of the genre at a minimum and perhaps literature as well.
It's a bit like the movies that get nominated for Oscars. While I certainly think it's important to recognize works that didn't necessarily earn a great deal at the box office but told good stories and were well acted, the Oscars does have a reputation for avoiding box office blockbusters as not "good for you" types of movies. There have been a few exceptions, but more often than not, the blockbuster movies - even ones like Lord of the Rings that win Oscars - win them for costume and set design and those kinds of things. Not for their acting. Or scripts. In other words, not for their story.
That being said, I do think that it's "good for you" to know at least some of the classics and that many other of these "good" books deserve a "second reading". And so I will endeavor to do so. And recommend that others do as well. Sometimes "good for you" really can be.
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