Poems, by Emily Brontë

Why I read it: Western Canon

Podcasts: None

Brow: Middle

What I thought of it: Honestly, this is what I thought Byron's poetry would be like: romantic quests, flowers, love notes, occasional tales from the land of Gondal, which the Brontës made up to amuse themselves before they all died of tuberculosis. I'm sure at the time it was very meaningful, and it's made even more meaningful by the fact that the author died unmarried and childless at age 25. Unfortunately, it isn't my kind of poetry. My kind of poetry turns out to be what Byron really wrote.

But should you read it? If you like romantic poetry that's more about imagery than adventure, this is the poetry for you. Most of it isn't very difficult to understand or relate to. Just make sure you get a version that just presents the poems and doesn't try to analyse every slip of Emily Brontë's pen, unless you're a Brontë scholar.

My Antonia, by Willa Cather

Why I read it: Western Canon

Podcasts: CBC Ideas

Brow: Upper Middle, but only if you already know how to pronounce the title character's name. Middle if you had to wait until Julia Turner said it on the Slate Culture Gabfest.

Summary: Jim Burden arrives in Nebraska at his grandparents' prosperous farm following the death of his parents back in Virginia. On the train with him is a poor but educated family of Bohemians who have bought a farm down the road. Jim is assigned by his grandmother to teach the oldest daughter, who is a few years his elder, English. The two strike up a lifelong friendship that endures even after Jim moves to town, finishes high school, and goes off to college, but is held back from turning into a romance by the gulf of social class. Years later, Jim, who has never married, returns and visits Antonia.

But should you read it? If you're a fan of Little House on the Prairie and doomed romances, this is definitely the book for you. If you get angry when two characters so obviously well-suited to each other are kept apart by their families' and society's expectations, perhaps you should give up on media altogether. It's also quite short at just 250 pages, probably just enough to tide you over during a train journey from Virginia to Nebraska.

Poems, by Robert Browning

Why I read it: Western Canon

Podcasts: Stuff you missed in history class

Brow: High, especially after I discovered that although the copy I borrowed from the library was purchased in 1907, some of the pages had never been cut apart.

Preferred Poems: Of course I've read different versions of The Pied Piper of Hamelin before, but this one bears reading. I also quite enjoyed The Flight of the Duchess. I think I might just be the type who enjoys narrative poetry and isn't so much into finding the similarities between say, a Grecian urn and the poet's underage male lover.

Less Loved Poems: Clearly any collection of Browning's poems ought to include My Last Duchess and this one does not, and so I wondered if perhaps one of the poems about ancient Greece might have been replaced.

But should you read it? If poetry is not your thing, but you feel you should at least be trying to access your civilization's heritage, than Browing is a fairly easy, accessible entry point for you. If you've acknowledged that not reading poetry marks you as a philistine and have taken up the hobby, Browning's works should definitely be on your list.

The Complete Plays of Aristophanes

Why I chose it: Western Canon, A Lifetime's Reading

Podcasts: La Trobe University's course on Ancient Greece

Brow: In Ancient Greece, most of this was pretty low brow, but nowadays it's high brow.

Summary: Aristophanes was the Adam Sandler of Ancient Greece, writing slapstick comedy plays for the masses. Yes, most of them are on serious themes, like Athenian politics and intellectuals, and yes, The Clouds may have been responsible for getting Socrates executed, but it's also about a popular, athletic teenager who's into fast horses and refuses to go to 'nerd school.' His dad goes instead, and gets kicked out for masturbating when he's supposed to be lying there meditating.

What I liked about it: The Birds, which is about two friends who get sick of living in Athens and convince a former king who now lives as a bird to build a whole bird city in the sky for them, is pretty good because it's not about arcane political machinations and you can imagine people today feeling the same. Lysistrata, which is about the women of Greece staging a sex strike in order to force an end to the Pelopennesian war, is also pretty funny, especially the scene where some of the ladies get horny and keep trying to make all these excuses for why they need to go home. Finally, Thesmophoriazusae or more easily pronounced The Parliament of Women, where the women go off to a festival by themselves. The playwright Euripides, worried they're talking about them behind his back, sends a friend in disguised as a woman to spy on them. Inside, he discovers a democracy, complete with voting, committees and action plans, debating how to punish Euripides for his negative portrayals of women in his plays. Of course the women quickly discover the cross-dresser and arrest him, only agreeing to release him when Euripides promises to stop treating them so horribly in his works.

