Top ten books you can't call yourself a writer without reading?

[youngsquire]

Looking for the top ten books in which someone who want's to call themselves a writer can't get by without reading.

Here's my list:
1) Moby Dick - Herman Melville
2) Great Gatsby - F. Scott Fitzgerald
3) Lolita - Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov
4) 1984 - George Orwell
5) Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
6) Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
7) The Scarlett Letter - Nathaniel Hawthorne
8) Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
9) The Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
10) Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Anyone else have a better list? Think Dickens should be on this list? Joyce? Woolf?

[Pope of Eruke]

Absolutely stupid idea, in my opinion.

[youngsquire]

Why? Please enlighten us. But be sure to use small words, we're not all as smart as you are.

[Pope of Eruke]

Why? Please enlighten us. But be sure to use small words, we're not all as smart as you are.

The idea that there is a list of ten books that you must read to qualify as a writer is pretty hilarious actually, and you are the one to make this list are you?

Cut the sarcasm, who is us? I dont see anyone else in this thread.

[grigioverde]

***


Honestly? I don't think that a "list" of books can be requested to be a writer, there are many things from which we can understand if a writer is acculturated and the reason because the "list" itself is superficial is that there is not an "appropriate culture" to write otherwise would be something steely.

YOUR list, anyway, is not so great -honestly speaking- mostly because there are only contemporary so-called classics where you need groundwork to tu build a towers.

[youngsquire]

Good point. I agree with you that just by reading these books, you aren't automatically "qualified" to be a writer. But if you read what I wrote, you would see that I never used the word "qualified". I am simply proposing that there are about of handful of novels that most, if not all, authors have read and hold in high regard.

I think that we can both agree that books like Moby Dick and The Great Gatsby are novels that have helped to shape western literature today, and I could imagine that we can both agree that, in fact, there is a short list of novels that every writer and aspiring writer should know even a little bit about and probably should read.

[kev67]

Looking for the top ten books in which someone who want's to call themselves a writer can't get by without reading.

Here's my list:
1) Moby Dick - Herman Melville
2) Great Gatsby - F. Scott Fitzgerald
3) Lolita - Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov
4) 1984 - George Orwell
5) Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
6) Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
7) The Scarlett Letter - Nathaniel Hawthorne
8) Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
9) The Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
10) Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Anyone else have a better list? Think Dickens should be on this list? Joyce? Woolf?

That list is a bit light and fluffy for me. I would substitute Pride and Prejudice for Tess of the d'Urbervilles.

[Lokasenna]

That list is a bit light and fluffy for me. I would substitute Pride and Prejudice for Tess of the d'Urbervilles.

It also has nothing from before the early nineteenth century. Given that the earliest 'book' we have is the Summerian epic of Gilgamesh, composed over 4,000 years ago, that's quite a lot of literature to miss out on...

For the record, I think anyone can call themselves a writer without having read any of these books (or, indeed, Gilgamesh). I think picking ten 'essential' books out the vast canon of world literature is pretty meaningless - and each entry impossible to justify. I suppose you could list 'books' that have had a profound impact on the literary canon, with regard to the frequency with which other words allude to or reference them - the Iliad, the plays of Shakespeare, the Bible, The Canterbury Tales, Paradise Lost, the Divine Comedy... frankly, that's an endless list as well.

[Pope of Eruke]

It also has nothing from before the early nineteenth century. Given that the earliest 'book' we have is the Summerian epic of Gilgamesh, composed over 4,000 years ago, that's quite a lot of literature to miss out on...

For the record, I think anyone can call themselves a writer without having read any of these books (or, indeed, Gilgamesh). I think picking ten 'essential' books out the vast canon of world literature is pretty meaningless - and each entry impossible to justify. I suppose you could list 'books' that have had a profound impact on the literary canon, with regard to the frequency with which other words allude to or reference them - the Iliad, the plays of Shakespeare, the Bible, The Canterbury Tales, Paradise Lost, the Divine Comedy... frankly, that's an endless list as well.

yup...

[youngsquire]

It also has nothing from before the early nineteenth century. Given that the earliest 'book' we have is the Summerian epic of Gilgamesh, composed over 4,000 years ago, that's quite a lot of literature to miss out on...

For the record, I think anyone can call themselves a writer without having read any of these books (or, indeed, Gilgamesh). I think picking ten 'essential' books out the vast canon of world literature is pretty meaningless - and each entry impossible to justify. I suppose you could list 'books' that have had a profound impact on the literary canon, with regard to the frequency with which other words allude to or reference them - the Iliad, the plays of Shakespeare, the Bible, The Canterbury Tales, Paradise Lost, the Divine Comedy... frankly, that's an endless list as well.

When talking about books before the 19th century, you are right that it is a vast list that absolutely bares consideration, but when talking about books that . . . you just really oughta read, which is what this list is about, we're looking at books that have had the most influence over novels being written today, and that also have had significantly withstood the test of time.

So, for example, when we talk about The Great Gatsby, I can almost guarantee that 99.99% of authors today have read it; the same goes for books like Moby Dick and The Scarlet Letter. But if you were to somehow take a poll and see who, out of all the authors of the past 20 odd years, have read Gilgamesh, I would assume that that list would be significantly smaller.

The point of this list is not to be dogmatic in by telling everyone that these are the 100% best books of all time, because that, of course, would be based merely on subjectivity. But instead, what this is attempting to do is to provide a backbone for modern literacy, that catalogues in it, some of the best known, most talked about, and most influential pieces of writing that you, most likely, couldn't go without reading if you wanted to call yourself any sort of a writer.

[Lokasenna]

It would be quite interesting, actually, to have some raw data on the reading habits of our modern established and celebrated authors - the works they felt were the most formative for themselves.

That said, I'm still not sure your list is justifiable. Take Austen for example. Sure, PnP is probably her most 'popular' novel, to the extent that it is the one most people have heard of (largely, in truth, thanks to Colin Firth emerging from that lake...) - but I don't think most Austen scholars (or any intelligent writers who had read her widely) would argue for it being her greatest work (Persuasion or Northanger Abbey, or even Emma seem to get more critical attention).

Your list is also rather US-centric - four of your ten are American authors. This might mean that modern US writers are more likely to have read them - but can the same be said to be true of modern British, French, German, Russian or whatever writers? I think most people would hold Chinua Achebe and Wole Soyinka up as major 20th/21st century writers, for example, but I expect the texts that have informed their work are drawn from a very different tradition. I'm not sure that, outside of America, 99.99% of writers would have read Melville or Hawthorne - I don't think you could even make that claim for something as universal as Shakespeare or Homer.

[Lykren]

It would be a lot more honest to call this another "my ten favorite books list thread".

When talking about books before the 19th century, you are right that it is a vast list that absolutely bares consideration, but when talking about books that . . . you just really oughta read, which is what this list is about, we're looking at books that have had the most influence over novels being written today, and that also have had significantly withstood the test of time.

Look, this is silly. Gilgamesh and other ancient mythological tales have of course had more influence on present-day novels than, to take your example, Moby-Dick because Moby-Dick was influenced by books that were influenced by books that were influenced by books that were influenced by Gilgamesh et al.

You somehow have come to the conclusion that in looking for books "you just really oughta read" one would be wise to exclude pre-19th century texts.

I could imagine that we can both agree that, in fact, there is a short list of novels that every writer and aspiring writer should know even a little bit about and probably should read.

I'll opt out of this particular agreement. Loka is right, those kinds of lists can have no reliable qualifications for inclusion, and quickly become enormous.

[youngsquire]

It would be quite interesting, actually, to have some raw data on the reading habits of our modern established and celebrated authors - the works they felt were the most formative for themselves.

That said, I'm still not sure your list is justifiable. Take Austen for example. Sure, PnP is probably her most 'popular' novel, to the extent that it is the one most people have heard of (largely, in truth, thanks to Colin Firth emerging from that lake...) - but I don't think most Austen scholars (or any intelligent writers who had read her widely) would argue for it being her greatest work (Persuasion or Northanger Abbey, or even Emma seem to get more critical attention).

Your list is also rather US-centric - four of your ten are American authors. This might mean that modern US writers are more likely to have read them - but can the same be said to be true of modern British, French, German, Russian or whatever writers? I think most people would hold Chinua Achebe and Wole Soyinka up as major 20th/21st century writers, for example, but I expect the texts that have informed their work are drawn from a very different tradition. I'm not sure that, outside of America, 99.99% of writers would have read Melville or Hawthorne - I don't think you could even make that claim for something as universal as Shakespeare or Homer.

In reference to your interest in some raw data, you might be interested in taking a look at this: http://www.toptenbooks.net/ But I think we're getting a little besides the point. The point of this thread is to ask you guys if you think there are any must-read books for aspiring writers. If not, cool. Maybe you think there aren't any, that people should just read whatever gives them a writing boner, which, if I am understanding you correctly, is mainly your point.

But, on the other hand, if you DO have recommendations for books that you believe people who are attempting to be successful at writing probably can't get by without, one time or another, sitting down with any specific titles in general, then let's hear 'em -- preferably in top-ten list format.

[youngsquire]

It would be a lot more honest to call this another "my ten favorite books list thread".

When talking about books before the 19th century, you are right that it is a vast list that absolutely bares consideration, but when talking about books that . . . you just really oughta read, which is what this list is about, we're looking at books that have had the most influence over novels being written today, and that also have had significantly withstood the test of time.

Look, this is silly. Gilgamesh and other ancient mythological tales have of course had more influence on present-day novels than, to take your example, Moby-Dick because Moby-Dick was influenced by books that were influenced by books that were influenced by books that were influenced by Gilgamesh et al.

You somehow have come to the conclusion that in looking for books "you just really oughta read" one would be wise to exclude pre-19th century texts.

I could imagine that we can both agree that, in fact, there is a short list of novels that every writer and aspiring writer should know even a little bit about and probably should read.

I'll opt out of this particular agreement. Loka is right, those kinds of lists can have no reliable qualifications for inclusion, and quickly become enormous.

So, your basically saying that any recommendations for aspiring writer for books that presently influence a mass number of successful authors is a moot point because all books, in the end, are influenced by their predecessors? So, in this respect we should never read any books except for Gilgamesh? . . . I'm going to have to sternly disagree with your argument.

When you say "reliable qualifications" what does that even mean? Facts? You want facts that these books are widely known and influential? This would defeat the purpose of asking the question because if there were facts then I wouldn't have the need to ask it.

[Pumpkin337]

Let's start with reading some books that enable you to tell the difference between 'bare' and 'bear'.


you are right that it is a vast list that absolutely bares consideration,

Are we talking 'great literature' here or what? Because I think the list of books for a fantasy writer, or a horror writer, or a sci-fi writer, or basically any genre other than 'literary' would have very different lists of influential / important books.

[youngsquire]

Let's start with reading some books that enable you to tell the difference between 'bare' and 'bear'.



Are we talking 'great literature' here or what? Because I think the list of books for a fantasy writer, or a horror writer, or a sci-fi writer, or basically any genre other than 'literary' would have very different lists of influential / important books.

Oh, I'm sorry. Do my typos offend you? I didn't know I was in the presence of Noah Webster. Anyway, let's assume we are talking about literary authors; I guess if I had to pick one. Even though I don't intend to marginalize one genre in particular.

[Lykren]

So, your basically saying that any recommendations for aspiring writer for books that presently influence a mass number of successful authors is a moot point because all books, in the end, are influenced by their predecessors? So, in this respect we should never read any books except for Gilgamesh? . . . I'm going to have to sternly disagree with your argument.

Haha, not at all. Change is occurring all the time despite and because of influence, so there are interesting reasons to read from all time periods. Joyce did things differently than Shakespeare, who did things differently from Dante, who did things differently from Homer, etc. But they all learned from their predecessors either directly or indirectly, and then they all tried something new. That's no reason to ignore anything but the earliest literature. It can be fun to see what changes over time.

When you say "reliable qualifications" what does that even mean? Facts? You want facts that these books are widely known and influential? This would defeat the purpose of asking the question because if there were facts then I wouldn't have the need to ask it.

What I mean is simply that people make lists of 'important books' all the time, and they're never the same, and often they're completely different. The terms by which we choose what to include are simply too vague. Take your terms for example; books that an aspiring writer should read to develop their writing skill. It helps to read widely, of course, but there is no one, there are no ten, books that can be called necessary for the process of writing. Writing is too flexible, too varied a process for that to be true.

[stlukesguild]

I think that we can both agree that books like Moby Dick and The Great Gatsby are novels that have helped to shape western literature today, and I could imagine that we can both agree that, in fact, there is a short list of novels that every writer and aspiring writer should know even a little bit about and probably should read.

I don't think you can come up with any list of books that a writer MUST have read to be successful at his or her profession. The type of literature that you are writing (poetry, short stories, science-fiction, etc...) would certainly impact what books you would consider "essential" to developing your abilities. As others have suggested, the culture in which you live and write will undoubtedly have an influence upon what writers you deem as "essential". I suspect a German writer will find Goethe, Schiller, Mann, Hesse, Boll, Holderlin, Kafka, Heine, Rilke, Kleist, etc... to be far more "essential" than Moby Dick or The Great Gatsby. Honestly, if I were picking American writers with the greatest influence on a broader (international) scale, I'd start with Whitman, Poe, and Eliot.

I agree that there are works of literature that have had a profound impact upon Western Culture and the development of subsequent literature in the West, but with the possible exceptions of Tolstoy and Moby Dick... especially for an American audience... I would suggest that there are far more important an influential works. The obvious choices would surely include The Bible, Homer, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Virgil, Ovid, Dante, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Cervantes, The Arabian Nights, Milton, Montaigne, the Romantic poets (Shelley, Keats, Wordsworth, Byron, Blake, Coleridge, Novalis, Goethe, etc...) Hugo, Dickens, Baudelaire, Whitman, etc...

Are more recent writers more important or influential upon writers of today? That's debatable. As has been suggested, if you take a writer like Joyce or Eliot you will find that Shakespeare and other earlier writers run throughout their works. Look at Cormac McCarthy. His novels speak of Moby Dick and Faulkner... but they also speak of Shakespeare. John Barth, J.L. Borges and other major Modern/Contemporary writers owe much to the Arabian Nights. As a visual artist I can assure you that while artists may be well aware of the artists of the recent past, they draw as much inspiration... sometimes more... from the "old masters".

[Calidore]

The problem with coming up with a universal list like this is that there is no universal. Everyone has their own unique taste in writing and their own unique voice they would write in. As a result, as stlukesguild said, everyone would have their own individual list of authors/books they could read to help develop that voice.

If I were writing science fiction, I could probably put together a list of ten books that would be beneficial to my writing based on what I like to read and how I want to write; but that would be different from someone else's list, because that person has his own style and tastes. If I were writing horror, that list might have some of the same authors, but also some changes specific to horror. Ditto literary or whatever other genre.

[youngsquire]

The problem with coming up with a universal list like this is that there is no universal. Everyone has their own unique taste in writing and their own unique voice they would write in. As a result, as stlukesguild said, everyone would have their own individual list of authors/books they could read to help develop that voice.

If I were writing science fiction, I could probably put together a list of ten books that would be beneficial to my writing based on what I like to read and how I want to write; but that would be different from someone else's list, because that person has his own style and tastes. If I were writing horror, that list might have some of the same authors, but also some changes specific to horror. Ditto literary or whatever other genre.

So, since we're all talking in english, let's assume we are talking about the Anglosphere. I think it's safe to say that we are not talking about Korean Horror Fiction, or any other regions or obscure genres like that. Also, since this is called "The Literature Network," I would assume we are talking about aspiring Literary writers. I would think that all this would be already implied.

[illiterati]

here--because I think this is probably what you're looking for (but also because it might help you reconceive that list of yours):

ten big, important, (mostly) recent (mostly) novels written by 10 (mostly) anglophone (mostly) American (mostly) white (mostly) guys that will broaden your writerly horizons:

1) Infinite Jest, David Foster Wallace
2) House of Leaves, Mark Z. Danielewski
3) Tai Pei, Tao Lin
4) Autobiography of Red, Anne Carson
5) Underworld, Don DeLillo
6) 2666, Robert Bolano
7) Blood Meridian, Cormac McCarthy
8) Midnight's Children, Salmon Rushdie
9) Austerlitz, W. G. Sebald
10) A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, Dave Eggers

[stlukesguild]

So, since we're all talking in english, let's assume we are talking about the Anglosphere. I think it's safe to say that we are not talking about Korean Horror Fiction, or any other regions or obscure genres like that. Also, since this is called "The Literature Network," I would assume we are talking about aspiring Literary writers. I would think that all this would be already implied.

Your assumption would be somewhat misguided. There are members here who are writing in English, but hail from France, Germany, Italy, Poland, Brazil, the Philippines, etc... Even within the English-speaking world you should recognize that there are differences in the literary traditions of England, Ireland, the US, Canada, etc... And then we have the question of how you define "Literary Writers"? We have members here who are enamored of certain styles (Romanticism or Modernism or experimental avant garde works), certain genre (fantasy, science fiction, short stories, poetry, etc...) Good... even great writing can be found across nearly every genre: romance, science-fiction, horror/suspense, non-fiction, poetry, etc... Think of it this way, if my aspirations are to be a poet, I am likely to find Blake, Keats, Yeats, Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Whitman, Eliot, Rilke, Donne, Holderlin, Garcia Lorca, Neruda, Montale, Leopardi, etc... far more important to me personally than Tolstoy, Dickens, Moby Dick, Hawthorne, Hugo, Proust, or most other novelists.

If someone were to ask me which visual artists I find personally "essential", my list would likely be exclusively made up of painters (Michelangelo, Rubens, Rembrandt, Matisse, Bonnard, Degas, etc...) whereas my list would likely be quite different if my own endeavors were as a print-maker, a sculptor, or an architect.

Again, I wholly appreciate your idea that there are certain writers who you personally feel have been essential to your literary development... and that there are certain writers who have made essential contributions to to the history of literature as we know it. I just don't think we can come up with a list of 10 writers that are essential to all writers... even limited to all writers in a given time and place.

[JCamilo]

Not to mention that a culture that closes itself to be in dialogue only with their own production, will be very poor. The 3 russians and Flaubert were certainly as influential to english modern novels as the previous english novel writers, if not more, for example. And that Don Quixote is everywhere (and even so, I bet only a minority needed to read it to be a writer).

[Pope of Eruke]

I say it again, this list is a ridiculous idea.

[stlukesguild]

I certainly don't think it is a ridiculous idea to suggest that there are certain literary works that are greater than others... or that there are certain literary works that have had a more profound impact upon subsequent literature than others. Certainly I don't think it is absurd to put forth a list of books that one personally feels were "essential" or of the greatest influence upon one's own efforts. I can quite assuredly make such a list of books as well as one of art.

[youngsquire]

Thank you stlukesguild and illiterati. But I see that Pope of Eruke still is adamant that the idea of this list still holds no relevance. So, let me provide a scenario: you're a guy who just got a book published in America, parts of Europe, and maybe some other places. Everybody loves your book. So they throw you a giant party on your behalf. At that party you mingle with other authors, colleges, and literary minds. Someone brings up the topic of the ending of the book The Great Gatsby. He maybe makes a comparison to it and your book. Then he asks your opinion, and you say: "The Great what? The Great Gatsby? . . . Never heard of it." You would look like a fraud, or at the very least people would think you were joking.

This is the point of the list. To provide a handful of books that you just plainly CAN'T get by WITHOUT reading . . . period, or at the very least knowing about.

So, I am assuming that the reason you think this is a "ridiculous idea" is because you believe that people should read whatever they want, whatever influences them, which I agree with. BUT, I also believe that there are just some books that you can't NOT know about, even if you don't necessarily like them -- hence the list.

[Pope of Eruke]

Thank you stlukesguild and illiterati. But I see that Pope of Eruke still is adamant that the idea of this list still holds no relevance. So, let me provide a scenario: you're a guy who just got a book published in America, parts of Europe, and maybe some other places. Everybody loves your book. So they throw you a giant party on your behalf. At that party you mingle with other authors, colleges, and literary minds. Someone brings up the topic of the ending of the book The Great Gatsby. He maybe makes a comparison to it and your book. Then he asks your opinion, and you say: "The Great what? The Great Gatsby? . . . Never heard of it." You would look like a fraud, or at the very least people would think you were joking.

This is the point of the list. To provide a handful of books that you just plainly CAN'T get by WITHOUT reading . . . period, or at the very least knowing about.

So, I am assuming that the reason you think this is a "ridiculous idea" is because you believe that people should read whatever they want, whatever influences them, which I agree with. BUT, I also believe that there are just some books that you can't NOT know about, even if you don't necessarily like them -- hence the list.

It's been explained plenty of times why the list is a ridiculous, or just implausible idea. It's literally impossible to narrow this down to ten books.

[Pope of Eruke]

I certainly don't think it is a ridiculous idea to suggest that there are certain literary works that are greater than others... or that there are certain literary works that have had a more profound impact upon subsequent literature than others. Certainly I don't think it is absurd to put forth a list of books that one personally feels were "essential" or of the greatest influence upon one's own efforts. I can quite assuredly make such a list of books as well as one of art.

Neither do and I didn't say that anywhere, I just think it's ridiculous to suggest it could be narrowed down to ten specific books. If you are saying, "these are the ten books that influenced me the most" that is different, but the list is always going to be subjective. You could justify so many choices.

[illiterati]

Thank you stlukesguild and illiterati. But I see that Pope of Eruke still is adamant that the idea of this list still holds no relevance. So, let me provide a scenario: you're a guy who just got a book published in America, parts of Europe, and maybe some other places. Everybody loves your book. So they throw you a giant party on your behalf. At that party you mingle with other authors, colleges, and literary minds. Someone brings up the topic of the ending of the book The Great Gatsby. He maybe makes a comparison to it and your book. Then he asks your opinion, and you say: "The Great what? The Great Gatsby? . . . Never heard of it." You would look like a fraud, or at the very least people would think you were joking.

This is the point of the list. To provide a handful of books that you just plainly CAN'T get by WITHOUT reading . . . period, or at the very least knowing about.

So, I am assuming that the reason you think this is a "ridiculous idea" is because you believe that people should read whatever they want, whatever influences them, which I agree with. BUT, I also believe that there are just some books that you can't NOT know about, even if you don't necessarily like them -- hence the list.

just to clarify, i wasn't in any way endorsing the idea of any kind of top ten list as a credentializing agent--i was offering a list of big novels that i thought might both fit within the constraints of and extend what i interpret as your conception of 'literature,' based on the novels in your own list.

if it's just an issue of straight cultural capital in the narrowest sense--name-dropping at parties or as part of professional socialization, you'd probably be better off with a more typical Great Books-type list, as others have implied: Iliad, Odyssey, some tragedy, Plato, Bible, Dante, Shakespeare--etc. Also as others have implied, one of the dangers of list-making--of presenting a list of any ten as THE books for all mankind--that you've so helpfully demonstrated is the ways in which it reveals our own parochialism and narrowness of perspective. To my mind, the idea of literature traced out by the books you list is terribly narrow--not there aren't some great books there (Moby Dick could stay on any list you want to make, as far as I'm concerned), but they're all cut of the same cloth: either novel-as-nationalist-literature or (even further revealing the educational and cultural context that informs your list) the dumbed down American primary school adaptation of the novel-as-nationalist-literature (viz 1984). Again, I'm not knocking any of these novels, except insofar as you put them forward as definitive, universal. They're not.

[youngsquire]

Neither do and I didn't say that anywhere, I just think it's ridiculous to suggest it could be narrowed down to ten specific books. If you are saying, "these are the ten books that influenced me the most" that is different, but the list is always going to be subjective. You could justify so many choices.

Yes, it is subjective. You're right. Hence the purpose of asking people on this forum what they think should be on the list.

[Pope of Eruke]

Yes, it is subjective. You're right. Hence the purpose of asking people on this forum what they think should be on the list.

Yeah a personal list of your choices is going subjective, a universal list is literally impossible. Hence your list is ridiculous, and hence why people have explained the problems with it, rather than giving you their list.

[illiterati]

you know what else is ridiculous?

friendship unicorns.

[youngsquire]

Yeah a personal list of your choices is going subjective, a universal list is literally impossible. Hence your list is ridiculous, and hence why people have explained the problems with it, rather than giving you their list.

I feel that this argument is turning into rather or not lists are an effective tool, which I think is way far beyond the point of this thread. Indulge me for a moment and imagine a classical musician who has never listened to Beethoven, or a painter who has never studied Rembrandt or Picasso. Kind of hard to believe right? The same goes for a writer who doesn't know who Hester Prynne is.

