I intended this piece for Taiwanease magazine, but it was rejected as being not focussed on Taiwan enough, and so I can give it to you. It bears the snobbish condescension that many of my articles for that magazine are infected with, but hopefully the book recommendations will still be interesting.
A Western Reading List
If you are a Westerner living in Taiwan, perhaps you have found yourself with more free time than before. Probably you do fewer hours of work, have fewer friends, and your options for entertainment are sparser. You should be happy about this: away from the noise of your own media and language, you have a perfect opportunity to get more familiar with your own culture’s literature and philosophy. Don’t laugh! Begin (or deepen) this love affair now and it will sustain you for the rest of your life. We read in order to live, as Flaubert said, and great writing becomes like wine that you cannot do without. And thanks to the Internet, reading the classics has become much cheaper than drinking wine: many works are available for free.
But there’s a problem – where to start? If you believe that reading Shakespeare is not enjoyable, the answer is simple: you’re wrong. But if you believe that reading Shakespeare is difficult, well, I know what you mean. If the first piece of philosophy you try is Wittgenstein’s “Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus” or Nietzsche’s “Thus Spake Zarathrusta”, you may well give up after a page or two (I can’t even understand the first line of the Tractatus), or decide that you can only read books that summarise the great works for you. The latter choice is a mistake because no one can explain geniuses better than they can themselves, and neither can anyone reproduce the fire and awe that they spill on to the page. Stick with the originals, and work your way up slowly to the more difficult peaks. With this mind, here is a three-stage reading guide: books for the curious beginner, for the more seasoned lover, and for the mountain climber. But, O, what mountains!
1. Introductions
Philosophy
Emerson, the essays “Self Reliance” and “Circles”. This is inspiring stuff – useful when you have a depressed evening wondering why Mandarin is so hard to learn. You can get them by searching for Emerson on Project Gutenberg www.gutenberg.org
Nietzsche, “The Genealogy of Morals”. Nietzsche tells us where guilt, religion and morality come from. Search for it on Google.
Literature
Haruki Murakami, “Norwegian Wood”. I know he’s not exactly Western, but it’s a great novel – romance, sixties Japan, despair, comedy – and will give you something to talk to lots of young Taiwanese people about. Try his much stranger “Wind-up Bird Chronicle” afterwards.
Raymond Carver, “Things We Talk About When We Talk About Love”. Go to Page One bookshop, sit on one of their sofas, and read a couple of these dark short stories.
Milan Kundera, “The Joke”. What a book! It’s certainly complex, but by the end, both the foolish joke that ruins one man’s life, and the larger joke of life itself become clear.
GK Chesterton, “The Man Who Was Thursday”. A joyful, silly, yet (eventually) profound story about a poet-policeman fighting an anarchist conspiracy. Available at Project Gutenberg.
Poetry
Allen Ginsberg, “Howl” – Find it with Google, and then download one of Ginsberg’s recitations of it from Limewire.
Christina Rossetti’s “Uphill”, “Goblin Market” and “Passing Away” – a brilliant English poet from the 19th century (find on poemhunter.com). As with all poetry, best read aloud.
DH Lawrence, “The Ship of Death”. Find it also on poemhunter.com, as preparation for Walt Whitman later.
2. Hills and valleys
Philosophy
GK Chesterton, “Orthodoxy” (his reasons for being a Christian, and how Christianity has given the idea of progress to the world). Find on Wikipedia.
Schopenhauer, “Studies in Pessimism”. On Project Gutenberg.
Plato, “The Apology of Socrates” and “Crito” (also on PG).
Lit
Jorge Luis Borges, “Fictions”. Reality twisting tales from Buenos Aires.
Shakespeare’s “Macbeth” and “Hamlet”. Macbeth is a great play to read aloud slowly, and then go on to see what you think of Hamlet. After that, sneak into Page One and have a look at Harold Bloom’s reverential analysis of the play in his “Hamlet: Poem Unlimited”.
Kundera, “The Unbearable Lightness of Being”. Even better than The Joke, and if you find its references to Nietzschean philosophy perplexing, look the terms up on Wikipedia.
Faulkner, “As I Lay Dying”. I feel this book is erratic in places, but the good parts are breathtaking.
Poetry
Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself” and “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking”. See if Song of Myself reminds you of Emerson.
TS Eliot, “Preludes” and “The Wasteland”. Preludes is my favourite of his poems, the banal, hideous city surrounded by the sense of the holy.
Emily Dickinson, any dozen you like.
3. Onwards!
“Paradise Lost” is a priority, once you feel acquainted with blank verse via Shakespeare. Not for the plot or characters, but for Milton’s awe inspiring use of the language, the way he gives words new shapes. To be a native English speaker and never read Paradise Lost is a terrible missed opportunity. I also love the poetry of Wordsworth, Wallace Stevens, and in translation, Neruda and Lorca. For philosophy, why not continue with Hume, Richard Rorty and some of the Existentialists/Absurdists like Satre and Camus; look into science as well, with Feynman’s “Six Easy Pieces” and something like “The Elegant Universe” or “The Blank Slate”. And for literature, the vast works still wait, such as Proust’s “In Search of Lost Time”, and Joyce’s “Ulysses”.
As your taste and knowledge start to grow, you start to realise how much is out there, how much there is to learn, and that your problem is how little time you have, not how much.
Daniel
7 Comments
December 21, 2006 at 7:07 pm
Interesting indeed yes. Thanks Daniel. I recently read Haruki Murakami’s ‘Sputnik Sweetheart’. He has such a way with metaphors. I shall find a copy of Norwegian Wood next
December 22, 2006 at 2:11 am
For fun, read Norwegian Wood AT Norwegian Wood (the cafe) off Roosevelt Road Sec 4. A good book in an interesting neighbourhood
December 22, 2006 at 3:14 pm
Re: your fiction choices — I also like GK Chesterton very much, but disagree with you on Murakami. I think he is a terrible writer. For short stories, my current favorite is Irwin Shaw’s (try his stories in “Five Decades”)…
December 22, 2006 at 4:22 pm
Hi Plahplah, I’ll have a look for Shaw. Why don’t you like Murakami? Conversational style? Lack of substance?
December 22, 2006 at 8:12 pm
no… not the meandering personal narrative that is bothersome. in fact, the style makes his books really easy to get into which i suspect is the reason so many people read his books. and there are some scenes, especially the sex scenes
, which are hard to put down. it’s nice that he is dealing with modern people and the kind of void and aimlessness that we feel, but overall, i feel the plot and character devpmt are very weak. the main characters seem to wander through life fantasizing, and the few actions they take bear no consequence outside or inside. how can we know who they are if nothing is at stake?
December 28, 2006 at 12:34 am
Paradise Lost–definitely a must-read. (Though I imagine some people will be muttering under their breaths as they work through it.) What do you think of T.S. Eliot’s “Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”? I like it a lot (and it’s much more accessible than “The Wasteland”), but I know some people aren’t so fond of it.
December 28, 2006 at 2:41 pm
Yes, Thuicc, I really like Prufrock. I think I prefer the Preludes, as Prufrock has a bit of the clever-clever tendency that I dislike in some of the poets of that period (William Carlos Williams, for example, though Stevens is so beyond clever-clever that I can’t complain about him). What’s of course technically interesting about TS Eliot is the formal poetic devices that he hides in his lines – Prufrock has a repeating three line device of two very poetic lines followed by a disappointment.