What I didn't like about it: I read the Bantam Classics edition, which not only uses anachronistic words like hamburger, it also translates all the parts for foreigners into a weird form of Scots English. Not only that, it completely lacks footnotes, so when someone or something unfamiliar is mentioned, not that surprising in a 2000 year old book of plays, you either have to turn to Wikipedia to figure it out or just skip over that bit.

The Family Moskat, by Isaac Bashevis Singer

Why I read it: Western Canon, A Lifetime's Reading

Podcasts: None

Brow: Sprawling family tragedies can only rate as middle brow, even if they're about Jews in Warsaw at the beginning of the 20th century and even if they're written in Yiddish.

Summary: The story of the Moskats, a wealthy Jewish family in Warsaw from just before World War I to moments before the fall of Warsaw in 1939. At the centre is the forbidden romance between Asa Heshel Bannet, a poor student from the countryside and the beautiful Hadassah Moskat, granddaughter of family patriarch Meshulam Moskat, but the book has dozens of major and minor characters, each with his or her own plot, which may or may not intersect with what the other characters are up to.

What I liked about it: Despite the tragedy and the doomed romance, some parts of the book are hilarious, like when a Hassidic bumpkin comes to the city in search of his wayward wife who longs for modernity and refuses to stay in her house because she lacks a mezuzah. When she offers to go out and buy one, he again refuses, because it needs to be inspected by a rabbi in case it contains spelling errors. In just a few sentences, you understand fully why the wife wanted out. A lot of the minor characters are equally interesting, and I found myself wishing I could spend more time with say, Abram Shapiro, a womanizer who is married to one of the Moskat daughters and who is the character who seems most alive, or Leah Moskat Berman, who marries the family's thieving bailiff and moves to America, rather than the central romantic triangle, which quickly becomes tedious.

What I didn't like about it: Asa Heshel Bannet must be one of the most infuriating characters in literature. First, he falls in love with Hadassah, one of the Moskat granddaughters, but her grandfather Meshulam insists she has to marry a rich man, because forcing someone to marry against her will always works out so well. So Asa goes off to Switzerland, where he is followed by Meshulam's new stepdaughter Adele. They get married but then on their first visit back to Poland, Asa runs off to fuck Hadassah and get drafted in to the Polish army for World War I. He comes back after the war and is finally able to divorce Adele and marry Hadassah, only to leave his new wife for a gentile communist. Oh, and he never has a job through any of this, but he has tons of women throwing themselves at him all the same. Of course even more infuriating than Asa is Hadassah, who spends most of the book hiding in various rooms feeling sick or depressed or waiting for Asa to come back.

Poems, by Lord Byron

Why I read it: Western Canon

Podcasts: In Our Time

Brow: If you read this as a teenage girl in 1816, when Byron was the equivalent of the Beatles, well, you'd still be high-brow because yay! You beat the odds by a wide margin.

Summary: It's all of Byron's published poems except for Don Juan.

What I liked about it: I honestly thought when I borrowed this book from the library that all of his poems were like To M.S.G.: When'er I dream of that pure breast, / How could I dwell upon its snows! / Yet is the daring wish repress'd ,/ For that - would banish its repose. / A glance from thy soul-searching eye, / Can raise with hope, depress with fear / Yet I conceal my love - and why? / I would not force a painful tear.' All forbidden romance and tragic death at 24 from tuberculosis that has got teenage girls worked into a lather for centuries. But actually, a lot of his poetry is about adventure stories, like Lara or Childe Harold's Pilgrimage or tragic narrative like Beppo. It turns out a lot of the hype that got the ladies worked up was just an early understanding of how publicity works.