Now, I know that there are quite a few works to choose from -- let's face it, probably more than ten -- but let's now assume that there is a list of say 500+ books that professional writers should know about. Who do you think would be in the top ten? And if you are totally opposed to the formality of some sort of hierarchical format, then just name a few, not in a list, in which you believe are a must-read in order to be even semi-knowledgeable about western literature today.

[Pumpkin337]

then just name a few, not in a list, in which you believe are a must-read in order to be even semi-knowledgeable about western literature today.

This is a totally different premise for a list than your original request for a list a writer must have read in order to be called a writer.


Reading is groundwork for a writer - like a musician needs to listen to music. A writer needs to familarise themselves with words, with styles, with phrasing, tempo, tension, plot, characterisation etc etc and apart from studying the rules of these things, reading is the best way to learn. However it is not possible to make a list unless you first ask - for what kind of writing? I think enough people have pointed that out in various different ways.

[ChicagoReader]

Thank you stlukesguild and illiterati. But I see that Pope of Eruke still is adamant that the idea of this list still holds no relevance. So, let me provide a scenario: you're a guy who just got a book published in America, parts of Europe, and maybe some other places. Everybody loves your book. So they throw you a giant party on your behalf. At that party you mingle with other authors, colleges, and literary minds. Someone brings up the topic of the ending of the book The Great Gatsby. He maybe makes a comparison to it and your book. Then he asks your opinion, and you say: "The Great what? The Great Gatsby? . . . Never heard of it." You would look like a fraud, or at the very least people would think you were joking.

This is the point of the list. To provide a handful of books that you just plainly CAN'T get by WITHOUT reading . . . period, or at the very least knowing about.

So, I am assuming that the reason you think this is a "ridiculous idea" is because you believe that people should read whatever they want, whatever influences them, which I agree with. BUT, I also believe that there are just some books that you can't NOT know about, even if you don't necessarily like them -- hence the list.

Haven't posted in a long time on these forums but this thread has riled me up a bit. I'm sorry but this post doesn't hold very strong to analysis. I get your point, but if you've had your book published in multiple countries and "everybody" loves it then you obviously can get by without reading it, and, to move away from this hypothetical, I certainly think you can be a highly successful writer without reading The Great Gatsby, or really any of the books you've listed. And I'm not even suggesting a different genre of writing. There is not a single book that you must read to be considered a writer, or to be a successful one.

You've done a lot of backtracking because frankly, your original post was ridiculous. It's a bit disrespectful. Imagine there are people out there who are working hard at being a writer, and maybe they haven't read some of these books, or any of them (and to be fair, I've read six from your list, and I'd like to consider myself at least an aspiring writer), are they supposed to stop calling themselves writers because they haven't read certain (90% white male authors) books? I would think the most important thing to read for an aspiring writer would be their own work, over and over and over, draft after draft after draft.

With all that said, there are some books that I'll suggest which I think can be helpful to an aspiring writer (which is really what you're asking and should have asked to begin with, without defending and attacking other members because they're pointing out obvious problems with your post):

Both Finding a Form and The World Within the World -- William H Gass
Norton critical edition of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn -- Mark Twain
How Fiction Works -- James Wood (this makes the list because I'm currently reading it and enjoying it, and it's already opened my eyes a number of times)
Winesburg, Ohio -- Sherwood Anderson (especially "Hands," because it's such an efficient and powerful story)
Go Tell it on the Mountain -- James Baldwin

My biggest suggestion would be to read a lot of critical work and nonfiction as you can read until your eyes bleed, but if you're not a very good reader (and sheer quantity won't do it alone), you won't be doing yourself many favors.

[youngsquire]

I think enough people have pointed that out in various different ways.

And I have answered them. Now I hope it's clear what I intend to ask, and I will ask it again now with, what I hope will be, all questions answered and all loose ends tied up, so to speak; in Western literary culture, name a few books in-which you believe are vitally important for professional literary writers and aspiring literary writers to read and know comprehensively, or -- and I'll use my previous wording -- just cant get by without reading (personally preferred as a numerical list format).

Questions? Concerns? Insults? No? Yes? Maybe? Yes . . . you over there?

[Marbles]

The point of this thread is to ask you guys if you think there are any must-read books for aspiring writers. If not, cool. Maybe you think there aren't any, that people should just read whatever gives them a writing boner, which, if I am understanding you correctly, is mainly your point.

But, on the other hand, if you DO have recommendations for books that you believe people who are attempting to be successful at writing probably can't get by without, one time or another, sitting down with any specific titles in general, then let's hear 'em -- preferably in top-ten list format.

I would take a broader view of the history of novel to fix a list an aspiring fiction writer is recommended to read. Why? Simply because those books teach you in the art of storytelling. And this exercise also takes you beyond language which is why it is unwise to restrict the titles only to those produced originally in English. There's everything you need to know in translation.

For starters, in random order, on top of my head, how about...

François Rabelais - Gargantua and Pantagruel
Miguel De Cervantes - Don Quixote
Lawrence Sterne - Tristram Shandy
Henry Fielding - A History of Tom Jones
Robert Musil - The Man Without Qualities
Hermann Broch - The Sleepwalkers
Marcel Proust - In Search of Lost Time
Leo Tolstoy - War and Peace
Gabriel Garcia Marquez - One Hundred Years of Solitude
..and Vladimir Nabokov's oeuvre

Remember, the purpose is to learn to write and these books teach you better than those creative writing courses (but by all means, do them too).

I'm a bit amused at your inclusion of 'The Great Gatsby', '1984' and 'Pride and Prejudice' for books an aspiring writer must read. I don't see why. They are good books for what they are but what exactly am I going to learn in the art of writing from the politically populistic harangues of 1984 except that Big Brother Is Watching Me?

[PerfectLovers]

First of all, you might want to remove the apostrophe from that "wants" and the second "t" from "Scarlet" if you want to call yourself a writer. And it's "colleagues," not "colleges." And yes, your typos offend me, you're talking about what you need to do if you want to be a writer.

Second of all:

1. White Male Author, American, fiction, published 1851
2. White Male Author, American, fiction, published 1925
3. White Male Author, Russian, fiction, published 1955
4. White Male Author, English, fiction, published 1949
5. White Male Author, Russian, fiction, published 1877
6. White Female Author, English, fiction, published 1813
7. White Male Author, American, fiction, published 1850
8. White Male Author, Polish/Belgian, fiction, published 1899
9. White Male Author, American, fiction, published 1939
10. White Male Author, American, fiction, published 1866

So following this logic, we can come to the conclusion that the books most worth reading of the 129 million in existence are written exclusively by white people, almost exclusively by men, that nothing particularly momentous has been published in the last SIX DECADES, nor was anything worth mentioning published prior to 1800; no woman has written anything worthwhile in 200 years, fiction novels are the only books from which we can glean writerly knowledge, and the only countries of origin for great authors are America, Russia, England, and - I think this is really only coincidental - Poland.

Because, like, screw poetry, right? And essays. And journalism. And philosophy. And memoir. And experimental structures and genres.

You know what the problem with this list is? It's basically composed of books you're required to read in high school, but the books you're required to read in high school are male-biased and white-biased because the literary industry is male-biased and white-biased, and our standards for "classics" are influenced by ideas dug in from the founding of modern universities back when only white dudes could attend them.

That being said, there's a vibrant literary community that exists today that - obviously - doesn't adhere to those standards because they've read widely and wised up. The entire idea that you don't include a single black author - what about Their Eyes Were Watching God? Or is the dialogue too colloquial for you? Or have you read it? What about Beloved, or I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings? Talking Back? What about Things Fall Apart - or is the only worthwhile version of Africa that from a white man's point of view? What about Native Son?

What about Love in the Time of Cholera, One Hundred Years of Solitude, The Savage Detectives, Like Water for Chocolate, or Labyrinths, or does Latin America not count? What about Rashomon? What about Midnight's Children? You're ignoring entire continents.

What about Frankenstein, arguably the founding novel of the science fiction genre? My Antonia? To Kill A Mockingbird? (There's some high school required reading for you.) Pilgrim at Tinker Creek? Kindred? White Teeth? The Color Purple? The Handmaid's Tale? The Joy Luck Club? The God of Small Things? The Poisonwood Bible? Or do women not count post-1900?

What about Song of Myself, Howl, The Odyssey, Ariel? Don't you need to understand imagery and rhythm to be a great writer of any kind?

The Republic? Beyond Good and Evil? The Way? Critique of Pure Reason? Being and Nothingness? Don't you need to understand human beings to write characters with human motivations?

Why should we only talk about "Western literary culture"? That is straight-up racist. Tell me even one serious, well-thought-out reason why you only need to read within the Western canon in order to be a great author. Since you're so fond of hypotheticals, imagine that someone had read every single great work of literature from Africa, Latin America, Asia, and southern Europe. Why would they be taken less seriously because they neglected to read The Great Gatsby?

You want a list? Here's my list:

-This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen, Tadeusz Borowski
-Le Petit Prince, Antoine de Saint-Exupèry
-A People's History of the United States, Howard Zinn
-Cat's Cradle, Kurt Vonnegut
-Art in Theory 1900-2000 ed. Charles Harrison & Paul Wood
-Escape From Freedom, Erich Fromm
-Nickel and Dimed, Barbara Ehrenreich
-A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again, David Foster Wallace
-On Photography, Susan Sontag
-A Man of the People, Chinua Achebe
-Tiny Beautiful Things, Cheryl Strayed
-Transgender History, Susan Stryker
-The Power and the Glory, Graham Greene
-Ariel, Sylvia Plath
-Candide, Voltaire
-Selected Poems, Carl Sandburg

Here's the thing: I'm not an "aspiring" writer, I'm a professional writer, I write for money. And I don't need to have read white-guy pedophile narratives (community: I am looking forward to reading Pale Fire, I do not discount Nabokov's genius) in order to write or write well. I need to have read diverse books, I need to have read them closely, and I need to have truly gotten a grasp on the material, the way the writer structures his or her sentences, and why they chose the words they did in order to write well. You're operating on the assumption that fame is a predictor of a great book, but you're not thinking about WHY those books became famous. You don't get credibility from reading the "right" authors, you get credibility from understanding how and why people write.

[youngsquire]

First of all, you might want to remove the apostrophe from that "wants" and the second "t" from "Scarlet" if you want to call yourself a writer. And it's "colleagues," not "colleges." And yes, your typos offend me, you're talking about what you need to do if you want to be a writer.

Second of all:

1. White Male Author, American, fiction, published 1851
2. White Male Author, American, fiction, published 1925
3. White Male Author, Russian, fiction, published 1955
4. White Male Author, English, fiction, published 1949
5. White Male Author, Russian, fiction, published 1877
6. White Female Author, English, fiction, published 1813
7. White Male Author, American, fiction, published 1850
8. White Male Author, Polish/Belgian, fiction, published 1899
9. White Male Author, American, fiction, published 1939
10. White Male Author, American, fiction, published 1866

So following this logic, we can come to the conclusion that the books most worth reading of the 129 million in existence are written exclusively by white people, almost exclusively by men, that nothing particularly momentous has been published in the last SIX DECADES, nor was anything worth mentioning published prior to 1800; no woman has written anything worthwhile in 200 years, fiction novels are the only books from which we can glean writerly knowledge, and the only countries of origin for great authors are America, Russia, England, and - I think this is really only coincidental - Poland.

Because, like, screw poetry, right? And essays. And journalism. And philosophy. And memoir. And experimental structures and genres.

You know what the problem with this list is? It's basically composed of books you're required to read in high school, but the books you're required to read in high school are male-biased and white-biased because the literary industry is male-biased and white-biased, and our standards for "classics" are influenced by ideas dug in from the founding of modern universities back when only white dudes could attend them.

That being said, there's a vibrant literary community that exists today that - obviously - doesn't adhere to those standards because they've read widely and wised up. The entire idea that you don't include a single black author - what about Their Eyes Were Watching God? Or is the dialogue too colloquial for you? Or have you read it? What about Beloved, or I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings? Talking Back? What about Things Fall Apart - or is the only worthwhile version of Africa that from a white man's point of view? What about Native Son?

What about Love in the Time of Cholera, One Hundred Years of Solitude, The Savage Detectives, Like Water for Chocolate, or Labyrinths, or does Latin America not count? What about Rashomon? What about Midnight's Children? You're ignoring entire continents.

What about Frankenstein, arguably the founding novel of the science fiction genre? My Antonia? To Kill A Mockingbird? (There's some high school required reading for you.) Pilgrim at Tinker Creek? Kindred? White Teeth? The Color Purple? The Handmaid's Tale? The Joy Luck Club? The God of Small Things? The Poisonwood Bible? Or do women not count post-1900?

What about Song of Myself, Howl, The Odyssey, Ariel? Don't you need to understand imagery and rhythm to be a great writer of any kind?

The Republic? Beyond Good and Evil? The Way? Critique of Pure Reason? Being and Nothingness? Don't you need to understand human beings to write characters with human motivations?

Why should we only talk about "Western literary culture"? That is straight-up racist. Tell me even one serious, well-thought-out reason why you only need to read within the Western canon in order to be a great author. Since you're so fond of hypotheticals, imagine that someone had read every single great work of literature from Africa, Latin America, Asia, and southern Europe. Why would they be taken less seriously because they neglected to read The Great Gatsby?

You want a list? Here's my list:

-This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen, Tadeusz Borowski
-Le Petit Prince, Antoine de Saint-Exupèry
-A People's History of the United States, Howard Zinn
-Cat's Cradle, Kurt Vonnegut
-Art in Theory 1900-2000 ed. Charles Harrison & Paul Wood
-Escape From Freedom, Erich Fromm
-Nickel and Dimed, Barbara Ehrenreich
-A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again, David Foster Wallace
-On Photography, Susan Sontag
-A Man of the People, Chinua Achebe
-Tiny Beautiful Things, Cheryl Strayed
-Transgender History, Susan Stryker
-The Power and the Glory, Graham Greene
-Ariel, Sylvia Plath
-Candide, Voltaire
-Selected Poems, Carl Sandburg

Here's the thing: I'm not an "aspiring" writer, I'm a professional writer, I write for money. And I don't need to have read white-guy pedophile narratives (community: I am looking forward to reading Pale Fire, I do not discount Nabokov's genius) in order to write or write well. I need to have read diverse books, I need to have read them closely, and I need to have truly gotten a grasp on the material, the way the writer structures his or her sentences, and why they chose the words they did in order to write well. You're operating on the assumption that fame is a predictor of a great book, but you're not thinking about WHY those books became famous. You don't get credibility from reading the "right" authors, you get credibility from understanding how and why people write.

Your points are very valid and I appreciate the response. Even though I would prefer it minus all the slander, haughtiness, and racial accusations, but maybe that's asking too much. Anyway, besides all of that, points taken.

Oh, by the way, do I need to send you a check in the mail for being my editor or do you just do that pro bono? Either way, much appreciated.

[PerfectLovers]

Your points are very valid and I appreciate the response. Even though I would prefer it minus all the slander, haughtiness, and racial accusations, but maybe that's asking too much. Anyway, besides all of that, points taken.

Oh, by the way, do I need to send you a check in the mail for being my editor or do you just do that pro bono? Either way, much appreciated.

Slander is a legal term that has to do with untrue and malicious accusations that are shown to do harm to a person's public reputation with the result of viable, demonstrable financial or social loss.

"Racist" and "racial" are two different things. "Racial" means of or pertaining to race; I made no statements about your race. "Racist" means prejudiced based on race, and since you claimed that we only "need" to know authors in the Western canon, and the Western cultural world is populated by white people, I think it's fair to say that you're showing prejudice.

This is my point exactly: You need to understand what you're saying and why to be a good writer.

You're welcome; henceforth I'll charge $125/hr.

[youngsquire]

Slander is a legal term that has to do with untrue and malicious accusations that are shown to do harm to a person's public reputation with the result of viable, demonstrable financial or social loss.

"Racist" and "racial" are two different things. "Racial" means of or pertaining to race; I made no statements about your race. "Racist" means prejudiced based on race, and since you claimed that we only "need" to know authors in the Western canon, and the Western cultural world is populated by white people, I think it's fair to say that you're showing prejudice.

This is my point exactly: You need to understand what you're saying and why to be a good writer.

You're welcome; henceforth I'll charge $125/hr.

slan·der [slan-der] Show IPA
noun
1.
defamation; calumny: rumors full of slander.
2.
a malicious, false, and defamatory statement or report: a slander against his good name.

I'm sorry but I think I'm going to have let you go as my editor. I need to make some cutbacks . . . I'm sure you'll land on your feet though.

[JBI]

I certainly don't think it is a ridiculous idea to suggest that there are certain literary works that are greater than others... or that there are certain literary works that have had a more profound impact upon subsequent literature than others. Certainly I don't think it is absurd to put forth a list of books that one personally feels were "essential" or of the greatest influence upon one's own efforts. I can quite assuredly make such a list of books as well as one of art.

It's interesting to question the general feeling of the work though. Take the masterworks made by illiterate artists, whose conception of the form, and arrangement of the actual artistic creation is merely a product of experience and surrounding influence, rather than a direct sort of inheritance from a learned tradition. That much religious art could be created by illiterate persons perhaps illustrates a notion that the literacy of a tradition is less important than the culture of it.

In that sense, Cervantes may be everywhere, but that doesn't mean he is read. You can get many of these texts indirectly through other sources, simply because they are either translated, appropriated, or alive within other books. If we are looking for a sort of "universal" in the text, most of us are approaching such things from second hand translations anyway. The person who hears their grandmother reciting bits of folklore is in many ways receiving a stronger education than a reader of the Brothers Grimm.

Now, since we are all hating on the anglosphere now I guess, I would say the list looks like this in a general sense.

The Bible (Hebrew and Greek)
The 13 Classics of Confucianism (namely the 4 "books" and 5 Classics selection)
The Koran
The Persian Book of Kings
Homer, Euripides, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Plato, Aristotle - Virgil, Cicero, Plutarch, Augustine and much in between
Euripides
The Wen Xuan, or Selections of Refined Literature (the premiere literary work of East Asia up until the modern era, where most allusions are drawn from anyway).
The Records of the Grand Historian and the Han Shu (or better yet, the 4 histories including the Book of the Later Han, and the Records of the Three Kingdoms).
Ramayana
The Sanskrit Canon, and many of its translations into Chinese
The Pali Canon

Those are basically the main forces of our cultural heritage in the extreme cases as these are the works that never seem to disappear from our traditional mainstream views. That certain works exist in isolated places without cross-cultural mixing (such as the lack of readers of the Wen Xuan in the west) shows how the world is more or less culturally divided on literature.

By now, however, we are approaching a point where these major textual bodies will converge and meld together. So that we will see an Arab quoting the Analects of Confucius while an Indian quotes Virgil. It is the general result of our cultural development.

Beyond these lines, however, we cannot come up with a particularly meaningful list beyond the post-classical language age (namely the renaissance when vernacular languages emerge). Even something like Shakespeare cannot rival the greatness of importance invested by culture in the Bible.

[Pierre Menard]

People who reduce a work like Lolita to 'white-guy pedophile narratives' and include Howard Zinn in their essential works of world literature, as well as repeat ad nauseum typical post-colonial theory without the slightest bit of nuance are pretty bloody hard to take seriously.

[JBI]

Slander is a legal term that has to do with untrue and malicious accusations that are shown to do harm to a person's public reputation with the result of viable, demonstrable financial or social loss.

"Racist" and "racial" are two different things. "Racial" means of or pertaining to race; I made no statements about your race. "Racist" means prejudiced based on race, and since you claimed that we only "need" to know authors in the Western canon, and the Western cultural world is populated by white people, I think it's fair to say that you're showing prejudice.

This is my point exactly: You need to understand what you're saying and why to be a good writer.

You're welcome; henceforth I'll charge $125/hr.

I believe the post was less about discussing the aspects of writer, and more in line with trying to discuss what makes one a good contributor to forums such as these. As valid and interesting as some of your opinions may be, the attitude in which they are delivered is nothing short of inflammatory, or slanderous, in that they deliberately seem to be constructed as to demean or reduce the status of the said poster, through insinuations both true and untrue that deliberately defame. As to the use of the word slander in a legal setting, the framework is there in that if specific social or financial losses are proven, there are grounds for compensation, this, however, does not limit the term to a legal setting.

As for the rest of your post, let me ask you a question - how well versed are you in foreign traditions, or female traditions. That you are dismissive of all authors as "white" or "male" perhaps betrays an inherent racism in your own stance? Are you suggesting because these authors are white, or male, they are somehow inferior, or less important? Wouldn't the reduction of their contributions from their literary works to merely racial metonymy be construed as a form of racism? I'm not saying you are wrong to limit the list, I am saying you are implying the list can be reduced to such racial terminology, or gender based terminology.

Your inclusion, of lets say Rashomon (the movie or the short story?) is baffling as well, given that this movie was particularly poorly received amongst Japanese audiences, and dismissed as pandering to Orientalist tastes - or are we talking about the short story that only made up the frame of the movie, in which case, hardly even a representative work of Japanese fiction.

Now, to your greater list, which is more or less a bunch of short stories, children's books, and minor novels, it is, with the exception of Achebe, pretty much a European, and most definitely a Western Book list. I don't need to reduce it to race to see that all those authors are playing with traditions rooted in the Eurosphere, including Achebe despite his African origins.

Now, I congratulate you for being a "professional" writer, as well as admire your self-confidence, though I highly suspect I will not be reading your novel any time in the future. I just question your list's so called diversity, and you condescending self-righteous inflammatory rhetoric at your own wider understanding of the more complex world of writing. This coming from another professional writer, though of another kind mind you, and in another language.

That books from countries that hold the majority of the world's population didn't even make your short list is both ridiculous and silly - not because an author really needs to know these works to be a good author, but more because of the self-proclaimed inclusion and diversity you so happily shout about. Put down your 1990s Culture Wars nonsense and try to listen to people more. As you say, you write for money, and if these books are what people deem important, sell them what they want, and don't be angry that nobody has taken Sontag seriously since the 1990s, let alone the rest of the mound of period pieces you strung together from your limited world of 3rd rate dated college curricula in the United States or wherever it is you are based.

[Marbles]

First of all, you might want to remove the apostrophe from that "wants" and the second "t" from "Scarlet" if you want to call yourself a writer. And it's "colleagues," not "colleges." And yes, your typos offend me, you're talking about what you need to do if you want to be a writer.

Second of all:

1. White Male Author, American, fiction, published 1851
2. White Male Author, American, fiction, published 1925
3. White Male Author, Russian, fiction, published 1955
4. White Male Author, English, fiction, published 1949
5. White Male Author, Russian, fiction, published 1877
6. White Female Author, English, fiction, published 1813
7. White Male Author, American, fiction, published 1850
8. White Male Author, Polish/Belgian, fiction, published 1899
9. White Male Author, American, fiction, published 1939
10. White Male Author, American, fiction, published 1866

So following this logic, we can come to the conclusion that the books most worth reading of the 129 million in existence are written exclusively by white people, almost exclusively by men, that nothing particularly momentous has been published in the last SIX DECADES, nor was anything worth mentioning published prior to 1800; no woman has written anything worthwhile in 200 years, fiction novels are the only books from which we can glean writerly knowledge, and the only countries of origin for great authors are America, Russia, England, and - I think this is really only coincidental - Poland.

Because, like, screw poetry, right? And essays. And journalism. And philosophy. And memoir. And experimental structures and genres.

You know what the problem with this list is? It's basically composed of books you're required to read in high school, but the books you're required to read in high school are male-biased and white-biased because the literary industry is male-biased and white-biased, and our standards for "classics" are influenced by ideas dug in from the founding of modern universities back when only white dudes could attend them.

That being said, there's a vibrant literary community that exists today that - obviously - doesn't adhere to those standards because they've read widely and wised up. The entire idea that you don't include a single black author - what about Their Eyes Were Watching God? Or is the dialogue too colloquial for you? Or have you read it? What about Beloved, or I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings? Talking Back? What about Things Fall Apart - or is the only worthwhile version of Africa that from a white man's point of view? What about Native Son?

What about Love in the Time of Cholera, One Hundred Years of Solitude, The Savage Detectives, Like Water for Chocolate, or Labyrinths, or does Latin America not count? What about Rashomon? What about Midnight's Children? You're ignoring entire continents.

What about Frankenstein, arguably the founding novel of the science fiction genre? My Antonia? To Kill A Mockingbird? (There's some high school required reading for you.) Pilgrim at Tinker Creek? Kindred? White Teeth? The Color Purple? The Handmaid's Tale? The Joy Luck Club? The God of Small Things? The Poisonwood Bible? Or do women not count post-1900?

What about Song of Myself, Howl, The Odyssey, Ariel? Don't you need to understand imagery and rhythm to be a great writer of any kind?

