I honestly haven't read any of those authors, but now I think I'll look them up. I'm probably missing out..

And in time, people will recognize Ebert as the greatest film critic of our time. And he certainly will continue to be read.

His sentences are a labyrinth of diffident but precise observation. In their construction is the creation of character; in their reluctance to boldly state something, we feel the reality of what goes unsaid. That may be the best summation of James' style I've ever seen.

As the household servant of one teen and one college age person, my observation is that my daughters do read a great hodgepodge of stuff--YA chick-lit, graphic novels, current best sellers, SF, Shakespeare--basically anything that catches their magpie eyes. I don't care what they're reading (or why--some reading is done for comfort or consolation, other reading is done for the challenge of the thing, or for information or to slake curiosity) so long as they're reading.

O Best-Loved Writer/Film Critic,

Here, in one fell swoop, you have warmed this frumpy English teacher/now children's librarian to my very foundations. Blessings on you, Roger Ebert, and long may you reign!

I lack the sensitivity to well structured or technical writing, I enjoy a good story teller more than anything.

Perhaps it is interesting that all the great "writers" seem to be great characters in their own right?

One batch of those is "New York Intellectuals" and another batch is "Academic Poets". Both groups were powerful coteries and now that they've lost their influence, not only are their members seen at their true value, but their enemies (such as myself, b. 1946) are happy to settle some scores.

I've read about half of them, sometimes voluntarily, and would only ever recommend Kenner and Powers to anyone (Powers for strictly regionalist reasons -- my parents met him before I was born.)

I think that people will continue to read Steinbeck. Besides the social-problems realist part he also can be a pretty good story-teller, amusing and somewhat sentimental.

I'm sometimes shocked by the poor levels of spelling, grammar and reading comprehension I encounter online. I see words used when the user has little idea what they actually mean, but they use them anyway because they sound familiar. I wonder what I did differently, and I think it's simple: I read a lot when I was younger, and continue to do so now I'm a bit older.

If you're looking for more to read, may I recommend Olaf Stapledon? He wrote two books that were hugely influential to "Golden Age" SF authors, and which are now available online: Last and First Men and Starmaker.

Sometimes, I dont feel like I even speak the same language as people anymore. Nowadays, whenever I try to talk to a person off the street about an analogy I see between life and a work of fiction, they just kind of look at me and grunt, "huh?"

Whats going on? Is it just me, or is there some kind of systemic breakdown of complex thought that a superhero such as myself needs to uncover.

According to, the Jenkins Group, 80 percent of families in the United States did not buy a single book last year. By the time people graduate from college, 42 percent of them will not even bother to read another book!

Source: http://www.humorwriters.org/startlingstats.html

I am finding more and more, I have to truncate my words and my thoughts just to get through to people. Especially the average person on the streets. I can only imagine this will get worse as people spend more and more time on Facebook, Twitter, and thinking and words in communications are necessarily simplified into one-liners, to match the new forms of media. These new forms of media require it.

The bad thing is that complex thoughts, and reasoning and logic itself really need paragraphs, not just sentences. Not just quips like, 'wher u at', 'wat u doin,' 'chillin,' chit chat that many people engage in nowadays. For better or worse, a new form of thinking is emerging. When our words change our brains change right along with them as our words are just representations of whats going on in our brain states and brain cells, and vice versa.

How come Henry always gets the credit?

I started off with picture books, explored with the hardy boys and Douglas Adams, fantasized in the lurid beautiful flatness of comics, developed a taste for Dumas, read all of Vonnegut and Salinger in a tough summer, then, when at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, in the Siskel auditorium, learned that the literature of our time is film.

Of course you know that already- but cinema, as Prof. Cezar Powlowski iterated again and again, is "the most important art". It is the synthesis of story, of painting, of play, and to some degree, architecture.

It's our dreams projected- our fantasies, our nightmares, our terrifically revealing psychologys- of course, books are different, in that they are projecting their visions into our heads, and they so much more individual.

Have you read Proust?

I've gotten pretty far (45 pages or so!),(it's amazing stuff, but to live in another's past instead of my present can be taxing) but i was really amazed by how cinematic it is...

Maybe though, it's because my mind's eye has been so influenced by a few decades of cinematography.

Joseph Brodsky once wrote, "The only thing worse than burning books is not reading them." I wonder who reads him and he was poet Laureate of United States, though not American by birth. I loved your blog and will come back to it, for the enjoyment of reading and to see how far down the list I had come.

Thank you,
Alina

Reading has disappeared from the American landscape never to return. The purpose of reading is to expand ones knowledge. Knowledge has no place in today's (federal) education system. Only rote regurgitation of revisionist history and politically correct dogma is encountered by the youth of today. Authors with original thinking have been replaced my drones pushing blind adherence. The result- a numb and mindless America overrun by deceitful Islamic militants pushing sharia compliance on a weak willed populace. Wake up America and reclaim the past as represented by ideas of the writers listed. Other wise any hand that pens intelligent thoughts in the future will be chopped off by the evil hate of Islam.

God, these articles are so pervasive and each one is increasingly mundane. All of Hemingway's novels endure and are read widely, suggestions to the contrary are foolishness. You also say people like Chandler and Steinbeck are not read much today? Is this a joke? Surely these are two of the most read authors.

Unfortunately you appear to have the same narrow understanding of being well-read that many possess. How much of Adam Smith, Albert Einstein, Derek Parfit etc. have you read? Undoubtedly these men wrote much more important books than any of the aforementioned names with the exception of Shakespeare.

Ebert: I think if you look back you'll see that I said Chandler and Steinbeck were still read.

I wish I were "well read"! Being a physician, I have spent most of my life reading about science.

Gorgeous conclusion.

I think the benefits of reading is also due in part to the endurance of enjoyment. It is the only medium that can successfully sustain naked, unprotected communication for hours upon hours upon hours-- save for Sting, of course.

The opportunity to read, and the access that is so much more expeditious than the library system of forty years ago, is the best it has ever been. Subscribe to The New Yorker (hey, congratulations!) and with your subscription you get digital-format availability to every single back issue since inception in 1925. With the Gutenberg Project, Kindle and equivalents, and who knows what on the horizon, the issue now is not access but preference.

Grade-school kids, judging by my substitute teaching experience, are far less motivated to seek a book for adventure, escape or enlightenment. The 17-minutes-per-weekend stat you quote will be if anything going down with time. And my own reading of classic works has dropped off drastically. Why? Well, for one thing, I spend too geedee much time on Roger Ebert's Journal.

But, look: only too much is ever enough. This is not passive read & take it, like it or lump it: this is interactivity. As reading what others wrote years ago declines, writing what others will read half a day from now--here and on Facebook and a half dozen other places--has gone through the roof. Multiply me by at least a billion, and what has come and is coming is the most exciting and contemporary-relatable writing AND reading AND imaging AND vidding ever. New heroes will emerge, and the best of them will be influenced by the best of the old.

I must admit that I am not currently reading any of those authors. But I have, for some time, been trying to track down "Berryman's Shakespeare", a collection of his essays on the playwright. I had a copy years ago, but lost track of it either by lending it or during one of several moves in my twenties. I also have "The Dream Songs" on my shelf and will occasionally bring those down a look at a few at random. My favorite remains Dream Song # 4, which begins:

Filling her compact & delicious body
with chicken páprika, she glanced at me
twice.

I also highly recommend an essay about Berryman by Phillip Levine included in the latter's "Bread of Time: Toward and Autobiography." The essay, titled "Mine Own John Berryman" is a reflection on Levine's time at the Iowa Writer's Workshop under Berryman's tutelage. I have a recording of Levine reading it at the Breadload Writer's conference years ago which I have transferred to mp3, and I listen to at least twice a year, including last week.

Speaking of Phillip Levine, I believe that his collections, "What Work Is" and "The Simple Truth" should be on the lists of anyone who wishes to consider him or herself "well-read."

So absolutely cool. I shared with friends. Thanks. Even though you didn't mean to make a list, I hope you don't mind if I use it as such when choosing future books. BTW, These authors' works are all available for free download at Gutenberg. I usually prefer a paper book in my hands but free is free right?

I want to read well without having the intention of being well read. I read, Marquez and Shakespeare, and some philosophers. But I'm also mesmerized by the culture and the lifestyle of Hollywood writers, who are involved on their projects. I heard a lot of film writers say that writing it is like directing it the first time. So I love those people. I own some comic books, I have to admit I sort of love reading adventure comics like Hellboy and Tin Tin, like, as much as I love eating. I don't know though, they kind of end up seeming like cheap television tricks.
In the episode Tin Tin destination moon, right, he's going to the moon and another cable company intercepted the rocket ship's navigationals, and you could imagine that happening modern day with spies passing operating files of information along on flash keys.
But am I going to read literature? Part of me really wants to. And I once read the Dictionary of Literary terms and literary theory, and it seems being well read is very hard to do. I even explored the past, Dante, Euripides. I just don't see it in me that I need to go from book to book like a sketchest at a gallery collecting little impressions of what type of art it is, and then reapplying those sketches in my writing. I can't help it if I don’t believe in myself that much; I'm just not very good.
So there's my mia culpa. I can go where the threads of ambition take me but that just isn’t headfirst into literature. I must also announce that I'm not very energetic so my ambition only takes me places very slowly and that’s why I think I'll never be very well-read. In a way I’m bitter because at university my inability as a writer made my track record embarrassing and I had to go elsewhere to seek educational opportunities. I have resigned myself from being a good reader because I discovered that I am not a prompt writer. I couldn’t be happier with the alterative path I chose which is a college level program in mechanical design engineering.
I do want to be a good scientist, and by that I mean, to support Russell conceptually and to devote time to physics. I'm not angling for chemistry, and biology, today, but it’s always cropped up in my mind as something that physics allows you to understand. As David Hume said, the body is a marvellously complex machine.
The picture of the year for me will not be an adaptation of a novel; I can’t wait to see Fast Five.

It is nice when your mind travels down these paths, Roger. Even when it starts out in something of a melancholy mood :)

John, in Vonnegut's Cat's Cradle, speaks of the consolation of literature. I love that notion. When I start a new author, even a contemporary writer of crime stories, I like to read them in the order of publication if I can do so easily. Just makes me happy to watch the author develop.

When I taught high school English, oh so briefly a quarter century ago, a freshman who didn't want to read his assignments toted around Stephen King's gargantuan IT- the scary clown book. I loved t hat he was reading for himself. His small rebellions wouldn't be good for his grades, but life has lessons.

I have a nephew who turns 24 this coming Friday. He is a reader. Started with Harry Potter, grew up with him. Finally began branching out after he had read them so many times he could probably recite them from memory. He has a kindle but buys books too. I have his complete Sherlock Holmes on loan. Best taken in small doses.

I seldom pick up poetry just to read it, but will do that with Auden or Yeats or Giovanni sometimes. I'll even force myself to read nonfiction every once in a while.

Roger: Thank you so much for this post! I have often regretted that I slid through the myriad of Literature classes I took in college. And I went to a wonderful university - Northwestern. But I think the transplantation from blue-collar Dayton, OH to the hallowed halls of NU at such a young age was too much for my dreamer heart and young straying soul. How I regret those wasted years... It has always been my shame that I never really soaked in those classics. But now, unlike the time of my youth, I understand the importance of the individual voice who can take someone on that quiet journey that is a great novel or short story. I love reading so much and have been procrastinating taking on that "To-do" list that has as item one: "Read the classics."

But having read this post I think I will simply open up that box of books from college (for once I am grateful for my hoarding) and just start reading one book. I will reach in, eyes shut (I am physically doing this as I type) and take out the first book I comfortably touch, open the book, feel for the first pages, open my eyes and read the first line.

Okay, here I go...

Wow.

You won't believe this! This is better than any surprise I've ever had:

"In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice I've been turning over in my mind ever since."

What joy is mine!

I wanted to be "well-read" (still want to, I guess, but my perspective on it has changed). In high school, I started reading things that I thought should have been covered in my AP class, but weren't (the full gamut of Shakespearean drama, to be specific). In college, I always had my own parallel reading list to go along with my philosophy and gen-ed coursework. I only ever got to read East of Eden, The Great Gatsby, Paradise Lost, The Turn of the Screw, Nausea, The Stranger, Kafka, etc. because I thought it was important that I do so. Because I wanted to be able to contribute to conversations and criticism, alongside all the people who seem erudite and/or wise in the ways of the world.

But after a while, I had to acknowledge that there's really no monolithic "canon" that I could chase down. For every great modernist, there's an author from antiquity; for every Rennaissance "essential," there's an African or Asian author who changed the way people think about the written word. Literature is just such a rich, deep art that listing "essential" authors, or being dismayed that certain authors don't seem to be part of every person's core education, is always an act of provincialism. Even Shakespeare and the Bible -- you could find many people out there in the world who haven't read either, and/or aren't familiar with them, and yet who qualify as "well-read" by some legitimate standard.

The solution is to vastly broaden what you think of as being "well-read" and not fetishize any particular work of literature. A person whose "essentials" include William Gibson and Alan Moore has just as much of a right to the status of "well-read" as a person who places great importance on Proust and Flaubert. Stephen King is at the center of a certain type of "well-read" status, just as much as Sophocles is at the center of another. When we talk about being "well-read," we need to acknowledge this breadth, and always keep it in mind.

If we can think this way, we'll realize that there's as much to celebrate in current intellectual culture -- and in the popularization of intellectual culture -- as there has ever been in the past. It's just a matter of loosening our personal expectations for what constitutes cultural and literary legitimacy.

I am always saddened that no one seems to read Thomas Mann, as I think him so vital. But then, what is truly disturbing is when adults offer, offhandedly, asked if they've read this book or that, that they "don't have time to read", or abandoning excuses entirely, indicate that reading is something they simply do not do.

Please Mr. Ebert you're an expert on Scorsese's movies could you answer me was that Jimmy Stewart's voice in the movie "Taxi Driver" of the voice of Irises father when he reads letter to Travis at the end?
It sounds like him but there is no credit who's voice that is in the end and I'm so restless to know. Please help.

I've been meaning to ask you this for some time now, and finally this Journal entry is the correct moment to do so.
What do you think of "100 Years of Solitude?"
Personally, it is my favorite novel and the only one I brought with me when I came to college in the United States.

Ebert: One of my favorites.

If we are talking women 19th C English novelists, I'd put George Eliot up there too, way ahead of Mrs Gaskell. Middlemarch is a book I regularly return to.

Ebert: Facepalm moment! I just went in and added Eliot. Of course.

Many will likely post their favorite authors here or argue your points. I just wanted to say thank you. It's good to know I'm in such great company in these thoughts. I went through 4 years of English literature and left college intending to get through the many reading lists I was assigned, but never finished. It is still a life goal 20 years later. Along the way distractions keep me pleasantly behind in my task, like the Rudolfo Anaya novel "Alburquerque" that made me plan a trip there.

I revisit my old friend Jane Austen in some shape or form every other year. I also reread Isabel Allende's "The House of the Spirits." One author I'd argue to add is Stephen King. Say what you will, but the structure of his early novels is pitch perfect and completely at odds with the dreck most of them became on film.

And James? Brilliant choice :) Ironic that it was the film verson of "The Portrait of a Lady" that made me finally want to dive into one of his intimidating volumes...pity it isn't on DVD.

Do you think filmmakers need a certain level of fluency with the literature?

It's true that teens don't read anymore. Some kids in my highschool are even proud of the fact they don't read for fun. I myself didn't read for the longest time, but after watching No Country for Old Men again, I've started reading McCarthy's works, which I love.

It is the same with everything: there are always new coming along, writing over the old. Actors too. Celebrities too. Designers too. Philanthropists too. Scientists too. EVERYONE is overwritten, and forgotten---the only difference is that some are remembered a little longer.

An issue, I think, is that we are awash in literature, more than any one person could ever read. So much is published in just one year (something on the order of 100,000 titles in America alone) that it would take a lifetime to simply read just that's year's product. To sort out the works important for the moment from those important for all time takes time and experience and skills that the culture of "now" simply fails to inculcate.

The idea of great authors and enduring literature is Classical, a remnant of the age when books were few and the Iliad and the Odyssey were the universal curriculum. But even in the Middle Ages, the vagaries of memory and chance had already condemned many of the great writers of antiquity to dust, yet bizarrely preserved the random scribblings of summarizers, students, and hacks.