I think my favourite of his works is Cain, in which the first murderer expresses his resentment at being kicked out of the Garden of Eden and made mortal for his parents' mistake:

And this is Life! Toil! And wherefore should I toil? - because my father could not keep his place in Eden. What had I done in this? I was unborn: I sought not to be born; nor love the state to which that birth has brought me.

He then goes on to meet Satan and kill his brother and get banished to the Land of Nod.

What I didn't like about it:  Byron didn't write enough limericks. Here's the one example in the entire book: John Adams lies here, of the parish of Southwell / A carrier who carried his can to mouth well; / He carried so much and he carried so fast, / He could carry no more - so was carried at last; / For the liquor he drank, being too much for one / He could not carry off - so no he's carri-on. Limericks forever!

What's Bred in the Bone, by Robertson Davies

Why I chose it: 1986 Booker Prize Nominee

Podcasts: None

Brow: Middle brow if you're Canadian, because come on, you can't spend your whole life watching hockey and this is the other half of your cultural heritage; high brow if you are anything else.

Summary: The life and times of Francis Cornish, who died in the first book of the trilogy and left his considerable art collection for his friends to fight over. Francis was born in the early 20th century in a small town in Ontario and spends his childhood ignored by his parents and bullied by his classmates. As a teen, he moves to Toronto to go to school and eventually ends up in the UK, where he is drafted into the secret service. In the run up to WWII, he's sent to Germany in an elaborate art forgery/spy scheme. He continues his career in the secret service until his mentor dies and leaves him a considerable fortune, at which point he returns to Canada to become a patron of the arts.

What I liked about it: Davies appears to have learned between the first and the second parts of his trilogy that having multiple narrators is confusing and annoying, so he limits himself here to using it during his framing device, which is a conversation between the angel who is deciding the fate of Cornish's soul and the daimon that has been shaping him into a great man throughout his life. As a result, the story is pretty good.

What I didn't like about it: As usual with Robertson Davies, there is nothing to dislike about this book.

The Divine Comedy, by Dante Alighieri

Why I chose it: Western Canon, numerous other book lists

Podcasts: Sidney Greats Lecture Series, but there are tons of others, especially if you focus only on the Inferno.

Brow: The highest of high. The only way you could get higher-brow than this is if you read it in 14th-century Tuscan.

Summary: Dante gets lost in the woods the night before Good Friday. While he's wandering, he's assailed by beasts and unable to find the trail back to Florence. Eventually he's rescued by the poet Virgil, who takes him through the underworld, starting at the top, where people who didn't do anything in life are stuck in hell's waiting room, to the very bottom, where Satan is torturing Judas Iscariot. Along the way, he happens to notice quite a few of his and his clan's enemies also being punished for their various transgressions. After climbing down Satan's fur, our heroes emerge in Purgatory, which the Catholic church had to invent so that little babies who never had a chance to be baptised wouldn't be roasting alive in hellfire and brimstone for all eternity. Here he finds excommunicated people and those who committed the seven deadly sins, a surprising number of whom are still his enemies. Finally, he's handed over to his ex, Beatrice, who died young. She escorts him into heaven, where he finds exemplars of the seven virtues, oddly including many of his friends. At the very end, he sees god and finally works out how Jesus can be human and divine, and learns to align his soul with god's love. Then on the Wednesday after Easter he gets sent back to earth to write his poem.

What I liked about it: The Inferno is fun, with lots of imagery of the punishments various sinners, including a pope who was involved in an incident in which various nobles couldn't decide who the next pope should be and ended up appointing three, each of whom immediately excommunicated the others. In the Inferno, he's face-down in a hole with his feet being burnt. But just like the bible, it's much more fun to dream up tortures for people than it is to think about how awesome paradise would be. Also, after a few cantos of torture, you've kind of got it. It's hard to imagine anyone who isn't a serious book nerd or a literary historian getting much pleasure out of Purgatory or Paradiso.