The Republic? Beyond Good and Evil? The Way? Critique of Pure Reason? Being and Nothingness? Don't you need to understand human beings to write characters with human motivations?

Why should we only talk about "Western literary culture"? That is straight-up racist. Tell me even one serious, well-thought-out reason why you only need to read within the Western canon in order to be a great author. Since you're so fond of hypotheticals, imagine that someone had read every single great work of literature from Africa, Latin America, Asia, and southern Europe. Why would they be taken less seriously because they neglected to read The Great Gatsby?

You want a list? Here's my list:

-This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen, Tadeusz Borowski
-Le Petit Prince, Antoine de Saint-Exupèry
-A People's History of the United States, Howard Zinn
-Cat's Cradle, Kurt Vonnegut
-Art in Theory 1900-2000 ed. Charles Harrison & Paul Wood
-Escape From Freedom, Erich Fromm
-Nickel and Dimed, Barbara Ehrenreich
-A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again, David Foster Wallace
-On Photography, Susan Sontag
-A Man of the People, Chinua Achebe
-Tiny Beautiful Things, Cheryl Strayed
-Transgender History, Susan Stryker
-The Power and the Glory, Graham Greene
-Ariel, Sylvia Plath
-Candide, Voltaire
-Selected Poems, Carl Sandburg

Here's the thing: I'm not an "aspiring" writer, I'm a professional writer, I write for money. And I don't need to have read white-guy pedophile narratives (community: I am looking forward to reading Pale Fire, I do not discount Nabokov's genius) in order to write or write well. I need to have read diverse books, I need to have read them closely, and I need to have truly gotten a grasp on the material, the way the writer structures his or her sentences, and why they chose the words they did in order to write well. You're operating on the assumption that fame is a predictor of a great book, but you're not thinking about WHY those books became famous. You don't get credibility from reading the "right" authors, you get credibility from understanding how and why people write.

I am all for internationalising reading lists to include fictions and literatures originating in countries other than Western, for all the learning that's there to be done. Free yourself from Euro-centric or West-centric ideas of what constitutes worthwhile literature and it opens new horizons of learning, enriches your experience, makes you a globally learned citizen, et cetera et cetera.

But West-centric reading dominated by White Western male writers is a different topic no?

How having a global reading list with authors from every corner of the world makes you a better fiction writer than if you concentrated only on Western canon and some important non-Western works which have been in translation in European languages for so long that they have come to be regarded as part of the Western canon?

Since we're talking about being a good fiction writer, the list of top works is inevitably going to be West/Euro-centric, because the novel as we know it today originated in Europe and passed through various stages of development from Cervantes to Dickens before anyone outside Europe/America began to take it seriously.

I don't include the great old works of mythology or fantasy in the post-Cervantes novel because I believe they belong to a different tradition altogether not modern fiction. A few non-Western fantastical works are:

Vishnu Sharma - Panchtantra, Sansrkit
Ibn Muqaffa - Kalila wa Dimna, Arabic improvement on Panchtantra.
Alf Layla in Arabic
Dastan Amir-e Hamza in Persian

The last two written by various writers over a long time.

[JBI]

I am all for internationalising reading lists to include fictions and literatures originating in countries other than Western, for all the learning that's there to be done. Free yourself from Euro-centric or West-centric ideas of what constitutes worthwhile literature and it opens new horizons of learning, enriches your experience, makes you a globally learned citizen, et cetera et cetera.

But West-centric reading dominated by White Western male writers is a different topic no?

How having a global reading list with authors from every corner of the world makes you a better fiction writer than if you concentrated only on Western canon and some important non-Western works which have been in translation in European languages for so long that they have come to be regarded as part of the Western canon?

Since we're talking about being a good fiction writer, the list of top works is inevitably going to be West/Euro-centric, because the novel as we know it today originated in Europe and passed through various stages of development from Cervantes to Dickens before anyone outside Europe/America began to take it seriously.

I don't include the great old works of mythology or fantasy in the post-Cervantes novel because I believe they belong to a different tradition altogether not modern fiction. A few non-Western fantastical works are:

Vishnu Sharma - Panchtantra, Sansrkit
Ibn Muqaffa - Kalila wa Dimna, Arabic improvement on Panchtantra.
Alf Layla in Arabic
Dastan Amir-e Hamza in Persian

The last two written by various writers over a long time.

The novel as you know it maybe. The Chinese novel, and earlier the short story, emerged much faster and stronger in the East than in the West, and was taken far more seriously here than you would believe. That is why thinks like The Tale of Genji are still regarded as "novels", whereas the first major English novels come much, much later. Even Cervantes, in the 16th century, is somewhat late compared to the Monogatari genre in Japan which emerges about 500-600 years earlier, and the Chinese short prose fiction which emerges in the 2nd Century AD as a major genre. That aside though, the novel in the west was rooted in much earlier forms, some of them Western, and some of them even Middle-Eastern.

[Marbles]

The novel as you know it maybe. The Chinese novel, and earlier the short story, emerged much faster and stronger in the East than in the West, and was taken far more seriously here than you would believe. That is why thinks like The Tale of Genji are still regarded as "novels", whereas the first major English novels come much, much later. Even Cervantes, in the 16th century, is somewhat late compared to the Monogatari genre in Japan which emerges about 500-600 years earlier, and the Chinese short prose fiction which emerges in the 2nd Century AD as a major genre. That aside though, the novel in the west was rooted in much earlier forms, some of them Western, and some of them even Middle-Eastern.

Thanks for drawing my attention to earlier Japanese and Chinese fictions. Would it not be correct to say that the examples you mentioned and those which I mentioned from Sanskrit, Arabic and Persian are pretty much isolated works of proto-fiction, and not components of well-established and well-practiced art form, which, along with other Western forms, influenced the emergence of the novel as we, or I, know it today?

I remember reading that learned men derided Cervantes day in and day out for writing a meaningless tome, which was neither poetry nor a religious text. Probably they didn't know about novel as we know about it today.

[JBI]

Thanks for drawing my attention to earlier Japanese and Chinese fictions. Would it not be correct to say that the examples you mentioned and those which I mentioned from Sanskrit, Arabic and Persian are pretty much isolated works of proto-fiction, and not components of well-established and well-practiced art form, which, along with other Western forms, influenced the emergence of the novel as we, or I, know it today?

I remember reading that learned men derided Cervantes day in and day out for writing a meaningless tome, which was neither poetry nor a religious text. Probably they didn't know about novel as we know about it today.
They are not isolated, since they have not only influenced European literature since the 18th century directly, but have also remained widely read in their respective countries of origin and elsewhere.

The novel as you know it, as I said. In China, the major novels don't include Cervantes. They are traditional novels written in traditional emergent styles rooted in the historical separate development of Chinese fiction. The same can be said for Japan.

My main point was that you are writing from the same western perspective. For me, I cannot talk about Cervantes without mentioning Heike or Journey to the West - each represent a sort of cultural culmination and a ground-breaking move forward. They also are as widely read, as widely (if not more widely) imitated, and as widely studied as Cervantes.

As I said earlier, by the necessity of population, 1/4 of people are more aligned to Journey to the West than they are to Cervantes. Let alone Susan Sontag.

[Marbles]

They are not isolated, since they have not only influenced European literature since the 18th century directly, but have also remained widely read in their respective countries of origin and elsewhere.

The novel as you know it, as I said. In China, the major novels don't include Cervantes. They are traditional novels written in traditional emergent styles rooted in the historical separate development of Chinese fiction. The same can be said for Japan.

My main point was that you are writing from the same western perspective. For me, I cannot talk about Cervantes without mentioning Heike or Journey to the West - each represent a sort of cultural culmination and a ground-breaking move forward. They also are as widely read, as widely (if not more widely) imitated, and as widely studied as Cervantes.

As I said earlier, by the necessity of population, 1/4 of people are more aligned to Journey to the West than they are to Cervantes. Let alone Susan Sontag.

Of course they have had immense influence on their own traditions as well as on the Western one, that's the reason we know them and that's why we're talking about them.

Every civilisation has its own tradition of classics, its own 'firsts' so to speak, and this is where the Chinese and Japanese examples fit in. Likewise in India, Kalidasa's 5th century CE 'Shakuntala' has perhaps the same status the 'The Tale of Genji' has in Japan (let's not mention Kamasutra just this once). Arabs have 'Alf Layla' and languages like Hindi and Urdu which have come of age relatively recently have their own firsts. Urdu, specifically has a long tradition of 'dastan' going back 500 years which is predecessor of the modern Urdu novel. The natives of these traditions are as unlikely as Japanese and the Chinese to include Cervantes and Rabelais in their essential reading.

Which brings me to ask how many 'novels' were written in the same vein when 'The Tale of Genji' emerged, or after Kalidasa penned 'Shakuntala' and after Mir Amman had penned 'Bagh-o-Bahar'?

What I'm saying is that the modern development of novel is a very Western thing in itself from which other traditions can't really extricate themselves, or stay indifferent to it, without losing on the developmental progress which has produced today's globally read novels. Does that make me West-centric?

[PerfectLovers]

slan·der [slan-der] Show IPA
noun
1.
defamation; calumny: rumors full of slander.
2.
a malicious, false, and defamatory statement or report: a slander against his good name.

I'm sorry but I think I'm going to have let you go as my editor. I need to make some cutbacks . . . I'm sure you'll land on your feet though.

ma·li·cious
adjective
characterized by malice; intending or intended to do harm.

How was I being malicious? How did I do harm? Counter-arguing isn't slandering. Again, understand the words you use before you use them; my point was that "slander" is loaded.

[PerfectLovers]

It's interesting to question the general feeling of the work though. Take the masterworks made by illiterate artists, whose conception of the form, and arrangement of the actual artistic creation is merely a product of experience and surrounding influence, rather than a direct sort of inheritance from a learned tradition. That much religious art could be created by illiterate persons perhaps illustrates a notion that the literacy of a tradition is less important than the culture of it.


This brings up a really good point, actually, about great storytelling (isn't that the point?) - there are plenty of oral traditions that were never published in print until the 1800s or 1900s that (to me at least) are as compelling as or more compelling than the "classic" works of the Western canon.

Also, hear, hear to your reading list.

[PerfectLovers]

People who reduce a work like Lolita to 'white-guy pedophile narratives' and include Howard Zinn in their essential works of world literature, as well as repeat ad nauseum typical post-colonial theory without the slightest bit of nuance are pretty bloody hard to take seriously.

Why? Howard Zinn revolutionized historical non-fiction, and his leftist theory is certainly more welcoming than Marx's (does leftist theory not count toward good understanding or writing? I've also read plenty of fascist texts, but I didn't think they were very well-written). And I do think content counts, and I find it interesting that the novel of Nabokov's that we've chosen to celebrate, as a culture, is Lolita and not arguably better works (his stories, or Pale Fire, for example). Again I think it's critical to think about WHY we celebrate books and not just the fact that they're celebrated.

[PerfectLovers]

This, however, does not limit the term to a legal setting.
Fair, nonetheless, I'd argue that I wasn't being malicious. I have no idea who this person is, and I was making observations based on the information he provided. And I didn't say HE is racist, I said that the act of ignoring entire swaths of the human race as producing great literature is racist.


That you are dismissive of all authors as "white" or "male" perhaps betrays an inherent racism in your own stance? Are you suggesting because these authors are white, or male, they are somehow inferior, or less important?
Oh no, you're going to make me voice an opinion that's unpopular with white men/people. It's impossible to be "racist" against white people because the exclusion of whites in no way affects their position of power, and the point of racism is that it affects power, position, access, ability, etc.

Besides, no, I didn't say at any point that literature by white men is LESSER, I said that literature by anyone else is GREATER than youngsquire's original post implied.



Your inclusion, of lets say Rashomon (the movie or the short story?) is baffling as well, given that this movie was particularly poorly received amongst Japanese audiences, and dismissed as pandering to Orientalist tastes - or are we talking about the short story that only made up the frame of the movie, in which case, hardly even a representative work of Japanese fiction. I was referring to the story, but I cede that it was merely off the top of my head and not the best example I could've chosen.



That books from countries that hold the majority of the world's population didn't even make your short list is both ridiculous and silly - not because an author really needs to know these works to be a good author, but more because of the self-proclaimed inclusion and diversity you so happily shout about. Put down your 1990s Culture Wars nonsense and try to listen to people more. As you say, you write for money, and if these books are what people deem important, sell them what they want, and don't be angry that nobody has taken Sontag seriously since the 1990s, let alone the rest of the mound of period pieces you strung together from your limited world of 3rd rate dated college curricula in the United States or wherever it is you are based.

Nobody has taken Sontag seriously since the 1990s? Yeuch, what an awful attitude. I chose the list I did because it was what has been most informative for me personally and the specific kind of writing I do, because those are the books I refer back to the most for the material I create, although it is by no means an exhaustive list (for instance, although my anthology of art theory is one to which I refer a lot and I think is a great foundational way to start, I could also list Claire Bishop's Participation or Nato Thompson's Living as Form or Nicolas Bourriaud's Relational Aesthetics, but they are not good starting places).

I think the term "aspiring writers" is a fallacy because it places the entirety of writers into one broad category. Once a writer gets to the point that they're writing professionally (as I'm sure you know), they'll have found a niche. My niche does not require The Scarlet Letter, as much as I generally enjoy reading Hawthorne. And I'll cop to the fact that I have read less international literature than I would like, but I also acknowledge that that's wrong of me and I need to remedy it.

[JBI]

I'm not an aspiring writer. I am a writer, primarily of scholarship (in Chinese believe it or not) on Ancient East Asian Manuscripts and religious works. It's just puzzling to see arguments against white a male, when, white male authors, particularly American authors, have had somewhat hard times in specific localities, namely China, where you don't find any really influential or read translations beyond the 1940s pre-Maoist translation freeze.

Or, perhaps we are talking about the multicultural nature of other civilizations - strangely enough, the most multicultural readers tend actually to be Americans, especially at the scholarly level. That is why, regardless of what tradition, what Race, what gender, or what persuasion, there seems always to be somebody studying such a body of work, and that person, almost always tends to be funded by the American academy.

In the 19th century, such advancements were particularly French, with their strong scholarly traditions, and in many ways, despite the incredible xenophobia of the French general public, the academy there still does some great work on international texts. But more importantly, the American academic machine is by far the leader in both diversity and in forward moving approaches in the world in almost every field. This is coming, mind you, from a particularly un-American person.

Now, you say white people cannot feel racism - that is just silly. Anybody can feel racism, and it is better to not simplify or reduce somebody to "white male" which is as reductive as reducing something to any other racial or gendered epithet.

[JBI]

Of course they have had immense influence on their own traditions as well as on the Western one, that's the reason we know them and that's why we're talking about them.

Every civilisation has its own tradition of classics, its own 'firsts' so to speak, and this is where the Chinese and Japanese examples fit in. Likewise in India, Kalidasa's 5th century CE 'Shakuntala' has perhaps the same status the 'The Tale of Genji' has in Japan (let's not mention Kamasutra just this once). Arabs have 'Alf Layla' and languages like Hindi and Urdu which have come of age relatively recently have their own firsts. Urdu, specifically has a long tradition of 'dastan' going back 500 years which is predecessor of the modern Urdu novel. The natives of these traditions are as unlikely as Japanese and the Chinese to include Cervantes and Rabelais in their essential reading.

Which brings me to ask how many 'novels' were written in the same vein when 'The Tale of Genji' emerged, or after Kalidasa penned 'Shakuntala' and after Mir Amman had penned 'Bagh-o-Bahar'?

What I'm saying is that the modern development of novel is a very Western thing in itself from which other traditions can't really extricate themselves, or stay indifferent to it, without losing on the developmental progress which has produced today's globally read novels. Does that make me West-centric?

I disagree with this. I think, firstly, the idea of the "western" novel is a false statement, even in the 19th century, when novels across the strait in france were very different. Secondly, the development of Chinese fictional writings never stopped. Many people don't realize that the general line from Gan Bao (author of the Suo Shen Ji, or the traces of the supernatural) to the modern day Chinese ghost story is a clear tradition. The same way that to this day Japanese authors are writing and rewriting on top of books like the Tale of Heike, and are using fiction, both in its indigenous sense and in its global sense, to explore both new and old themes. This is not restricted to "western" forms.

The so called "Western" novel seems different in places. In general, French novels feel different from Spanish which feel different from English. The big novelist god of the 19th century who pretty much made the form profitable and kept the lending libraries in business was Sir Walter Scott, and Zola's emergence in translation worked counter-intuitively to destroy such a tradition.

IF we are looking for clear movements or anything of the sort we are likely to confuse ourselves.

This doesn't mean I am in favor of talking about traditions, or even believe in so called "civilizations". I am just pointing out that even something as simple as a novel is quite relative to the particular tradition.

[PerfectLovers]

Now, you say white people cannot feel racism - that is just silly. Anybody can feel racism, and it is better to not simplify or reduce somebody to "white male" which is as reductive as reducing something to any other racial or gendered epithet.

"White male" is not a racial epithet in the sense that most people use the term "racial epithet," that being a racial term that expresses hostility. And I didn't express hostility toward white men, I expressed a certain amount of skepticism about a lack of diversity in a list of "necessary" books to read. What else should this demographic be called? Are there other epithets for white men that I should avoid so as not to offend? Those are serious questions.

And no, white people can't feel racism. You can feel excluded, but you can't feel like your power or voice is being taken away from you (not rationally, anyway), because it factually is not.

Also, here's a list of things that have been directed at me in the course of this conversation:
-I've been called silly and haughty, two terms that are frequently used to dismiss women
-I've been called "slanderous" for pointing out a racist attitude - not calling someone racist, but pointing out what is factually a racist attitude (implying that white men and women are the most "necessary" authors to read or that only the Western canon needs to be considered)
-I've been told that my being critical of the literary and academic worlds for being currently and factually exclusive of women and people of color is "1990s Culture War nonsense" (see the VIDA count for one very clear example)
-I've been told that I read "3rd rate dated college curricula"
-I've been told that no one takes the authors I read seriously, which is obviously not true (no one takes Sontag seriously? Come on now)

Underneath all of this is the hostile motivation to talk to a woman in such a way that you make her feel isolated and invalid in a forum that's dominated by men. I'm capable of seeing the language you use for what it is. Are you?

Now, personally, I don't see this as changing the conversation. The original post was a very exclusive, prejudiced list, and when I pointed that out I was accused of being inflammatory and slanderous and had all of the above directed at me. That's an extension of the same exclusive, prejudiced attitude. If you think that's nonsense, it's probably because you haven't been on the receiving end of it your whole life, and that's probably exacerbated by the fact that you think it's not imperative to read diverse narratives by diverse authors. Storytelling is probably the greatest way of growing empathy and you clearly have that neither for women nor POC.

[Pierre Menard]

Why? Howard Zinn revolutionized historical non-fiction, and his leftist theory is certainly more welcoming than Marx's (does leftist theory not count toward good understanding or writing? I've also read plenty of fascist texts, but I didn't think they were very well-written). And I do think content counts, and I find it interesting that the novel of Nabokov's that we've chosen to celebrate, as a culture, is Lolita and not arguably better works (his stories, or Pale Fire, for example). Again I think it's critical to think about WHY we celebrate books and not just the fact that they're celebrated.


"Revolutionised" is over-stating it. He's not a particularly great writer in an artistic sense either, which would make his laughable bias and smudging of history more palatable. There can certainly be good political writing (I'm not sure why you reduced it to leftist or fascist, but hey), and good historical writing…Zinn is a fair way back artistically and historically though.
The issue is reducing Lolita to so simplistic a notion of 'white-man pedophile narrative', when there was no need to mention race, reducing the novel to such simplistic terms and themes is intellectually weak and you completely failed to mention the craft at all.

[PerfectLovers]

He's the most prominent and compelling historical writer in recent memory. Sorry, I don't think that's not worth stating. I was saying leftist and fascist to provide contrast. Personally I don't think Fitzgerald was that great of a writer, but his books are certainly entertaining. Why isn't it fair to give Zinn the same credit?

Lolita is a book about a white male pedophile in a sea of "classic" books about white men who fetishize women, particularly young women. There's reducing, and then there's stating it in the simplest possible terms. And my point is that the fact that we've chosen Lolita over Pale Fire or Pnin as Nabokov's greatest work demonstrates the fact that as a culture we've decided that it's normal and OK for men to fetishize young women. Even without the moral judgment on that decision that I obviously and admittedly feel, I think that's an interesting thing about our culture that's worth examining. I said that I don't discount Nabokov's genius, and I don't, but I do discount the general judgment that that's the best example of his work, and I discount the idea that the content of the novel and our celebration of it is not culturally important.

Guys: Literature doesn't exist in a vacuum. These are cultural products. You can't remove either books or the ways we judge books from their context. Why does that irritate you so much?

[Ecurb]

Indulge me for a moment and imagine a classical musician who has never listened to Beethoven.... Kind of hard to believe right? .

No. How about Bach? Shakespeare never read any of the novels on your list. Does that mean he couldn't "call himself a writer"? Jane Austen never read any of the novels on the list before she wrote one of them. Lists can be fun and I agree that in general one can't be a good writer without being a reader. But Shakespeare, Virgil, Dante and others managed to write some decent stuff without reading any of the books you list.

[Lykren]

the fact that we've chosen Lolita over Pale Fire or Pnin as Nabokov's greatest work demonstrates the fact that as a culture we've decided that it's normal and OK for men to fetishize young women.

It does no such thing. Macbeth is regarded as one of Shakespeare's greatest plays; does that demonstrate moral approval of murder? You've been taken in by Nabokov's first-person narration.

[Calidore]

Underneath all of this is the hostile motivation to talk to a woman in such a way that you make her feel isolated and invalid in a forum that's dominated by men. I'm capable of seeing the language you use for what it is. Are you?


After reading this, I went back and read your other posts, and this is the first time you have stated that you're a woman, making the above quite a stretch (and also insulting to most guys in the same way that accusing someone of being a bigot who isn't is insulting). "A forum that's dominated by men" is especially laughable--most if not all of the site authority (admins and siterunner) are women, and I believe there was a site poll that showed a nearly 50/50 gender split. I'd be very interested in hearing whether any of our numerous regular female posters have ever felt marginalized on this site because of their gender.

[AuntShecky]

you are right that it is a vast list that absolutely bares consideration,

Is that the naked truth?

[Pumpkin337]

Is that the naked truth?

Now you aren't allowed to criticise his/her complete lack of basic spelling and grammar.

I think the first book we should suggest is

Handbook of Grammar and Composition

This excellent handbook for writers covers grammar, usage, and mechanics thoroughly and emphasizes the application of those elements to the writing process. It is designed to be used for two years (grades 11 and 12) and then kept by the student as a valuable reference tool during the college years and afterward. Students are given a thorough explanation of the writing process to help them learn how to plan, write, rewrite, and edit. Besides good general principles for writing paragraphs and themes, they are also given clear and concise instructions and well-written models for writing for a wide variety of specific kinds of compositions, including essay answers and research papers.

https://www.abeka.com/ABekaOnline/BookDescription.aspx?sbn=63355

[Pumpkin337]

People who reduce a work like Lolita to 'white-guy pedophile narratives' and include Howard Zinn in their essential works of world literature, as well as repeat ad nauseum typical post-colonial theory without the slightest bit of nuance are pretty bloody hard to take seriously.

So it is NOT a narrative about a disgusting white middle-aged paedophile preying on a 12 year old? I just absolutely love the way that people who praise this book manage to be utterly blind to the fact that this book is about a middle-aged paedophile who grooms and abuses a 12 year who is then blamed for the abuse because she is a 'nymphet' oh how gloriously misogynistically perverse this is. And we wonder why abuse against women and children continues.....

[Ecurb]

If we had chosen Pale Fire as Nabokov's greatest work, would that mean we've decided it's OK for men to fetishize young boys, like Kinbote does?

[Pierre Menard]

So it is NOT a narrative about a disgusting white middle-aged paedophile preying on a 12 year old? I just absolutely love the way that people who praise this book manage to be utterly blind to the fact that this book is about a middle-aged paedophile who grooms and abuses a 12 year who is then blamed for the abuse because she is a 'nymphet' oh how gloriously misogynistically perverse this is. And we wonder why abuse against women and children continues.....


Well, I mean, this embarrassing for you, because you've clearly and obviously totally misunderstood the novel, and you have no idea how to read a text.

[Pumpkin337]

Well, I mean, this embarrassing for you, because you've clearly and obviously totally misunderstood the novel, and you have no idea how to read a text.

no I refuse to read it on the grounds that it is about a paedophile and I have not read any analysis of the book that says different. What makes me truly sick (and convinced of the mental confusion and moral ambiguity that exists today) is that somehow because it is well written that that makes it OK.