We are more fortunate than the medievals in that we are able to access virtually anything ever published, but this cornucopia also means that we encounter mostly what we want to see, and can go a lifetime without ever venturing beyond a favorite genre or subject. Lacking a cultural expectation of familiarity with anything beyond the current popular novel, what impetus is there for someone to challenge him or herself? It takes effort to sort through the mountains of literature to find the one author or work that might change a life.

I guess it's the paradox of abundance: paralyzed by choice, too many simply choose what is nearest, shiniest, or most popular. In one sense, I benefitted because I was often without money and read what came free or cheap. Used book stores stocked a lot of classics and the works of once-famous authors, and that's what I read because the popular trash was far too expensive. Of course, there aren't many used book stores now. The internet put them all online, and we're back to the problem of too much choice and too little guidance.

This post is disturbing to me.
Not because of something in your content or style, but because it reminds me that I no longer read many books for pleasure.

When I was younger (an odd phrase when only 21), I read voraciously and constantly, and to that I credit nearly all of the intellectual faculties I have today.
However, it stopped, when I got my first PC, from that point on nearly all of my reading happened online. I perhaps read more now than I ever did previously, but how much of it is of any worth? The vast majority of my reading is simple unedited communication with people across the globe on forums and blogs.
The only conventionally published writing that I still read seems to be academic, and then only when I find it electronically. From the list you began the article with, I have read only Sontag (On Photography). This leads me to the only semblance of a point I have; It seems to me that the proliferation of information on the Internet leads to intense specialization of consumption, rather than the broadening of horizons one might think would come of such breadth.

The local library used to be the center of my world in a way, it isn't the biggest, certainly not the best stocked, but it was always there for me to browse and sample. I stopped frequenting it in high school, as I shifted my reading online.
At university I had access to an enormous library, which I mainly used to sit in and use my laptop. When I came back to my hometown, in a fit of self improvement, partially due to realizing how little I'd used that library, I vowed to begin reading books again, only to find the local library had closed, due to the populace's refusal to fund it.
It is coming back this summer, thanks to the actions of a group of concerned citizens. I hope to use it this time.

One thing I like about public transporttation is the opportunity to read on my commute. I probably read at least 4 hours a week, and most of it is on the train.

I hope to read SOMETHING by everyone listed in the second paragraph before I'm dead, and perhaps others in subsequent paragraphs. I disagree with you on GREAT EXPECTATIONS -- the prose is incredibly dull. The characters are interesting -- Mr Jaggers is the best! -- but Pip is a nebbish surrounded by much more interesting people. Until Mr J shows up, it's pretty boring. Pip turns out not merely to be boring, but also unpleasant and snobbish when greatness is thrust upon him, quickly adopting to the upper classes and their evils, even to his benefactor. Naivete doesn't excuse his rudeness and his idiocy.

Also -- Congratulations, sir! I saw your name in the New Yorker cartoon caption contest and recalled your struggle and was glad to see your success!

I have the Sargent portrait of Henry James hanging in my hallway. I tell new visitors that it's Schoenberg. Only one person has ever told me it's not.

I talk to friends about what they're reading and sometimes that will point me to new areas. But otherwise my selection is random. Sometimes it's as simple as picking up the new LoA volume that just arrived.

Ebert: I love the Library of America--which was inspired in range and format, by the way, by Edmund Wilson.

Roger, consider the list you cited: Mary McCarthy, James T. Farrell, John Berryman, Allan Bloom, Irving Howe, Alfred Kazin, Edmund Wilson, Anne Sexton, Alice Adams, Robert Lowell, Grace Paley, Owen Barfield, Stanley Elkin, Robert Penn Warren, Norman Mailer, Leslie Fiedler, R.P. Blackmur, Paul Goodman, Susan Sontag, Lillian Hellman, John Crowe Ransom, Stephen Spender, Daniel Fuchs, Hugh Kenner, Seymour Krim, J.F. Powers, Allen Ginsberg, Philip Rahv, Jack Richardson, John Auerbach, Harvey Swados--or Trilling himsel

Now, compare it to this list: Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, James M. Cain, Jim Thompson, Graham Greene, Ross Macdonald, Cornell Woolrich, Patricia Highsmith, John D. MacDonald, John Le Carre, Elmore Leonard, Frederick Forsyth, Eric Ambler, B. Traven, Isaac Asimov, Philip K. Dick, J. G. Ballard, Ray Bradbury, Robert Heinlein, Orson Scott Card, Ursula LeGuin, Douglas Adams, Theodore Sturgeon, George Orwell, Jack Vance, James Hilton, Frank Herbert, Anthony Burgess, Aldous Huxley, and so on.

Genre writers are often more indelible than many of the top literary talents. There is something overwhelming and unforgettable about a great genre work. Perhaps it's because many of them--whether crime or sci fi--resemble elaborate nightmares. Perhaps it's because they often use archetypal characters: the femme fatale, the loner, the outcast, the adventurer, the hero, the villain, etc. Perhaps it's because they are driven by fun ideas and fast plots, not by style and atmosphere.

Whatever the case, I am a firm believer that the American literary canon of the mid- to late-twentieth century should be largely, although not exclusively, filled with genre works.

Ebert: Her list seemed drawn from a small group of academic intellectuals, and yours offers a wider and, I must say, more readable list.

I really thought I was well-read until I came across the fourth paragraph of this post. I've made a list and I'll be off to the library!

William Faulkner could write an exhaust pipe gag that would really make you think.

What about Carson McCullers? I just read 'The Member of the Wedding" a couple of weeks ago, and I think its one of my favorites. And you forgot Melville. I think people still read 'Moby Dick'.

I agree with what Jambalaya said above. I think the prevalence of contractions, abbreviations, acronyms, slang etc on the internet is a detriment to our thought and language functions. I worry that "big words" will become endangered, it frightens me.

I'm an English major and someone with an interest in literature, film, television, and sports, all sort of conflicting with each other. I think a large reason for the absence of the above authors in most of our reading lists comes from the diversity of topics available today. For centuries, books were the most realistic and powerful medium for storytelling. American film didn't break from censorship until 1967, television even later than that. Some of the finest literary adaptations of the 1970's like The Last Picture Show, The Godfather, and Fat City would never have been made a decade earlier, or they would have been heavily sanitized. Shows like The Sopranos only found a venue with the rise in cable programming. Today, we simply have options for great storytelling that extend beyond literature. I love the best works of Updike, Roth, Cheever, and Richard Yates, but I'm also drawn to films and television that wouldn't have been around for the 1st half of the 20th century. (And think about what Revolutionary Road would have been like as a Sirkian melodrama without the controversial ending.)

Wow, I thought I was slightly well-read until I read this, and I have a two year degree in English. Now, where to begin? There are just so many great authors to choose from, and not nearly enough time!

This piece hits home.
When I was in high school, a neighbor gave me a book by Clifton Fadiman, A Lifetime Reading Plan. I actually started ticking off many of the titles in there, with some more modern (then) authors sprinkled in.
In the last few years, my reading has slowed down because of a little stroke that I had, but I still read constantly, and have added audio books to the mix.
The sad part is that many of the works I consider essential are pretty hard to find. Even the internet has a great deal, but not everything. (Try to find copies of early W. sommeret Maugham dramas.) I'm lucky that I live near a major city, which makes access to things much easier.
Now, I'm back on Dickens, filling in with the novels that I missed the first time around. I have an iPad full of Barbara Tuchman, Suetonius and Julius Ceasar for the near future.
When you combine all of the authors you mention with technical reading, there just isn't enough time. Add Mr. Ebert's tweets, and I can barely het any work done.

Hi, Roger. As you're currently only interested in books that are worth the remaining time of your life, I've got two book recommendations I honestly think you will find both enjoyable and intellectually profound. They'll affect you as a human, I predict.

Iain M. Banks: "Look to Windward" (and if you like that book as much as I predict you can pick similar by him such as Surface Detail and many others). I read Look to Windward years ago and still think of it frequently in how I view my place in this world.

Mark Helprin: "A Soldier of the Great War" This book isn't as socially complex and insightive as the Iain M Banks one, but rather this is closer to a long prose poem about the beauty of life we find and must appreciate regardless of where we are. This book taught me to appreciate small things to great degree and to not be so stingy with the present.

A few years ago I worked with a young man (about 22) who had never heard of Hemingway. I can understand not having read him, but never heard of him??? I asked him what they were teaching him in high school and college. "Not much, I guess," was his answer.

As an aside, do you listen to audio books? Any thoughts?

Ebert: I've listened to a lot of audio books. My favorite: "Perfume," read by Sean Barrett, but it's only on cassette.

funny that youd write this now.

someone on this blog suggested i try amazons kindle for pc. i so want to thank him. im reading again. ive got into the habit of reading a hour a night before bed.

a week ago an idea hit me; im gonna read 5 classic american novels between now and labor day. after much debate i decided to start with hellers catch-22 (umm, WOW) and from there maybe vonnegutt maybe kerouac. im just enjoying the ride.

I have always admired your criticism and suspected the quality of your work emanated in part from a passion for literature. However, I didn't really know how well-read you are until this blog. We are all richer for your love of literature. Thank you!

Mr.Ebert,

I enjoyed reading your article, and I would just like to say that I know plenty of young men and women who wish to be well-read. I am numbered among them and have read a good number of the authors you listed, and several others that were absent such as Joyce, Pynchon, Delillo, Atwood, and others.

I do not really think that the good authors will fade away into obscurity, though I must admit that this perhaps this opinion is slightly naive but, with that in mind, I still continue to believe it because, well, David Foster Wallace said it better than I can:

“I have this -- here’s this thing where it’s going to sound sappy to you. I have this unbelievably like five-year-old’s belief that art is just absolutely magic. And that good art can do things that nothing else in the solar system can do. And that the good stuff will survive, and get read, and that in the great winnowing process, the shit will sink and the good stuff will rise.”

Hope you enjoy your third read-through of Blood Meridian; it's a fantastic book.

Cheers,

Javy
South Carolina

Mr.Ebert,

I enjoyed reading your article, and I would just like to say that I know plenty of young men and women who wish to be well-read. I am numbered among them and have read a good number of the authors you listed, and several others that were absent such as Joyce, Pynchon, Delillo, Atwood, and others.

I do not really think that the good authors will fade away into obscurity, though I must admit that this perhaps this opinion is slightly naive but, with that in mind, I still continue to believe it because, well, David Foster Wallace said it better than I can:

“I have this -- here’s this thing where it’s going to sound sappy to you. I have this unbelievably like five-year-old’s belief that art is just absolutely magic. And that good art can do things that nothing else in the solar system can do. And that the good stuff will survive, and get read, and that in the great winnowing process, the shit will sink and the good stuff will rise.”

Hope you enjoy your third read-through of Blood Meridian; it's a fantastic book.

Cheers,

Javy
South Carolina

Ebert: I mentioned I was leaving living authors out of the discussion.

Ebert: "That's how I've done my reading: Haphazardly, by inclination. I consider myself well read, but there has been no plan."

Then again, your inclinations were many, and there were mentors along the way. But I can dig it: picked up The Metamorphosis in high school because it had a funky cover. Discovered the startling Kobo Abe because Inter Ice Age 4 was a featured selection in Doubleday's Science Fiction Book Club. Stumbled onto the greatest "invisible" semi-autobiographical episodic novel of the first half of the 20th century, Tom Kromer's Waiting for Nothing, because I was in a modern drama class and was reading Waiting for Godot and Waiting for Lefty and thought it was a cool coincidence.

But thank God for the mentors: Greene's The Power and the Glory was assigned in my high school--and I've stuck with that "Catholic Atheist" ever since; and I knew Lord Jim, but in college my modern novel prof had us read Victory (there's a kind of remarkable silent film version with Lon Chaney, directed by Maurice Tourneur) and Nostromo--and introduced me to Ford Madox Ford's The Good Soldier.

One can go on and on with this kind of listing-memoir--but I just wanted to pass along a few titles.

p.s. Strange that some comments seem pissed that you mention only literary stuff. "Adam Smith"? A real page-turner, gang! SPOILER ALERT: The country, you see, produces the raw materials, and the town, it manufactures them. Everyone gets oh-so-wealthier-and-wealthier until ... Well, you'll just have to read The Communist Manifesto for the thrilling conclusion! (Hint: "The essential conditions for the existence and for the sway of the bourgeois class is the formation and augmentation of capital; the condition for capital is wage-labor. Wage-labor rests exclusively on competition between the laborers. The advance of industry, whose involuntary promoter is the bourgeoisie, replaces the isolation of the laborers, due to competition, by the revolutionary combination, due to association. The development of Modern Industry, therefore, cuts from under its feet the very foundation on which the bourgeoisie produces and appropriates products. What the bourgeoisie therefore produces, above all, are its own grave-diggers. Its fall and the victory of the proletariat are equally inevitable." Boy, nothing rolls off the tongue like old-school dialectical materialism.)

I took Dan Curley at Illinois too. I sat across from him at a conference and he told me I was "well brought up." I'm pretty sure it was code for "you can't write." I don't really know what it meant, though. I don't remember the corduroy pants.

I am sorry, but Henry James is unreadable. You are correct on every other evaluation.

gy38aw

I've always been a big reader, but like many people, I often find other things getting in my way. Lately, I've taken to just closing the computer (I haven't watched television in years) to make sure I have time to read. In the past few months I've read David Copperfield, The Three Musketeers (which was so much fun that I also read The Count of Monte Cristo), Washington Square and The Bostonians (Henry James, natch!), The Brothers Karamazov (for the 2nd time), and Dostoevky's short novels, The Double and The Gambler. Getting back into reading was a recentering and relief. I'm also starting the graduate program at St. John's College (the "Great Books" school) this fall--simply because I think that reading and discussing important books is the best way I can think of to spend a couple of years. They go by so quick....

I thought one of the greatest things was Fox News taking a dump on Vonnegut upon his death. In a world where the Sex Pistols have been inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, it's good to know that there are a few people out there, like Vonnegut, who can still piss the establishment off after all these years.

Just a couple of quibbles: of the list, I do think Grace Paley is a writer who will endure, because of the quiet dignity of her stories. And Penn Warren may no longer be read, but he told great stories that are still being made into great films (think of All the President's Men).

Other important writers I would add who are still read by people who know where to look: W. E. B. Du Bois, Arthur Miller, James Baldwin, John Updike. I've never liked Updike much myself, but the others are important to me. And what about the early Joyce, of Dubliners?

Finally, thank you for mentioning Steinbeck, whom I still consider the greatest English-language novelist of the twentieth century.

I read a lot. Whether or not I am well read is a different question.

I have been, over the course of my life. I was fortunate to have great librarians in junior high who got me involved in the "Great Books Club".

I've gone through many phases and genres since then. War books. Detective series. Historical novels. Tolkien (LOTR) vs. Herbert (Dune). Lots of Stephen King early novels - including my favorite novel ever - "The Stand". Try his shorter stories, like "The Long Walk". Wow.

High school years saw trips through authors like Taylor Caldwell and John Jakes. My son and I were at the library last week where they had a $1 a bag sale and we found most of the Kent Family Chronicles - which I read in the 70's real time. I bought them for him.

Mostly now I read non-fiction. Political in nature. These are important times, and there is a lot to learn and stay current on.

But, I do take a break with a Kindle full of free classics. Dickens. Dumas. Etc. I read "The Road" on the Kindle.

Tonight I have the Kindle out enjoying Grisham's new novel. Now there's an engaging author.

Will I ever get to the list in the second paragraph. No. But there is a world of literature out there that's entertaining to me.

Ebert: I don't think one "needs" to read many of those authors, unless one is a graduate student of literature. Edmund Wilson, however, deliberately wrote for general readers.

It's not just books, by the way.

"What's a newspaper"?, I joked to my wife at lunch. She was talking about how thin our local paper is getting. We've both been reading it since the 60's. Her father worked in the newspaper business for 40 years. We're fans. I can't remember either child reading the paper though. Sad.

I do take them to the library, like my father did for me. Trying to interest them in reading. Not very successfully.

I visited my son's high school library and talked to the librarian. She took me over to the Japanese anime section and said it was by far the most popular section of the library. Manga. Very depressing. And unhealthy.

They will have a different experience with reading than I did.

I did get 17 to try writing this year. He did NaNoWriMo with me. So, there's hope.

Great post. I think one of the best gifts in the coming years will be to point someone to your journal, along with the comments. Hope they persist for eternity. But the comments are so numerous that, like NYTImes, it might be helpful to have some interesting comments highlighted or voted on by the readers.

