NOT A STUNT: SF(6) GEORGE ORWELL

I am pretty good at literary quizzes, and I especially like those where you identify a work based on its first line. I always get this one right: "It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen." That's the opening of 1984 by George Orwell. I have never read 1984.

Orwell's novel is the first on the list of David Pringle's Best 100 Science Fiction Novels, the list I have been choosing from for these blog postings. It is the one book on the list that I can tell most any of my friends that I have never read and expect always the same response, "I can't believe that."

Is it unimaginable that I have never read 1984? I have read a lot of other books. According to my Good Reads list, I have read 84 books since the first of the year. Even though that number may be inflated because so many have been relatively short sf novels, I still consistently rank above the national average for "books read per year," which according to the Washington Post is four It's just that in my case none of them has ever been George Orwell's 1984.

Friends ask, "Didn't you have to read it in high school?" No, I did not. I am a victim of American public school education, 1957 - 1969. We didn't have to read books. We made books reports, choosing I suppose from a list of acceptable titles. (1984 was possibly on these lists.) But never in my English classes were we all assigned the same book for outside reading, and there were certainly no such things as Summer Reading Lists. It was during this time that I read several of the other books on the Pringle list: Robert A. Heinlein's The Puppet Masters; several by Ray Bradbury, who was my idol at the time; and, in seventh grade about half of us read Pat Frank's Alas, Babylon. (This was only a year after the Cuban missile crisis and we all still thought we might be blown up in the near future. I think Alas, Babylon remains popular on reading lists for early teens. Apocalypse never goes out of style.)

I could blame Aldous Huxley for the fact that I never read 1984. I had around that same time read Brave New World and found it dull. It was a poor introduction to dystopian fiction, as well as probably a denser and more adult novel than a thirteen-year-old needed to read. I have ever since associated the Huxley and the Orwell novel, and never picked up the latter.

So what difference does it make if I go to my grave having never read 1984? As with most rhetorical questions the answer, I think, is obvious. None whatsoever. There are no more pop tests in my future. I don't think I will lose any friends having revealed my dark secret. And I still get that question right on Famous First Line quizzes.

I am feeling brazen. Here are some other things I have never read.

1) Anything by Charles Dickens from beginning to end. (There might be an exception for A Christmas Carol, although it could be that I have seen so many film adaptations so may times that I feel I know it by heart."There is more gravy than grave about you, Marley.")

2) No Faulkner since 9th grade. And then I only had a go at The Sound and the Fury and felt pretty much at sea the whole way through it.

3)Very little that would have been considered "age appropriate" when I was in elementary school and junior high. No Black Beauty or Old Yeller - saw the movies. (Films adaptations of Jules Verne and H.G. Wells made me want to read the originals, which I discovered were long and had few if any of the Ray Harryhausen monsters found on screen. A TV presentation of John Huston's Moby Dick lead to a disastrous encounter with that novel when I was around eleven. I have read it a couple of times since)

4) Nothing by Dostoevsky.

5) None of the following: Tony Morrison, Cormac McCarthy, John Irving, Jack Kerouac, or Stephen King.

I have a copy of 1984 sitting in front of me now. I still don't know if I will read it. For one thing it has the wrong cover. The one pictured above is the proper cover. It also has that ugly, Signet Classic typeface -- so dark it looks like a stain, narrow margins. Whether I ever read it or not will remain my own, dirty little secret.

UNREAD

Something I read the other day made me think about those books I have on my shelves that I know I will never read and yet have no inclination to get rid of.

Several varieties of unread books crowd my shelves. The majority are those that I can still imagine myself reading someday. These range from The Tale of the Genji to Norman Sherry's three volume biography of Graham Greene. Those examples imply that length plays a role in this category, so I will add Tin Tin and the Secret Life of Literature by Tom McCarthy. Then there are books that I never intend to read cover to cover, but that I have or will "read at," as in "No, I have not read all seven volumes of the Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson, but I have read at them."

I have, in fact, read quite a few of the books I own, and I no longer own many books that I have read. What put me in mind of that other category -- the books I have no intention of reading but still keep in the house -- was Thornton Wilder's lifelong commitment to Finnegan's Wake. Wilder had two academic avocations. One involved establishing the chronology of the plays Lope de Vega wrote between 1590 and 1610. I may be a little off on those dates, but since Lope de Vega wrote over two hundred plays, Wilder had his work cut out for him. He knew that it was a project of interest to at most a handful of academics, but he enjoyed doing the research. He also spent years with Joyce's final work, maintaining notebooks and a heavily annotated copy of the novel where he delighted in puzzling out the word play, the arcane references, and the multi-lingual puns.

Better he than I.

I've read just about everything else by Joyce, I think I even read his play once, but one thumb through of Finnegan's Wake assured me that the pleasure/frustration ratio there was not such that I would ever seriously consider reading it. But I would keep it around because I own all the others. I even have a copy of Sribbledehobble, the transcription of the notebooks he kept while planning Finnegan's Wake.

What it turns out I don't have is a copy of Finnegan's Wake. Reading about Wilder's fascination made me want to glance at it again, but there is not a copy on the shelf. My immediate reaction to this discovery was to think, I should pick up the next good secondhand copy I see. Then I thought, What am I thinking?

I take comfort, and some degree of snobbish pride, in this thought from the Mexican poet and critic Gabriel Zaid. In So Many Books he defines the truly cultured as those who "are capable of owning thousands of unread books without losing their composure or their desire for more." By that standard, I am Andre Malraux.

I found the Zaid quote in one of Nick Hornby's Stuff I'v Been Reading essays for The Believer. I did get Zaid's book from the library, and it is a very quotable book and very short. Did you know that a book is published every thirty seconds?

And nearby where I thought I would find Finnegan's Wake I found another book that illustrates my original category equally well: Lewis Carroll's Symbolic Logic. Complete. 496 pages.