And I'm truly fed up with people whose sense of right and wrong is so clearly absent in their judgement of this book telling me I'm wrong to think this way. I refuse to be intimidated by the morally bankrupt on this.

IF by some very remote chance you have some undiscovered analyses of this book that manages to reverse the role it has played in perpetuating some truly harmful attitudes towards women I'm all ears. If not, attacking me, does your defense of the book no good whatsoever.

So far in 100% of cases the only defense of the book that is offered is that I must be deficient in some way for failing to be blind to the fact that is about the abuse of a 12 yr old child. My question is - how dare YOU be blind to it?

[Pierre Menard]

no I refuse to read it on the grounds that it is about a paedophile and I have not read any analysis of the book that says different. What makes me truly sick (and convinced of the mental confusion and moral ambiguity that exists today) is that somehow because it is well written that that makes it OK.

And I'm truly fed up with people whose sense of right and wrong is so clearly absent in their judgement of this book telling me I'm wrong to think this way. I refuse to be intimidated by the morally bankrupt on this.

IF by some very remote chance you have some undiscovered analyses of this book that manages to reverse the role it has played in perpetuating some truly harmful attitudes towards women I'm all ears. If not, attacking me, does your defense of the book no good whatsoever.

So far in 100% of cases the only defense of the book that is offered is that I must be deficient in some way for failing to be blind to the fact that is about the abuse of a 12 yr old child. My question is - how dare YOU be blind to it?



You deserve all the criticism you get if you conflate a book being about something, as a justification of that thing. If you can't understand so simple a premise, or nuances of logic, maybe classic literature simply isn't for you.

[Frostball]

no I refuse to read it on the grounds that it is about a paedophile and I have not read any analysis of the book that says different. What makes me truly sick (and convinced of the mental confusion and moral ambiguity that exists today) is that somehow because it is well written that that makes it OK.

And I'm truly fed up with people whose sense of right and wrong is so clearly absent in their judgement of this book telling me I'm wrong to think this way. I refuse to be intimidated by the morally bankrupt on this.

IF by some very remote chance you have some undiscovered analyses of this book that manages to reverse the role it has played in perpetuating some truly harmful attitudes towards women I'm all ears. If not, attacking me, does your defense of the book no good whatsoever.

So far in 100% of cases the only defense of the book that is offered is that I must be deficient in some way for failing to be blind to the fact that is about the abuse of a 12 yr old child. My question is - how dare YOU be blind to it?

Surely there are all kinds of novels that feature murderers, rapists, racists, and any manner of terrible thing as main characters, but that does not at all imply the author or the work itself is advocating these things. To just forbid somebody to make a main character that has, for example, murdered somebody in cold blood just because murder is wrong is just a severe limitation on the kinds of stories that might be told. In short, it's just a story, and a story about a thing does not imply advocating that thing. Heck, the bible features rape, murder, and slavery, but that doesn't make it a terrible book to read or a person terrible for reading it. Following it maybe, but not reading and enjoying it.

[R.F. Schiller]

no I refuse to read it on the grounds that it is about a paedophile and I have not read any analysis of the book that says different. What makes me truly sick (and convinced of the mental confusion and moral ambiguity that exists today) is that somehow because it is well written that that makes it OK.

And I'm truly fed up with people whose sense of right and wrong is so clearly absent in their judgement of this book telling me I'm wrong to think this way. I refuse to be intimidated by the morally bankrupt on this.

IF by some very remote chance you have some undiscovered analyses of this book that manages to reverse the role it has played in perpetuating some truly harmful attitudes towards women I'm all ears. If not, attacking me, does your defense of the book no good whatsoever.

So far in 100% of cases the only defense of the book that is offered is that I must be deficient in some way for failing to be blind to the fact that is about the abuse of a 12 yr old child. My question is - how dare YOU be blind to it?

Wait... you haven't even read the book, yet you're casting such strong judgments against it? Yes, it is ABOUT pedophilia, but the majority of "serious" readers would argue that it is not a book that approves of it and the author, Vladimir Nabokov, certainly does not approve of it. Is Crime and Punishment an immoral book too, because it involves senseless murder? Is The Awakening immoral, because it contains adultery? Even the most simple and straightforward analysis of Lolita has Humbert realizing at the end that he has perverted her. As he looks upon a valley of singing children, he remarks: "I knew that the hopelessly poignant thing was not Lolita's absence from my side, but the absence of her voice from that concord". If you look at Nabokov's own life, and notes, you will see that he valued the magic of childhood above all else, claiming that he had "the happiest childhood imaginable". This happy childhood was almost not realized for his son, Dmitri, because he was half-Jewish by his mother, and the Nabokovs lived in Berlin/Paris before America during Hitler's rise. Nabokov's fiction from then on involves worlds where a child is corrupted, his greatest fear. The novel he wrote previous to Lolita, Bend Sinister, is about a child who is accidentally killed by a tyrannical regime. Poor little Lolita is corrupted by Humbert Humbert. In Pnin, the novel immediately after, young Victor is "abused" by his parents. It is clear that Nabokov identifies with Lolita far more than Humbert (whom he calls a "baboon" in an interview), despite Humbert's similarities (both older European men of letters) superficially. Nabokov's other novels are actually more "offensive". Nabokov was a known extreme homophobic and characters in Despair (Herman) and Pale Fire (Kinbote) are nastily portrayed homosexuals. Nabokov believed that being gay was in itself was a kind of bad art. Nabokov definitely did not believe in raping children.

As for other interpretations of Lolita that are not focused on pedophilia, check out Martin Amis's, arguably the greatest living British author who has read the book cover to cover eight times. He reads it allegorically, and argues that Lolita is Nabokov's rant against totalitarianism. Maybe actually read the book before you make such grandiose comments.

Here is an excerpt from an older post of mine that touches on this subject:


I think the book has more to do with tyranny and Nabokov's disgust with totalitarianism. In Speak, Memory, Nabokov repeatedly speaks about the purity and beauty of his own childhood and life in Russia. When he was 17, the Communist regime took over, eventually resulting in his father's death, and he was forced to flee to Berlin, leaving his native homeland. Then again, he was forced to flee from Berlin to France during the uprise of the Nazi party, as his wife was Jewish (and therefore his son as well by the Nuremberg Laws). He was then forced to flee from France to New York upon Hitler's invasion of France. Many of his friends, including his brother Sergei, were killed in the Holocaust. Nabokov then began to absolutely loathe totalitarianism, both because he championed individualism over collectivism and because he was personally affected by it.

When he was writing his first "American" book, Nabokov began to wonder deeply about what would have happened to his son if he had failed to protect him from Nazi Germany. This is reflected in Bend Sinister as it is about a character who fails to protect his child who is then killed by the totalitarian state. These sentiments leak into Lolita where Nabokov now writes from the perspective of the tyrant. Superficially Humbert has many similarities with Nabokov, both Europeans who later arrived in America, both middle-aged, both men of letters ect. but it is actually Lolita who shares the same innermost nature with Nabokov. Just like many tyrants, Humbert is incredibly seductive with his speech - Hitler's oratory skills were legendary which made him exceptionally popular with the German people, and even foreign leaders, like the Canadian Prime Minister in the mid-1930s (if I remember my high school history correctly) had a man-crush on him. Nabokov uses Humbert to show us how powerfully persuasive tyrants can be and we, the readers have to find Nabokov's clues within the story to not be seduced by Humbert and focus on the facts.

The book is not about sex, it is about corruption and loss of childhood. Sex is merely one of the mechanisms which Humbert "broke" Lolita.

[Marbles]

So it is NOT a narrative about a disgusting white middle-aged paedophile preying on a 12 year old? I just absolutely love the way that people who praise this book manage to be utterly blind to the fact that this book is about a middle-aged paedophile who grooms and abuses a 12 year who is then blamed for the abuse because she is a 'nymphet' oh how gloriously misogynistically perverse this is. And we wonder why abuse against women and children continues.....

I had thought this type of reactionary fervor was a thing of the 50s and the 60s but it's staggering to see it repeated over and over again so many decades since Lolita was written, read and discussed to death.

I really want to know your way of writing a story of a paedophile in first person narrative. In what inflections of language and by using what content as fodder could Humbert have told a story without stirring up the waters of righteous outrage?

By the way, how come everyone fails to mention the point in the book where Humbert does a critical self-examination and chastises himself for 'destroying' the young girl? (remorse?) I think most detractors of Lolita don't read the book to the end?

There is an unmistakable divide between what the paedophile does versus what he later thinks he should or should not have done. In my opinion, Nabokov went out of his way to be politically correct, but even that was not enough for some.

I think people aren't outraged for what Humbert actually says or does in the narrative but more due to the fact that he's a mature adult who is after a young girl. This is a new blasphemy of our times.

It's shocking to see Lolita become The Satanic Verses of the West.

[Pumpkin337]

[/quote] due to the fact that he's a mature adult who is after a young girl.[/]

The shame is on you that this doesn't outrage you. Are you unaware or do you just not care that 25% of all adults report being sexually abused and that 90% of victims never tell making the actual number of people who have been abused closer to 50% of the population? Women and girls are 8 x more likely to be abused than men and boys.

How about the fact that the novel has become so inextricably linked with the 'sexually precocious' underage girl


Lolita
noun
a pubescent girl who is sexually precocious
Origin of Lolita
after title character in Nabokov's novel Lolita (1958)

A non-dictionary definition to illustrate the attitude further:

A Lolita is a girl who is coming of age (basically coming into her sexual identity) who 'practices' on older men in order to get things that she wants.


This attitude that women and girls invite their abuse is so pervasive it extends to how police and courts treat victims and although there is some change reporting abuse is still a horrific process in which the victim is the one who has defend herself. She is guilty because of the crime perpetrated on her. Prostitutes can't be raped because they are the ultimate representation of a woman who is 'asking for it'.

And this book, whether or not that is exactly how it is written, or what Nabokov may have intended, is so firmly part of perpetuating these attitudes it's effect cannot be blithely dismissed.

[Aylinn]

You still don’t understand that in the book Humbert’s actions are not whitewashed. It can only been seen like that if you cannot read between the lines.

[Iain Sparrow]

due to the fact that he's a mature adult who is after a young girl.[/]

The shame is on you that this doesn't outrage you. Are you unaware or do you just not care that 25% of all adults report being sexually abused and that 90% of victims never tell making the actual number of people who have been abused closer to 50% of the population? Women and girls are 8 x more likely to be abused than men and boys.

How about the fact that the novel has become so inextricably linked with the 'sexually precocious' underage girl


Lolita
noun
a pubescent girl who is sexually precocious
Origin of Lolita
after title character in Nabokov's novel Lolita (1958)

A non-dictionary definition to illustrate the attitude further:

A Lolita is a girl who is coming of age (basically coming into her sexual identity) who 'practices' on older men in order to get things that she wants.


This attitude that women and girls invite their abuse is so pervasive it extends to how police and courts treat victims and although there is some change reporting abuse is still a horrific process in which the victim is the one who has defend herself. She is guilty because of the crime perpetrated on her. Prostitutes can't be raped because they are the ultimate representation of a woman who is 'asking for it'.

And this book, whether or not that is exactly how it is written, or what Nabokov may have intended, is so firmly part of perpetuating these attitudes it's effect cannot be blithely dismissed.[/QUOTE]


First, I'll admit I haven't read Lolita, nor do I intend on doing so anytime soon. I have no idea if the novel was written to be provocative and scandalous, or that there is indeed an underlying text or some grander message involved... but, haven't you ever read something that completely goes against your moral grain and yet come away better for it? I certainly have.
I recently read Rule 34 by Charles Stross. It's a science fiction novel set in the very near future wherein Stross is challenging our ideas of virtual reality, and how we try to apply our laws in the real world to that of the virtual (unreal) world. One of the bad guys is an assassin who among other things, carries with him a large suitcase... in which contains an android; an android that when turned on looks and behaves like a little girl. Presumably he is having sex with this little android girl during his downtime between murders. In the book the technology is referred to as "meat-puppets", and it is outlawed. Sure, it's an abhorrent notion and Stross risks being offensive, but he's making an important point, one I hadn't ever considered before.

[Marbles]

The shame is on you that this doesn't outrage you. Are you unaware or do you just not care that 25% of all adults report being sexually abused and that 90% of victims never tell making the actual number of people who have been abused closer to 50% of the population? Women and girls are 8 x more likely to be abused than men and boys.

How about the fact that the novel has become so inextricably linked with the 'sexually precocious' underage girl

Lolita
noun
a pubescent girl who is sexually precocious
Origin of Lolita
after title character in Nabokov's novel Lolita (1958)

A non-dictionary definition to illustrate the attitude further:

A Lolita is a girl who is coming of age (basically coming into her sexual identity) who 'practices' on older men in order to get things that she wants.

Seriously, the problem is with how you are reading the novel not with the novel itself. Humbert is a paedophiliac character whom Nabokov has given voice. It is with the paedophile's point-of-view the story is told with all his biases, temptations and perversions tagged along.

What you completely seem to miss is that Humbert comes out to consider his predilection as perversion and nowhere justifies his sexual interest in minors as morally acceptable. I never understood how could detractors so easily overlook this dimension of Humbert's character.

Give voice to all sorts of characters doing all sorts of outrages things - isn't this what all fiction eventually does? How about a serial killer telling his story in first person? And the gory details of how he killed his victims? Equally outrageous? I don't think so.

For heaven's sake this is 7th grade stuff, please...

Paedophilia outrages me as much as it outrages you, or as much as it outrages any decent human, but making it subject of a story doesn't outrage me. For some, because the subject is highly objectionable, the novel hey presto becomes objectionable. This is downright fatuous.

I have a feeling you have not read it, not past fifty pages at most.


And this book, whether or not that is exactly how it is written, or what Nabokov may have intended, is so firmly part of perpetuating these attitudes it's effect cannot be blithely dismissed

You didn't answer my question. Let me rephrase it and ask again.

If sexual exploitation of minors and young women is pervasive (not arguing with your stats), then wouldn't you want fiction to treat it? If yes, in what way it should treat the subject? If no, please provide a reasonable justification as to why should this remain outside the domain of literature?


This attitude that women and girls invite their abuse is so pervasive it extends to how police and courts treat victims and although there is some change reporting abuse is still a horrific process in which the victim is the one who has defend herself. She is guilty because of the crime perpetrated on her. Prostitutes can't be raped because they are the ultimate representation of a woman who is 'asking for it'.

*scratches beard*

Police? Courts? Prostitutes? 'Asking for it'?

This may be part of some other discussion about blaming girls and women for the actions of the perverts but it doesn't relate to Lolita, I'm afraid.

[Edit: I read the preceding posts after I typed up mine, and there you confirm you haven't even read the book. I feel I wasted my time!]

[JBI]

I like to see the same hatred leveled at Romeo and Juliet. After all, is Paris not a Humbert Humbert, is Romeo not a young pedophile by such moralizing notions?

This is not a justification of Humbert's actions, mainly a refutation of such moral reading. The novel is beautifully written and has never, ever, been shown to either encourage pedophilia or to make it seem more acceptable. It is hardly pornographic, and more disgusting in its depictions of perversions. In truth, it would more likely be off-putting rather than encouraging.

You fail to realize these things when you dismiss the text. The "social utility" of the text is not toward encouragement or acceptance of pedophilia (the same way we don't read the Muhammad biography as such), yet every now and then someone takes a jab at it.

Now, that aside, should we ban all news reports about arrested pedophiles? We are aware, mind you, that if we bust someone with child pornography there clearly is a child behind it. Are we going to not report on these things? IS knowing of the fact that there was a child rapist encouraging, or censurable when we aren't looking at the pictures.

If psychologists have taught us anything it is that pedophilia is a psychological preoccupation. Those of us without these tendencies are not likely to be put toward them by this text. Those with these tendencies are not going to find encouragement either.

What's left then is a hardly sexual text at all. Should we not read Plutarch because of its sexuality? That has far more graphic pedophilia in it - should we ban that too?

[Pumpkin337]

Lolita had an incredibly negative impact on popular culture. Humbert’s perverse perception of his flirtatious nymphet Lolita acted like a slow, leaching poison on popular culture. The novel greatly accelerated the inappropriate, exploitative sexualisation of young girls by various mass media.

http://cosynch.com/lolita-nabokovs-greatest-hoax/

Nabokov said:


Well, I can only repeat that I have neither the intent nor the temperament of a moral or social satirist. Whether or not critics think that in Lolita I am ridiculing human folly leaves me supremely indifferent. But I am annoyed when the glad news is spread that I am ridiculing America.

Giving lie to the idea that he intended it to be a satire.


Then we have Nabokov's response to being asked why he wrote Lolita:



It was an interesting thing to do. Why did I write any of my books, after all? For the sake of the pleasure, for the sake of the difficulty. I have no social purpose, no moral message; I’ve no general ideas to exploit, I just like composing riddles with elegant solutions.

Then the man utterly condemns himself -


I find it very amusing when a friendly, polite person says to me —probably just in order to be friendly and polite—“Mr.Naborkov,” or “Mr. Nabahkov,” or “Mr. Nabrov” or “Mr.Nabohkov,” depending on his linguistic abilities, “I have a little daughter who is a regular Lolita.”

What is amusing about this?

This man, by his own admission, did not write a satire, he did not write a social commentary, did not write a scathing denunciation of sexual predators and abuse (thankfully really because if he had he failed spectacularly). He wrote the book to to amuse himself and betrays his own lack of empathy by his reaction to the decidedly inappropriate and disturbing men who see their own daughters in the character.


I remain disgusted and condemnatory of this book.

[108 fountains]

There was a posting on LitNet a couple months ago – don’t remember now if it was on “short story sharing” or “general writing” – that was nothing much more than a rant in the guise of a short story. Every sentence was laced with profanity, it was racist, and it included crude remarks sympathetic to pedophilia and to violence in general (besides being utterly devoid of any literary value in its feeble prose). A week or so after it (deservingly) received no comments, the poster re-posted it. At that point I contacted the moderators suggesting it should be removed – and it was. In my message to the moderators, I stated that in my opinion, the post was “beyond offensive.”

I’ve thought about it a lot since, and have come to regret what I did. While I was “outraged” at what I read, I don’t feel anyone, including myself, can claim the moral right to condemn what other people write (doubly so for anyone who hasn’t even read the thing being condemned). The offensive post I brought to the attention of the moderators likely would have continued to go unnoticed or ignored by the LitNet community. I should have realized that a posting like that would find no audience among ordinary, literate people with average or above-average intelligence, and that the Forum did not need me to act as a judge of morality.

I have not read Lolita, so I can’t comment on it. But I would note that The Color Purple, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Of Mice and Men, Beloved, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Lady Chatterley’s Lover, The Catcher in the Rye, Brave New World, The Invisible Man, To Kill a Mockingbird, Peyton Place, and even Harry Potter have been condemned, banned and burned by those who feel their clear sense of right and wrong gives them the right to pass judgment on the “morally bankrupt.”

[Marbles]

I remain disgusted and condemnatory of this book.

It is not possible to be 'disgusted' with the book you admittedly refuse to read lol. Neither you can condemn something you do not know.

It is a good idea by rules of common sense to know things one is so eager to opine about.

This is fanatical, religiously fanatical.

The thread's digressed. Better for us to revert to the topic of the opening post.

[Pumpkin337]

My problem with this book is that unlike the ones you mention was not written to have any meaning. It was not, like Uncle Tom's Cabin or To Kill A Mocking Bird, written with the express intent to address a wrong. It was not written as a satire on middle class mores or American consumerism or a debunking of Freud as the critics would have us believe. It was not intended as anything other than an intellectual exercise for a man who comes across in interviews as a narcissistic dilettante. In other words it has no purpose, no redeeming quality that we can point to as say "Yes he wrote it like this but ...' and that for me is where it crosses the line from acceptable to unacceptable. People's pain is not an amusing intellectual exercise.

[Pumpkin337]

It is not possible to be 'disgusted' with the book you admittedly refuse to read lol. Neither you can condemn something you do not know.

It is a good idea by rules of common sense to know things one is so eager to opine about.

This is fanatical, religiously fanatical.

The thread's digressed. Better for us to revert to the topic of the opening post.

I do not need to get into a cess-pit to know that it stinks. If you think you do, please be my guest but I shall not join you. The problem with sh!t is that you can't wash the stink completely off. There is no way to unring a bell. Once you have opened yourself to certain images, thoughts, ideas you can not undo the effects, and not all the effects of filth are good or desirable.

[stlukesguild]

People who reduce a work like Lolita to 'white-guy pedophile narratives' and include Howard Zinn in their essential works of world literature, as well as repeat ad nauseum typical post-colonial theory without the slightest bit of nuance are pretty bloody hard to take seriously.

My thoughts exactly.

So it is NOT a narrative about a disgusting white middle-aged paedophile preying on a 12 year old? I just absolutely love the way that people who praise this book manage to be utterly blind to the fact that this book is about a middle-aged paedophile who grooms and abuses a 12 year who is then blamed for the abuse because she is a 'nymphet' oh how gloriously misogynistically perverse this is. And we wonder why abuse against women and children continues.....

It seems that more than a few here never got beyond their sophomore classes on multiculturalism, feminist theory, and sensitivity training. I'm sorry, but I have to agree with Pierre here:

"Well, I mean, this embarrassing for you, because you've clearly and obviously totally misunderstood the novel, and you have no idea how to read a text."

Just because an artist or writer creates a work that confronts a difficult or uncomfortable... or downright repugnant subject matter does not mean that the artist is celebrating that subject.

http://eszkola.pl/img/galleries/thumb/home/778px_El_Tres_de_Mayo_by_Francisco_de_Goya_from_Pr ado_in_Google_Earth.jpg

http://i1245.photobucket.com/albums/gg581/StlukesguildOhio/BeFunky_goya-1-589x1024jpg_zpscbbfc7e8.jpg (http://s1245.photobucket.com/user/StlukesguildOhio/media/BeFunky_goya-1-589x1024jpg_zpscbbfc7e8.jpg.html)

Somehow I doubt that Goya was celebrating executions and cannibalism.

But then I don't read or look to art to reinforce my own beliefs, values, standards... and biases. I look for a powerful, unique voice... certainly not one pandering to the "correct" thinking of the time.

[Calidore]

There was a posting on LitNet a couple months ago – don’t remember now if it was on “short story sharing” or “general writing” – that was nothing much more than a rant in the guise of a short story. Every sentence was laced with profanity, it was racist, and it included crude remarks sympathetic to pedophilia and to violence in general (besides being utterly devoid of any literary value in its feeble prose). A week or so after it (deservingly) received no comments, the poster re-posted it. At that point I contacted the moderators suggesting it should be removed – and it was. In my message to the moderators, I stated that in my opinion, the post was “beyond offensive.”

I’ve thought about it a lot since, and have come to regret what I did. While I was “outraged” at what I read, I don’t feel anyone, including myself, can claim the moral right to condemn what other people write (doubly so for anyone who hasn’t even read the thing being condemned). The offensive post I brought to the attention of the moderators likely would have continued to go unnoticed or ignored by the LitNet community. I should have realized that a posting like that would find no audience among ordinary, literate people with average or above-average intelligence, and that the Forum did not need me to act as a judge of morality.


I think I know the post you're talking about, and you're not the only one who reported it. LitNet isn't intended as an anything-goes site (though Wolf does his best); it's meant to be at least reasonably all-ages friendly. That "story" wasn't a statement of any kind, but was simply a substanceless attempt be as offensive as possible, so I didn't see reporting it as being any different from reporting spam.

[Marbles]

I do not need to get into a cess-pit to know that it stinks. If you think you do, please be my guest but I shall not join you. The problem with sh!t is that you can't wash the stink completely off. There is no way to unring a bell. Once you have opened yourself to certain images, thoughts, ideas
you can not undo the effects, and not all the effects of filth are good or desirable.

Just hear yourself.

A meaningless string of words, aimed only at avoiding all the points I and other have raised.

[stlukesguild]

no I refuse to read it on the grounds that it is about a paedophile and I have not read any analysis of the book that says different. What makes me truly sick (and convinced of the mental confusion and moral ambiguity that exists today) is that somehow because it is well written that that makes it OK.

In other words, you are judging a work of Art upon non-Artistic values, standards, and measures as opposed to artistic merit. How is this different from judging a work of Art based upon my personal religious beliefs? Would it be at all valid for me to dismiss the Qur'an or the Bhagavad Gita as works of literature because they convey religious ideas contrary to my own... or in reverse, should I find this repugnant...

http://www.artsjournal.com/realcleararts/wp/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/rubens-crucifixion.jpg

... were I Hindu or Buddhist? After all... is it not at its core a representation of torture and execution?