What I didn't like about it: I had been led to believe that this is one of THE great works of western literature and if you're serious about reading, you must put this on your list. As a consequence, I expected it to be good, like Faust. Instead, it's a mostly boring list of what happens to Dante's friends and enemies in the afterlife. Unless you're up to date about 14th century Florentine politics or you have a superhuman ability to remember who is a Guelph and who is a Ghibelline and which one Dante is, it's very hard to see why anyone would be interested in vast sections of this book.

Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, by James Agee and Walker Evans

Why I chose it: Harold Bloom's Western Canon

Podcasts: None.

Brow: High. But not the highest.

Summary: In 1936, Walker Evans and James Agee accepted a commission from Fortune magazine to write a story about the plight of white sharecroppers in the southern US. They lived with 3 families for a month, photographing them and documenting their day-to-day existence. When the article was not published, they re-wrote it as a book.

What I liked about it: The photographs are amazing, of course, as are the descriptions of the families' homes, possessions, meals, work, clothing and schools.

What I didn't like about it: First, the photographs are presented with no descriptions, so you have only a rough idea of which person is which. Second, while the authors spend dozens of pages exhaustively cataloging the contents of one family's living room, they devote almost no time to the families themselves. There is almost nothing in the way of character development or plot. We get no sense of how family dynamics work or how the families relate to their community or society at large. I definitely would have preferred to have some psychology and sociology mixed in with the static snapshot of their lives.

Confessions of Zeno, Italo Svevo

Why I read it: Western Canon A Lifetime's Reading

Podcasts: None

Brow: While Zeno himself may be quite lowbrow, reading this book sets you apart as one of the highbrow set. Reading it in the original Italian just makes you smug.

Summary: Zeno enters into psychoanalysis to cure his smoking habit, and his therapist recommends keeping a diary. The long chapters are not linear. The first documents his attempts to quit smoking. The next part is about his father's death many years later. The third part recounts how he met his wife and her three sisters. He immediately falls in love with the most beautiful sister Ada, but is rejected in favour of a handsome businessman named Guido who speaks Tuscan. Zeno himself is bald and only speaks the dialect of Trieste. He then proposes marriage to a second sister, who rejects him because she's only 17 and has intellectual plans. The third sister is only 9, so he skips over her in favour of the 4th sister Augusta, who he considers boring and plain, but who loves him. Zeno surprises himself in the next part by actually falling in love with his wife. However when a poor but pretty singer moves in downstairs he quickly acquires a mistress who demands to meet his wife. He leads her to believe that Ada is his wife, and on seeing her, the mistress breaks off the affair because of how lovely yet sad Ada is. In the fifth part, Zeno has gone into business with Guido. He quickly realises that Guido's obsession with profits combined with his affair with one of the employees is driving the company, and Ada, to ruin. Ada asks Zeno for help and Zeno takes Guido on a fishing trip, where Guido starts asking him about various suicide methods. Soon after, Guido dies. Zeno misses his funeral because he's busy gambling on the stock market and winning back most of Guido's losses. The final section is set in WWI Italy. Zeno is still seeking a cure to his imagined sickness and finally concludes that the problem is natural selection has been subverted, causing more weaknesses in humans. He envisions a time when weapons of mass destruction will wipe out illness.

What I liked about it: Zeno is actually hilarious, as are the situations he keeps getting himself into. For example, the scene where he is running around the house of his in-laws proposing to their various daughters and being rejected on all fronts is a classic farce.

What I didn't like about it: After 300-odd pages of comic relief, the last part of the book suddenly takes a turn for the serious and Zeno find himself contemplating the serious questions facing people early in the 20th century: war, illness, scientific advancement. It's a jarring shift and the build-up doesn't fit the payoff.

The Koran

Why I read it: Western Canon, Philip Ward's A Lifetime's Reading

Podcasts: Minnesota Atheists Koran Curious I didn't actually mean to listen to an atheist podcast about the Koran, but there was very little available.

