Sunday, July 03, 2005

Canon in G 

As in Geebus, how am I meant to even start on the Canon? All the fun stuff is all the way at the end- it'll take me til the 22nd century before I get to the 20th! Dude. I mean, dude. Plus, all these lists start with Homer's Iliad or Odyssey. Fat books in verse. Tres appealing. Here are the ideas so far:

-1 Go from both ends ie. read Greeks and 20th century simultaneously
-2 God forbid, read whatever sounds interesting from these lists
-3 Go from top to bottom, skipping none. Will finish in maybe 2205
-4 Pick a book from each author listed. Finish in maybe 2105
-5 Go from top to bottom, skipping boring-looking/terrifying ones
-6 Cheat: yes, I did have that bookmarked, and yes, it is incredibly tempting
-7 Stuff em all, go read Harry Potter. Also tempting.
-8 Start with the English-language ones, under the pretext that nice modern translations probably aren't available on Project Gutenberg
-9 Devise my own mini-canon. I'm pretty good at this pseudo-intellectual thing myself; before going to France in Year 10, I read a handful of French authors to acquaint myself with the culture or something (totally more reasonable than reading, like, Lonely Planet, of course). About a book or two each from these, in translation: Flaubert, Voltaire, Balzac, Zola, Sartre, Hugo, Camus, Verne, maybe Dumas, I forget. Leaving out all the great playwrights and poets and er, everything before the Romantics; shallow, but sufficient*.

Maybe I could do a recognition test: if I've heard of em, they're famous, and if they're famous, they're more likely to be necessary/important, right?....right?


...


Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone it is.


*Hey, that could be my personal tagline.

# posted at 2:53 am

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