[stlukesguild]

Humbert Humbert is one of the most vile villains in the whole of Western literature. Part of his "strength" as a character is the brilliant manner in which Nabokov seduces the reader into empathizing with him... in a manner not unlike Milton's Satan.

This man, by his own admission, did not write a satire, he did not write a social commentary...

The artist is the last person to trust with regard to explaining their own work.

It was an interesting thing to do. Why did I write any of my books, after all? For the sake of the pleasure, for the sake of the difficulty. I have no social purpose, no moral message; I’ve no general ideas to exploit, I just like composing riddles with elegant solutions.

What, then, do you imagine is the purpose of Art? Is it to promote a moral or ethical message? To champion a socio-political cause? Whose cause? Whose message? Are we to assume that a noble cause or message shall result in a great work of Art... while the lack of such... or worse yet, a message that we disagree with or find repugnant results in a poor work of Art?

Personally, I hold with Oscar Wilde:

The artist is the creator of beautiful things.
To reveal art and conceal the artist is art's aim.
The critic is he who can translate into another manner or a new material his impression of beautiful things.
The highest as the lowest form of criticism is a mode of autobiography.
Those who find ugly meanings in beautiful things are corrupt without being charming. This is a fault.
Those who find beautiful meanings in beautiful things are the cultivated. For these there is hope.
They are the elect to whom beautiful things mean only beauty.

There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.

I have not read Lolita, so I can’t comment on it. But I would note that The Color Purple, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Of Mice and Men, Beloved, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Lady Chatterley’s Lover, The Catcher in the Rye, Brave New World, The Invisible Man, To Kill a Mockingbird, Peyton Place, and even Harry Potter have been condemned, banned and burned by those who feel their clear sense of right and wrong gives them the right to pass judgment on the “morally bankrupt.”

"Where they have burned books, they will end in burning human beings."
-Heinrich Heine

[Marbles]

The underlying assumption behind railing against Lolita and other such works is the fallacy that art should go about with the express intention of righting a wrong, or making social commentary, or being a moral vanguard of society et cetera.

A work of art is all about beauty. It is about human condition, about a truth hitherto not known, about unexplored aspects of human consciousness, their emotions, their relations, and their strengths and weakness. This is what great art does: It dramatises a moral problem, with which people relate; it doesn't offer answers. Nor it should. This is why I love it when Nabokov, as a true artist, refuses a moral mission behind his reasons (or lack thereof of any reason) to write his much-maligned book.

If one is looking for moral codification of society then they are advised to refer to moral treatises of any religious traditions of note. And if one wants to right a wrong or provide succor to the victims of human depravity, they should drop their CV at the recruitment centres of law enforcement outfits, or practice law, or climb atop a pulpit, or......but don't put irrelevant burdens on art in general and fiction/poetry in particular.

[R.F. Schiller]

Lolita had an incredibly negative impact on popular culture. Humbert’s perverse perception of his flirtatious nymphet Lolita acted like a slow, leaching poison on popular culture. The novel greatly accelerated the inappropriate, exploitative sexualisation of young girls by various mass media.

http://cosynch.com/lolita-nabokovs-greatest-hoax/

Nabokov said:



Giving lie to the idea that he intended it to be a satire.


Then we have Nabokov's response to being asked why he wrote Lolita:




Then the man utterly condemns himself -



What is amusing about this?

This man, by his own admission, did not write a satire, he did not write a social commentary, did not write a scathing denunciation of sexual predators and abuse (thankfully really because if he had he failed spectacularly). He wrote the book to to amuse himself and betrays his own lack of empathy by his reaction to the decidedly inappropriate and disturbing men who see their own daughters in the character.


I remain disgusted and condemnatory of this book.

First of all, don't pull random quotes out and use them to support your "interpretation" of the book when

1) You have no idea the context of Nabokov's comments
2) You still haven't read the book!

Nabokov wrote/spoke a lot these comments upon the initial publication of Lolita (such as the essay "On a Book Entitled Lolita"), when the book was nearly taken to court/banned because of people like you, who did not read the book, but heard the themes from a secondary source. Nabokov's close friend Edmund Wilson had his own book banned some years before, Memoirs of Hecate County, for profanity. The best way to combat this and offend the least amount of people (Nabokov took legal counsel), was to claim that the book was not concerned about morality, and was merely a celebration of the English language. If Nabokov claimed Lolita was a moral book, more people would actually be offended, because they have not read the book like you and would be outraged that an author would moralize from such a scandalous topic.

Next, as St. Luke said, you should never take what an artist says about his own work at face value, especially a playful man like Nabokov. Nabokov hated being associated with sermonizing authors that he disliked like Sartre an Camus, therefore he often overcompensated in his interviews to make it seem like his work has no purpose. Anybody that has read Nabokov extensively understands that there definitely is a "point" to almost all of his novels, but you often have to dig a little deeper beyond the surface unlike Harper Lee's work. Two of his works are overtly didactic, which completely contradicts the quotes you posted. Invitation to a Beheading (which is very similar to Kafka's The Trial) and Bend Sinister (which is very similar to Orwell's 1984). Many critics who are much more intelligent than you an have devoted their entire life to art have found these same elements as well (like Martin Amis - read his interpretation).


I do not need to get into a cess-pit to know that it stinks. If you think you do, please be my guest but I shall not join you. The problem with sh!t is that you can't wash the stink completely off. There is no way to unring a bell. Once you have opened yourself to certain images, thoughts, ideas you can not undo the effects, and not all the effects of filth are good or desirable.

Terrible analogy. It seems like you get all your information from secondary sources (hearsay, maybe wikipedia). It would be more like looking at a picture of a pit an deciding it was smelly. Secondly, how do you compare the simple register of a physical sense to the abstract and intellectual appreciation of art which often takes many, many hours? Read the book or don't make stupid comments and act like you actually understand it.

Also, the article you linked has factual errors:

"Bend Sinister (1947), where a boy is admitted to a children’s institution and tormented in a sexualised manner" --> This is incorrect. David Krug was NOT tormented in a sexualised manner.

"It indirectly reveals that as a young boy Vladimir was himself lured into meeting his uncle in secret and sexually abused over many years." --> This claim (concerning Nabokov's maternal uncle, "Ruka") is taken from a book (later made into a documentary on youtube) that fabricated information. The author emphasized how Vladimir was his Uncle's favourite from birth over all his other nieces/nephews. and how his Uncle left him an entire estate (Vyra) after his death. What the author fails to mention is that Ruka had no children of his own so Vladimir, being the eldest male of the next generation was his natural heir. The author also tries to justify a homosexual relationship by commenting on how Ruka would embrace Vladimir in pictures and reads far too much into them. Why do you think "Dr". Joanne Morgan has had so much trouble, as she stated, getting her book published and eventually had to get it self-published? Because it is a badly-written, unscholarly piece of crap. --> http://politicsandculture.org/2005/09/05/solving-nabokovs-lolita-riddle/ The fact that you would use it as an authority on Lolita is similar to a student using Dr. Andrew Wakefield's paper on vaccines and autism as a source. Use Brian Boyd's authoritative biography or Stacy's Schiff's on Vera. For analysis, Alfred Appel, Julian Connolly and Vladimir Alexandrov are good resources.

Honestly, any credibility you could possibly have with Lolita goes right out the door when you admit you haven't read the book. Us debating with you is like playing chess with a pigeon. One can be a good player, but the pigeon will flap around cluelessly, knock over pieces, take a poop on the chessboard and strut around like it is the victor.

[JCamilo]

This man, by his own admission, did not write a satire, he did not write a social commentary...

The artist is the last person to trust with regard to explaining their own work.

But the funny part St is that the quote of Nabokov claiming it is not a moral satyre, as if this does not have an specific meaning to Nabokov, for who moral satire is something completely different to the genre he was attempting, and not that Nabokov is not critical towards (not pedophilia, as the awareness on this field actually increased after the 60's, not lowered) the destruction of inocence. Irony is certainly a trait to fine for most people to perceive, imagine someone who doing the obviously foolishnss to cross swords about a book with people who read it in several levels when she read some articles which seems are beyond understanding...

I mean, someone denying Nabokov didn't mock freudian theories in Lolita? Because she cannot find a quote in a google search? Read the book, HH mocks them in the book all the time. Just because it is needed to cross references for find... meh...

Sometimes a pointless discussing is a relief. But this one is not, it is pinpointing toward a black hole, as one side just admited to be completely ignorant on the subject.

[illiterati]

due to the fact that he's a mature adult who is after a young girl.[/]

The shame is on you that this doesn't outrage you. Are you unaware or do you just not care that 25% of all adults report being sexually abused and that 90% of victims never tell making the actual number of people who have been abused closer to 50% of the population? Women and girls are 8 x more likely to be abused than men and boys.
[/QUOTE]


Pumpkin, please stop supporting child abuse by writing about it in this forum post.

[WyattGwyon]

Humbert Humbert is one of the most vile villains in the whole of Western literature. Part of his "strength" as a character is the brilliant manner in which Nabokov seduces the reader into empathizing with him... in a manner not unlike Milton's Satan.

I have heard this before and never found him the slightest bit seductive. I found him a repulsive, bottom of the barrel scumbag from the first pages — which has nothing to do with my opinion of the novel, which I enjoyed.

[Pumpkin337]

there are the ignorant and then there are the wilfully ignorant.

I have a right to choose what I will read and what I will not. Lolita is a book I will never read because nothing I have read it about it gives me any indication that this will be a book that will give me any joy to read. Every indication is that I will not get beyond a few pages before getting so infuriated with the author that I would want to commit GBH on him. Not only that but the entire premise of the book - being written in a large part from the perspective of the abuser does not appeal to me in the slightest .. as I said .. I do not need to get in the cesspit to know it stinks. And this is one particular cess-pit I have ZERO intention of visiting. And you have no right to abuse me for that opinion.

Not only that but your willful misreading of what I have said is just not worth responding to. I've stated my opinions clearly enough for any one to understand, the truth remains not one of you has defended the book in a clear and logical fashion. You have defended it by attacking me and that is not a defense ... that is the thrashing around of people who know deep down that I am saying something you don't want to hear. This book is about a paedophile. Its effect in popular culture has been to perpetuate certain paedophilic and misogynistic attitudes towards women and girls, particularly through the adoption of 'lolita' as a term to label girls as sexually precocious.

If I wasn't touching a nerve none of you would be reacting so vehemently. Fact is by your very response you are proving me right. You know this book is not right in its attitudes and what it expresses. You just think its intellectually superior to ignore that and waft on about how 'wonderful' it is. Sadly this does not make you intellectually superior - it makes you morally suspect and bluntens your conscience because you have to suppress it in order to ignore what your conscience is telling you about this book.

As I said - not every thing is beneficial to experience.

[stlukesguild]

I have a right to choose what I will read and what I will not. Lolita is a book I will never read because nothing I have read it about it gives me any indication that this will be a book that will give me any joy to read. Every indication is that I will not get beyond a few pages before getting so infuriated with the author that I would want to commit GBH on him. Not only that but the entire premise of the book - being written in a large part from the perspective of the abuser does not appeal to me in the slightest .. as I said .. I do not need to get in the cesspit to know it stinks. And this is one particular cess-pit I have ZERO intention of visiting. And you have no right to abuse me for that opinion.

You have every right to choose what to read and what not to read. You have every right to base such decisions upon whatever you wish. If you choose to base your decisions as to what to read or what not to read upon the advice of your phrenologist or your proctologist, you are free to do so. Do not expect others to embrace your decisions when you do so.

As for others abusing you... this is not the result of your decision to avoid reading Lolita; it is the result of you casting public judgment upon a work of literature... feeling free to refer to it as a "cess pool"... without ever having read it.

Not only that but your willful misreading of what I have said is just not worth responding to.

How have your postings been misread? You have stated that you are uninterested in reading Lolita. Fine. Your prerogative. I have elected to avoid ever reading one of the Twilight novels. You have stated that the reason for your decision is based upon moral grounds. Again, that is your right. But then you choose to cast judgment upon the merits of the book without having ever read it... and take a holier than thou position, suggesting that this novel were somehow responsible for pedophilia and the abuse of young girls, and that those who suggest that the book is a great work of literature are somehow complicit in pedophilia and abuse and are metaphorically wallowing in the cesspool of decadence and Western Civilization in decline. Did I miss anything?

I've stated my opinions clearly enough for any one to understand, the truth remains not one of you has defended the book in a clear and logical fashion.

Would you likely take any such logical critical analysis seriously? You have rejected the arguments of those who tell you that Lolita is a brilliant and beautifully written book. It is. There are few writers with a greater mastery of English in prose... which is all the more spectacular considering that English was the third language (after Russian and German) in which the author wrote. I have already spoken of the character, Humbert Humbert. Nabokov brilliantly takes this vile villain and turns him into the narrator... one of the most dazzling displays of the unreliable narrator. The character at once repulses the reader... and seduces him or her with his wit, intelligence, and cutting observations upon American (and European) culture. Humbert is but a single memorable character among a number of such memorable figures.

You have defended it by attacking me and that is not a defense ... that is the thrashing around of people who know deep down that I am saying something you don't want to hear.

No one has attacked you... which the administration would have dealt with. Rather, they have "attacked" or rather "challenged" your opinions and your judgments... and the fact that these opinions and judgments are:

1. Not based upon artistic merits, but rather upon moral grounds
2. Not based upon personal experience of having actually read the book in question, but rather upon hearsay or the opinions of others
3. Expressed in a vehement and holier-than-thou manner comparing the unread book to a "cess-pool" and inferring that those who are of a different opinion are are somehow complicit in pedophilia and abuse and the decline of culture.

This book is about a paedophile...

Yes. And many great books are about murder, rape, incest, adultery, physical and psychological abuse, and every other repugnant behavior you can think of. Again, the Crucifixion I posted above was essentially about torture and execution. But it was also about much more. So is Lolita.

[Iain Sparrow]

Not only that but your willful misreading of what I have said is just not worth responding to. I've stated my opinions clearly enough for any one to understand, the truth remains not one of you has defended the book in a clear and logical fashion. You have defended it by attacking me and that is not a defense ... that is the thrashing around of people who know deep down that I am saying something you don't want to hear. This book is about a paedophile. Its effect in popular culture has been to perpetuate certain paedophilic and misogynistic attitudes towards women and girls, particularly through the adoption of 'lolita' as a term to label girls as sexually precocious.

If I wasn't touching a nerve none of you would be reacting so vehemently. Fact is by your very response you are proving me right. You know this book is not right in its attitudes and what it expresses. You just think its intellectually superior to ignore that and waft on about how 'wonderful' it is. Sadly this does not make you intellectually superior - it makes you morally suspect and bluntens your conscience because you have to suppress it in order to ignore what your conscience is telling you about this book.

As I said - not every thing is beneficial to experience.

What I think you should be asking yourself, what I'm asking myself... is why has Lolita stood the test of time, and why is it considered a "classic". It's solidly ranked in the top 100 best books of all time, and on multiple lists. Me thinks that thematically it touches on some universal taboos and many people read it for just that reason. So what's the big deal? I happen to read a lot of True Crime novels for the same reason. Does it make me morally suspect, is my conscience at risk... of course not.
As far as feminism goes and the part literature plays in perpetuating damaging stereotypes toward women... have you seen the kind of books that women and girls of today are reading, most of which are written by women?.. google "Dinosaur Erotica", I dare ya.:)

[petermcelwee]

I agree with you. All writers have their unique voice and to say you have to read a specific ten books is b*llocks

[mande2013]

I agree that people who want to write should also be readers. Anyone with a keen interest in writing as an artistic pursuit will invariably be drawn to certain canonical works and figures even if not others. One may be heavily drawn towards Milton, Faulkner, and Dostoevsky yet be heavily apathetic with respect to Dickens and Henry James. Do these people still have something to prove? Should they be forced to appreciate Dickens or James before they've earned the right to pursue their craft. Isn't that precisely the sort of academic attitude that kills creativity? The literary canon is simply too vast to expect omniscience vis-a-vis say Henry Bloom's pantheon of every aspiring writer. When would people ever actually have time to do any creating of their own? It's not like the jazz pantheon or even the cinema pantheon both of which are far more digestible. How many people on here can actually read The Sound and the Fury thoroughly in one sitting?

Also, there are certain stereotypes that just won't die. For instance, the benchmark stereotype of an aspiring writer is a humanities major from Vassar or Wesleyan with an 800 on his or her SAT verbal to accompany their upper middle class upbringing. What of the people who don't quite have those "qualifications"? Is the late bloomer with that 600 SAT verbal a fraud or wannabe simply trying to vainly compensate for some void? Is reading 'difficult' literature simply not his turf or territory? Now I won't lie, this is certainly personal, as being someone who only scored around a 600 on the CR section of the SAT often makes me feel like an impostor when I display an interest in literature, since if I can barely succeed on the English portion of the SAT how could I possibly manage to comprehend Joyce or even Dostoevsky.

[Vota]

Pumpkin, your refusal to read a book and make up your own mind about it's actual content and message shows a lack of independent thinking, whether you realize this or not.

A rational, reasonable person, investigates things and forms their own opinions. You obviously have a deep hatred for child molesters, and this is rational and reasonable, but to project this hate onto a work, and to condemn a work that you have not read, whose context for using such a despicable character and subject you do not understand, is inherently irrational and unreasonable.

This is the problem with judging all things by feeling alone, by specific emotions, or by false and incorrect association. This is essentially viewing the world as black and white, when in reality it is shades of grey. This is what happens when you don't read between the lines.

This is what you are doing when you say that you refuse to read a book and call it filth. You are associating child molestation and the book "Lolita" incorrectly. How can you judge something without thoroughly inspecting it? Do you make snap judgments about people? You know the old saying, never judge a book by it's cover, or title for that matter.

I can't guarantee that if you deigned to read the book that you would like it, but you might find your eyes opened in more ways than one if you did.

[Pumpkin337]

the argument that one HAS to experience something in order to form an 'informed' opinion is specious. Do you have to take drugs, smoke weed, jump in front of a speeding train to decide these things would be a bad idea?

as for 'lack of independent thinking' I think that if you think just because a book is a 'classic' blah blah that its a. good, b. shouldn't be challenged, c. MUST be read then you are the one who is suffering from an acute case of lack of independent thinking.

as for assuming the book is harmless ... just on the basis of the assumption into the regular lexicon of the word 'lolita' to describe a sexually precocious girl who comes on to an older guy thus justifying her subsequent abuse (because in most places in the world sex with an underage girl is abusive, illegal, and proscribed) is harm enough. It's also the name of a lifestyle/fashion style where grown women dress up like little girls. It's even the name given to a psychological complex for heaven's sake! The harm this kind of branding does to the image of women is immeasurable and this book, its name, is a focal point for a great deal of it regardless of what is in the book itself which I do not care to immerse myself in.

Furthermore I would say that if you do read it and are not utterly disgusted at the descriptions, at Humbert, at other moments in the book to the point of putting it down and crying 'no more' then you are also guilty of a kind of collusion at the events. There is no way to justify, not even in the name of 'art' or 'literature' to condone anything that even hints at any kind of acceptability to the crimes against women in this book. I do not however ascribe such a lofty ambition to Nabokov however, that he intended to write a scathing assault on the readers perceptions of what is acceptable. The problem with Nabokov is that he seems to think paedophilia is funny!

And then what about all the films it has spawned? From the first film version through films such as Gigi - with that dreadful song 'Thank Heaven For Little Girls' to Kevin Spacey's "American Beauty"? And many more besides.

DO NOT tell me this book and its effect in the common perceptions is negligible or harmless.

[qimissung]

This thread has gotten way off topic. Time to return to the original post.

[Marbles]

I agree that people who want to write should also be readers. Anyone with a keen interest in writing as an artistic pursuit will invariably be drawn to certain canonical works and figures even if not others. One may be heavily drawn towards Milton, Faulkner, and Dostoevsky yet be heavily apathetic with respect to Dickens and Henry James. Do these people still have something to prove? Should they be forced to appreciate Dickens or James before they've earned the right to pursue their craft. Isn't that precisely the sort of academic attitude that kills creativity? The literary canon is simply too vast to expect omniscience vis-a-vis say Henry Bloom's pantheon of every aspiring writer. When would people ever actually have time to do any creating of their own? It's not like the jazz pantheon or even the cinema pantheon both of which are far more digestible. How many people on here can actually read The Sound and the Fury thoroughly in one sitting?

Also, there are certain stereotypes that just won't die. For instance, the benchmark stereotype of an aspiring writer is a humanities major from Vassar or Wesleyan with an 800 on his or her SAT verbal to accompany their upper middle class upbringing. What of the people who don't quite have those "qualifications"? Is the late bloomer with that 600 SAT verbal a fraud or wannabe simply trying to vainly compensate for some void? Is reading 'difficult' literature simply not his turf or territory? Now I won't lie, this is certainly personal, as being someone who only scored around a 600 on the CR section of the SAT often makes me feel like an impostor when I display an interest in literature, since if I can barely succeed on the English portion of the SAT how could I possibly manage to comprehend Joyce or even Dostoevsky.

I never quite understood American hangups with certain colleges, majors and SAT scores. Given that writers with a gift for language and storytelling came, come, from all sorts of backgrounds and socioeconomic strata renders the preoccupation with relevant majors and exam scores so superficial as to be laughable.

[JCamilo]

the argument that one HAS to experience something in order to form an 'informed' opinion is specious. Do you have to take drugs, smoke weed, jump in front of a speeding train to decide these things would be a bad idea?

as for 'lack of independent thinking' I think that if you think just because a book is a 'classic' blah blah that its a. good, b. shouldn't be challenged, c. MUST be read then you are the one who is suffering from an acute case of lack of independent thinking.

as for assuming the book is harmless ... just on the basis of the assumption into the regular lexicon of the word 'lolita' to describe a sexually precocious girl who comes on to an older guy thus justifying her subsequent abuse (because in most places in the world sex with an underage girl is abusive, illegal, and proscribed) is harm enough. It's also the name of a lifestyle/fashion style where grown women dress up like little girls. It's even the name given to a psychological complex for heaven's sake! The harm this kind of branding does to the image of women is immeasurable and this book, its name, is a focal point for a great deal of it regardless of what is in the book itself which I do not care to immerse myself in.

Furthermore I would say that if you do read it and are not utterly disgusted at the descriptions, at Humbert, at other moments in the book to the point of putting it down and crying 'no more' then you are also guilty of a kind of collusion at the events. There is no way to justify, not even in the name of 'art' or 'literature' to condone anything that even hints at any kind of acceptability to the crimes against women in this book. I do not however ascribe such a lofty ambition to Nabokov however, that he intended to write a scathing assault on the readers perceptions of what is acceptable. The problem with Nabokov is that he seems to think paedophilia is funny!

And then what about all the films it has spawned? From the first film version through films such as Gigi - with that dreadful song 'Thank Heaven For Little Girls' to Kevin Spacey's "American Beauty"? And many more besides.

DO NOT tell me this book and its effect in the common perceptions is negligible or harmless.

The problem of your lack of reading about Lolita is that you keep making ridiculous claims about it, simple as that. Anyone who would had read the book would not be as infantile to think pedophilie is funny in the book at all. Your arrogance to think your complete lack on information is valid while the "expertise"of everyone else, who have a lot more information and study in the matter, is dismissed as "snobbery" is astounishing. You simple do not know what you are talking about.

Yes, you do not need to jump before train to know it is deadly, but knowledge is not something you have in only one way. Try to go to a physics class without studying and go making your claims about how gravity work. You do need to read and study the subject and that is minimal to have an educated opinion about the subject. It is literature, reading is must and that is something you do not need to jump before train to know.

This goes worst for stuff like having a complex (So does Cinderella, Peter Pan, Oedipus... and why not showing us this medical condition know as lolita complex) or Saying that Gigi (which is based on another book, by another author, spawned movies and a broadway musical before the Leslie Caron sugary and romantic version which started to be produced in 1954, a year before Lolita was published) was inspired by it. It is embarassing that even when you are talking about something that does not demand knowledge of the book, you commit such mistake.

And finally, the real fact is after Lolita, the awareness about pedophilie increased, the laws became more strict. Lolita was not the cause of it, but if anything they should award Nabokov's Lolita a prize for being the nurse that protected so many young girls around the world. It is a paragorn of virtue. If it could wear a cape, it would jump higher than buildings and outrun bullets.

