When you are flying home on Air India, you stand a good chance of being trapped between Sneezy and Sleazy for 26 hours, and you need to carry something toxic and forbidding that will still make it past the U.S. airport security. Richard III was just the thing for me. My fellow passengers on this particular flight turned out to be female, quite sweet, and only mildly sneezy, but the book put a blanket on conversation, as planned.
When I found Richard III mouldering on my parents’ bookshelf, I wondered why I had never read it in full. Within a few pages I remembered why. It is full of trite dialogue and whining royalty, and it features a protagonist who has a time-pass approach to villainy. Still, I muddled through. I’ve been brought up to finish everything on my plate. The ordeal reminded me of the days of assigned reading and obedience to a list decreed from above. The summer before my independent study of George Eliot, I tunnelled cheerfully through her seven novels and six volumes of published letters (out of nine volumes in the series) and then struggled through a long poem called The Spanish Gypsy . When I reported to my guide on the first day of the semester, he was horrified. “My dear,” he exclaimed, “nobody reads George Eliot’s poetry!” What a relief.
At the time even the most august English departments were de-sanctifying dead white writers. During an interview with two professors that same year, I was asked by one whether I would read a bad book written by a good writer. As I thought about it, the other gentleman shifted in his armchair and muttered, “ Titus Andronicus .”
My answer that day was no, that I would rather spend that time studying another writer’s works. But later in life I’ve often picked up mediocre books just because they had familiar names attached to them. We smile at young readers who say they’ve read the entire Harry Potter series, or the Unfortunate Events series, or the Eragon series. They’ll soon grow out of that, we know, and learn to read a broader range of literature. And sometimes it seems like an easy way to navigate the vast ocean of books. Are we to pay down good money for an entirely unknown work? It would be like bungee-jumping without the bungee. And even in a library, where we can leap on the cheap, we wear a cord.
But a committed reader must jump. I use a buddy system to overcome resistance. My buddy leaves out a well-thumbed paperback for me that she has just read in one sitting. Or I see she owns a row of titles by an author I’ve never picked up before. She does the same at my house, and we both end up reading outside our respective comfort zones. When all those unfamiliar voices get loud and confusing, I look around again for a reliable, comfy old bore. Now where’s my copy of Titus Andronicus ?