Both my parents were professors at the university, and I will be eternally grateful to them for the plethora of books strewn around the house. My mom taught American Literature, having done her theses on Conrad and James, and I read Crime and Punishment when I was 14. I think there is an increasing tendency to get a quick payoff from one's reading. Great works of literature, great films, great art, takes time and patience to appreciate, and this paucity of long hours of leisure which are needed to dive deep into such treasures is increasingly lacking in the cities.

The modern methods of communication assume that one is always available and distractable. To shun one's mobile phone or email for 4-6 hours is not only hard given one's own addiction to seeing what is "new", it may give one's friends an alarm if one is doing alright. More and more adults are suffering from attention deficit, I feel.

I fondly remember days and nights spent on reading a good book, forgetting meal times, and being transported into other people's universes and modes of thinking. I hope I can start again.

Another writer that I have immensely enjoyed is J M Coetzee. His novels are not very long, and are crystalline in their prose and development.

I think, through the defects of our society and our education system, reading has been associated as a chore. I had to learn to enjoy a good book.

I'm a high school English teacher. I absolutely live for reading, and I can tell you that I still some of the authors on your list. My intellectual pedigree was in political science, under the students of Leo Strauss, and, even if I don't lean so far right these days, I still read Allan Bloom. He wrote a book on Shakespeare that I return to consistently. I still read Anne Sexton, Robert Penn Warren, and yes, Trilling himself.

As for your comment about high-schoolers, I have to tell you that my experience confirms the statistics. Kids don't read anymore. They text, they browse the web, they watch a lot of youtube videos, and they scan each other's Facebook pages. But only a few of them read. Still, I remain in the trenches, fighting the good fight, always hopeful that my passion for books will rub off on a few.

I am terrified that reading is becoming extinct except among the few who are genuinely curious about the world.

I'm in my mid thirties, and have read numerous authors mentioned in your post, Roger. I have a soft spot for Dickens myself. His characterization is incredibly rich, his ability to create a world so complete you can smell rain and dirt remains untouchable.

I encourage my daughters to read everything they can get their hands on, in hopes that at least one of them will continue on the soon to be lost art of reading good literature. My eldest left tonight for a babysitting job with her copy of Mrs. Dalloway under her arm along with a bag of Cinnamon Toast Crunch and a bottle of ginger ale.

It's most impressive she bought that book with the babysitting money she earned last week.

I have some hope for the future, not a lot. But a few kids like her will push on ahead. She's got her eye on my copy of Infinite Jest when I'm finished. I estimate it will be sometime in 2032 a the rate I'm going. I keep re-reading every page.

I am relieved that people out there are still attempting to be well-read. I always figured you were, Roger. The greatest of writers are always the most ambitious readers.

You left out two of the most important writers of the 20th century - Harrold Robbins and Jacqueline Susann. Haven't read them but I know they are important because Capitain Kirk called thier novels the neglected works of the period in one of the Star Trek movies.

I'd like to add Rudy Rucker, Robert Anton Wilson and Andrew Vachss to the list.

Right now I'm reading Entangled, the first ever novel by Graham Hancock. If this book is any indication he has a great future as a writer of speculative fiction.

Digital literacy is replacing "well-read" and traditional literacies like the Faulkners and so-and-so. Its a matter of taste, if you like cooking shows, then for gods sake, be well-read on the top chefs and their literature and practices. But we don't all need to subscribe to a hegemonic cultural literacy.

Long article, btw. I'm sure nobody read it in its entireity, and if they did, didn't understand the intentions of every sentence the way you hoped to and meant to put them on display.

English MA
ASU

Ebert: Does the name M.F.K. Fisher ring a bell?

I myself haven't read Mailer, Sontag or Ginsberg, etc., as I have this prevailing image of them as unreadably narcissistic asses, somehow removed from the canon of human behavior. (Which is probably the reason I don't read Hemingway, either, but I may be missing out.)
The ones I read are the ones immortal enough to end up on postage stamps: Twain, Poe, Dickens, etc. A great gulf widened between "literary" (non-genre) books and popular entertainment sometime during the turbulent 50's, and the only popular reading is to be archaeologically dug out from before that great divide, back when an author was lucky to be published at all.

And even then, reading glasses and vanishing free time keep me from actually reading them, and I confine myself to iPod audiobook, wherever I happen to be in transit. (Or washing dishes, a great way to catch up on audiobooks if you don't happen to have an automatic...Makes both chores tolerable.)
And since commercial audiobooks are insanely gouge-priced by a greedy industry that puts too much overhead on them, my meager resources are left to scavenging most of my audiobooks either off of the library, or off the public-domain classics I can find for free on the volunteer-audio site Librivox.org: Again, Twain, Poe, Dickens, Austen...Funny how that works out, isn't it? :)

Ebert: Three words: Used book stores.

I'm trying to become "well-read," though I wonder if that is actually a concrete, attainable goal and not something completely subjective. Regrettably, I've only read Ginsberg out of the list of authors you named at the beginning of the article; for my age range, I don't know if that means that I'm not well-read. I've read Dickens, Dostoevsky, Kafka, Austen, Woolf, Emily Bronte, Shakespeare, Fitzgerald, Hemingway, etc.

But the canon of literature is both vast and finite. Every now and then a Jack Richardson or a Trilling have to be forced out of the canon so that a Cormac McCarthy or a Thomas Pynchon can take his rightful place there. Who knows? As much as I love Blood Meridian, maybe that work will be pushed out of the pantheon of great books to make room for another author, and I'll be later in my life and, like you, lamenting the dying of interest in someone I consider to be great.

This discussion reminds me of the Fitzgerald narrator in This Side of Paradise describing his literary pursuits while at Princeton; he prominently lists Rudyard Kipling in addition to at least half a dozen 19th century English and American writers, most of whom I didn't recognize. Kipling is still read today, but likely not as much as he was in the 1910's; most of the other authors mentioned in the book probably aren't read at all. In their place, students in universities across America today are reading Fitzgerald and several of his contemporaries.

In any case, I think that it's a difficult task to be well-read by any objective standard, even if there even is one. By Fitzgerald's standard, I would be an unread ignoramus, by your personal standard I might be considered slightly more literate, by the standard of my generation, I might be substantially on my way to having most of the milestones covered in order to be considered well read. It is certainly exhausting just trying to determine where to strike out and what to read though given that there are so many works floating around out there and not enough time to read them all.

Ebert: Sounds to me like you're doing just fine.

Roger, I can definitely tell you that the 17 minutes per week is wrong. Despite what all the doomsdayers and curmudgeons will claim, teenagers are in fact reading more than ever now, and yes, some of it is even in books. A lot of their reading does take place online, but that is not inherently a bad thing (case in point, this blog). Incidentally, the internet means that students are writing more than ever now too.

I am speaking, by the way, from my experience as a college English instructor currently studying rhetoric and composition, where I have read extensive studies on the reading habits of teenagers as well as interacting with them quite a lot myself, so I'm not talking out of my ass here. One of the big projects they do is a remediation assignment where they have to pick a text to to transfer into other forms (based on McLuhan's idea that the message is in the medium) and analyze how the text changes with the medium. The only requirement I give is that the text has to be at least fifty words long, but students regularly pick people like Frost, Poe, Donne (and yes, I was quite astonished), Dickinson and Hawthorne. I have only ever had one student pick a videogame, but at the same time I'll also admit that last time I taught the project I made the decision to ban Taylor Swift songs because of how often she was selected.

As for the list at the beginning, I must say that I have only read two of those authors and there are quite a few who I've never heard of. I do consider myself quite well read by the way (or at least as well read as a 27 year old can be). The thing is, the literary canon is a brutal mistress that shuts out all but the greatest of the greatest of the greatest. There are very few of the writers Ozick listed who strike me as really being worthy of preservation, not because they weren't good, but because we only have 24 hours in the day and Daniel Fuchs' Brooklyn Trilogy is difficult to justify when there are still so many Dickens novels I haven't read.

Great literature is in no danger of dying out, no matter what the doomsdayers claim, but unfortunately there is only so much space for near great writers.

I'm of two minds on this issue:

On one hand, no one reads, and that is very sad. Of my personal friends and acquaintances, a well-educated lot, I can think of two who regularly read challenging, historically important, or "great" books. Really, I can think of less than a handful who regularly read anything at all - besides the internet - which for me is the great enemy of books. And I find this very, very sad.

On the other hand, good riddance to some of what went along with the intellectual culture of the past. My father, raised 70 years ago in Europe, got an excellent education, much of it in Latin, and with the aid of a crop for slapping his hand whenever he spoke up and daily humiliations of every sort. He can still quote poetry he was forced to memorize as a pre-teen, but don't ask him to talk about how he feels about anything - he can't!

Do I care about being well read? As I grow into adulthood, yes, I am starting to. I haven't read more than a half dozen authors mentioned in this post, having chosen living authors, women, immigrants, outsiders and so forth, who thank goodness now have an audience due to the dismantling of the old ideas about literature and who should write it. But I just finished my first Henry James (an earlier, easier one) and loved it, and am taking a stab at the Aeneid now, and am glad for the chance to touch words that has touched so many others before me.

I can't understand Ozick's quote though. If I can read a 2000 year old poem today, I can only conclude that a great writer never, never dies. Their writing will always be there - even if at times when it is not touched much. And why should we think that just because no one reads today, that no one ever will again? Someday all our electronic devices will fail - we're almost out of oil after all - and we'll need something to do. And Virgil and Dickens and Achebe and Roy will still be there waiting.

Ebert: I wonder if I should even have quoted her list. Many of the authors on it are not relevant any longer, which I think was her point. It was a way of getting around to her belief that Saul Bellow still is. Ironically, Bellow is the one writer no one has yet mentioned in this thread.

I don't care if I'm well-read, I just want to be read. (Lament of the zillions of humans who, though desirous of becoming an "author", never manage the feat.)

I've been reading since I was 3 years old. The first book I owned (it was given to me by a teacher) I received at the age of 6, which was "Have Space Suit, Will Travel" by Robert Anson Heinlein. Reading is a love affair I have consummated more often than Wilt Chamberlain ever dreamed of, and I expect to continue my profligate ways until the day I die.

I read "real" books (I own so many my beloved wife refers to my collection as "the monster in the house"), I read electronic books. I read on my computers, I read on my Kindle, I read on my iPad. I read in my office, in my bedroom, while seated at the breakfast table or on the toilet, while on the bus or in the mall or the waiting room or an airplane or...

I read anywhere, anytime I get the chance.

As far as real books go, the ones I can hold so lovingly yet dismissively, (I know I will soon be setting it aside, another spurned lover in my quest for satisfaction) they are genre fiction almost exclusively. The same can be said for the content I consume on my Kindle. But when I'm reading on my computer, and somewhat less so on my iPad, I read non-fiction almost exclusively: News, opinion, science articles, sports coverage, etc. (It would be closer to being exclusively non-fiction, except for the fact that I follow politics in depth, and the fact that much political discourse, though not labeled as fiction, is the product of some remarkably "creative" writers.)

Whether I meet the classic standards for being anointed "Well-Read" is a matter of opinion. I've read perhaps 1/2 dozen authors on your list in the 2nd paragraph, Roger, but it is unlikely that I will revisit any of them in the foreseeable future. I have read so many books by so many authors that it is impossible for me to even guess at a total, and I read so fast that the number increases almost daily.

(As a freshman in hi-school, all 9th graders were required to take a class in speed reading that lasted four weeks. I was dismissed on the 3rd day when the teacher realized that I already read more than 10 times faster than the official class goal.)

I'm currently beginning my fourth foray through Winston Churchill's "The Second World War", where the prospect of six large volumes should not dismay those who haven't read it. Trust me: Once you learn how to skip the pages of minutiae about tonnes of this, 100's of that, and complete copies of munitions shipping manifests, you can enjoy the incisive, heartfelt and fascinating account of a man who lived in the midst of one of the most profound upheavals of modern times.

I'm also re-reading my way through Heinlein's oeuvre on the computer, and am delightfully engrossed in Kim Harrison's series about the witch, Rachel Morgan, on my Kindle.

I've learned that voracious (compulsive?) readers will read anything. When I am without a book in my hand I will read cereal boxes, advertising supplements, 12 year old magazines on Women's Health, even the banner ads on the inside of buses.

Call it a disease, call it an addiction, call it an unhealthy appetite. No matter what approbation you use, I admit to owning it. Yet no matter how you define my need to read, I have no interest in any 12-Step program intended to help me, much less cure me.

The world would be a desolate wasteland without the words of my fellow humans there for me to imbibe, digest, and perhaps even burp after consuming.

God bless reading. It helps keep me human.

Ebert: Yeah. I'll read anything too, in a pinch. To visit the toilet without reading material seems woeful to me.

Roger,
Love the article. Boy, I may have to set up more shelves in my bedroom after I try some of the authors you talked about.

But, as an author myself, I have to inject a "disagree" about the state of reading today. I am finding that the advent of the "e-book" has caused many who previously did not read to actually start reading. Perhaps they're reading mostly genre books, but that's how I started, and I've certainly outgrown most of the "blood and thunder" writers of my youth. The only ones from my youth that I stick to nowadays are Don Pendleton, Ian Fleming, Raymond Chandler, and Dashiell Hammett. Why? They are more than "blood and thunder" and are genuinely good writers. Having recently begun Hemingway and Fitzgerald (F. Scott was the better of the two!) and having been exposed to Wodehouse through the wonderful Leslie Charteris, I see many wonderful years of reading ahead and you can bet their influence will be seen in my own writing in years to come.

So, despite the statistics, despite what our teachers are seeing today (and the kids in my day weren't reading, either, by the way) I see a bright future for the written word, though the form may be primarily digital in the coming years with paper books a secondary option.

So let 'em start with the chick-lit and the manga and the what-not. Those who get bitten by the bug will branch out eventually.

Cordially,

Brian Drake

The sad truth is that I am much more well-watched (well-viewed? Well-seen?) than I am well-read. Such will probably be the case throughout my entire life.

Explanations abound as to why this may be: I read slowly, am easily distractible, and am often slow to comprehend. Plus, I take classes, I work in the school library; I don’t have that much free time to read.

At the end of the day, though, these are all just excuses. Movies are just a little more my speed. I try to see at least one movie per day. Just yesterday I saw Will Penny. The day before that was Red Eye, and before that, it was Get Carter. All three of them are truly excellent films, Penny and Carter especially so.

Don’t get me wrong; I DO read, and that includes reading for pleasure. I love the poetry of Robert Frost and the prose of Philip Roth. I also love Stephen King, and for that--as I preemptively told my most recent English teacher--I make no apologies. I’ve passed many a long hour with a book of his short stories. I enjoy Wodehouse, Kafka, and Twain, and I’ve returned to them again and again. I find Hemingway’s short stories are close to perfect; I don’t just read them, I STUDY them, and I often have them in mind when I myself sit down to write.

There have been other great books that I only got around to reading because they were required for some school assignment or other. I didn’t enjoy them any less for that reason. They include, but are not limited to: Dracula, Things Fall Apart, The Great Gatsby, The Odyssey, The Faerie Queene, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Hamlet, and most recently, The Things They Carried, by Tim O’Brien, which is one of the best and most moving Vietnam war stories I’ve ever come across. While discussing it in class, I remember mentioning that it depicted Vietnam in a way that was totally dissimilar to any war movie I had ever seen, with one exception: Oliver Stone’s movie Platoon. I went on: not only did they both paint a similar overall picture, but they also touched on similar details, similar feelings--the exhaustion, the tense silence, the hot listless days and the cool humid nights, the feeling of unreality and detachment with which they viewed the whole experience, and the realness of death.

I’ve read lots and lots of Ray Bradbury, Jasper Fforde, Neil Gaiman, Tom Robbins, as well as a one work apiece by Salinger, Fitzgerald, Gaskell, Dickens, Chekhov, Tolstoy, Rushdie, Plato and Epictetus. The fact that I have read--and, for the most part, understood--The Gods Themselves, by Isaac Asimov, is no small source of pride, especially considering that it is rife with hard science (to which I am sometimes aversive) and that I read it while in middle school. I’ve also read LOTS of graphic novels, comic strips--and movie reviews. Not just yours, but also Leonard Maltin’s and Time Out Cinema’s; I consult all three of you almost daily. At the rate I watch movies, it’s a necessity.

Do you see where I’m going with all of this?

I agree with everything you’ve said here; however, I also agree with Jesse Crall--books are important and always will be, but film has come so far in the last several decades. I, for one, simply enjoy stories, in any shape or form, and in my opinion, movies work just as well as books do.