[mande2013]

the argument that one HAS to experience something in order to form an 'informed' opinion is specious. Do you have to take drugs, smoke weed, jump in front of a speeding train to decide these things would be a bad idea?

as for 'lack of independent thinking' I think that if you think just because a book is a 'classic' blah blah that its a. good, b. shouldn't be challenged, c. MUST be read then you are the one who is suffering from an acute case of lack of independent thinking.

as for assuming the book is harmless ... just on the basis of the assumption into the regular lexicon of the word 'lolita' to describe a sexually precocious girl who comes on to an older guy thus justifying her subsequent abuse (because in most places in the world sex with an underage girl is abusive, illegal, and proscribed) is harm enough. It's also the name of a lifestyle/fashion style where grown women dress up like little girls. It's even the name given to a psychological complex for heaven's sake! The harm this kind of branding does to the image of women is immeasurable and this book, its name, is a focal point for a great deal of it regardless of what is in the book itself which I do not care to immerse myself in.

Furthermore I would say that if you do read it and are not utterly disgusted at the descriptions, at Humbert, at other moments in the book to the point of putting it down and crying 'no more' then you are also guilty of a kind of collusion at the events. There is no way to justify, not even in the name of 'art' or 'literature' to condone anything that even hints at any kind of acceptability to the crimes against women in this book. I do not however ascribe such a lofty ambition to Nabokov however, that he intended to write a scathing assault on the readers perceptions of what is acceptable. The problem with Nabokov is that he seems to think paedophilia is funny!

And then what about all the films it has spawned? From the first film version through films such as Gigi - with that dreadful song 'Thank Heaven For Little Girls' to Kevin Spacey's "American Beauty"? And many more besides.

DO NOT tell me this book and its effect in the common perceptions is negligible or harmless.

Well let's look at it this way. Is a virgin in a position to write a great sex scene in a novel? Is someone who's never been in the military capable of writing a war novel. Can a straight person direct a great gay-themed film, etc.

[Pumpkin337]

Well let's look at it this way. Is a virgin in a position to write a great sex scene in a novel? Is someone who's never been in the military capable of writing a war novel. Can a straight person direct a great gay-themed film, etc.

is a non-paedophile able to write such graphic scenes about seducing a child? beware of your argument, you may just be saying something you don't mean. Unless of course you did mean to imply a guy who included paedophilia in so many of his books (no less than 6 I believe) may just have had some kind of problem?

“Asked by an interviewer if he’d ever known a girl like Lolita, the old man’s lizard eyes flickered, and just for a second the body language spoke as eloquently as anything Nabokov ever wrote in his adoptive tongue.”

“. . . The Laura joins The Enchanter (1939), Lolita (1955), Ada (1970), Transparent Things (1972), and Look at the Harlequins! (1974) in unignorably concerning itself with the sexual despoiliation of very young girls. . . [B]y sheer weight of numbers, by sheer iteration, the nympholepsy novels begin to infect one another – they cross-contaminate. We gratefully take all we can from them; and yet . . . Where else in the canon do we find such wayward fixity?


To answer the issue of Nabokov's rather perverse sense of humour:


Nabokov’s close reading of Havelock Ellis’ famous case history, “The Confession of Victor X,” whose Russian narrator “develops from precociously over-sexed adolescent debauchery […,] through a lengthy period of abstinence in Italy, which finally degenerates into paedophilia, voyeurism and masturbatory obsession amid Neapolitan child prostitution.” Cornwell even cites Nabokov’s reaction to the confession, in a letter to Edmund Wilson, who had introduced him to Ellis’ work:

I enjoyed the Russian’s love-life hugely. It is wonderfully funny. As a boy, he seems to have been quite extraordinarily lucky in coming across girls with unusually rapid and rich reactions. The end is rather bathetic.

You see I may not read the text, but I do read 'defenses' like this:

http://numerocinqmagazine.com/2013/05/01/nabokovs-exoneration-the-genesis-and-genius-of-lolita-bruce-stone-2/

which is no defense ... cut through literary analysis bulldust and no-where does it actually say 'Nabokov was right to write about paedophile and the sexual victimisation of a child in this way because ...' because there is no defense for it in those terms. None I have read and I have looked. There are only these intellectual discussions of why people are wrong to criticise (which is not a defense but merely an offensive against those who criticize) and/or why the book itself is good and never address the central issue which is the heart of the offense against the book over and over ... the book glorifies a paedophile and makes no excuses for him.

So when you are done criticising me for taking a stand ... and done trying to tell me how great the book is ... make this defense...

Nabokov's Lolita has had no effect in the negative perception of woman in the general public because ....

Nabokov was correct to write about the sexual victimisation of a young girl in Lolita and so many of his books because ...

Every boy should read Lolita because ... (hint things like it teaches young men how not to treat women, highlights the issues women face, puts a face on the ugliness of paedophilia might want to feature in your answer)

Lolita has not contributed to the negative perceptions of women in mass media and public perceptions particular through the adoption of the words 'nymphet' and 'lolita' and all imagery / perceptions associated with them into the general lexicon because ...

[stlukesguild]

Well let's look at it this way. Is a virgin in a position to write a great sex scene in a novel? Is someone who's never been in the military capable of writing a war novel. Can a straight person direct a great gay-themed film, etc.

I don't think these analogies work. There are probably any number of powerful books and paintings about war by authors and artists who never served in the military or experienced warfare at first hand. Tolstoy? Victor Hugo? As for directing a great gay-themed film we only need to look to Ang Lee. Art involved fantasy and imagination as much as it involves real life experiences.

[stlukesguild]

The artist is the creator of beautiful things. To reveal art and conceal the artist is art's aim. The highest as the lowest form of criticism is a mode of autobiography.
-Oscar Wilde

Art involves as much illusion and deceit as a magic show. It can be... but quite often is not is the least bit autobiographical. Those moralists who would attack what they deem as moral failings in a work of art are often hypocrites who fear the same failings in themselves.

Art at its greatest is fantastically deceitful and complex... Beauty plus pity - that is the closest we can get to a definition of art.
-Vladimir Nabokov

Nabokov would go on to write that Lolita was based on a theme which was “so distant, so remote” from his own emotional life that it gave him special pleasure to use his “combinational talent” to make it real.

One attempt at lending Lolita an autobiographical base is that Nabokov was a victim of abuse. Many critics have been able to piece together some of Nabokov's early childhood. According to Brandon Centerwall, as a young boy Nabokov had an uncle who was a paedophile. Uncle Ruka apparently abused Nabokov as a boy, and although his parents knew of the abuse, they did nothing to stop the scandal. Uncle Ruka was Nabokov's mother's brother, who had no children of his own. When Uncle Ruka died he left his fortune to Nabokov. It was a trifle odd that a teenager was left millions, but it can be thought of as some sort of compensation for his ‘sexual services’. There are many parallels between Uncle Ruka and Nabokov, and Humbert Humbert and Lolita. The first and most obvious similarity is that Nabokov was age twelve during the escapade and Uncle Ruka was thirty-seven. Lolita was a young nymphet of twelve and Humbert Humbert was thirty-seven.

But another similarity was that Nabokov had a strange relationship with his own mother, as did Lolita with Charlotte. One critic points out that all the women in Lolita die. Humbert’s mother also died when he was very young, and then his caretaker took a turn for the worse, Charlotte was killed, and in the end Lolita died during childbirth, (the passage through life when she is to become a mother). Freud did numerous studies on the Oedipus complex, when a young boy has intimate feelings towards his mother and has a dislike to his father, or the other man in his mothers life. Although Freud's preoccupation with the Oedipus complex is subject to question, psychological evidence confirms that incestuous thoughts and feelings, largely subconscious, do play a part in human behavior. Nabokov did not keep his dislike of Sigmund Freud a secret. At the end of The Annotated Lolita, he wrote, “I detest symbols and allegories (which is due partly to my old feud with Freudian voodooism and part to my loathing of generalizations devised by literary mythists and sociologists)”.

[JCamilo]

is a non-paedophile able to write such graphic scenes about seducing a child? beware of your argument, you may just be saying something you don't mean. Unless of course you did mean to imply a guy who included paedophilia in so many of his books (no less than 6 I believe) may just have had some kind of problem?

“Asked by an interviewer if he’d ever known a girl like Lolita, the old man’s lizard eyes flickered, and just for a second the body language spoke as eloquently as anything Nabokov ever wrote in his adoptive tongue.”

“. . . The Laura joins The Enchanter (1939), Lolita (1955), Ada (1970), Transparent Things (1972), and Look at the Harlequins! (1974) in unignorably concerning itself with the sexual despoiliation of very young girls. . . [B]y sheer weight of numbers, by sheer iteration, the nympholepsy novels begin to infect one another – they cross-contaminate. We gratefully take all we can from them; and yet . . . Where else in the canon do we find such wayward fixity?

Have you even read the articles you quoted? Because they kind off label Lolita as masterpiece, reduce the problem to be an aesthetic one and justify the books due to Nabokov (and his family) own lost childhood. The best they do is to identify the theme of Lolita as Nabokov yerning for lost childhood. Not him with HH (which should be obvious, he may have meet someone like Lolita and he is emotional about it, your you thought his eyes flickering was his perveted mind?).

In fact, Amis article pretty much debunke you over and over (I guess someone already quoted Amis here to debunke you).

So my question is: are you in a cruzade against reading?

[Pumpkin337]

answer the questions I posed ... but I guess you can't because you clearly don't even realise you just said exactly what I said everyone does. Attacking the critics is not a defense. Stating how well it isvwritten is not a defense. A defense states this book is not about a paedophile because ... This book has not had an effect on the perceptions in mass media, etc because ... The author was not defending, deliberately or inadvertentlly glorifying paedophilia, perpetuating certain prejudicial perceptions about women because ...

Point to where those central bones of contention that I am neither the first nor the last to object to are made null and void by any rational proof other than 'but its good writing'

[Marbles]

I seriously think this thread should be renamed "Lolita" and the off topic posts deleted.

[Frostball]

answer the questions I posed ... but I guess you can't because you clearly don't even realise you just said exactly what I said everyone does. Attacking the critics is not a defense. Stating how well it isvwritten is not a defense. A defense states this book is not about a paedophile because ... This book has not had an effect on the perceptions in mass media, etc because ... The author was not defending, deliberately or inadvertentlly glorifying paedophilia, perpetuating certain prejudicial perceptions about women because ...

Point to where those central bones of contention that I am neither the first nor the last to object to are made null and void by any rational proof other than 'but its good writing'

You pretty much have to also criticize any book that contains murder, or you're just being hypocritical. Books, movies, or videogames that contain murder have been repeatedly shown to not make people want to go murder. The exact same thing goes for a book that contains pedophilia.

[JCamilo]

answer the questions I posed ... but I guess you can't because you clearly don't even realise you just said exactly what I said everyone does. Attacking the critics is not a defense. Stating how well it isvwritten is not a defense. A defense states this book is not about a paedophile because ... This book has not had an effect on the perceptions in mass media, etc because ... The author was not defending, deliberately or inadvertentlly glorifying paedophilia, perpetuating certain prejudicial perceptions about women because ...

Point to where those central bones of contention that I am neither the first nor the last to object to are made null and void by any rational proof other than 'but its good writing'

Nobody is attacking you (the critic, or rather, not a critic, because a critic would read the book), we are attacking your misinformed rant. You know, the nature of a debate is countering arguments.

This book is about a pedophilie. Just like every post you did in this thread is about or haven't you noticed that?

This book did had an effect on perception of the people and it was pointed, the awareness about of pedophilie increased in the last decades. So did the strictness of the law. In fact, you are a Child of Lolita, my dear.

The author is not defending pepophilie because if you read the book, you will notice the pedophile is a villain. The book does show him as monster, manipulative, cruel. Lolita's mother call him by names a detestable, abominable and a fraud. He classifies himself as rapist.

Those questions weren't avoided, they were ridiculous. It is like someone reading the bible and asking who was Jesus. You should know the answers already.

But to this, you would need to read the book or perhaps even the stuff you have been misquoting. You have to read.

As long you rant as if you are some genius we all must bow down, accusing others of some sort of snobery because anyone really knows how fragile is your argumentation, when you do not do the very basic: reading. As long you avoid it, it will be as ridiculous as you claiming the Lolita complex or that Gigi was inspired by Lolita.

As the off-topics, the mods could put appart the thread? We can named "Why reading is so important in a Literary forum"

[R.F. Schiller]

One attempt at lending Lolita an autobiographical base is that Nabokov was a victim of abuse. Many critics have been able to piece together some of Nabokov's early childhood. According to Brandon Centerwall, as a young boy Nabokov had an uncle who was a paedophile. Uncle Ruka apparently abused Nabokov as a boy, and although his parents knew of the abuse, they did nothing to stop the scandal. Uncle Ruka was Nabokov's mother's brother, who had no children of his own. When Uncle Ruka died he left his fortune to Nabokov. It was a trifle odd that a teenager was left millions, but it can be thought of as some sort of compensation for his ‘sexual services’. There are many parallels between Uncle Ruka and Nabokov, and Humbert Humbert and Lolita. The first and most obvious similarity is that Nabokov was age twelve during the escapade and Uncle Ruka was thirty-seven. Lolita was a young nymphet of twelve and Humbert Humbert was thirty-seven.

But another similarity was that Nabokov had a strange relationship with his own mother, as did Lolita with Charlotte. One critic points out that all the women in Lolita die. Humbert’s mother also died when he was very young, and then his caretaker took a turn for the worse, Charlotte was killed, and in the end Lolita died during childbirth, (the passage through life when she is to become a mother). Freud did numerous studies on the Oedipus complex, when a young boy has intimate feelings towards his mother and has a dislike to his father, or the other man in his mothers life. Although Freud's preoccupation with the Oedipus complex is subject to question, psychological evidence confirms that incestuous thoughts and feelings, largely subconscious, do play a part in human behavior. Nabokov did not keep his dislike of Sigmund Freud a secret. At the end of The Annotated Lolita, he wrote, “I detest symbols and allegories (which is due partly to my old feud with Freudian voodooism and part to my loathing of generalizations devised by literary mythists and sociologists)”.

I just read the article written by Centerwall (http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/40754944?uid=2&uid=4&sid=21104558239543 --> you might not get access to the full version; I needed to log in to my University of Toronto account). Centerwall is not a literary scholar, he is a psychologist. He uses two texts for his arguments, Speak, Memory and Andrew Field's mistake-ridden biography. Several factual errors already present themselves. He claims the protagonist of The Enchanter is named "Arthur", when he is simply known as "The Man" (he no doubt got this from Andrew Field who made the error in the first place). The claim the ages of H.H. and Lolita (37 & 12 respectively when they meet) is the same as V.V.N. and his uncle is also incorrect. Vasily Ivanovich Rukavishnikov (1872-1916) would be 39 when Vladimir Vladimorovich Nabokov (1899-1977) was 12. I strongly believe that Lolita's age was chosen to be twelve simply because of physiological reasons. Nabokov did a large amount or research on young girls for his novel, including the average age of the onset of puberty for American girls in the 1950s... which is not susprisingly twelve years of age. Some of Centerwall's comments are also ridiculous. "Humbert Humbert's name is Vladimir Vladimirovich's most direct admission to pedophilia" --> Yes, because both the author and his character have double names, the character must be an exact alter-ego of the author and therefore, be a pedophile. Also this quote: "Even so, Uncle Ruka did make Vladimir his sole heir, and young Nabokov inherited the Ruka millions in 1916, after his uncle died (72). Nabokov is laconic on this point, not elaborating on why Uncle Ruka chose to make a teenager the sole inheritor of his fortune, rather than Vladimir's mother (Ruka's sister), the Nabokov children jointly, or some other arrangement. Perhaps it was payment for services rendered". In pre-revolutionary Russia, it was standard practice for the eldest male to receive inheritance. As Uncle "Ruka" was childless, naturally, the eldest son of his closest relative would be designated heir. Nabokov was already 17 as well, not like he was 10.

Centerwall cites this passage as his main piece of evidence for Vladimir being "sexually harassed" in Speak, Memory (VN speaking about his uncle): "he would invariably take me upon his knee after lunch and . . . fondle me, with crooning sounds and fancy endearments". Really? One thing he is right about is that Uncle "Ruka" was a known homosexual and would hold Vladimir quite tightly in many of the family photographs. Vladimir was admitted he was "embarrassed" by this, but there is zero evidence that their relationship went beyond some fondling, Centerwall sounds like an overzealous psychologist trying to stir up controversy when there isn't sufficient evidence.

As for your second paragraph, where did you get that information that Nabokov had a strange relationship with his mother? Andrew Field? Because I know that Andrew Field believed that Vladimir Nabokov addressed his mother as "Lolita" in his letters. This is because while he was compiling them for his biography, Nabokov would cross out sections that he felt were too personal and didn't want to share (he did this with Vera's letters as well), including the name, which he only left the first letter, "L". Field saw that it had about six letters so came upon this assumption. Dmitri Nabokov explained that the name was "Lyolya" (maybe I spelled it wrong), which is a short form for Helene/Elene (his mother's name) in Russian. And the name "Lolita" was conceived very late in the publication of the novel. In Nabokov's first drafts, the girl was called Juanita Dark --> this was decades after the letters to his mother were written. As to the fact that many of the female characters die... well what does that have to do with Nabokov's relationship with his mother? Many of the male characters die as well (all characters die!). Humbert Humbert dies, Quilty dies, Charlie (the boy Lolita lost her virginity to) dies in the (Korean?) War. Looking more closely, I suppose more females do die compared to males. But everything I've read of Nabokov's relationship with his mother has been pretty standard, nothing like Lolita/Charlotte. Nabokov's relationship with his homosexual brother Sergey on the other hand... that's another story. Nabokov's hatred of Freud, at least I believe, is because Freud's Oedipus Complex destroyed Nabokov's vision of childhood. Nabokov had "the happiest childhood imaginable" and was offended that "the Viennese Quack" would reduce the beautiful innocence he experienced as a child to crude sexual desire.

My sources:

The Russian Years - Brian Boyd
The American Years - Brian Boyd
Vera - Stacy Schiff
Speak, Memory - V.V. Nabokov
On a Book Titled The Enchanter - Dmitri Nabokov
The Annotated Lolita - Alfred Appel Jr.

To conclude, I find it interesting that so many people try to find pedophilic elements in Nabokov's life when there is very little evidence. The one controversial thing that is present in his literary works and his personal life that is not too widely talked about is his extreme homophobia. Every homosexual character every written by Nabokov is a bad artist and has very nasty attributes in general. Just off the top of my head, they appear in The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, Pale Fire, Despair and even briefly in Lolita (Gaston Godin). Nabokov's brother Sergey was gay and Vladimir was very embarrassed by this, leading to a strained relationship (Sergey would often wear lipstick and makeup). Sergey was then killed in the Holocaust, likely because he was gay.

[R.F. Schiller]

the argument that one HAS to experience something in order to form an 'informed' opinion is specious. Do you have to take drugs, smoke weed, jump in front of a speeding train to decide these things would be a bad idea?

Another bad analogy. The assumption that smoking is bad for you is a conclusion that scientists have validated based on experimentation and is based on facts. The effects of smoking on the body are physiological in nature and objective. Furthermore, I have yet to see a legitimate scientist claim that smoking is not bad for health. Art, on the other hand is dependent on firsthand experience. It is in the mind of the person and is entirely subjective. Furthermore, most "serious" critics agree that it is a quality work and not "disgusting" as you would suggest. If you have a different opinion that is fine, but it better be a strong, well-supported one; AKA one that requires someone to actually read the book rather than just get information from hearsay and quote mine from random articles.


Attacking the critics is not a defense.

This sentence is highly ironic, because it is YOU who are essentially attacking the critics. What most of the posters in this thread have stated are shared by the majority of critics in the literary world. Just because you can find one of two people who dislike Lolita on the internet, doesn't mean we are "attacking the critics".


“. . . The Laura joins The Enchanter (1939), Lolita (1955), Ada (1970), Transparent Things (1972), and Look at the Harlequins! (1974) in unignorably concerning itself with the sexual despoiliation of very young girls. . . y sheer weight of numbers, by sheer iteration, the nympholepsy novels begin to infect one another – they cross-contaminate. We gratefully take all we can from them; and yet . . . Where else in the canon do we find such wayward fixity?


He missed The Original of Laura (2009) for this list actually. Also, do you see a recurring pattern? Except for The Enchanter, every other book about little girls was written after Nabokov landed in America. Another European, Aldous Huxley similar was disturbed by the developing promiscuity and sexualized culture. of America in the twentieth century and wrote about it in Brave New World . Nabokov is more or less commenting on what he is seeing.


The problem with Nabokov is that he seems to think paedophilia is funny!

Quite a bold (and mind you incorrect) statement for someone who hasn't read the book.


just on the basis of the assumption into the regular lexicon of the word 'lolita' to describe a sexually precocious girl who comes on to an older guy thus justifying her subsequent abuse (because in most places in the world sex with an underage girl is abusive, illegal, and proscribed) is harm enough. [B]It's also the name of a lifestyle/fashion style where grown women dress up like little girls. It's even the name given to a psychological complex for heaven's sake! The harm this kind of branding does to the image of women is immeasurable and this book, its name, is a focal point for a great deal of it regardless of what is in the book itself which I do not care to immerse myself in.

And then what about all the films it has spawned? From the first film version through films such as Gigi - with that dreadful song 'Thank Heaven For Little Girls' to Kevin Spacey's "American Beauty"? And many more besides.

DO NOT tell me this book and its effect in the common perceptions is negligible or harmless.

Yes, the world "Lolita" and "nymphet" have been incorporated into the English language. Also, what is exactly wrong with the bold? It seems weird in our culture, but quite normal in Japan. Lolita fashion in Japan is not directly tied with sexuality and there is no evidence to suggest it is harmful. Furthermore, many oriental cultures have been altering appearances to look more youthful and diminutive (see stories of Chinese girls binding their feet to make them smaller) long before Lolita was published. Lolita fashion is just a term to describe modern examples. You've made numerous claims that Lolita has resulted in the degrading of women in society with no concrete evidence. At least find a sociological study or something that backs up your claim. However, just for sake of discussion on my next point, let's grant that you are right about this - Lolita has caused damage to society. Should Nabokov, or Lolita be held responsible? Nabokov wrote the novel with no deliberate intentions of spawning any kind of female degradation in future generations. Therefore, should Niels Bohr, J.J. Thomson and many other physicists in the early 20th Century who merely did experiments for sake of scientific discovery be held responsible for the Atom Bomb being dropped in Nagasaki, Hiroshima or the nuclear accident in Chernobyl, all of which were direct descendants and links to their work on nuclear physics? Are they therefore "disgusting" as well, like you have called Nabokov?

[Pumpkin337]

la la la la la la - same old same old ... why can't any of you actually defend the book in any way other than to say 'but its art / good writing / don't attack it if you haven't read it'? I'm so bored now .... the only difference between you and the other defenders on the net is the degree of erudition.

No one going to tackle my questions?

Read Lolita - because it is NOT shocking! http://mycardboardcastle.wordpress.com/2013/02/21/a-reason-not-to-read-lolita/

and finishes with - 'read it because it is good'

Read Lolita - because it is good (yawn) and "illuminated with sparkling prose and dry sardonic humour." (and I was WRONG? for saying Nabokov has a perverse sense of humour?)

http://www.swide.com/art-culture/book-list/why-you-should-read-it-lolita-vladimir-nabokov-review/2013/02/17

because I see nothing that is in the least bit 'amusing' sardonic or otherwise in the passage quoted in support of this opinion -

“She was musical and apple-sweet. Her legs twitched a little as they lay across my live lap; I stroked them; there she lolled on in the right-hand corner, almost asprawl, Lola, the bobby-soxer, devouring her immemorial fruit, singing through its juice, losing her slipper, rubbing the heel of her slipperless foot in its sloppy anklet, against the pile of old magazines heaped on my left on the sofa—and every movement she made, every shuffle and ripple, helped me to conceal and improve the secret system of tactile correspondence between beast and beauty—between my gagged, bursting beast and the beauty of her dimpled body in its innocent cotton frock …”

What is 'amusing' about that? It's perverse and disturbing and not funny!

at least after hashing on about it being funny and saying 'read it because its good' he does actually get ' the truly disturbing thing about the book is the empathy the reader has for the main character Humbert.'

And this POV expressed many times over and over is in itself not shocking? The fact that it is so well written you feel sympathy for the pervert? Why isn't there something disturbing in that? Why isn't that reason enough to say this book is, at very least, (and I am being horrifyingly kind) confused in its moral stance.

read it because it is a love story (a truly perverse notion on the part of the person who thought that up)

http://www.npr.org/2006/07/07/5536855/why-lolita-remains-shocking-and-a-favorite

"and for all its controversial subject matter, Lolita is one of the most beautiful love stories you'll ever read. It may be one of the only love stories you'll ever read. This is the most thrilling and beautiful and most deeply disturbing aspect of the novel — and it's what most persuasively recommends the book — that in addition to finding Humbert's soul on the page, we also find, like it or not, a little of our own."