Brow: Like all religious books, your brow rating for reading the Koran depends on why exactly you're doing it: if you use it like some bible readers do, opening it to a random page to either solve a problem or find out what's going to happen to you today, that's pretty lowbrow, but if you're reading it out of a genuine curiosity to figure out what your Muslim friends are always going on about, it's very highbrow. 

Summary: Allah doesn't fuck around:  if you follow him and obey his rules (in sum: believe in Allah), he'll reward you in heaven with virgins, or possibly grapes. The translation isn't clear. Failure to believe in Allah will result in an eternity of torture in hell. There's also some stuff in there about how Muslims should be Unitarians because Jesus, although a prophet, was not divine, when you can have sex with your slaves, and what you can and cannot eat, but 85 percent of it consists of admonishments to believe in Allah or else.

What I liked about it: Surah 109 is nice and tolerant:

Say: Unbelievers, I do not serve what you worship, nor do you serve what I worship. I shall never serve what you worship, nor will you ever serve what I worship. You have your own religion and I have mine.

But then right there on the same page of my translation, The Penguin Classics version, is this:

There are some who in their ignorance dispute about Allah and serve rebellious devils, though these are doomed to seduce their followers and lead them to the scourge of the Fire.

What I didn't like about it: It feels like every religious book is a dumber version of whatever it's based on. So the New Testament is a simplified version of the Old Testament, and the Koran is a simplified mishmash of the New Testament with a few nods to Leviticus and Exodus and a couple of the prophets thrown in. By the time it was written, the message was reduced to 450-odd pages hammering you over the head with the punishments for disobedience. By the end, I was just shell-shocked. Maybe that's the point. Thank goodness the Book of Mormon doesn't appear on any of my reading lists, as I understand it's a dumbed-down version of the bible written in pseudo-King Jamesese.

Nightmare Abbey, Thomas Love Peacock

Why I read it: Western Canon

Podcasts: None

Brow: Middle to Upper, depending how many of the references you get.

Summary: This is the book about nothing. If Jerry, Elaine, Kramer and George had been a bunch of unlikeable narcissistic Romantic poets instead of unlikeable narcissistic New Yorkers, they would have fit right in. Sir Christopher Glowry and his son Scythorpe spend most of the plot either sitting in their dining room or sitting in their living room having absurd conversations with their friends about various Gothic tropes: suicide, ghosts, regeneration and secret societies. There's also a subplot about Scythorpe being in love with two women and having to hide one in the closet, then getting dumped by both. Your basic-cable sitcom, but written in the 19th century.

What I liked about it: I'm a sucker for satire and the Romantics are ripe for it. It's also really fun to see how many of the references you get, à la The Simpsons.

What I didn't like about it: Alas, it's an epic failure of the Bechdel Test.

King James Study Bible

Reasons for Reading: Harold Bloom's Western Canon. Philip Ward's A Lifetime's Reading Also, if you're a serious reader and you want to understand all the biblical references in anything from contemporary magazine articles to Dante's Inferno, you can only get away with not reading it for so long. I chose the KJV because it has had the most impact on English language and literature.

Podcasts: There are thousands available for any sort of bible reader. I recommend the ones from Yale Divinity School if you're a secular reader.

Brow: Low to high, depending on your method and reasons for reading it.

Summary: How do you even summarise the bible? Well, it's a mishmash of genres and styles, from origin myth to sex poems to apocalyptic prophecy. Most of it is pretty dull and repetitive and it's true that you could probably get away with just reading Genesis, Matthew, and the first few chapters of Luke and you'd probably get 90% of the references.

What I liked about it: The Song of Solomon is pretty good, what with it being a book of sex poems that somehow got into the mix. I also liked some of the bits about the crazy prophets and their bizarro tactics for getting people to believe that god was seriously mad again.

What I didn't like about it: It turns out that there are no annotated versions of the KJV published by mainstream publishing houses. There are annotated bibles put out by Oxford University Press, for example, but they use the New International Version, where the language is easier to understand but less majestic. I thought this one would be fine, but it was put out by Jerry Falwell's Liberty University Press and so his annotations are useless unless you're an evangelical Christian uninterested in thinking about the historical and literary context.