I regret that I have never read most of the authors you’ve mentioned in this article. I’d like to say that I will try to read all of them, but that’s a promise I don’t feel capable of keeping. At least a couple of them, for sure… Grace Paley is someone I’ve heard great things about, AND she was a fellow Sarah Lawrence student. Maybe I’ll give her a try one of these days.

Rest assured, I don’t plan to ever stop reading; moreover, I will do everything I can to ensure that my favorite authors endure for future generations. But I will probably never be as well-read as you are now. All those works, by all those great writers…

Simply put, reading as much as I possibly can, before dying, is just not my highest priority. And that’s all right, isn’t it?

P.S. I’m a little surprised to learn you were once planning to be an English teacher. I suppose I should not have been; I’ve known for some time what an avid reader you are. You’d have been an excellent teacher, no doubt about it. Still, education’s loss is our great gain.

Ebert: Sorry, but you sound like a splendid reader to me.

"Does anyone want to be "well-read?"

No, I'm fine with "staycation."

Ah yes-and does the writer want to be the subject of another movie starring Ralph Fiennes or Nicole Kidman ? These are pertinent questions.

In all seriousness, as writer myself I greatly appreciate the emphasis on reading as a continual expansion of humanity, both individually and collectively. Often the experience of writing is a mystery even to those of us who undertake the sometimes perilous climb through the caverns, recesses and unlit portions of humankind's greatest instrument-the mind....

For throughout Time's beating wings,
beyond the gate
stands the poets dream
where the lark and the muse
are not just light footed creatures
that pass lightly across the sleeping mind

but vessels that move with
swift flight
towards the ever changing scene

D.M.

Indeed.

After not reading for years (gasp) I am finally enjoying the intimacy that comes from reading again.

Joyce Carol Oates was one of my favorites. Her visceral scenes haunted me.

Even when a known writer is read, they may not be read for the works they would have wanted to have been remembered by.

The real tragedy to me with regard to writers is that these works may disappear, not that they're not currently being read. I would hope, too, that the fame of days past doesn't dictate what we should read in the future; only so many books can be remembered by the collective public. The best situation for me, and admittedly it's a bit of a fighting retreat, would be to properly index as many writers as we can, using more specific words than simple genre labels, in order that future readers may still discover them, if they have an adventurous spirit.

Then we have to wonder what the state of education will be in, and how much experimentation is encouraged (and heeded). The reason that list of classics is still widely read is the same reason you were forced to read Dickens. I think there are more readers out there who would not have become disenfranchised and built their school accomplishments through forged papers, cheat books, and winging it on final exams. Speaking from personal experience, the book that saved me was 1984. Until I had discovered it, one of the many books forced on me by lit teachers, I had assumed that "literature" was limited to the kind of junk that people who were afraid to use their imaginations were limited to. We were to get past all this genre stuff and forge into the adult territory of the mundane.

1984 used its imagination, and painted a picture of horror that Lovecraft never matched. It is still regarded by some as a genre work, poorly constructed and written, but it saved me. It spoke directly to me, as I imagine A Cather in the Rye would have had that been given to me, and helped me see that literature wasn't about limits so much as possibilities, and that as long as I kept an open mind, I didn't have to worry about how a book was classified.

I still remember that it was the books that seemed to have their own thematic weight, not books that were there just because people have been reading them forever, that reached across and shook me awake. With the proper language we could communicate to more kids in more ways, and break through that barrier that seems to make the books that are read shrink. Individuals might, some day, be defined by what strange curios they find buried in history, rather than walking lockstep with the old classics that we feel honor bound to force our kids to read (and through this fealty to tradition rather than genuine belief, turn them off to the joys of reading, possibly for good).

Expanding on this idea, though, is that just about all work that any of us do may be forgotten, no matter if we achieve fame or not. And a writer, trying his or her best to get their thoughts on to paper, will often find that their fame will have a life of its own, and will speak in a tongue they never wrote in, saying words they never thought. Fame is less immortality than a sort of clone, a pseudochild that has a life of its own, a minor god in an ever-changing pantheon that gives mythological meaning to the current age.

So, yeah, human beings are a callous bunch, allowing the giants whose shoulders we stand on to sink into the soft earth, forgetting that we will, too, disappear.

Yet we still work, because we are a people who build, enjoy building, and enjoy seeing that which other people have built. We forget our inevitable end and do the job because it gives our lives meaning. The tangle that we make through our interactions enriches all of humanity, even if the individual strands will, in time, meld together.

We say a king built a castle, a pharaoh built a pyramid. We know it's not true, and we pity the people forced to do these works, either through coercion or slavery, but we still remember them, and work to make our individual accomplishments matter for us while we're still alive, and for others for all time.

I'm not well read. Maybe it shows in my prose, but I hope that won't keep me from adventuring while I still can, and telling people about it.

I recently read Little Big Man, by Thomas Berger, and saw the film directed by Arthur Penn. Both are great, but the book is more complex and moving (with a radically different ending). Even though it's not widely read anymore (and Berger himself has faded into obscurity), it would definitely make my list of the best American novels of the past 50 years. Berger was reinventing the historical novel years before E.L. Doctorow, and examining serious historical and metaphysical questions while doing so--while I find Doctorow's work to be overly nostalgia-driven.

"Mom was always out in the kitchen cooking, because that's where the stove was."

Inspired by Thurber. Wrote for Letterman. Now writing short humor:

http://sawyerspeaks.wordpress.com/2011/04/15/growing-up-according-to-plan/

Thanks Roger.
Jeff

Personally, I think it's elitist to set boundaries in stereotyping the 'well-read' person. There are countless well-written books from a wide range genres at this moment in history; how is it that some are supposedly 'better' than others?

I'm not trying to be rude here, but I seriously do not believe that a specific list of books has to be read for someone to be 'well-read'. Reading is for pleasure, and I can admit that I think the Lord of the Rings books boring. I like the world it was set in, just not comfortable with the way the books were written to be read. It's not even the genre I find fault with, because I do have a favourite author as with every other genre I prefer.

However, that is not to say that there is nothing wrong with the lack of reading people seem to be doing these days. I'm in my 20s and grew up hating some books/authors because they were mandatory readings for my Literature classes, which basically are suckers of whatever enjoyment I can derive from reading the book. I still love reading though, because I simply enjoy it. It's not something the school system can do, but parents play too important a role in this as well. I have 15-year old students who have never read tales such as Gingerbread Man, which stems from both parents and education system. I could go on forever, but it's a different argument for another day.

I'm not sure if I'm making much sense here.

Ebert: I didn't intend to set any boundaries. For myself, I meander.

How good a substitute are the great movies to literature? the image to the written word? Movies certainly take less time. To make a wild comparison, Cries and Whispers takes an hour or so. Anna Karenina probably took me between one and two months.

I think, given the amount of time people have in a day, and the continually growing body of literature, being well-read will become more individually defined, as people will each have a slice of all of history's literature under their belts, but no longer be able to have all read all the same things, or we would have to stop reading new books as they come out just to keep up.

There will continue to be some touchstone authors, however, since there are a few books that are assigned very broadly as required reading, and those, perhaps, will become the bridges for people to introduce their own reading to each other. Our younger generations are very mobile and are likely to end up living amongst a crowd of people whom they did not go to school with. The potential for literary cross-pollination is, I think, very good.

I hear you, Roger. While I can't say that I am well read like yourself, it dismays me that so few love and appreciate the gift of language. Too many distractions in our modern life. I remember first reading Stephen King's Firestarter back in 7th grade, I wanted to be a writer right then. Guess I still do, seems to be the thing I love to do, and I know I have a natural talent for it. My time is limited now with running my own business and raising kids, but knowing those great authors will be waiting when I have more time on my hands is a comfort. I am grateful my teen daughter loves Shakespeare and S.E. Hinton. My youngest (she's 11 and very gifted) hasn't discovered a love for books yet. Working on it though, got her reading Harry Potter. I read all 7 Potter books in 4 months. You say you love the "classics" and they think you're talking about old rock music. Ever inclined to write your own novel? Or maybe you have already. You're a great man, Mr. Ebert. All the best to you and Chaz.

Have you read Paul Auster or Haruki Murakami? Great storytellers.

You mentioned that Sinclair Lewis is not read at all. I know that he is read at the university level in at least one course at one college--The American Novel. Maybe someone else out there reads him, as well.

I think Sinclair Lewis is well worth someone's time . . . and is still read. The title of _Arrowsmith_, after all, spawned Aerosmith . . . _Elmer Gantry_ became a term for any hypocritical preacher. _Main Street_ and _Babbitt_ still speak to us. I think the problem is that Lewis' style is so different from the minimalist, postmodern style (the no-style style) preferences of today. But give him a chance.

Perhaps Sherwood Anderson, as well. _Winesburg, Ohio_ is generally what people today can relate to.

Don't forget Philip K. Dick. Show me an SF movie that has NOT stolen from PKD in the last few years, credited or uncredited. What is reality? Which is waking and which is sleeping? Are robots/computers with consciousness possible, and if so are we to treat them as we do other sentient beings ("The Measure of a Man" from Star Trek comes to mind)? What is the meaning of life? Do I really have to pay my own front door to open and close? And so forth.

My reading habits are similar; if I hear of something that sparks an indescribable compulsion, I jump to Abebooks or another online retailer and put it in line. Sadly, the line of books-to-read outstrips the reading time I have available. This has resulted in a collection of books that I have yet to get to, or may never get to.

The same trouble plagues my Netflix queue, except that a movie is added to the queue with a simple click of a button. Perhaps this is why I resist buying a kindle. I have no interest in paying 10 dollars for byts that will just collect e-dust on an imaginary shelf, but I will pay 10 dollars to collect handsome volumes to be placed on a bookshelf. And I don't have to powerup my bookshelf to look at them.

I thought I'd stop in and leave a few recommended titles from one of the authors on the "forgotten" list, Stanley Elkin. Elkin has some of the most beautiful sentences I've read, all the more striking because he's incredibly funny and dark. A quick look at Amazon shows that the following two are still in print and available on the Kindle:

A Bad Man: Breaking the law in a foolhardy attempt to accommodate his customers, unscrupulous department store owner Leo Feldman finds himself in jail and at the mercy of the warden, who tries to break Leo of his determination to stay bad.

The Magic Kingdom: Eddy Bale’s twelve-year-old son died after a terrible, drawn-out illness. Now, determined to help alleviate the suffering of other sick children, Eddy plans to take a group of seven terminally ill youths on a dream vacation to Disney World. Accompanied by four eccentric chaperones, Eddy and the kids embark on what is meant to be a magical retreat that quickly devolves into a series of disasters when the kids turn out to be more full of life than anyone expected.

"The Magic Kingdom" also has the Queen of England uttering the line, "Does the Pope shit in the woods?," so that's enough right there.

'Invictus' by William Ernest Henley,
'The Highwayman' by Alfred Noyes,
.. a lover of books of all kind.. the classics to non-fiction.. to the old and new..
'Pope Joan' by Donna Woolfolk.. to The amazing Stephen King.. and Pablo Neruda's; 'A Song of Despair,' and 'Ode to the Atom' And My loved Edgar Allan Poe.. and e.e. cummings.. the feel of old paper.. or new crisp paper.. the "turning of a page.." my loved old books of true parchment.. not only is reading an intrinsic part of my being.. but the books.. themselves have an ethereal quality to them.. I pray no day comes that the only way we can read our favorites..(and or find new ones..) is or will be in dull lifeless.. digital format.. that on that tattered page.. only digital now.. digital now and nothing more.. will Quoth The Raven..
"Nevermore"

If I may say so, this article and many others of late seem to be reflecting back on your life and your influences. I think all of us who appreciate the classics for what they're worth can say that what we have read has influenced who we are. I'm still a fledgling thinker myself, but the significance of art and how different individuals interpret it has led me to appreciate anything highbrow or lowbrow.

But seriously, I just want to thank you for guiding us all through the smoke and mirrors of the entertainment industry and towards the truth of the matter with your bravely expressed insight and analysis of so many things. If we accept lies for the sake of etiquette, the truth becomes obsolete in moments of adversity. So thanks for the honesty and may you never become unread.

This semester I am taking a class on 20th century European thought. I have read books and excerpts from many of the great thinkers of Europe like Bergson, Heidegger, Wittgenstein, and Sartre. Yet, I am also assigned to read Marcel Proust's 'Swann's Way'. I don't know if you have read that or any other pieces from his 'In Search for Lost Time' but I find his imagery, straight from Bergson's perspective on metaphysics, one the most imaginative and emotional. Proust combines both elegant descriptions of the environment as well as deep psychological studies of the characters within the narrative with such details that your almost not even reading the book but feeling it. I find that Marcel Proust is well-read because his books encapsulate so many aspects and thoughts from European civilization as well as anticipates many modes of thinking.

Also, I would give a shout-out to an American writer I find daunting and everlasting; Ray Bradbury. He made the science fiction novel into something majestic and truthfully mysterious.

I was a young bookworm. I could go through a novel a day as a young girl and when I finished university, I could read as fast on the icky stuff. You know, the stuff you read because you should even though you hate every sentence that passes through. This lot includes both textbooks and "great literature" some of the latter being exceedingly dull to a modern mind. Then I got online. I read your column. I read several news sites. I read a bushel full of picture sites with cute animals, stupid humans, and crazy contraptions. I really enjoy it. I don't agree that I need to be "thus" or "so" as a person, I am here and that's is all. It is up to me to make the best of my life and I don't agree that I have some responsibility to the artists, social engineers, grannies or anyone else who wants me to "improve" myself with my time. Frankly, I'm wonderful already and anyone who doesn't agree can and will just move on.
I do tire of the guilt trips from artists who want more market share. They try and tell me I'm letting down humanity by being shallow. Get over it folks, we're just here till we're not and our lovely democratic freedom means you can't shove your morality down my throat. I'll take disapproving rabbits and squee baby lizards over agonized introspections any day.

It deeply troubles me that you don't seem to consider science fiction to be on the same level as your "serious" novels (you grouped it with vampires and Harry Potter, saying those still count).

Anyway, I've always considered myself rather well read for my age. I now realize that this is hardly true. I'm off to find a book to read. =)

I was an English major in college, so I read all the Big Names. I never read them now, I admit, although I read voraciously and have, at last count, three active library cards. So am I "well read"?

The people who claim that reading is dead are fretting over a particular kind of reading. English major reading. Maybe that kind of reading is becoming precious but really, was that ever the way most people read? People largely liked ripping yarns and they still do. Look at lists of the most popular books and you'll find genre fiction, mainly, because that's where the good stories are. As long as legions of teenagers start blogs and pack forums to discuss with great passion the love lives of vampires, I don't think reading is imperiled. I might not particularly like it, and I might cringe at the grammar I see in these posts, but it's reading, and some of those teens will move on from emo vampires to better books.

Dear Mr. Ebert,

May I recommend, since your list seems to accidentally omit, as so many do, some of the great Canadian writers:

Timothy Findley, Mordecai Richler, Sheila Watson, Margaret Atwood, Robertson Davies, Archibald Lampman, Alice Munro, Gabrielle Roy, Alden Nowlan, Michale Ondaatje, Morley Callaghan, Stephen Leacock, Hugh MacLennan, Alistair MacLeod...

Thank you once again for a wonderful post!

Reading this post and all the comments attached to it, I realize how insulated I am in my reading life. Myself, my wife, and all my close friends and family all read avidly, among a wide swath of content: literature, genre, biography, poetry, comics, etc. It's easy to forget sometimes that most people don't read. The art of critical thinking (critical reading and interpretation) is dying out in America. Though there are some heartening trends: the Harry Potter phenomenon, NYRB Classics, Hard Case Crime, the resurgence of Borges, Bolano, Simenon, and Patrick White. All indicators that people are out there reading broadly.

Sadly, I currently can't read as much as I'd like because I am suffering from eyestrain brought on by my job as a Librarian. You'd think I'd be handling books all day but actually I sit in front of a computer for 7 hours a day, 5 days a week. It's made my eyes so wonky and that I can hardly ever read for pleasure. Computers, the internet, iPhones, etc. All of this robs us of time and leisure.

Ebert: Yeah. I'll read anything too, in a pinch. To visit the toilet without reading material seems woeful to me.

I marvel your profundity! Far from maddening crowd! The longer it takes, all the more better. Gandhi called it his library. They are some of my favorite minutes of the day. Ideal for the heavy stuff. If means permit, why not a movie home system too?