Nope there is no way I can twist my head on so far backwards I can see the story of perversion as a 'love' story. And you want to tell me this book doesn't have any kind of negative effects ... it convinced a whole bunch of people to think that black is white and evil is good.

To go back to my point about the effect of Lolita in pop culture:


Why Should I Care?

We could tell you to care about Lolita because it is a classic of twentieth-century American fiction – or because it has been banned and scorned by so many librarians, literary critics, and judges. But the real reason you should care about Lolita is that the character of 'tween Lolita has become an icon and inspiration in popular culture. Almost disturbingly so.

Lolita isn't just a character in a Nabokov novel or a famous nymphet; Lolita has been claimed by fashionistas and fetishists, transformed into the embodiment of knee-sock and mini-plaid skirt wearing promiscuous school girl. Lolita has inspired everything from the subculture of "Gothic Lolita," a popular Japanese style that embraces Rococo and Victorian clothing types, to "Sweet Lolita," "Classic Lolita," and "Punk Lolita."

The most well known in America is the plain old Lolita-influenced style. The sexy 'tween image of a younger Britney Spears or Miley Cyrus owes a big debt to Lolita, for good or ill. Popular culture seems to love the image of young sexy girls. Skin tight miniskirts for 11-year-olds? A "hottie" t-shirt for a fifth-grader? Are these things empowering or exploitative? A book called The Lolita Effect (2008) by M. Gigi Durham is dedicated to this subject, explaining that the very word "Lolita" is now shorthand for an overly sexualized, provocative adolescent.

What's interesting about this cultural phenomenon is that it makes no mention of Humbert, the middle-aged man whose exploitative urges ruin young Lolita's life.

http://www.shmoop.com/lolita/

And if you don't think there is something wrong with children dressing sexually provocatively / old for their years at one end of the spectrum and grown women at the other end trying to dress like children you have something wrong with your perceptions of what is appropriate. Do children have be sexualised early and do adults have to dress like children to be attractive? There is something profoundly wrong with this.


and another book -Chasing Lolita: How Popular Culture Corrupted Nabokov's Little Girl All Over Again


There's a new interview on Nerve with Graham Vickers, the author of Chasing Lolita: How Popular Culture Corrupted Nabokov's Little Girl All Over Again, in which the author explores the way the icon has entered the culture - and how thoroughly that perception distorts Nabokov's actual novel. Nowadays, a Lolita is any underage temptress - "from Amy Fisher to Hard Candy" - whereas the character is very much a creation of adult male fantasy. Weirdly, as our culture's obsession with pedophilia grows, the character of Lolita has become more of a vixen and less of a victim."Lolita" is one of those terms that has entered the culture without having much to do with the character who inspired it. Whereas Nabokov's character is essentially just a kid - albeit a precocious and disturbed one - who's explicitly a canvas for the projection of Humbert's fantasies. As Vickers puts it, "She almost doesn't exist as a person to him." When we talk about a "Lolita" nowadays, it's usually in the context of a little Jezebel who manipulates men; it's a sexually-charged term for sure. How can we have taken such an ambiguous character and invested her with such a simplistic - not to say misleading - meaning? And why does this poor child get all the press? Why hasn't Humbert-Humbert entered the culture as a prototypical pedophile in the same way? Sure, he's less "sexy", but shouldn't that kind of be the point? We're talking, after all, about pedophilia, which is supposed to be the most feared subject of our times. In a way, the wholesale acceptance of the term "Lolita," the insistence on viewing her as a sexy temptress in the face of Nabokov's beautifully-crafted ambiguity, is a handy (if simplistic) mirror for the weird duality with which we view young girls as a whole. As Vickers says, it feels like awareness of the generality of "pedophilia" is all around us - an openness to childhood abuses, public registries and the risks to which children are subject every day. And yet, young girls are increasingly sexualized and the line between childhood and womanhood has never been more blurry. Vickers makes the point that most of the people who toss around the term "Lolita" are probably more familiar with one of the movie adaptations than the actual novel. Ironically, in their unwillingness to ever cast a really young girl in the role (both Sue Lyon and Dominique Swain were 15, as opposed to the novel's 12), the films are serving to blur the creepiness of the situation and so the picture these people see is probably less shocking.

oh and lets not forget this little gem:

http://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=1298&dat=20000730&id=njIzAAAAIBAJ&sjid=QwgGAAAAIBAJ&pg=6127,7700794

I didn't actually molest a 13 year girl - she seduced me! Its the ... wait for it .. .LOLITA DEFENSE! But no, the books ideas are not to blame for this association ... its just a misunderstanding on the part of all the people who came to his defense because they didn't understand it is just 'art'.

And this wasn't just an isolated case:

http://www.koreaherald.com/view.php?ud=20070221000071

Except they called his sexual attraction to children the "Lolita Syndrome". Gee I wish these psychological types would make up their minds. Is the pervert who has the inappropriate sexual attraction for minors the one with the Lolita Syndrome, or the girl with absent father issues making up for it by coming on to older men? Either way ... its a problem.

This essay discusses 'The Deceptive Veil of Language in Lolita'

http://www1.umassd.edu/corridors/bestessay25810.html


Humbert Humbert’s changing voice is meant to emphasize the aesthetic nature of his appreciation for young nymphettes rather than expose him for a perverse pedophile, suggesting that even the most disturbing things can be momentarily masked by the beauty of art.

and ends by saying:


Lolita is a testimony to art itself. Humbert’s narration exemplifies the idea of language as an art form as he uses intricate word play to appeal to an audience. His skill is ultimately a performance that attempts to disguise his unorthodox appreciation of young women, or Lolita in particular. The beauty in his words veils the harshness of pedophilia. Though his linguistic artistry serves as a mask, it only manages to momentarily distract the readers from the truth. In the end of the novel, even Humbert himself acknowledges reality as it is, and readers walk away from his memoir with the satisfaction that morality cannot just be compromised by aesthetic trickery.

All I'm saying is that there is insufficient aesthetic anything in the world to cover up, even momentarily, the wrongness of paedophilia and to attempt to do so is wrong. What possible good sane motivation could there be for trying to make something so repugnant (or what should be so repugnant) 'beautiful'? The fact that so many defend the beauty while ignoring (at best) the repugnant nature of the subject matter is another proof this book does it job a little too well.

[stlukesguild]

la la la la la la - same old same old ...

Well at least we know what we're dealing with here. A 12 year-old like Dolores herself, sticking her fingers in her ears and chanting, "La la la la la... I can't hear you!"

...why can't any of you actually defend the book in any way other than to say 'but its art / good writing...

Once again:

The artist is the creator of beautiful things.
There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.

There is no need to defend a work of literature upon moral grounds. Art is not about morality.

Having said this, any number of individuals have made critical points as to the fact that in no way does the novel, Lolita promote pedophilia or present it in a positive manner. But you clearly haven't bothered to read these comments any more than you bothered to read Lolita. The fact that you haven't even read the work makes you wholly unqualified to comment upon it and appear increasingly ridiculous.

don't attack it if you haven't read it'? I'm so bored now ....

Brilliant response! You're so bored with others suggesting that just perhaps one should have read a book before bothering to offer critical comments upon it?

No one going to tackle my questions?

Your questions and comments have been replied to repeatedly. You simply dislike the answers.

Read Lolita - because it is NOT shocking!

Who suggested that? Certainly Lolita could be deemed by many as shocking. So could MacBeth, Ulysses, Dante's Comedia, and endless other books of great merit.

She was musical and apple-sweet. Her legs twitched a little as they lay across my live lap; I stroked them; there she lolled on in the right-hand corner, almost asprawl, Lola, the bobby-soxer, devouring her immemorial fruit, singing through its juice, losing her slipper, rubbing the heel of her slipperless foot in its sloppy anklet, against the pile of old magazines heaped on my left on the sofa—and every movement she made, every shuffle and ripple, helped me to conceal and improve the secret system of tactile correspondence between beast and beauty—between my gagged, bursting beast and the beauty of her dimpled body in its innocent cotton frock …

What is 'amusing' about that? It's perverse and disturbing and not funny!

... at least after hashing on about it being funny and saying 'read it because its good' he does actually get ' the truly disturbing thing about the book is the empathy the reader has for the main character Humbert.'

And this POV expressed many times over and over is in itself not shocking? The fact that it is so well written you feel sympathy for the pervert? Why isn't there something disturbing in that? Why isn't that reason enough to say this book is, at very least, (and I am being horrifyingly kind) confused in its moral stance.

Yes, the passage is perverse... in that what is being presented are the internal thoughts of the perverse villain. So how should the writer present the Villain? Milton's Satan, Cormac McCarthy's Judge Holden, Shakespeare's Iago are all perverse characters... villains... yet villains with a degree of brilliance, if not genius. This is what makes them so dangerous. They are endlessly seductive. At times they seduce the reader and make him or her uncomfortable... or worse yet... begin to empathize with their perversity.

You seem to want a happy literature where nothing makes you uncomfortable... or if you allow for villains, you seemingly want those of the clear cut-out variety.

To go back to my point about the effect of Lolita in pop culture:

Why Should I Care?

We could tell you to care about Lolita because it is a classic of twentieth-century American fiction – or because it has been banned and scorned by so many librarians, literary critics, and judges.

Huckleberry Finn, Ulysses, Romeo & Juliet, To Kill a Mockingbird, Brave New World, Of Mice and Men, Harry Potter, The Lord of the Rings, The Grapes of Wrath, The Collector, Slaughterhouse Five, The Metamorphoses, Things Fall Apart... even the Bible are all among the books frequently censored or banned. Often, such books are banned due to sexual content or profanity, but they are also banned due to political content. Parents certainly should have the right to oversee what their children are reading or watching and Lolita is certainly a book that should probably be reserved for a mature audience. Perhaps you simply aren't ready.

But the real reason you should care about Lolita is that the character of 'tween Lolita has become an icon and inspiration in popular culture. Almost disturbingly so.

Lolita isn't just a character in a Nabokov novel or a famous nymphet; Lolita has been claimed by fashionistas and fetishists, transformed into the embodiment of knee-sock and mini-plaid skirt wearing promiscuous school girl. Lolita has inspired everything from the subculture of "Gothic Lolita," a popular Japanese style that embraces Rococo and Victorian clothing types, to "Sweet Lolita," "Classic Lolita," and "Punk Lolita."

And how do these fetish subcultures affect you or larger American culture? By the way, Japanese fetish for underage girls/school girls long predates Lolita. I can certainly pull up some examples from Japanese prints and photographs if you so desire. Indeed, the underaged school-girl fantasy/fetish in the West certainly predates Lolita. You only need to look to the Surrealists... the poet, Andre Breton, Georges Bataille, Louis-Ferdinand Céline... look up the art of Hans Belmer. Hell, go back to the Marquis de Sade or the Roman, Petronius.

And if you don't think there is something wrong with children dressing sexually provocatively / old for their years at one end of the spectrum and grown women at the other end trying to dress like children you have something wrong with your perceptions of what is appropriate. Do children have be sexualised early and do adults have to dress like children to be attractive? There is something profoundly wrong with this.

Please! You are making a lame attempt at appearing holier-than-thou... oh so concerned for the welfare of children which has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with the literary merits of Lolita.

[stlukesguild]

Am I the only one who gets the feeling that we are in the presence of the banned member ftil resurrected?

[JCamilo]

Aye, I was feeling a deja vu as well. Dunno if it was because she (I call she only because the pumpkin nickname and the content make me think of Married with children Kelly Bundy, so if she is a he, my apologises) is basically repeating the same non-sense... but now that you mention...

[HCabret]

Walden.

[HCabret]

Why? Please enlighten us. But be sure to use small words, we're not all as smart as you are.
Also your list is almost exclusively the product of western civilization. No Japanese writers, or african writers, no arab writers?

[HCabret]

So, since we're all talking in english, let's assume we are talking about the Anglosphere. I think it's safe to say that we are not talking about Korean Horror Fiction, or any other regions or obscure genres like that. Also, since this is called "The Literature Network," I would assume we are talking about aspiring Literary writers. I would think that all this would be already implied.
3 of the books on your list weren't originally written in english. Leo Tolstoy didnt write his books in english to the best of my knowledge; some french, but no english.

[Marbles]

Don't know about the writing bit but what this thread proves is that you can't call yourself a reader without reading Lolita :D

[108 fountains]

I haven't read Lolita, so I can't comment on it, but after glancing through this thread I'm gonna have to read it so I can see what all the fuss is about.
I guess I'll have to put off Lady Chatterley's Lover - I never seem to be able to get around to that one.

[Lokasenna]

I guess I'll have to put off Lady Chatterley's Lover - I never seem to be able to get around to that one.

You aren't missing much. Lolita is superb - LCL is, at least in my opinion, grossly over-rated.

[JCamilo]

Beware, when Loka said it, he was dressing his Gaffer Wolf costume, because you know, you can not appreciate Lolita without being a literal pedophile. Poor, red hidding hoods...

[mande2013]

Tangentially related to the thread topic, does anyone here feel there are certain works of literature one shall have read by age 25 or age 30 and that if they haven't done so by such an age they've sort of "missed the boat"? It often seems to be the case that certain works of literature are presented as necessary reading for people once they've finished high school, finished college or what have you. Do we not have our whole lives to read Crime and Punishment or The Odyssey? Why do these specifically need to be read when you're under 20 as opposed to say later when you're 32? I doubt Austen and Dickens themselves would be comforted by the fact many of their works have been relegated to the status of "high school literature". I'm baffled when people for instance posit that one shouldn't leave high school without having read Pride and Prejudice. I can accept that certain works of literature are necessary formative intellectual experiences just as 8 1/2 is a necessary formative experience or rite of passage for cinephiles, but I still find it disrespectful to the works themselves to relegate them to "high school literature" status.

[Marbles]

Tangentially related to the thread topic, does anyone here feel there are certain works of literature one shall have read by age 25 or age 30 and that if they haven't done so by such an age they've sort of "missed the boat"? It often seems to be the case that certain works of literature are presented as necessary reading for people once they've finished high school, finished college or what have you. Do we not have our whole lives to read Crime and Punishment or The Odyssey? Why do these specifically need to be read when you're under 20 as opposed to say later when you're 32? I doubt Austen and Dickens themselves would be comforted by the fact many of their works have been relegated to the status of "high school literature". I'm baffled when people for instance posit that one shouldn't leave high school without having read Pride and Prejudice. I can accept that certain works of literature are necessary formative intellectual experiences just as 8 1/2 is a necessary formative experience or rite of passage for cinephiles, but I still find it disrespectful to the works themselves to relegate them to "high school literature" status.

The earlier you read the best works the better. It ups your your intellectual curve if you have solid reading history behind you as opposed to, say, wasting all your 20s on stuff like Harry Potter and Twilight Series and Sheldons and Steeles of fictions. But I don't think there is a fixed age for reading certain books that if you miss them it is too late for you toread and/or appreciate them.

[mande2013]

The earlier you read the best works the better. It ups your your intellectual curve if you have solid reading history behind you as opposed to, say, wasting all your 20s on stuff like Harry Potter and Twilight Series and Sheldons and Steeles of fictions. But I don't think there is a fixed age for reading certain books that if you miss them it is too late for you toread and/or appreciate them.

I agree, and I certainly wouldn't discourage someone from reading a certain work as soon as possible, but I don't know. Some people may just be intellectual late bloomers. But this ties into another issue, the conundrum of having read something vs. actually reading it, so that having read Ulysses in its entirety becomes a status symbol in and of itself. It becomes difficult to genuinely enjoy reading a work when you're brought down by the guilt factor of not having already read it. Now I'm 25, and I certainly haven't been wasting my twenties on Harry Potter and Twilight, but I suppose I've been looking in vain for ways to accelerate my progress of canon exhaustion not realizing the solution is to simply accept it's time consuming and that I should allow myself to be patient and read slowly if I'm reading a difficult work or one in a second language. In other words, it dawned upon me I should stop looking for shortcuts just so that I could feel comforted in the fact I've read it all.

[Frostball]

I agree, and I certainly wouldn't discourage someone from reading a certain work as soon as possible, but I don't know. Some people may just be intellectual late bloomers. But this ties into another issue, the conundrum of having read something vs. actually reading it, so that having read Ulysses in its entirety becomes a status symbol in and of itself. It becomes difficult to genuinely enjoy reading a work when you're brought down by the guilt factor of not having already read it. Now I'm 25, and I certainly haven't been wasting my twenties on Harry Potter and Twilight, but I suppose I've been looking in vain for ways to accelerate my progress of canon exhaustion not realizing the solution is to simply accept it's time consuming and that I should allow myself to be patient and read slowly if I'm reading a difficult work or one in a second language. In other words, it dawned upon me I should stop looking for shortcuts just so that I could feel comforted in the fact I've read it all.

I like a lot of what you said. I really liked your phrase "progress of canon exhaustion". That's something I've started to work on in the last year, which is why I ever found this forum in the first place. At 24, I might be kind of a late comer to the world of classic literature, but I'm making progress. You're probably right about being patient and just accepting that it will take a long time, but progress can always be made. Great thoughts!

[JCamilo]

No, its irrelevant when and even if you read a given work. If you die without reading Homer, you are in, most likely, fine company: Shakespeare, Dante, Cervantes...

[Cleanthes]

Fun fact, we know that Shakespeare read Cervantes. He even wrote a play (now lost) based on a certain episode from Don Quixote, which is surprising since Cardenio was written only one year after Thomas Shelton's English translation was first available.

[JCamilo]

Which proves without doubt: Cervantes wrote the plays of Shakespeare. They both had goatees.

[mande2013]

No, its irrelevant when and even if you read a given work. If you die without reading Homer, you are in, most likely, fine company: Shakespeare, Dante, Cervantes...

Well I read The Iliad when I was 15, but it was the Rieu translation, so I don't know.

[Vota]

I actually don't feel that certain works are better read when young. In fact, I think this is what turns off alot of highschool kids from literature, reading books they aren't ready for.

I've heard people call War and Peace a slog, most of these being comments from people under 30 years old. I'm not saying you have to be older to read certain works, but age and experience can go a long way in increasing one's understanding and enjoyment of a work.

I started getting serious about reading a little over two years ago, and at age 34 I know for a fact that I would have stopped reading War and Peace within the first 50-100 pages in my early 20's because I didn't have the patience or knowledge to realize that some works take awhile before they get going.

I'm all for people reading great books from an early age, but I think some need to be introduced carefully depending on the intellectual development and maturity of the reader in question.

I'm a great example of this. I was pretty immature in my 20's in many ways, and all I could really appreciate or had the requisite patience for were sci-fi and fantasy books. I write down everything I read on my own time and leave comments and a rating for it. In the last two years there are probably a couple of dozen works I've listed as not only re-reads for enjoyment, but because I know I missed something and so need to develop more and let some time go by before revisiting them.

[mande2013]

I don't disagree Vota, but wouldn't you agree that if certain formative intellectual experiences aren't reached by a certain age one will always be playing catch up. So while adherents of the depoliticized Great Books approach, such as Harold Bloom and Roger Scruton do strike me as reactionary, I believe we should avoid allowing literature appreciation to become too atomized. There needs to be a 'there there' for lack of a better term.

[Marbles]

I agree, and I certainly wouldn't discourage someone from reading a certain work as soon as possible, but I don't know. Some people may just be intellectual late bloomers. But this ties into another issue, the conundrum of having read something vs. actually reading it, so that having read Ulysses in its entirety becomes a status symbol in and of itself. It becomes difficult to genuinely enjoy reading a work when you're brought down by the guilt factor of not having already read it. Now I'm 25, and I certainly haven't been wasting my twenties on Harry Potter and Twilight, but I suppose I've been looking in vain for ways to accelerate my progress of canon exhaustion not realizing the solution is to simply accept it's time consuming and that I should allow myself to be patient and read slowly if I'm reading a difficult work or one in a second language. In other words, it dawned upon me I should stop looking for shortcuts just so that I could feel comforted in the fact I've read it all.

Absolutely. The canon is so vast and diverse that it takes ordinary readers a lifetime to cover it. Even then, apart from some "must-reads" there comes a time when a reader has to choose a set of authors they are inclined to read over others, for various reasons. There's hardly a case when you have people with encyclopedic readings of the canon. Even if you're an academic, beyond a certain point, you focus your energies on your specialised area or author(s) which in itself is a life-consuming enterprise. The task of reading the canon is made even more difficult by the modern-day need to get out of one's cultural or civilisational mould and include in their reading lists international literatures in translation. In addition to that, I can't emphasise the importance of reading contemporary literature and writers who have made a solid mark on the literary landscape for their style and substance. And then, as if that was not enough, there is so much more in the world than just fiction and poetry. I mean who wouldn't want to have a diverse reading list that includes major works of philosophy, history, sociology and contemporary affairs? All these multiple factors slow down the journey of reading the canon and so how it is possible for one to have read the big chunk of the canon by the age of 25 or 30?

I have a personal example to offer. I'm 29 and still haven't read a single book from Jane Austen and Charles Dickens. Since my high school education did not include English or the study of English literature, when I came to serious reading, I started off with books and authors who piqued by interest more than the two mentioned above. Not that I'm proud of not having read them. I believe I must read them. But I have the same difficulty as you in that I haven't yet had the chance, time and mind to pick up their books. Does that make my opinion of books/authors I have read any less valuable than if I had read Austen and Dickens?

[mande2013]

While we're at it, discussing essential works for aspiring writers to read, why does Balzac never seem to be mentioned in the same breadth as Dostoevsky and Faulkner among Anglophones? I'd think he belongs in that category. He's easily the equal of Dickens, but 19th century French literature in general tends to take a backseat to Russian literature of the same period, at least in the Anglosphere, and I don't understand why. Do the rabid obsessions and concerns with bourgeois hypocrisy just not resonate with 'pragmatic' Anglo-readers? Is the "cosmic profundity" of Kafka more to their liking? I can assure you in France, where I live, Balzac is generally more highly regarded than the other major 19th century French prose writers Stendhal, Flaubert, Zola, Hugo, and Maupassant. I'm not going to bring Proust into the equation, since he's a modernist, and it would be like comparing apples to oranges. But living here, I often get the sense they regard Balzac more than any other as their greatest literary glory, at least if we're sticking to prose. Then again, maybe it depends on one's political orientation where more 'progressive' types tend to favor Balzac and Dostoevsky while the more 'reactionary' Victorian intellectuals go for Hugo and Tolstoy. I don't know.

[Whosis]

I don't know if anyone covered this, but grigioverde's comment on page 1 seems a bit out of place. I didn't interpret this as a list of books for people to aspire toward to be a writer, which I think is perfectly fine to emulate other authors anyway. Writers have a taste in books that may differ from other readers. I believe many aspire to Hemingway for his dialogue. As for what I like to read as a writer, I like to focus on contemporary American literature, particularly for competing with my style, so I may read Don DeLillo or some other.

[Emil Miller]

I can assure you in France, where I live, Balzac is generally more highly regarded than the other major 19th century French prose writers Stendhal, Flaubert, Zola, Hugo, and Maupassant. I'm not going to bring Proust into the equation, since he's a modernist, and it would be like comparing apples to oranges. But living here, I often get the sense they regard Balzac more than any other as their greatest literary glory, at least if we're sticking to prose. Then again, maybe it depends on one's political orientation where more 'progressive' types tend to favor Balzac and Dostoevsky while the more 'reactionary' Victorian intellectuals go for Hugo and Tolstoy. I don't know.

I agree that in France Balzac is probably more highly regarded than those French writers of the latter part of the 19th century. It is, however, important to remember that his writings belong to the restoration period between 1815 through the revolution of 1830 to the establishment of the second Empire of Napoleon III in 1852; by which time a profound change had created a country that was altogether different to that of Balzac's: the France of Flaubert, Zola, Daudet and Maupassant. I have never read Balzac without feeling that he belongs to a different age and country. Books such as Eugénie Grandet, La Peau de chagrin, Le Père Goriot, etc., are certainly major works but they don't engage me as much as those writers who are closer to our time and whose influence is therefore more self-evident.

[WolfLarsen]

Reading good books is not enough. In fact, writers can learn more from the other arts than they can from literature, because literature is behind the other arts.

It seems that a good deal of many writers are stuck in the past. I think you can learn more from the advancements in painting since the 1880s, then you can learn from literature. In addition, one can watch modern dance performances, listen to 20th-century & 21st-century classical music, as well as advant-guard free jazz, etc.

In fact, you never know where inspiration might come from! For Picasso, it came from African masks and new discoveries in science about atoms. I have found Afro-Brazilian music to be very inspirational. And why not try some comic relief from the literary world? The more the better, as the literary world is so stuffy, pretentious, and Puritanical!

