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A review by toniclark
The Pleasure of Reading by Antonia Fraser
3.0
I love books (and podcasts) about readers and reading. I can usually listen to people talk endlessly about their reading lives. But this book didn’t engage me as most such books do. Perhaps a combination of its being a bit dated and very Brit-centric. I’ve never heard of some of the books these people read as children. The same books are mentioned over and over. Perhaps that’s a testament to their greatness. But I did wonder at times whether people were simply listing the books they thought they should list, rather than ones they really loved.
I’m amazed that so many writers mention the Bible as one of their favorite books. Have they actually read it? Or does it seem the right thing to say?
There were a few pieces I enjoyed. And I appreciated the fact that so many of the writers had in common the childhood experience of reading being “a pleasure so intense it was practically a vice,” as Gita Mehta put it.
One thing that this collection brought home, though not for the first time, is how many of the Great Books I’ve never read — from both children’s and adult literature. I sometimes wonder how it’s possible that I’ve been a life-long reader, from childhood on, majored in English, got a masters degree in English, and yet have never read Little Women or The Hobbit or the Chronicles of Narnia or Lord of the Flies or Animal Farm. Not even Winnie the Pooh. . . . I have missed most of Dickens, Hardy, Trollope, C.S. Lewis, Cather, Eliot, Proust, Wolfe, Waugh, and Wodehouse. . . . The list seems to be infinite and sad.
But I think Hermione Lee is probably right on in her opinion of the 10 best books in the language (of English, that is): Jane Austen, Persuasion; Charles Dickens, Little Dorrit; George Eliot, Middlemarch; Henry James, The Portrait of a Lady; Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse; Elizabeth Bowen, The Death of the Heart; Edith Wharton, Ethan Frome; F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby; Willa Cather, The Professor’s House; James Joyce, Ulysses. (With the possible exception of Ulysses. I was confronted with it twice in college and faked having read it — and got away with it — both times.)
And I agree with Paul Sayer that “Children make the best readers. As adults, most of them will lose their willingness to be entertained or informed by books of any kind.” True of Americans, at any rate, though he was probably talking about Brits.
One of my favorite bits in the entire book comes from Wendy Cope (who, as a child, liked stories about horses):
“But I was discriminating. At the age of nine or ten I abandoned a book after a few chapters because the heroine got keen on a boy and let him kiss her. Boring. Horse stories with romantic interest were unacceptable. Horse stories – or any other kind of stories – with a Christian message were even worse. Since my mother is of the evangelical persuasion, I was sometimes given these. They infuriated me. Religious instruction disguised as a pony book was a cheat and I wasn’t having any of it.”
I’m amazed that so many writers mention the Bible as one of their favorite books. Have they actually read it? Or does it seem the right thing to say?
There were a few pieces I enjoyed. And I appreciated the fact that so many of the writers had in common the childhood experience of reading being “a pleasure so intense it was practically a vice,” as Gita Mehta put it.
One thing that this collection brought home, though not for the first time, is how many of the Great Books I’ve never read — from both children’s and adult literature. I sometimes wonder how it’s possible that I’ve been a life-long reader, from childhood on, majored in English, got a masters degree in English, and yet have never read Little Women or The Hobbit or the Chronicles of Narnia or Lord of the Flies or Animal Farm. Not even Winnie the Pooh. . . . I have missed most of Dickens, Hardy, Trollope, C.S. Lewis, Cather, Eliot, Proust, Wolfe, Waugh, and Wodehouse. . . . The list seems to be infinite and sad.
But I think Hermione Lee is probably right on in her opinion of the 10 best books in the language (of English, that is): Jane Austen, Persuasion; Charles Dickens, Little Dorrit; George Eliot, Middlemarch; Henry James, The Portrait of a Lady; Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse; Elizabeth Bowen, The Death of the Heart; Edith Wharton, Ethan Frome; F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby; Willa Cather, The Professor’s House; James Joyce, Ulysses. (With the possible exception of Ulysses. I was confronted with it twice in college and faked having read it — and got away with it — both times.)
And I agree with Paul Sayer that “Children make the best readers. As adults, most of them will lose their willingness to be entertained or informed by books of any kind.” True of Americans, at any rate, though he was probably talking about Brits.
One of my favorite bits in the entire book comes from Wendy Cope (who, as a child, liked stories about horses):
“But I was discriminating. At the age of nine or ten I abandoned a book after a few chapters because the heroine got keen on a boy and let him kiss her. Boring. Horse stories with romantic interest were unacceptable. Horse stories – or any other kind of stories – with a Christian message were even worse. Since my mother is of the evangelical persuasion, I was sometimes given these. They infuriated me. Religious instruction disguised as a pony book was a cheat and I wasn’t having any of it.”