Where's Tolkien and Lewis on your list of dead writers still being read? And while Vonnegut hasn't been dead for that long, I'm fairly certain his work will endure.

Two great writers who surprisingly have not been mentioned in either the article or the comments: Tennessee Williams and Mary Shelley.

It doesn't matter most people no longer read. Some always shall—and they are the ones who count.

Electrons are slippery; the Word endures.

I guess I'm the answer to Cynthia Ozick's question (and I'm not a ''professional specialist," either). I've read most of the writers in her list, liked some, disliked others, and was thoroughly disgusted by Allan Bloom, a neoconservative disinformation artist who used his academic credentials to pull the wool over the eyes of unsuspecting readers. He's a particular bete noir of mine. I also vigorously disagree with Ozick (and the general consensus) about Bloom's amigo Saul Bellow. Most of Bellow's work fails to impress me, and I don't think his reputation will survive even among the minority who still reads 'serious' fiction in the future. I think Bellow is destined to be eclipsed by a writer he influenced, the markedly superior Philip Roth. In the literary history of the future, Bellow will play Marlowe to Roth's Will of Stratford. (That's my contrarian prediction, anyway.)

Here's my rule of thumb for literary greatness: When you finish the book, do you feel an impulse to turn back to the first page and start reading it again? The greatest works are the ones that can't be exhausted even by multiple re-readings. For me, some books that meet this criterion are: Ulysses by James Joyce, Absalom, Absalom by William Faulkner, Moby Dick by Herman Melville, Notes from Underground by Fyodor Dostoyevsky, any of the four long fictions of W.G. Sebald (Vertigo, The Emigrants, The Rings of Saturn, Austerlitz), Dante's Inferno, Purgatorio and Paradiso, the plays and poems of Shakespeare, the poems of John Donne, the poems of Paul Celan, Harold Bloom's The Western Canon and The Anxiety of Influence (criticism as art), Walter Pater's sublime The Renaissance, and I'll end this top-of-my-head list with a great work of American philosophy that deserves to be much better known, Inwardness and Existence by Walter A. "Mac" Davis, who I believe was one of your fellow-students during your year at the University of Chicago.

Ebert: W. G. Sebald. Yes. Yes.

I thought it curious that you omitted Joyce and Proust, two writers from the literary canon that are often discussed but seldom read by many beyond literary critics and professors. Proust, in particular, seems to be cited even more frequently in the past 10 to 15 years. I am the only person I know to have made it through all of In Search of Lost Time, even though it took me almost six months to do it. I read Joyce up through Ulysses but will probably never tackle Finnegan's Wake.
I got a B.A. in English but have read more of the literary greats in the 30 plus years since I graduated. I was also always in the majority for being able to not only admire but enjoy most of Henry James. I never thought a person with a life that was so lacking in overt drama would become the subject of more than one novel. Again, people keep coming back to him, perhaps more for what he represents as a cultural touchstone than to actually wade through his many volumes of labyrinthine prose.
You mentioned Balzac, although I am also the only person I know to actually seek him out as well. It's a mystery why he is not more widely read in this country as he is as much a master of storytelling and as much a vivid chronicler of 19th century Paris as Dickens is of 19th century London.
I do appreciate the fact that you, as one of our premier film critics, consistently promote literature and reading. One of the many things I admire about Francois Truffaut is that so many of his characters are avid readers, even the skirt-chasing title character of The Man Who Loved Women. When he's not obsessively pursuing ladies' legs or at his job he's at home reading.
I hope to step up my reading again soon after I finish my master's degree (Library and Information Science). It's always good to get a reminder of all the great writers I haven't yet read that are worth checking out.

I have a weakness for smart American fiction--a story that teaches me something new, offers characters who feel real, and opens up some new aspect of our national experience. Favorites of mine: Cather, Bellow, Faulkner, William Maxwell, Alice McDermott, Stegner. A recent fine book in this high (and you're right, endangered) tradition is, I think, Dana Hand's DEEP CREEK. Chinese gold miners are murdered in Hells Canyon, on the Oregon-Idaho border, and a middle-aged judge goes after their killers, even though his small town would far rather see the crime forgotten. Based on a real event; unusually well-written. (Interestingly, Hand is a pen name for a pair of Princeton writers, one female, one male.)

Any mention of Phil Dick here should bring up his non-SF (one might say "literary") realist novels of the 1950s, only one of which was published during his lifetime (Confessions of a Crap Artist, basis for the French film Confessions d'un Barjo). The many SF stories and novels he wrote in the '50s sold; the non-SF novels didn't, and he stopped writing them around 1960. One of the earliest was first published quite recently: Voices from the Street (Tor, 2007). Tor has been bringing back into print some of the others, such as In Milton Lumky Territory and Humpty Dumpty in Oakland.

As for John O'Hara being categorized as "not so much," I completely agree with respect to his many novels - but his shorter work is much more deserving of survival, and I hope it does survive. My favorites are mostly in his second-last story collection, Waiting for Winter.

Another writer who seems to have faded from view is Bernard Malamud, who's been gone for 25 years now - it's a shame that all of the film adaptations of his work to date have failed to capture what made his storytelling special, and by now there have been a number of them, most recently The Tenants. (The Natural, the only Malamud adaptation most people will have heard of, didn't even try, completely changing the ending.) I wonder whether A New Life will ever be filmed - that could be great with the right cast.

Dear Roger, bit.ly is filtered in Iran.

It was a ironical moment when I clicked on the link on your yet-to-be-banned homepage to READ this blog entry about WRITERS and faced the same good ol' need of resorting to anti-filtering services to get through... :-(

Roger,

Thanks for the interesting article. Personally I think Bellow is overrated, though I loved "More Die Of HeartBreak". I am surprised that some writers seem headed for oblivion. For example, it is hard to find a Peter DeVries novel, except in a library. They are so entertaining, so many people would enjoy them, but good luck finding one. Though one can find many terrible books to read, such as "Art Of Racing In The Rain". Currently I am reading Collected Essays of Aldous Huxley in 6 volumes, and am up to volume 2, so far, so good. Anthony Powell will last because of "Dance To The Music Of Time", if not for that one, his other excellent works such as "Venusburg" and "From A View To A Death" would likely be forgotten same as DeVries' works.

One of things I love the most about A Prairie Home Companion is that Garrison Keillor, an amusing writer himself, introduced me to Billy Collins. How wonderful to hear the man read his own poetry.

Which leads me to point out that many authors are now listened to via Audiobook while people engage in other activities. I wonder how many people use Audiobooks rather than or in addition to reading a hard copy.

My own reading has gone from Trollope, Hardy and Tolstoy as a teenager to the Magic Realists, none of whom seemed to be American, as a young adult to non-fiction today.

I wonder if Spinoza is available on Audiobook....

So glad you are still writing for us Mr. Ebert. I really loved the last paragraph of your article. "We read to know that we are not alone." C.S. Lewis

I also feel I am more well watched than well read though I try my best to be well read. I'm an English Major at Dalhousie University in Halifax Nova Scotia so I'm used to a lot of reading. I just finished a William Faulkner/Toni Morrison class which was quite exciting. This may not sound special but my favourite author is William Shakespeare. I'm what you could call a Shakespeare nerd.

I'm planning on reading Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar this summer, which was deemed the most depressing novel ever written a while back. I've really liked the poetry of Plath's that I've read so I'm looking forward to reading this book.

ok, Roger, i will search out "The Adventures of Augie March".

Some good novelists who may be forgotten: Mordecai Richler and Robertson Davies, except perhaps in a "Library Of Canada" series, Walker Percy, Malcolm Bradbury. Other novelists will be remembered for at least one "classic": William Golding for "Lord Of The Flies", Kingsley Amis for "Lucky Jim", Anthony Burgess for "A Clockwork Orange", Muriel Spark for "The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie", Joseph Heller for "Catch-22", Salinger for "Catcher In The Rye", Kurt Vonnegut for "Slaughterhouse-5". Amis and Spark are two of my favorite authors, and would perhaps be remembered in Great Britain in any event, though perhaps not in the USA.

Ebert: I re-read Davies' Deptford Trilogy last year.

I remember that Stephen King once said that any excuse is valid to read, whether it's a visit to the bathroom or a traffic jam or just about anything. It's an advice that I take at heart (I never leave home without a book) and give to everyone who tells me they don't have time to read books. It's not a competition, nobody's pressuring anyone. You can take a year to finish a book; if you read it thoroughly and, hopefully, you enjoy it, it's worth it. Sadly, not many take my advice.

Personally, I don't believe in a "universal literature", books and authors everyone MUST read, just as I don't believe it with any other thing (movies, places, etc.); somehow it gives the notion that you don't have much of a choice and that you can't dislike them. I have read a lot of the "vital" writers (Dostoyevsky, Tolstoi, Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Hugo, Dumas, etc.), but also I've read some less aplauded writers (lots from my country, almost unknown outside) and even some bathos (like "Twilight", which I hated, but I don't regret reading it). I even read "Dianetics" of L. Ron Hubbard, although that was more because of my morbid curiosity that anything else.
The important thing is just to read and cultivate the mind; I've read hundreds of books since I was a kid (I'm 24 now) and I plan to keep going. When I'm not reading or watching movies, I'm writing.

I must recognize I don't know most of the writers of the list. Maybe it's because of the location, but I don't think so.

Have you read something about Bolaño? You might like it, if you like the books with some sort of mind-screwish thing, that is. Or Vargas Llosa? Of course, that last one is still alive, ja ja.

Loved the entry. Keep it that way.

"...now that they've lost their influence, not only are their members seen at their true value, but their enemies (such as myself, b. 1946) are happy to settle some scores."

Oh, how I hope I live long enough to dance on the grave of close-minded conservatism and stubborn, life-averse, anti-intellectualism!

I can't imagine thinking a writer my enemy. Any writer.

As a first-year graduate student (studying English), it's one of my lifelong goals to be "well-read." It's an incredibly nebulous concept, though, and I often find myself asking whose standard of "well-read" I really mean. On the one hand, the traditional "canon" of "old dead white guys" is important to be familiar with (for someone pursuing a career in academia, at least). And while I love many of those writers (Hemingway, Faulkner, Dickens, Trollope, etc.) my own interests lie primarily outside of their work, and in the movements which, in large part, run counter to "tradition." I am reminded of Jonathan Rosenbaum's "Alternate 100" list from some years ago, in which he challenged the AFI's list of the "Top 100" American films. One could argue about which list is better, but that would be missing the point: that it is impossible to contain the vast number of culturally significant works of art (be they books, films, or anything else) to a single list.

This is something I've only begun to realize recently. Like you, Roger, my approach to reading has been a non-systematic (perhaps even haphazard) one, for lack of a better word. I read what I enjoy (or what I think I will enjoy), and I write about it when I can. In a strange way, this approach, or lack therof, has been both encouraged and frustrated by the structure of my graduate program. Rather than writing a thesis to complete our Master's Degree, we have a comprehensive exam that we must pass instead -- one that covers a long list of authors and works spanning from the anonymous author of Beowulf to Toni Morrison.

I like this, in one sense: it forces me to read authors outside of my primary field of interest (20th century American literature and culture), and thus to gain a broader base of knowledge which I'm sure will serve me well in the long run. After all, I'll have plenty of time later to pursue my field in a much more in-depth way. But then I read things like this post, which make me realize the limitations of lists, and of the "canon." You see, not one of the writers listed by Ozick in the fourth paragraph of your post appear on the list; nor have I ever been formally instructed on any of them in any of my classes. The authors from Ozick's list that I have read are ones I sought out in my free time. In other words, the sad fact is that not only are many of these writers no longer widely read, but they are no longer widely taught, even at a graduate/professional level.

That said, perhaps the benefit of studying a wide range of literature is that it makes you more capable of exploring works outside of the canon on your own. Of course, I'm talking about people who essentially make a living of reading and writing, and not about the average person. As I once saw pointed out somewhere (perhaps it was even on this blog), it's only within the "academy" that Thomas Pynchon is considered to be more "mainstream" than Michael Bay. It's a strange world we live in, where neither popular nor academic opinion seem entirely oriented towards what me might call an "ideal" appreciation of what makes art...art.

Ebert: I don't think she believes you necessarily should read all those writers. Her point is that once they were read, now they're not, and Saul Bellow still is.

The point in being "well read" is probably selfish--because you love good books. The odds of finding someone else with your reading scope is very small (even in graduate school, maybe). Once in Hawaii I sat on Paul Theroux's veranda and we talked for hours about books we loved, simply because we could. In Hawaii, he said, when Leon Edel died, he lost his book-talk buddy.

"...the shit will sink and the good stuff will rise.”

Not if film continues to be the dominant story-telling medium, and especially not if James Cameron, Zack Snyder, Michael Bay, Christopher Nolan, etc. ad nauseum, continue to work.

Roger

I think you need to add some travel writing to your list. If you havent read Patrick Leigh Fermor's magnificent A Time Of Gifts yet consider yourself very lucky, you are in for a treat.

The twentieth century was the high point of literary travel writing and most of the following books are still read purely for their literary qualities:

A Time of Gifts - Patrick Fermor

A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush - Eric Newby

Labels - Evelyn Waugh

A Dragon Apparent - Norman Lewis

Black Lamb and Gray Falcon - Rebecca West

Yes. I want to be well read.

I've been reading all my life. I'm 49 years old now and most of the "classics" I read were when I was in high-school. I enjoyed them then, but I seemed to have lost my way afterwards. I still read, but it was mostly "junk-food". Pulp fantasy or horror or court-room type things, but nothing really of substance. Popular to be sure, but nothing that's going to make you contemplate what you had just read. But as I grew older, I wanted to start "reading healthy" I suppose is the only way I can describe it. The pulp fiction I was reading just wasn't satisfying me.

So, where do I begin? What to read? I'm only on this earth a finite set of hours, so what I read has to matter. I can't get them back. One place where I started was a list that appeared a few years ago in the NY Times of the "Best Work of American Fiction of the Last 25 Years" or something to that effect. So I started knocking off things like Morrison's "Beloved" and Updike's "Rabbit Run" and DeLillo's "Underworld". Then I got to McCarthy"s "Blood Meridian" and that stopped me cold. It was like running into a brick wall. Let me just say that "Blood Meridian" was one of the most horrific books I've ever read....and I've read a ton of horror novels. That novel really put the zap into my brain. So then I started devouring everything from McCarthy. I'm still reading him to this day.

Also, I look at the Pulitzer Prize winners of fiction for things to read, but I don't know where else to get good recommendations. I honestly can't look to my friends and family because they're reading book 12 of Discworld or the Wheel of Time series and bless them, that makes them happy to read. But it's not enough for me. I know, it sounds like an elitist snob, but to me it's junk food. It's not good for me. So...what do I read? I want to read for pleasure. But I want it to be GOOD.

Also, I've read SO much over the past year...about three times as much as I normally would, all thanks to the Kindle. Reading both from the Kindle App on my iPad to the actual Kindle. It's been wonderful and convenient. If a book isn't available on the Kindle that's okay, I move on to something that is. As I say, I only have so much time left in my life to read, and I'll never run out of books.

Where do I discover what to read though? Just what I've been doing? Just go with the flow and see where things take me?

Roger,

Oh, what little do I know.

I just walked out of a coffee shop with John Fante's 'Ask the Dust' under my arm which happened there perchance through a course of events that could have started with Marx's 'Das Kapital,' shrugged up next to Anthony Powell's 'A Dance To The Music of Time,' danced with Claudia Rankine's 'Don't Let Me Be Lonely,' and tripped over Bukowski himself somewhere in the dark on my way from James Baldwin's 'The Fire Next Time.'

I'm but a babe with amniotic fluid still in my hair and the books that I have read, and love, and hope to get back to, are collecting dust behind all the movies that still need to be seen, music that still needs to be heard; life I need to live.

How can things be forgotten if they are never known?

Thanks for another decades worth of authors (I only knew eight on the list) I can spoon with at night. However, now I might know why I keep getting rejection notices for my writing, and grad school applications:

I'm not well read enough.

Or is it "read well enough?"

I don't know that there could ever be a list of names and titles one must check off before they receive their Reading Merit Badge. I know, for certain, however, that one must read and keep reading until they find that one book, that one author, which releases them from their devotion to "Genre" and introduces them to that elusive, essential human trait --- curiosity.

It is the same for books as it is for movies, as it is for music, as it is for philosophy.

When you gain your pleasure from thinking, as a side effect to being entertained, I think you are on your way.