Merely reading good books is not enough. Either not enough good books have been written, or not enough good books are being published. The canon is a joke! And the publishing corporations seem mostly dedicated to airport novels, because that's where the money is. Well-written literary fiction is produced in massive quantities, but the lack of innovation is rather stifling or boring or both.

And what are the good books? That is debatable. Perhaps a lot of the stuff on the canon is not very good. I remember a "literary magazine" (well, it was more like zine) that was called **** Diary. I would say that it and other zines like it would make better essential reading, than anything that was in the pretentious or prestigious literary magazines. In fact, much of the writing in **** Diary was better than stuff that won the Pushcart Prize.

I think that an illiterate person could make a good writer, it mostly depends on their level of creativity. There are many well-read people that you do not know how to write, or have nothing original to contribute to literature, although they may be quite adapt at writing good conventional literature (otherwise known as literary fiction).

But I'm serious about the possibility of an illiterate person being a better writer than most of the people who are traditionally published. If someone is very creative – if someone has great stories to tell – if their literature is unique & exciting – then they can be a great "writer" without having read any of the great books many of you talk about. Voice-recognition software and a big imagination can make a great writer of an illiterate person. (Albeit, voice-recognition software has a long way to go! So such a person may need some assistance, perhaps an academic person could help an illiterate person write great books! A lot of people with college degrees simply just casn't write a great book, they just don't have the imagination.)

But reading great books no doubt helps. There are some works that are better than others. Shakespeare sonnets you could do without, there's little special about them. But anyone who has not seen or at least read most of Shakespeare's plays is missing out on something big. I think everyone should read Hemingway as well, because he communicates with such easy-to-read simplicity. You learn a lot from reading Hemingway. Hemingway, by the way, was originally despised by many in the literary establishment because his writing style was new at the time.

I have always liked Jean Toomer's Cane. He writes simply like Hemingway, but each one of his words is so essential, and each phrase packs a wallop! I would argue that Jean Toomer is more special than Hemingway. He is probably my favorite writer, well, actually some of the best writing I've seen has been from unknowns on the Internet. People that will probably die in obscurity, and whose writings will never be read in a college course.

Octavo Paz's poetry is also very powerful (when he's properly translated). Anne Sexton has both simplicity and the great power of her imagery. She never finished college by the way. There is also the poets Andrei Codrescu, Russell Edson, and there's some great anthologies out there of modern French poets, surrealistic poets, cubist poets, modern Chinese poets, etc.

But some of the best writing I've ever read was in a literary zine called **** Diary.

And you know what? My favorite writer/poet is myself. I think I should be essential reading in all the schools of the nation and of the world. Of course, it would drive the Puritans mad. And the conservative literary establishment. And my lack of modesty will make many uncomfortable I'm sure.

Looking around you on the Internet, it's like many of the writers & poets of today are not familiar with the great innovations in literature in the past 100 years. But then again, most of it is not assigned reading in college literary courses. But, sometimes you come across unusual writing on the Internet, and when I do it makes me so happy! Especially if it's not dry and boring.

[Pumpkin337]

There is self-aggrandizement and then there is sheer delusion.

[WolfLarsen]

I do believe it is a prerequisite to be insane to be a good writer. However, there are different kinds of sanity and insanity. There is a sane part of me for everyday functions, like sitting on the toilet for example, or taking a bus.

But if I were a completely sane person I would not write – at least I would not write literature – what is a sane person doing writing literature?

So I think in order to be a writer you also have to be at least partly insane. I think being partly insane is more important to being a writer than reading good books. No, wait – reading good books is very important – but just as important is being partly insane. I mean you need some insane creativity.

Also to be a good writer I think you need a lack of conformity. There must be some rebellion inside of you. You must also have the balls to write what you want to write against the voices of censorship, which are many, and come in many different forms.

[AuntShecky]

"You don't seem to have many books. You write more than you read--the mark of a true amateur."

I heard that line (or a paraphrase of it) in the film Quills (2000). (Seeing the direction to which this thread veered off, maybe I shouldn't have mentioned that movie--it's about the Marquis de Sade!)

My point is aspiring writers should spend more time reading than writing for the following reasons:

1. To know what's already been "done." The point is to create something "new," from your own unique vision, not to rehash the earlier, albeit successful, works of others.

2. To learn the craft -- not to "copy" the techniques of others but to assimiliate them into your own personal style.

3. Remember-- the quality of writing arises not from the "what" but the "how."

4. The tools of the trade: words, sentences, paragraphs, words, structure, and did I say words?

So-- why only "ten" books? Read everything. Read voraciously. Compulsively -- both the good (so you'll know what to do) and the bad (so you'll know what not to do.)

[WolfLarsen]

"You don't seem to have many books. You write more than you read--the mark of a true amateur."

I heard that line (or a paraphrase of it) in the film Quills (2000). (Seeing the direction to which this thread veered off, maybe I shouldn't have mentioned that movie--it's about the Marquis de Sade!)

My point is aspiring writers should spend more time reading than writing for the following reasons:

1. To know what's already been "done." The point is to create something "new," from your own unique vision, not to rehash the earlier, albeit successful, works of others.

2. To learn the craft -- not to "copy" the techniques of others but to assimiliate them into your own personal style.

3. Remember-- the quality of writing arises not from the "what" but the "how."

4. The tools of the trade: words, sentences, paragraphs, words, structure, and did I say words?

So-- why only "ten" books? Read everything. Read voraciously. Compulsively -- both the good (so you'll know what to do) and the bad (so you'll know what not to do.)
I both agree with this, but I also feel there's something missing here.

There is nothing in this that isn't true. It's all true.

However, it just isn't that simple. There are people who are extremely creative who write great stuff, and who are not widely read. There are people who are widely read, but the stuff they write is nothing exceptional.

I find it interesting how many jazz musicians can write such great literature, and how many painters can also write such great literature. These people are writing stuff that's way better than material that wins the Nobel Prize or the Pushcart Prize. Writers can learn a lot from them. Salvador Dali the author (yes he also wrote) writes way more interesting stuff than 95% of the authors out there.

There's something to music. And there's something to the spontaneity of jazz. And there's something about the accomplishments of painting since the 1880s – accomplishments that leave the literary world in the dust (in my opinion). Words and phrases need music – look at the dramatic works of Shakespeare! Absolutely married to music! Very musical!

Reading widely can only be helpful, but in itself it is not enough. It is not nearly enough. There has to be more than merely reading widely to produce a good writer. In fact, while reading widely may be very helpful, it is not essential.

There are tribal societies that have storytellers that are not widely read. Maybe they are illiterate. But they can often tell a story better than many a published author who has read many books.

Something is lacking in the literary world. It is too dry, too brittle, too much like a white wall, a blank white wall.

Something is missing. Perhaps sex? Not just talking about sex, not just sexual scenes, but the feeling of sex – the FEELING of sex in the poetry or prose. Too much censorship! And the world is too uptight about sex! And frankly the average writer doesn't have enough sex – and that has a detrimental effect on writing or any other creative endeavor, I would argue. Creativity and sex are absolutely linked I believe! Lots of great sex is not essential to being a great writer, but I would argue it's very helpful!

And the FEELING of music. And there must be FRESHNESS. You know how impressionistic painting painted today feels so dry & inhibited & stale compared to the impressionist painting of the late 19th century – when it was fresh!

Writers are rehashing the same old style of writing over and over again. As if there is only one way to write! And that's why so much writing lacks freshness! For writing to be fresh it must break new ground! It must be truly creative!

The literary world does not need more conventional literary fiction, there's too much of it as it is. The literary world needs more writing from people that have been homeless, from people that are insane, from people that were drug addicts, from people that had lots of sex in their lives, from people that had lots of adventure in their lives. And especially from people that have giant imaginations! People like Salvador Dali! Salvador Dali's two works of creative literature are worth more than much of the canon combined! So much of the canon that writers are told to emulate is very dry, and very mediocre.

You can be a proficient sculptor. A proficient sculptor that sculpts things in the same style that so many others sculpted before you. But for some reason it might not feel fresh. It might feel dry. Very proficient in sculpting – like a super master craftsmen – but something is lacking. Because such as sculptor is merely copying the styles that have already been done over & over again.

I walked through an art museum the other day. I was so envious! Why can't writers write with the same creativity that painters paint? Some writers are up to it, but most are not. Come to think of it even most painters I know (I am related to one, he painted my avatar) are only capable of painting what is in front of them.

What can you write about? You can write about your own personal experiences, but what if your life is boring? What does that leave? Your imagination! You must write what is in your imagination! (Well, do what you want, but really, do you want to excite us with your writing?)

My life has been far less boring than most. And even then there reaches a point where in order to tell an interesting story I have to start resorting to my imagination. And then there is the factor that perhaps the writer himself becomes bored of endlessly writing in the conventional style.

Once a boy soldier in Africa, or a crab fishermen in Alaska, (very interesting conventional reading!) has told that tale of his life then he can move on to other things besides writing, or he can use his imagination to create something that's interesting to read, or you can write an endless series of books about crab fishing in Alaska, who's gonna read them all? What for? Maybe reading two of them is enough!

I don't disagree with anything you said. But I think there's a lot more to it than simply being widely read. And being a proficient writer, there's a zillion of those! They're a dime a dozen!

As the quality of computers and voice-recognition software improves, it will be possible soon for an illiterate person to write almost with the same "quality" as a well-educated person.

This reminds me of the situation that painters faced with the invention of the camera. Why paint merely what's there when the camera can do that?

Perhaps the next step in great writing will be those who completely depart from conventional grammar. Some have already done it. But soon perhaps the person who writes in a conventional manner will be regarded as merely an illiterate hack.

I would argue that conventional writing has its place. But it has its limitations.

[mande2013]

I would never suggest an aspiring writer not read. There must be a cerebral aspect to all creative aspirations. Otherwise it merely becomes a form of sensory stimulation and nothing more. The idea of art as being entirely visceral is romantic and amateurish. It's a short cut. Craftsmanship is underrated. With that said, where does one start if they want to be a writer but are behind on their 'canon consumption'? Should one not start writing until they've read enough books? Should they read and write at the same time, one day reading voraciously the next day writing? As for me, I would suggest they read and write simultaneously. Being a great artist in any medium means making sacrifices, and that could entail risking going to the grave without having read Homer or Ulysses or Moby Dick. That's just an example of course. I'm not saying don't read Moby Dick necessarily. While a great writer must be a reader, even if not necessarily as well-read as Harold Bloom, he or she still needs to prioritize. In other words, avoid developing a guilt complex over the fact you haven't yet read X or Y canonical work, because that just leads to writer's block.

[Aylinn]

I would not suggest an aspiring writer not read either. I don't see how that can be helpful. People who are not well-read usually end up being terrible writers. As for writers having knowledge of different subject areas, this is bound to be welcome. After all, apart from having good style, they should also be able to have something interesting to write about.

[Marbles]

I have come to realise that good writers are first excellent readers, and then good writers. It is impossible to be a good artist without having a rounded appreciation of the tradition you're trying to advance.

In a letter a young girl sent to William Faulkner in response to the critique Faulkner had made of her stories [on her own request], she said that she hated to read other writers lest her unique ideas and special language be corrupted by outside influence. Faulkner, calmly but definitely, brought the point home: "I learned to write from reading other writers; why can't you?'

[mande2013]

I have come to realise that good writers are first excellent readers, and then good writers. It is impossible to be a good artist without having a rounded appreciation of the tradition you're trying to advance.

In a letter a young girl sent to William Faulkner in response to the critique Faulkner had made of her stories [on her own request], she said that she hated to read other writers lest her unique ideas and special language be corrupted by outside influence. Faulkner, calmly but definitely, brought the point home: "I learned to write from reading other writers; why can't you?'

Agreed, but how do we define an "excellent reader"? Is it someone who aces the SAT verbal? Is it okay to be a late bloomer in that department, as far as reading great literature is concerned. With that said, omniscience with respect to the literary canon is hard to come by unlike with say the jazz canon considering how vast the former is. Most literature academics generally have a specialty, whether that be 19th century French poetry or Elizabethan era drama. They can't conquer it all. Saying that, yes, we should all have at least a passing familiarity with Milton, Dante, Kafka, Joyce, Tolstoy, Cervantes, Dickens, Shakespeare, and even someone like Pynchon, in order to have a sense of the general historical narrative of the literary arts. Yes, absolutely.

Can someone with dyslexia or some other type of LD ever have any hope of becoming a great writer? Does having an LD preclude being an excellent reader?

[mande2013]

Also, I could be wrong here, but I sense "amateurish" essentially implies 'enfant terrible' like Henry Miller or Bukowski.

[WolfLarsen]

Again, I don't disagree with the idea that people should be as widely read as possible.

However, reading an endless monotony of conventional "literary fiction" is helpful to what?

Perhaps at a certain point being surrounded by monotony can make one's own literary worldview rather monotonous?

And I think there is an exaggeration of what we as a species have accomplished. Have we really accomplished that much in literature? We as a species have existed for 200,000 years, and the first 190,000 years we didn't do much in terms of literature.

Well, maybe we told stories around the fire in the cave. And maybe after eating certain roots or whatever some of the stories got rather goofy, or creative, and entertaining. But nobody wrote it down, there was no system of writing. But maybe many of the stories told over the fire by prehistoric man were far more interesting than much that is published today. But then again, maybe not.

Perhaps literature is only in its embryonic stages at the present point. After all, unless there's a nuclear war first, think what literature will look like 200,000 years from now!

Maybe it won't even be two-dimensional. Perhaps literature will be a 360° experience. And that's just for starters.

Basically, we primates are intellectually lazy, and there are perhaps species in this universe who have a far greater literature than our own. It's not impossible that compared to other species we are rather dumb, considering there are over 200 billion galaxies in the universe, and perhaps there is more than one universe. Basically, we are a bunch of primates on some floating rock. Perhaps our best literature is little more than chicken scratch compared to what other species in the universe have done.

What we may consider "great" and essential reading may be overrated. Is James Joyce really that good? Lots of people say so, but does that make it true? You could say the same about so many writers/poets in the canon. It isn't great just because a bunch of primates tell you it is.

[Marbles]

Agreed, but how do we define an "excellent reader"? Is it someone who aces the SAT verbal? Is it okay to be a late bloomer in that department, as far as reading great literature is concerned. With that said, omniscience with respect to the literary canon is hard to come by unlike with say the jazz canon considering how vast the former is. Most literature academics generally have a specialty, whether that be 19th century French poetry or Elizabethan era drama. They can't conquer it all. Saying that, yes, we should all have at least a passing familiarity with Milton, Dante, Kafka, Joyce, Tolstoy, Cervantes, Dickens, Shakespeare, and even someone like Pynchon, in order to have a sense of the general historical narrative of the literary arts. Yes, absolutely.

Can someone with dyslexia or some other type of LD ever have any hope of becoming a great writer? Does having an LD preclude being an excellent reader?

I was actually advancing an idea than offer a precise definition of what it means to be an 'excellent reader', such that, in my opinion, an excellent reader is the one who learns well from their readings, absorbs ideas about form, style, word usage, thought production, plot-weaving, character-building, trends in literature - in general storytelling - and having thus gained reading experience, uses their gift to become a good writer themselves. It's not a cause-and-effect sort of regime. Both reading and writing go in synergy, and it's a lifetime endeavour. I have not heard of a great writer who had admittedly been a poor reader.

I agree that having read thoroughly by the time a young writer puts pen to paper in what has come to be accepted as 'canon' is a minority feat and most writers probably don't have better reading experience than an educated lay reader. What makes those writers different from lay readers is that they have a gift for good writing, and a will to write, which they have used to create their own voice.

I also think it is not necessary to be thoroughly read in canonical works to be a good writer because there is so much else outside the so called canon that a writer needs to consume for a rounded perspective on life and humanity, and that includes a lot of non-fiction and international literary traditions. But, as you said, a good acquaintance with the canonical works always helps. Even then, a writer should have a discriminatory reading list and prioritise some canonical works over others because, let's face it, having found a place on the canon by a general consensus of the litterateur is still no guarantee that the work possesses great merit. Popular appeal? Yes, but great merit? Maybe.

[JCamilo]

Jesus, you don't have to have such familiarity with watsoever. Writers are not academics. And what some writers read may have little or nothing to do with the canon. When you keep running in circle with "reading all canon" as a mantra and you guys cannot even mention the only man who is basically the canon, Virgil, and this "expert readers" non sense, you are just creating an over-vallued Oprah club.

Just read because you want, reading only the canon is as bad as reading only crap.

[Marbles]

Jesus, you don't have to have such familiarity with watsoever. Writers are not academics. And what some writers read may have little or nothing to do with the canon. When you keep running in circle with "reading all canon" as a mantra and you guys cannot even mention the only man who is basically the canon, Virgil, and this "expert readers" non sense, you are just creating an over-vallued Oprah club.

Just read because you want, reading only the canon is as bad as reading only crap.

Yes, that's fine. However, 'expert readers' are the academics who critique; 'excellent readers' are writers who absorb.

[JCamilo]

nah, an academic is an expert critic. Not a reader. Being able to formulate critical opinion with comparative exemples only shows which topics he have been reading, that is all. Trying to imply ony those who like to read Northop and Harold are "experts readers" is like trying to say only those who swimm are expert athletes.

[Aylinn]

Jesus, you don't have to have such familiarity with watsoever. Writers are not academics. And what some writers read may have little or nothing to do with the canon. When you keep running in circle with "reading all canon" as a mantra and you guys cannot even mention the only man who is basically the canon, Virgil, and this "expert readers" non sense, you are just creating an over-vallued Oprah club.
Well, I imagine that a person who is truly serious about writing may be simply interested why certain works have stood the passage of time and/or are considered great, even if she/he does not find each and every book from canon to their taste.

[Marbles]

nah, an academic is an expert critic. Not a reader. Being able to formulate critical opinion with comparative exemples only shows which topics he have been reading, that is all. Trying to imply ony those who like to read Northop and Harold are "experts readers" is like trying to say only those who swimm are expert athletes.

An expert critic has to first read the text expertly? Hmm...we might have a problem of labels here and of defining those labels.

[JCamilo]

Forget the labels. They are sounding ridiculous.


Well, I imagine that a person who is truly serious about writing may be simply interested why certain works have stood the passage of time and/or are considered great, even if she/he does not find each and every book from canon to their taste.

Nah, many never cared to know why X book resisted anything beyond: it was good and I like it.

[mande2013]

Does reading count towards a writer's "10,000 hours"?

[mal4mac]

Does reading count towards a writer's "10,000 hours"?

I think this 10 000 hours thing is a myth. I read an article recently on the work of a psychologist who looked at chess players in the light of the 10 000 hour theory. He blew it out of the water - some became masters with less than a thousand hours of playing & learning, others were still at novice standard after trying for much longer than 10 000 hours. This suggests some people just have a natural talent for chess, and I would guess the same goes for writing. Although he did also say *how* you practice is important. If you *just* read I very much doubt you'll get good at writing! Got to get your feet wet!

[WICKES]

You have to be familiar with at least some of the following: Homer, Shakespeare, Dante, Chaucer, Milton, Wordsworth, Proust, Kafka, Joyce, Keats, Shelley, Coleridge, Byron, Blake, Eliot, Donne...

[mande2013]

I'd say it also depends on the sort of creative personality you are. Having passing familiarity with all the different "movements" and cultural sign posts may be useful to "conceptual innovators", but "experimental innovators" will just find it tedious.

[Verdaguer]

Even the best translations can't help being translations. Someone who wants to be a writer should first stick to the literary canon of his own language, so that he can learn to shape the main writing tool in a variety of ways and eventually find his own.

This is why, in my case, my top ten must-read books are from authors in Catalan most of you may not even have heard about, as this is the language I use for writing. Then there are of course a series of world masterpieces one should read for a variety of reasons, as well as lesser-known works by authors whose writing style could change your point of view, even in translation. But reducing that to ten is simply absurd, and the path each one must walk to find his own voice should rather be a personal one.

[mande2013]

Even the best translations can't help being translations. Someone who wants to be a writer should first stick to the literary canon of his own language, so that he can learn to shape the main writing tool in a variety of ways and eventually find his own.

This is why, in my case, my top ten must-read books are from authors in Catalan most of you may not even have heard about, as this is the language I use for writing. Then there are of course a series of world masterpieces one should read for a variety of reasons, as well as lesser-known works by authors whose writing style could change your point of view, even in translation. But reducing that to ten is simply absurd, and the path each one must walk to find his own voice should rather be a personal one.

I agree and disagree. As for translations, I think it depends on the writer personally. With writers we often read more for "content" than for "form" or "style" like Kafka or Dostoevsky, I don't think it's necessary to hold off on them, since I'm sure we can all agree great literature can be just as much about "content" as about "style". With Faulkner or Flaubert, however, in the case of someone who doesn't speak either English or French I suppose it's okay to hold off

With that said, I don't think we should discourage people from reading literature in a second language if they can do so at an advanced level. I see no reason for reading done in French or German if you speak those language not being able to inform one's own literary work being done in English or another language, especially since you may fall upon syntactic possibilities one may not have discovered had they only stuck to reading in Language 1. That's just one example of course.

So if you're own work is being done in English, but you can read in French at an advanced level, then by all means read Madame Bovary or Swann's Way in the original. How would that be a detriment?

[Eiseabhal]

Strange directions some threads take. Hmm. You do not need to read a set of books to be a decent writer.

[mande2013]

Strange directions some threads take. Hmm. You do not need to read a set of books to be a decent writer.

Perhaps there aren't certain prerequisite texts every aspiring writer must read, but I'd say all great writers are/were voracious readers. One has to know their place within the narrative of the medium within which they choose to express themselves.

[Insane4Twain]

Reading is groundwork for a writer - like a musician needs to listen to music. A writer needs to familarise themselves with words, with styles, with phrasing, tempo, tension, plot, characterisation etc etc and apart from studying the rules of these things, reading is the best way to learn. However it is not possible to make a list unless you first ask - for what kind of writing? I think enough people have pointed that out in various different ways.This is a very smart, wise response.

Along that line, and without laboring to read all the responses, I'll venture to suggest an aspiring writer become familiar with a wide variety of styles. I'd start off with something grammar-related, like Eats, Shoots and Leaves by Lynn Truss. Collections would be your best bet. I'll go with columnist Mike Royko (God rest his soul and ink-stained fingers) because he covered a lot of different topics outside of Chicago politics. His columns were usually entertaining, if not infuriating. You probably can't go wrong with a collection of short stories. Beyond that, well, like a professionally-trained musician, just read. Read some more. And keep reading.

[Vota]

I'm not sure there is such a list, but if someone asked me for advice about which books to read to become a better writer, then I could make a list of books pretty easily that are based off my reading experiences and my western background/upbringing. I would never claim it as being a well rounded list, or a perfect list, but I think it would be useful. I believe a list of books should have a diversity of genres in it and should include key elements of the history and symbolism of that writer's audience. I will admit that any list I devise would be almost completely written by white males because the majority of books that I have read were written by them. The thing is, I never read any of the books BECAUSE they were written by white males, so it shouldn't matter. In my opinion, the race and gender of an author is pretty inconsequential in a lot of ways. I'm not saying it doesn't matter because there are books that are specifically great because of the insight provided by the author's race/sex experiences. I'm not saying that women don't have insights unique to them, but the main themes of life are beyond sexual/racial boundaries and physical borders.

1. War and Peace- How to write an epic, complex, huge scale story using simple writing in a way that is both accessible and deep.
2. Moby Dick- How to write an interesting story using an odd but beautiful syntax.

These two writer's couldn't be any more different imo, but they both write beautifully with deeply philosophic probing.

3. The Dark Knight Returns- graphic novel, the comic book form is an interesting blend of storytelling techniques, and this is a great story.
4. Dune- epic science fiction that touches upon many subjects, from psychology to economics and more.
5. The Stars My Destination- Quite possibly the fastest paced and most entertaining sci-fi story I can remember reading. The essence of the feel of this story is revenge and speed.
6. The Iliad and The Odyssey- fantastic stories, and the absolute backbone of the western canon.
7. Plutarch's Lives- Fascinating accounts of great men, history, and what it means to be virtuous. Could be useful for a writer.
8. Shakespeare-complete works- because it's Shakespeare man. I have read plays of his that I thought weren't that great, but they are all beautifully written with copious pearls of wisdom strewn about.
9. Nietzsche-Anthology- I find his work mentally stimulating and thought provoking, so I could see it being useful.

I am well aware of the deficiencies of this list. I am consistently reminded of how limited my reading experience is, having a giant backlog of books I plan to read just sitting around. This is stuff that I have read, and that I believe would prove useful to a writer wanting to have a bank of useful historical information from a western perspective, and an exposure to a fairly diverse range of writing styles.

[ennison]

You don't need to read a prescribed list. Such a notion is nutty.