Playing which of these writers does not belong--Cather, Hemingway, Faulkner and Fitzgerald. Cather? A great writer but not even close to those other three or some others you mentioned. I also think that readers today aren't going to automatically read all of someone's works because a few were outstanding. And why should they? So they can say that they read all of their books? If you start reading a Faulkner and don't like it, why should you continue because you liked The Sound and The Fury? I agree with you about reading for pleasure but too many read to prove something.

Ebert: I stand by Cather's name on the list. Passionately.

I suppose it's not surprising. If you compare the thousands of books that get published every year to the far fewer number of movies that get made, it's easier to feel connected to the contemporary pulse of movie making than to developments in the world of literature. Additionally, you can check a great movie off the bucket list with a sense of accomplishment in a few hours, as compared to days or weeks for many novels.

Ultimately, is reading necessarily more admirable than going to an opera, a play or a film? The former lets you appreciate only a single art form, while the others capture several: writing, acting, singing, dancing, music, costumes, set design, etc.

Oh, just to be a troll, you know what other author is still being read long after her death.

Ayn Rand.

Let the death of this thread begin!

(sorry)

Hey Roger,

You should check out "A Moveable Feast" by Hemingway. It's beautiful. I love your blog, please keep up the good work.

Thanks,
Matt

Does anyone read John dos Passos any more? Yet he influenced all the great midcentury writers. One of those writers, James Jones, will be remembered if only for a single novel, "From Here to Eternity." I've read it every few years for half a century.

@Mike:

"I can't imagine thinking a writer my enemy. Any writer."

Even the writer of Mein Kampf?

(again, sorry, but it had to be said)

Hah!
Look at this.
A new post by Ebert and already a long list of answers!

I will copy his journal entry and read it through on a quiet day.

Learning. That's what I do.

It's very commendable to read your appreciation of reading and how important it is, but with the world in such sad shape right now, on so many levels, I think many people think reading classic literature is a somewhat unneccesary luxury. It reminds me of the book Waterworld, where a student asks a teacher why studying history is so important. Perhaps you can write a column on why reading classic literature is so important in the context of today's external world, not just the internal world of the mind.

"The Importance of Being Iceland" - Eileen Myles.
"A Suitable Boy" - Vikram Seth.
Michael Forsythe Trilogy - Adrian McKinty.

Maybe one day more people will read. Meanwhile writers keep on writing.

I have heard many people bring up these sorts of arguments about degrading intellectual standards, but to me, the real question is two-fold:

1. Has there been a reduction in the number and quality of the highest-level of literary output in recent years?

2. Has there been a reduction in the number and quality of intellectual and research output (scientists, novelists, writers, mathematicians, philosophers, etc.)

My theory is 1) NO and 2) NO. The only difference is that technology and different standards have made it easier for us to observe the lower-end of the bell curve.

As an academic, I see it all the time: 50 years ago, only the cream-of-the-crop were admitted to university. Today, we accept many more students, but are absolutely puzzled by why the intellectual level seems to have dropped. Well, of course it's going to drop.

Similarly, the number of literate people in the world has climbed steadily over the years. Of course the per capita number of people who have read Shakespeare is going to drop.

I'm almost 19, but I hope to be well-read; I do tend to read a lot, though; I read on the Internet constantly, am in the middle of several graphic novels (Akira is a great epic of science fiction and should be taught), but I'm in the middle of Portrait of the Artist As A Young Man. The passages on hell are some of the best I've ever read on what that concept truly means.

FYI:"Proust Was a Neuroscientist", by Jonah Lehrer, explained and clarified many things for me as a writer, and helped me to understand more my intense desire to merge art and science to create more symmetry in our mass thinking.

(I think books like this are a good supplement when perusing works from writers old, and new).

Pre-internet, I read a lot. A book or two every day, mostly science fiction. Then I became a scientist, and started reading real science.

Reading of fiction dwindled considerably, but it has picked back up considerably since I've become a Kindle addict. I've got the complete works of about 150 authors on it, though most date to before 1923, the year chosen for the Public Domain to stop. Becoming well read for more modern authors would require a larger amount of cash.

Amusingly, Dr. Adolf Ebert wrote on this same topic in 1860. Look up Jahrbuch fuer Romanische und Englische Literatur.

"My only goal is to enjoy reading."

That is the key. I appreciate 'great lit' lists because they give me a place to start: with so great a multitude of books and only one life, I don't want to waste precious time. By the same token, if I start a so-called 'great' and don't find it compelling, I don't always feel the need to see it through to the end. Compelling doesn't necessarily mean that I 'like' it, I could be intrigued or challenged or even incensed. If I put down a book, it's because the book has no noticeable impact, good or bad. Maybe the timing isn't right, and I'll pick it up in a few months or years and find it amazing. Then again, maybe not.

At any rate, when I read, whether it's 'great lit' or pop lit or children's lit (and, as I get older, I find certain 'children's' books stick with me in a way many adult novels do not), what matters to me is that there are ideas to which I can react, which entertain me and encourage me and challenge me to develop ideas of my own. Whether it's 'Harry Potter' or 'The Sound and the Fury', what makes a book 'great' is that changes a reader in a meaningful way. Of course, some books achieve that more readily that others; but you never know 'til you pick one up.

I consider myself a haphazard reader, too. I have not read anyone on Cynthia Ozick's list and, yet, I do consider myself well read. Of course, I've read Poe and Twain, quite a lot of them, actually. I still read Steinbeck, I read Whitman and other poets. I remember the mythologist, Joseph Campbell, stating that, to really get to know a scholar's work and the work that informs them, read every thing you can by them and then read the people that they cite in their texts. I never really tried that but I did read a lot of authors Campbell cited after reading as much of his own work I could get my hands on. I read Mircea Eliade (still do), I read Frazier's Golden Bough, James Joyce who was arguably the greatest writer of the English language although some might wish to bestow that honor on Shakespeare. A few months back, after finishing up a degree in anthropology, I decided to embark on an ambitious endeavor and read every volume of Will and Ariel Durant's Story of Civilization. I'm still on the first volume but I'm not giving up!
Don't despair. I think these writers will still be read (even if not by me). If anyone is reading them now—and how would Ozick know if they're not?—perhaps they're simply not sharing. If they're not being read, perhaps this little push will get the ball rolling.

Dear Roger,

You mentioned that you were leaving living authors such as David Foster Wallace out of the discussion--but I hope you meant it as hyperbolic praise for the vitality of Wallace's work, because he's unfortunately been dead since 2008.

That being said, I would love to recommend a book to you--Chris Adrian's "The Childrens' Hospital."

Not mentioned: Tom Jones, by Henry Fielding. Not only an entertaining novel, it also is recommended by an Oscar winning movie and an excellent BBC miniseries.
Not mentioned: Dreams of the Red Mansion, by Cao Xueqin. A fun novel but encyclopedic in its description of its time and place. Supported by detailed CCTV miniseries.
Not mentioned: Cyranno de Bergerac, by Edmund Rostand. Do plays count? If so...
Not mentioned: Salome, and The Importance of being Ernest, by Oscar Wilde.
Mentioned, but not in the original article, anything and everything by Kurt Vonnegut. Especially The Sirens of Titan which is, according to Esquire: "His best book . . . He dares not only ask the ultimate question about the meaning of life, but to answer it."
These additions aren't meant as a criticism of the article, but as suggested reading for people who are inspired by the topic to search out new texts.

Thank you for defending Cather. Just finished Professor's House, a book of hers that is really receiving a lot of critical attention in the last twenty years or so and wrote a pretty darn good paper on it last week, if I do say so myself.

On Bellow: I am in the midst of writing my thesis right now, on the male protagonists of post-1950s literature (the archetype - "the angsty young man" - aka The Anti-Hemigway). Bellow's Seize the Day is one of the books I used, the only Bellow I have read (I loved it, my advisor is not a fan of Bellow but knew that it would work for the thesis). I am also using the works of Philip Roth, Walker Percy, John Cheever, and John Updike: contemporaries of Bellow. In my opinion, all of these authors will (and have) held up, even moreso than Bellow. Updike's prose is as decorous as Fitzgerald's; Roth is in a simliar vein as James; Cheever is not as recognized, most likely because he writes in the short story genre. Percy's The Moviegoer is also brilliant. My opening argument which segues into my thesis is the first passage from The Dangling Man.

I am a senior undergraduate returning adult student (30 yo, female). I wish I had finished 7 or 8 years ago, but goddamned I'm savoring every morsel of it in a way I never would have when I was 20.

Ebert: "The Professor's House" haunts me. I agree about the worth of Philip Roth, Walker Percy, John Cheever, and John Updike; Cheeve's "Wapshot Chronicle" is a masterpiece.

Although I have read many books, you remind me again there are still the wondrous regions I have not been to. Let's see, I read two Dickens novels, nearly all works of James Joyce, "Moby Dick", two Austen novels, three books by Forster, two Faulkner novels, two novels by Steinbeck, one short story and one novel by Hemingway, six McCarthy novels, two novels by Marquez, one work by Simenon(I'm glad that lots of his work will be soon introduced to my country, by the way), that long book by Proust, two Joseph Heller novels, a novel by Vonnegut and so on. But I haven't read any of works by Murdoch or Conrad or Waugh or James or Wharton or Woolf or Navokov yet - and I have woefully been too far away from Russian literatures(Unfortunately, one of my good teachers complained to us that they were boring when I was young).

I wish I can read those books untouched by me as soon as possible, but the other books and the limited time somehow have prevented me from reading them. I'm reading Jon Krakauer's "Into Thin Air" - and there are other books I bought in Chicago last year. At least, I still have lots of time to study and read.

P.S.

1. I also found bathroom is useful for reading.

2. I'm considering reading "Atlas Shrugged" due to my curiosity after finding it at the campus library. But, for saving time, I will read a translated version instead. It's a big book, but it smells of a potboiler.

3. "Perfume" is one of fascinating books I read during elementary school days. I hope they will release CD someday.

Ebert: I don't think you would find "Crime and Punishment" boring.

Sinclair Lewis still speaks to the America behind the myths. I'm waiting for the Coen Brothers to film "Kingsblood Royal".It is still very much a story of our time.

I graduated from highschool last year, and I spent most of those 4 years trying to become as 'well read' as possible. Partly to improve myself, but mostly just to imitate the intellectuals I looked up to (including Mr. Ebert!). In single semester I devoured both of Tolstoy's epics, just because they were thick and impressive looking. I discovered Dosteovsky, read several Dickins works, along with Cormac McCarthy, Jane Austen, Victor Hugo, Kirk Vonnegut, Mark Twain, Upton Sinclair, Herman Wouk, etc etc and many other "lesser" writers like Stephen King, Robert Heinlein, Arthur C Clarke, Neil Gaimen, Harry Turtledove and so on just for personal pleasure. I even suffered through 2/3rds of "Atlas Shrugged" before abandoning it. The school library had a points systems based off how much you read, and an english class would require you to read around 20-50 points a semester. By the time I graduated, I had well over a thousand points altogether. Did any of this make me a better, wiser person? I don't think so. I think its probably more of a testament of how much free time I had and how little of a social life. These days I work through an individual novel much slower, and I much prefer nonfiction works about politics or history. And while several of those novels will stick with me, I'll be damned if I can remember a single plot point or character in "War and Peace".

Honestly, what made a much bigger impact on me was a different project along the same veins. I followed the great movies list on your website and tried to fill in the gaps in my knowledge of film canon. It helped awake a great passion for the medium inside me, to the point where I honestly would never read a book again if it came down to a choice between that and film. Not that it should be a choice, mind you, just trying to illustrate the impact its had on me.

Of course, I also read a lot of comic books and played a lot of video games so maybe my mind has been so thoroughly ruined by such drivel to the point that I cannot enjoy good literature anymore.

Ebert: Sounds to me as if you're doing just fine.

Two thoughts:

1. This post made me resolve to dig out my copies of the "Harvard Classics Five-Foot Shelf of Books" and actually get going on my someday-plan to read through them all.

2. Thank you very much for the post, because it caused me to think about one of my most treasured memories. Years ago, I was sitting in the waiting area of a Speedy Muffler, waiting for (a lot of) work to be done on my car, and reading Mrs. Dalloway. An elderly man a few seats away from me apologetically asked why I was reading it. When I explained that I had borrowed a copy of The Hours from a friend, but wanted to re-familiarize myself with the Woolf book before I read it, he lit up. He told me that he was a retired English professor from a local college, I told him that I taught English at an area high school, and we spent the next hour discussing literature. He told me about the Bells and the Hogarth Press; I told him about Carrington and Lytton Strachey; eventually, somehow, we found ourselves talking about Steinbeck's characterization of women. It was the kind of encounter that could never occur in fiction, and one that I rejoiced at. I never learned his name, but I remain grateful to him for providing me with such an unexpected, wonderful conversation.

Thank you again for calling it to my mind.

Ebert: When you meet someone like that, it's like a connection on a SETI search right here in Earth.

I've compiled a quick list that I highly recommend others read:

"Dr. Bloodmoney" - Philip K. Dick
"Candide" - Voltaire
"Haters" - David Moody
"Siddhartha" - Herman Hesse
"Tin Drum" - Gunter Grass
"Cat and Mouse" - Gunter Grass
"Collected Poems" - Alan Ginsberg
"The Constitution of the United States" -Jefferson et.al.
"Satanic Bible" - Anton LaVey
"Kafka on the Shore" Haruki Murikami
"Anthem" - Ayn Rand (Her most succinct work)
"Mathematics for the Million" - Hogben
"Relativity: The Special and General Theory" - Einstein
"The Ethics" - Spinoza
"The Presocratics" - Philip Wheelwright
"The Double Helix" - James Watson
"Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus" - Wittgenstein
"Mathematics for the Million" - Hogben
"Philosophy of Andy Warhol" - Andy Warhol
"Les Miserables" - Victor Hugo
"Midnights Children" - Salman Rushdie
'The Burrough,' Metamorphosis' and 'Hunger artist' - Franz Kafka
"The World as Will and Representation" - Arthur Schopenhaur
"Science of Logic" - Hegel
"Critique of Pure Reason" -Kant
"Das Kapital" (To the poster on the other thread who suggested I hadnt read this, I actually still have the copy I read when I was 17. Being well read is essential for being analytical and that means reading things you might disagree with).
"Galapagos" - Vonnegut
"The Ones Who Walked Away from Omelas" - Ursula K. Le Guin

Enjoy!
Jambalaya

Hey Roger,

I'm 26. The statistic about high schoolers never reading is probably true. I remember that I never read anything in high school except what I had to. Now I'm a law student, and my reading today consists of hundreds and hundreds of boring cases. I have sought out Cormac McCarthy (on your advice, actually) after falling in love with the "No Country for Old Men" film. I've read "Blood Meridian" and was baffled that there were vocabulary words in there that I had never seen before. I'm going to have to give it a second go, or maybe a third, before I can fully absorb all of it. As I'm sure you know, there's a "Blood Meridian" movie coming. I think that the experience of reading some books can be enriched by then watching the films, and vice versa.

Also, it's a bit ironic that you decided to become a film critic. Film is a medium of entertainment that has done quite a bit to usher in the death of reading, just like radio before it. Books are just considered "high brow" entertainment now. Most Americans would roll their eyes if you suggested Shakespeare to them. I'd count myself among them. Things change, I think, and while Shakespeare and very great authors will always have a place among the intellectual elite, regular folks just aren't going to care... I don't think this is a bad thing.

Nobody wants to watch "ugly black and white" movies today either. I've never wanted to watch a silent film - I probably never will. The great directors of the past like Fellini, Kubrick, Welles, etc. will all be forgotten. We will have new great authors, new great directors. Yes, the Twilight series is very popular now but right before it came Harry Potter. For every 10 Transformers movies that come, there is surely a Dark Knight close behind. Your world will pass, and so will mine, and the only real regret we should have is that we won't live to see that the true golden age of art is our limitless future.

I find it sad that you mention Sinclair Lewis, as I have discovered him in the past year, and enjoy his novels nearly as much as those of my favorite author, Charles Dickens.

So much to read, so little time...

"Ironically, Bellow is the one writer no one has yet mentioned in this thread."

Well, Saul Bellow is my favorite writer. And although it's clear that he's still read, consider this: Humboldt's Gift is his most beautiful book, but would you recommend it to anyone?

Take a look at his sales rankings on Amazon and it's dispiriting.

He may go the way of Cheever, one of Bellow's own favorite authors.

Roger-As an English teacher currently working in a public high school, I'd like to let you know that reading among young people is in decline on a catastrophic level. That said, I was amazed that this year my sophomores read two of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales (granted, they were the some of the bawdiest ones) along with the General Prologue, and they demanded that we read a third! A select few even asked to borrow the book for a longer period in order to read some of the others. So there is a little hope...
What authors are people reading? Any student of mine in my sophomore class gets Golding, Tolkien, Chaucer, and a very abridged version of Beowulf. Every kid in my high school gets a Shakespeare play a year and I don't think that's the exception for most schools on Long Island.
Being a specialist in Chaucer and Shakespeare, I'm out of the loop on modern authors but I can't seem to put down any Cormac McCarthy book and have discovered real enjoyment in Raymond Chandler partly because of your Great Movies books. Part of me bemoans the ossification of so many authors due to technology and the loss of what may be, yet this past week, one of my tenth graders had Dante's Inferno on his desk. Why was he reading it?
Because there's a video game based on it, naturally.

Ebert: Well, that's a reason.

I know this comment thread is now a million entries long, so this will probably be an example of my whispering into the great cyberabyss that is the Internet, but as you found yourself limiting your reading selections to your great favorites at this point in your life, I hope you still find time to explore. The greatest author writing today may well be Jamaica Kincaid ("The Autobiography of My Mother"!), and then there are a good few writing today who manage a masterpiece here and there (Andrea Levy's "Small Island," Nicole Krauss' terribly-titled "The History of Love"). Explore!

Especially Kincaid, I swear it.

Ebert: I didn't mean to leave the impression I had limited my reading list!

So many books, so little time.
Maybe they will all be made into movies.

One of my favourites that I return to every few years is W. Sommerset Maugham. His language flows like a river and often with the depth of poetry.

And I'm proud to say that both my young children are avid readers. My 12-year-old son in particular will read just about anything from Archie to Tom Sawyer. Maybe he's an anomoly though. He also loves old movies, citing The Picture of Dorian Gray as one of his favourites, along with anything by the Marx Brothers. He recognizes Cary Grant and Humphrey Bogart at a glance. Both my kids (my daughter is 9) have asked when we can watch more Buster Keaton silents!

I suppose my point is that our passions are often something learned. My children have witnessed my enjoyment of both book and film and have hungrily wanted to be a part of that -- something I am only too willing to share. And with that interest set, I am certain that one day (along with their intimate knowledge of Selena Gomez and Justin Beiber) they will stumble upon the likes of Wilde and Austin, but also Asimov and Clarke, and anyone else that captures their imagination.

Ebert: I re-read "Of Human Bondage" a couple of years ago. Holds up well!

Ah, great list Roger.... Since my busy family has arrived, I have a wonderful excuse to "not find the time" but was (should be?) a reader of most anything I can get my hands on. I find now that I'm in my 30's, dusting off the old HS reading list and re-reading them through an adults eyes is refreshing. I recently read The Grapes of Wrath again, and that book puts you in the dirt and dust and evokes emotion like no movie ever could. I'm curious: Have you ever read Whale Music by Paul Quarrington? It is one of my favourite novels, and I revisit it from time to time. I understand it would not rank up there with the classics, however I judge a book by the feeling it evokes in me...the connection it gives me to its' characters and settings. Anyway, thanks for giving me something to think about. BTW - you're TED talk brought me to tears, BRAVO!

Mr. Ebert,

The universe is rather whimsical, I find. Your post has encountered me at an opportune moment and I feel compelled to comment. Ordinarily I do not, as I try to wait until I feel I have something of intelligence to contribute, so as not to diminish the good work you and your friends are doing here.

I'm toiling diligently at present to join the illustrious group of authors with which your post is concerned. An agent in New York is helping to edit what constitutes my fifth completed novel (but only the first one that was worth a damn) - a lengthy and arduous process that contains a sliver of hope at its conclusion. While I wait for word on my manuscript's fate, I'm working on yet another book and reading through some Milan Kundera. You know: to keep my spirits high.

However, with the state of literature and its consumption in such decay, what - I ask - is the purpose of continuing to create novels? From the POV of an idealist, I understand it, certainly. There is something noble and romantic about the transfer of one's ideas into something tangible and the offering of same out into the world. But it certainly does not mean what it once did.

When I first started jotting down thoughts on scraps of paper, part of the allure (albeit distant) was the prospect of having my name possibly mentioned alongside Twain, Poe, Salinger, Bronte, DeLillo, Mailer, Greene, Steinbeck...and thousands of others. But now even those names are fading from the collective conscious. The brick and mortar stores that sell books are dwindling. And how long will it be before the Kindle gives way entirely to an abridged audiobook? And then merely a recorded anecdote? It seems that if the current path continues, the long-form story will only be a memory soon. A lost art. Like those tribes in the Amazon who can still make rafts from tree bark.

So the question that your post aroused in me was this: if the very act of reading is fading from the social atmosphere then what is the point of continuing to create things meant to be read? To write a novel (or any form of book, as you well know) takes such a staggering investment of time, but for what purpose? If there will be no readers for it, then the only satisfaction from a creative standpoint would be...what? A printed copy of my book, a small section of missing rainforest that was sacrificed to create the paper, and a semi-decent review from The Cleveland Plain Dealer, maybe?

I'm not trying to equate public adulation with the great satisfaction that comes from finishing the writing of a novel. But it has occurred to me that I'm attempting to enter an industry that is very quickly rendering itself extinct. I get the sinking feeling that within my lifetime, I will see the very last printing of a novel. It will probably happen on a Monday, and Facebook and Twitter (or whatever has replaced them) will be full of snark and memorials, and then by Tuesday Haley Joel Osment, now 63, will be arrested for a DUI in Omaha and the age of books will officially be old news.

I'm sure this comment seems fatalistic but, to me at least, not as far-fetched as it might seem. Do you think there is still value in trying to write a novel, Mr. Ebert? Do you think that even if one person, somewhere in the world, is affected by the work that justifies its entire act of creation? Or do you understand why I might now feel like the dancing chicken at the end of "Stroszek?" Sure, it's nifty to see a chicken that can waltz, but maybe it would have been more useful in the fryer at a KFC in Milwaukee?

I had the great good fortune to go to a high school in a year when they banned a great number of books. Therefore, I immediately had to go and read them all (except one, which I could not get hold of anywhere, Tropic of Cancer). I read Huckleberry Finn (amazingly, it was banned for racism), Andersonville, Chairman Mao's Little Red Book, Mein Kampf, As I Lay Dying, Catch 22, the Decameron, Canterbury Tales, the Faerie Queene, Grapes of Wrath, the Critique of Pure Reason, and many other books which ensured that my mom was terrified that the librarian would call the FBI on me. It was probably the best reading year of my life. Perhaps ironically, my favorite book of that year was Farenheit 451.

When my son was about 13 he became a Voltaire addict, and he was reading Candide at my workplace (I'm a nurse) while waiting for me one day. A man sitting there told me, "Why would you let him read that? He can't possible understand it." My son said, "I believe that I do understand it, very well." The man said, "Well, tell me what it's about, then." My son never looked up and said, "It's about my mom's job here." I laughed all the way home!

One thing I find difficult about so many outlets for reading and writing, and likewise for video entertainment and music, is that the dispersal of people amongst so many different outlets is that we hardly have a common interest with very many real people that we know. Remember when we were all talking about who shot JR? Everybody listened to pretty much the same music, or we would find a great new book and pass it around to everybody.

As an avid gamer, I use terms and slang that my coworkers don't know. Many of my crew listen to rap and hiphop, which I do not, so they have a different frame of reference. Even Bible quotes are often unfamiliar, which is deeply strange here in the Deep South, but the times they are a-changing'. So often, we seem to be speaking the same language as those around us, but we are not. I went to a Renaissance Faire with a bunch of Dungeons and Dragons geeks and they might as well have been speaking Urdu as far as my workfriend was concerned.

I've gotta say in my opinion The Great Gatsby is the "Great American Novel". Course I'm not an American so maybe my opinion isn't really qualified.

I recognize a few of the authors in Ozick's list, mainly from my time working in a small town library when I was in high school. No one read them then, and that was 10 years ago. Roger, your list was like reading the names of friends, full of warm feelings and memories of reading good books in restaurants. I had a 9-month period of indolence between college and graduate school, so I started reading through the Modern Library Top 100 list, keeping a journal of my thoughts and opinions on them as I go along. The intent was to become "well-read", to be better able to discuss literature. 35% of the way in, it's become a pleasure, a means of discovering new ways of thinking and understanding people. This project has become the best use of leisure time not spent catching up on sleep.
As for Anthony Powell's A Dance to the Music of Time, that series is proof that you should never give up on a book after the first chapter. It took the first two books to get me hooked, and by the time I finished the last volume, I didn't want it to end. Such an epic and glorious masterpiece!

I was an English major, consider myself well read, etc. There are so many books, and so many good ones among them, that it's possible to be very well read and still have a long, long list of titles you've been meaning to get to. I've been immersing myself in the work of David Foster Wallace lately, and have begun - for the fourth or fifth time - Infinite Jest again. Do you know him, Roger? I have hope I will succeed at this attempt as I have now read several of his other novels and "get" him, as much as I, non-genius, can ever hope to get a genius.

What's fascinating is how one book can lead to so many others you might not have otherwise considered, and how those books lead you to many more.

In 1967 I was 13 years old & starting 9th grade. I was already an avid reader when my homeroom teacher -- bless you, Mr. Lloyd Grosse! -- noticed the sort of books I read -- a lot of science-fiction & historical fiction -- I was enthralled by "Captain Blood" at the time. He lent me his Ace paperback of "The Fellowship of the Ring" with a smile & said I just might enjoy it.

At the same time, we were reading "The Odyssey" in English. Well, it didn't take me long to realize that Tolkien & Homer were essentially covering the same sort of territory. Within the year I had immersed myself in the Greek playwrights, Medieval & Renaissance literature, and discovered my first great lifelong author, Dante.

Dante led me to William Blake, and I realized that he was also in Tolkien & Homer territory. This led me to the English Romantics, to myth in general, to Campbell & Jung. I thrilled to recognize the mythic references in Cream's song "Tales of Brave Ulysses," for instance. And much of the music from then led me to the Surrealists & the Beats.

We were also reading "Great Expectations" then, which oddly led me not to more Dickens at first, but to "Jane Eyre," a book & a character I still love with a passion to this day -- looking forward to seeing the newest film version of it! And from there to the range of 19th Century authors.

By the way, a few years ago I looked up Mr. Grosse & sent him a letter, thanking him for that paperback & for all the encouragement he gave me. I was delighted to hear back appreciatively from him. Blog readers, if there's a teacher you remember who did something similar for you, don't hesitate to let him or her know it!

"Just to read for yourself for pleasure is the point. Dickens will come later, Henry James perhaps never."

This part gave me hope. Until then I felt hopelessly inadequate. I, sadly, am not well read, but I am trying more and more to read well. The authors listed by Ozick? I have read not a single one of them -- and I was an English major! And even at just 27 years old I think I shall never find the time to appreciate the greatest movies and the greatest literature. There's just too damn much of it. Where to start? Where to end? If I have yet to read a single novel by Dickens, should I hang my head in shame? Does it win me any points that I recently read "The Picture of Dorian Gray" by Oscar Wilde? I feel like I'm trying to acquire cultural knowledge but I'm not fast enough, and it whizzes past me faster than I can keep up with.

My Kindle might be a great help. There are countless public domain books available to download for free, and since those books include mostly the old and still-read it seems the free books available on a Kindle are far more valuable than any I could pay for. (Among the titles I downloaded with the intention to read ... someday: "Anna Karenina," "Frankenstein," "The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes," and "A Tale of Two Cities.") I'm not generally a fast reader, though I've been getting faster. Just the fifteen books I downloaded, ranging in difficulty, could alone take me a couple of years to get through. This in addition to my pursuit of writing. I'm overwhelmed.

I just finished a David Sedaris collection and earlier this year I read "Freedom" by Jonathan Franzen. I've read Cormac McCarthy and am soon to embark on my second Jonathan Safran Foer ("Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close"). Of all the authors I've read in my life I've fallen in love with few, maybe even just two: F. Scott Fitzgerald (or, specifically, "The Great Gatsby," which I loved in high school) and Edgar Allan Poe, whom I studied in college and continue to read; "The Raven" remains one of my all-time favorite pieces of writing -- such emotional urgency yet with such a flawless rhythm of words that it resembles fine architecture as much as poetry.

I'm in-between jobs right now. Goodness knows how much will pass me by when I'm working. I wonder if that's what happens from most people: we start out curious and then we find it harder to make time for curiosity as we get older.

I'm going to London next month for the first time and have started to celebrate the occassion by reading some Wodehouse and the new Tom McCarthy book "C." I'd like to read more Dickens (I've only read David Copperfield which I loved) before I depart. My inclination is to read Great Expectations but should I read Oliver Twist, Pickwick Papers, or Nicholas Nickleby first? I'm sure I'll read them all eventually but I'm just curious to hear if I should "prioritize."

Thanks for a great discussion.

Ebert: If you really want to sink into London, how about "Our Mutual Friend?"

I am an avid reader but I may not be considered well-read. I have my favourite authors - John Grisham, Stephen King, etc but I have not read classic books i.e, Shakespeare, etc since high school.

I think the real argument today is not if a person is well-read but if they read at all. I know people who don't read. Not that they can't read but reading as a form of enjoyment is foreign to them. For today's students reading is a chore. I got my love of reading from my grandmother and I hope to pass this on to my kids.

I am almost 26 and, at least for my age, considered myself well-read. Then I read the list from the article in the 2nd paragraph and had only heard of a couple of the names but had read none. Humbling. I have read about 15-16 of those names you brought up yourself and so I felt a little better.

I've always been a reader and so what I've been doing to bridge the gap between the reading I'm inclined towards and that which I aspire to is to use Modern Library's reader's list of top 100 novels of all-time (http://www.modernlibrary.com/top-100/100-best-novels/). I mostly picked this list because it was the list I had read the most from when I started it (around 10-12) and included some of my more recent favorites like Ender's Game, 1984, and To Kill A Mockingbird. I'm up to 30+ now and by the time I finish this list I will with more confidence tackle some of the others mentioned at the beginning of this article. The question I often have, though, is how do I balance my reading of the new with the classic when you can read "the classics" your whole life and never be finished?

Roger,
I wanted to know how you view people like myself who veer more towards non-fiction than fiction. Among the over 100 books in what I like to call “My personal library” I do have “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn”, “Moby Dick” and “Great Expectations”, but the rest are related to my great passions, history, music, sports and yes, film. I am avid reader of works by Stephen Ambrose, David Halberstam, Shelby Foote, Jimmy Breslin, Robert Creamer, David Maraniss, Marv Harris, Roger Angell and your good friend William Nack. I have had the great privilege of twice going to speaking engagements with David McCullough, nearly have all of his books including two (John Adams and 1776) signed by him. I have even enjoyed the wonderful writing of that Chicago great Mike Royko.
I also have a collection of film essays from James Agee, Pauline Kael, Otis Ferguson, Walter Kerr, Vincent Canby, Charles Champlin, Richard Schickel and some guy name Roger Ebert (one book, “The Great Movies II” you so kindly signed for me in San Francisco).
Before I go to bed, I make it a habit of reading a short Walt Whitman poem for inspiration.
I know that I will never be as well read as you nor enjoy the works of Jack Richardson, Alice Adams and Susan Sontag the same way you do, but I still hope that you can respect me as a well read man who is simply more dram to non-fiction than fiction. Thanks for the great article and signing my book!

Ebert: I happened to get started on fiction in that entry, I read a lot of non-fiction.

Your list of authors didn't scare me away, even though I haven't ready any of them. Instead, it gave me the beginnings of a new reading list.

Your comments on Cormac McCarthy led me to discover some of the best literature I've read. I've been hoping to find more ever since.

I probably read more books in an average month than most people read in their entire adult lives. Mostly nonfiction these days; science, history, current events. But I still read a lot of fiction too.

An aside: Why does nonfiction often get such short shrift in book discussions like these? Isn't Darwin's "On The Origin of Species" as profound and world-changing as anything by a James Joyce or Charles Dickens? Well-written, too. Or William Shirer's "Rise and Fall of the Third Reich" or William Manchester's "The Last Lion" about Winston Churchill. These aren't fiction, but they are books, and in my humble opinion as entertaining and educational and thought-provoking as any work of fiction I have read.

But that is something of a side point here. I've read many of the classics of fictional literature; from Thomas Mann's "The Magic Mountain" to Tolstoy's "War and Peace" to Boris Pasternak's "Dr. Zhivago" to Dickens, Herman Hesse, Jane Austen, and many others. Many are wonderful indeed, though some can descend into a pit of intellectual insularity that spoils my enjoyment of them (like some of Hesse's more intellectual works).

Another aside; I don't know that "most intellectual" is necessarily "best". There can be a snob factor at work. And profound things can be written very simply--one of my favorite books is the children's story "The Velveteen Rabbit". I'll take The Velveteen Rabbit over James Joyce any day.

I have wondered about this decline in reading that I've been reading about; that books aren't selling as well, newspapers and magazines are in decline, many bookstores have been closing, including some of my favorite ones. Why?

Sure, there's a lot of talk about the internet--but reading a website isn't the same as reading a novel or history book. Video clips and podcasts rarely can get as educational and in-depth as a book or newspaper article can.

I speculate one reason may be the alleged decline in our educational systems. I hear things like 1/3rd of all high school graduates never read a single book the rest of their lives, and 1/5th can't even read their own diploma. Without a certain level of reading ability, reading is a chore, not a pleasure. And young folks today seem to have less patience and shorter attention spans than my grandfather's generation did.

You can tell a lot about a person by the books they love--or whether they even read at all. I find I don't relate well to people who are non-readers. And it's not that I talk about literature very much, it's simply that people who don't read tend to have a very different world view that I simply can't relate to--The Christian Right, the Tea Party, Birthers, and the like tend not to read much if at all.

I don't know though that reading "The Classics" really makes you a well-rounded or particularly intelligent person--more so than other books written at the college level, I mean.

I remember Robert Heinlein's famous quote: "A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects."

I believe that applies to reading books as well.

My first love is hard science-fiction and high fantasy. Fantasy books like "The Last Unicorn" by Peter S. Beagle, "Lord of the Rings", and Ursula K. LeGuin's "Earthsea" series. There's a poetry of language and imagery in those books that I find enchanting.

And for hard science fiction, there's Robert Heinlein, Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, George Orwell and Aldous Huxley. Even Mark Twain wrote a few tales in the science-fiction/fantasy genres (such as his terrific satire, "Captain Stormfield's Visit to Heaven" and "The Mysterious Stranger"). Go back in time and there's Jules Verne and H.G. Wells, with Olaf Stapledon perhaps the most ethereal of them all ("Last and First Men"). Move forward in time and there's David Brin's Uplift saga (imagine a multi-billion-year-old civilization spanning thousands of species and 5 galaxies..), Frank Herbert's Dune series, Greg Bear's "Strength of Stones" and "Eon".

I suppose in literary circles it is popular to disparage science-fiction as pulp and hack-writing, not "real, serious literature". But I disagree. The great strength of the best science-fiction is it's sheer imaginativeness and creativity. And in my opinion it is among the most difficult type of fiction you can write.

I mean, for conventional fiction, you can simply write "London, Picadilly Circus, 1852" and that for many readers immediately sums up a myriad of details--clothes, speech styles, accents, how people looked and dressed and thought, architecture, technology, and so on. But for science-fiction you have to work a lot harder. Saying "Planet Belzique, in the year 21,812" doesn't say much. You have to write out more details and they must be both plausible and hang together logically. Then you have to write out a compelling story on top of that. And the beauty of science fiction and fantasy is that you can explore so many different aspects of humanity--entire different societies with different moral codes, different political systems, different technologies of all kinds and their effect on humanity and what it means to be a human being. And they can help greatly in both imagining a future life, and preparing for it.

For example, think of how many things we have now and take for granted that were inspired at least in part by Star Trek; flip-top cellphones, iPads, naming a Space Shuttle "Enterprise", even the electric automatic sliding doors at the supermarkets.

And Star Trek imagined a post-racist world--something that is easier to do in science fiction than in classical literature which tends to be about the past and where we've been, rather than where we are going.

And reading science fiction definitely has greatly influenced who I became, how I see the world, and what I've done in life.

When I've read books in which an entire society is based on group marriages with a species that has three genders, and an individual of that species becomes all three genders at different stages in life, the current brouhaha over gay marriage just seems petty and silly.

That's something you don't get in classical literature.

Don't get me wrong--I love classical literature. Especially as, since most of them were written so long ago, they have an element of escapist fantasy as they all are written in a vanished mileau. Most regular contemporary fiction (with some exceptions) for me has rather little appeal--most are pulp or potboilers. Science fiction at least is the literature of exploration, about "what if?", and at it's best is an exploration of human nature and reality itself.

I love the grand themes in science fiction--they can ask some of the most profound questions and explore it in a way no other genre can; "are we truly alone in the universe?" "is there a God?", "What is and is not a human being?", "is this all there is?", "Why am I here? Do humans exist for a purpose?" "What's our ultimate fate?", "What is morality?"

To me classical literature and science fiction both complement each other. The one tells us where we've been, and who we were. The other tells us where we may be going and what we could become--at our best and at our worst.

Heck, there was even a science fiction story written about a post-literary future. A society where everything was done by computer with voice commands that spoke back. Nobody could read anymore. Nobody could do arithmetic. Nobody needed to. Except the computers were making life-threatening mistakes and nobody could figure out why, until one day someone rediscovered arithmetic...

Roger, it occurs to me that this is the perfect thread to tell you that I read The Quincunx on your recommendation several years ago. And for you to forgive me for finding it too much like Nicholas Nickleby, but without Dickens' particular charm.

Roger:

I recommend Henry Miller and Lawrence Durrell. Durrell's Alexandria Quartet is rich with the most beautiful prose. As for Henry James, some wag once remarked that "James always chewed more than he bit off."

That said, I was amazed that this year my sophomores read two of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales (granted, they were the some of the bawdiest ones) along with the General Prologue, and they demanded that we read a third! A select few even asked to borrow the book for a longer period in order to read some of the others. So there is a little hope...

I can speak from my own experience that the first fear that must be conquered at the very beginning junior-high level (the age when you begin choosing "grown-up" books for yourself) is, "Does it have a PLOT?"
It's not that shallow a question. We feel it's fair, really. And it's one for which, in so many 20th-cty. instances, the answer is "No". :(

I remember, during a high-school summer, trying to thrill-seek "show off" my own overconfident intellectual thirst by going through (albeit in performance recordings, while following along in the text), every single one of the Shakespeare plays people generally didn't know about, and became hooked on Bill's canny and contemporarily cynical deconstruction of royal history in the Henry VI's. I tried going through the compleat Dickens (albeit in BBC miniseries form), and could see right away that Chuck, in addition to his jolly Victorian sarcasm, was paid to be a Soap Opera writer. (There is a certain scene in "Bleak House" that I will arguably compare to "Who Shot JR", and am convinced Dickens knew what he was doing.)

Call me "shallow" for not reading a contemporary novel until someone at least considers adapting it for movies, but that's the first hurdle to conquer.
I remember the Siskel & Ebert review getting all huffy at the public for finding Lawrence Kasdan's adaptation of Anne Tyler's "The Accidental Tourist" a big puzzling heaping pile of quirky NOTHING. (It was the audience's fault, you see, for not "meeting it halfway")--And that, to me, has always symbolized the "highbrow" canyon that has crumbled between "NYT Bestsellers" and the popular entertainment that normal folks feel they CAN enjoy without "showing off".
Hollywood has literally developed a terror of bestselling books: They must adapt the titles for their marketable fame, but fear that inside will lurk some cappucino-sipping snootie regaling us with endlessly self-justifying navel-gazing about growing up with her insightful relative in Maine, or quirky Nora Ephron heroines stumbling over their own quirkiness...And Oprah's Sisterhood-Hugging Book Club ain't helping the image any either. The fear pretty much became headline news after producers thought the only way to adapt Tom Wolfe satire for film was to turn "Bonfire of the Vanities" into a screwball Tom Hanks comedy--Quietly covering up the fact that "The Right Stuff" had also been originally envisioned as a slob comedy for Dan Aykroyd and John Belushi. (I kid you not.)

We can shake our heads at the producers for having the Fear, but we can also glare self-righteously at many modern authors for causing it.
Books have become their OWN snooty cappucino, for people to talk about and show off that they talk about, and the image is blackening the practice for even the "good" books that were written in their historical day. In the day when books were the only movie or television, they had to deliver the plot, but nowadays, books have been reduced to a "diary" for authors to create their own fantasy worlds of self-empowerment.
In high school, I could feel I was "showing off" in reading Chaucer and find myself chuckling over the Wife of Bath, but nothing to this day "compels" me to read Toni Morrison or Cormac McCarthy--If all they feel put on this earth to write is self-justifying diary entries, I don't feel like reading their journals if they weren't written for any other human being in the first place.

MAL wrote:
He also loves old movies, citing The Picture of Dorian Gray as one of his favourites, along with anything by the Marx Brothers. He recognizes Cary Grant and Humphrey Bogart at a glance. Both my kids (my daughter is 9) have asked when we can watch more Buster Keaton silents!
I suppose my point is that our passions are often something learned.

I see that classic-film literacy keeps popping up as a metaphor for book literacy, and I've been much more passionate about classic-film literacy. (Not that I'm ignoring classic-book literacy, I'm just leaving that to other people.)
And the film-illiteracy issue has been the same: It's been the paradox of our modern culture that now that "everyone" can watch movies, they've practically vanished from view: Like classic books, now that we can put classic movies on our bookshelf, nobody ever takes them down. In our day, we first saw Humphrey Bogart or the Marx Brothers when they "ambushed" us on the middle of a late-night or Saturday-afternoon local-station channel-click--We sat watching for a moment wondering what we were looking at, and then realized, hey, these are pretty cool people, whoever they are...Hey, that fruity tap-dancing Fred Astaire guy is really an obnoxious smartass, isn't he?--And if that's Bogie, wonder if he's going to find out why everyone wants that black bird?

Which immediately conquered that fear that kids have today of B/W films: Do they have, like...plots, or do they all sit around posing like Greta Garbo, 'n stuff?
Why, yes, as a matter of fact, they DO have plots. Pretty darn involving ones, at that. But now that the "cultural ambush" of seeing something classic at random has literally vanished off of our local stations (along with just about any other form of local programming), you can only see a classic film you've never heard of if you go and look it up, and you can only look it up if you've heard of it.
(And any of the rich folk with expensive premium-cable setups who can still afford to get Turner Classic Movies where they don't show it for free, kindly spare me the defenses of cable-gentrification, thank you--I moved away six years ago from a system that showed the Last Remaining Old Movie Channel on the free systems, and I literally don't think I've watched broadcast television since.)

Parents...show your kids a Marx Brothers movie today. Or a Danny Kaye, or a Gene Kelly. Tell your teenager that Humphrey Bogart existed, and make him watch it if he tries to make Brady Bunch jokes about pork chops. Let your youngest kids try to "narrate" what's going on in a silent Chaplin or Keaton, and there is no age too young to watch James Cagney (be it Yankee Doodle Dandy, Footlight Parade, Midsummer, or One Two Three). Wager any amount of money if you think it won't work.
If greedy studio dragons now guard their treasure hoard from the masses, and preservation societies now prevent old movies from even being tainted by the threat of commercial interruption, it is up to the faithful to keep the light burning in the Dark Ages.
Then, with that fear conquered (and the cultural showoff badge that they know something others their age don't), maybe your offspring will start to get curious about the Books.

I disagree with the opening quote. The great writers not only supercede their current time and setting, but they are often called upon to represent those settings for generation after generation. Death CAN'T silence them. That's kind of the whole point.

There are so many authors who have written so many wonderful books. I don't think it will be long before five relatively well-read individuals can name their favorite book to the others and none of them will have never heard of the other books.

I read teenagers read about 17 minutes per day and about 18 minutes on the weekend. That includes almost everything they read, I believe. I'd bet hard money that it doesn't include text messages or Tweets, which is almost constant. That is also the average and counts people who don't or can't read. The other average is that teens watch about 2.2 hours a day watching TV, which I assume counts periphery viewing and multitasking. Also not taking into account how much they read off their phones while watching TV. Neilsen gave us a study on it. They found that watching TV increases the use of phones and iPads while watching TV. I know it does for me. Anything and everything I don't know while watching TV, I look up.

Hi Roger,

I like the tone of the article. You lament the state of book reading in younger folks, but you also share the warmth of your feeling for the books you have loved. I believe that's important, and a key part of encouraging younger people to read.

So many of these types of articles are read, and so many have a curmudgeonly tone about them. It's one long harangue after another. Why would anyone want to read when they are being scolded for not doing so? The condescension of it is simply staggering, and when it's not implicit it's explicit, which is immeasurably worse.

I like your recommendation list, and I suppose I would echo it in places. I am not hugely well read in American authors, though I have loved Bellow and Roth, and I think Edmund Wilson is the greatest American critic (with Harold Bloom a close second).

My tastes tend to the European and, increasingly, the Latin American. So, if I may, I shall make a few recommendations for people who might want to look outward from America. Though many of these authors are dead, they are all reasonably contemporary, and should be easy enough to locate.

W. G. Sebald - Particularly Austerlitz, though Vertigo or The Emigrants are the easiest to ease in to. Sebald writes of the dead and the ruined, and how the corpse of history impacts people today. His writings are about memory and the pale gauze separating the living from the dead, and our inherent closeness to culture, art, history and tragedy. A German, Sebald believed his nation had willfully turned its back on what it had done during the Second World War; his writing is an attempt to force people to look back and remember.

Enrique Vila-Matas - A Spaniard. His writing is impossibly literary, comprising of catalogues, encyclopedic entries, journals, notes, footnotes (to a book never written), etc. Vila-Matas has read more than me and more than you, but his writing on writing is warm, funny, connected and relevant. He is not a dusty writer but vibrant, bursting with the pleasure and potential of literature as it enters (yet another) late stage.

Roberto Bolaño - The romantic chaotic violent Argentinean. Bolaño made a big splash a few years back with The Savage Detectives and 2666, though a large part of his fame came from being (safely) dead. Still, I would suggest readers begin with his short stories, which are intense examinations of romance and literature, death and poetry, violence and forgetting. Bolaño understands that literature is futile in the face of history's grinding maw, but he also understands that beauty is important and is perhaps all that is left to us. He is a master of the polyphonic novel.

Javier Marías - Another Spaniard. Marías is, to my reading, a contemporary Proust, a digressive, contemplative, ruminative author who takes as his recurring themes language, translation, memory, sex and death. He is preoccupied with the difficulty of communication and the melancholic inability of human beings to articulate their thoughts, feelings and desires to others, and often themselves. The beginning of his novels are always spectacular, though the middles tend to sag.

José Saramago - Portuguese Nobel Laureate. Saramago's works tend to be fables (what if everyone suddenly went blind? What if death no longer visited a nation? What if a chunk of a country floated away? What if... etc), but this should be considered a springboard for Saramago and not the terminal point. Saramago's writing is philosophical without being sophistry, and is immensely readable once you are able to align yourself to the rhythm of his work. His writing is largely devoid of punctuation outside the period and the comma, and dialogue is unattributed. Characters tend to have no name or a descriptive name (the girl with dark glasses) and, at their core, Saramago's novels, however bleak during the story, becoming, in the end, overwhelmingly compassionate toward humanity and the individual's capacity for love and good feeling - though this is not to suggest his work ever becomes cloying.

Georges Perec - The great French master, Perec's most famous works revolve around their constraints, though they never become beholden to them. The easiest example to explain would be his novel which completely omitted the letter 'e' (difficult in English, harder in French). Of course, he followed this up with a novel whose only vowel was the letter 'e'...! For all that, Perec is not simply a game player; his writing is concerned (obsessed) with things and daily activities, the sort of 'stuff' that comprises so much of life and so little of fiction. He wrote about the things nobody else wrote about, because they aren't important - or so we think. I'd suggest Life A User's Manual (which is his masterpiece), but An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris is much shorter and very readable.

I hope someone is encouraged to read these works. I love them all deeply, and they have in their own way touched my heart and mind, and influenced the way I perceive the world (which means: the way I live in the world). "Exotic" authors usually aren't, and if a character's name is Juan instead of John, well - so what?

Enjoy reading.

Damian

"In English 101 he assigned us Dostoyevsky, Flaubert, Fitzgerald, Faulkner, James, Forster, Cather, Wharton, Joyce, Hemingway..."

Short stories, right? In my English 101 sections I have a hard time getting my students to make it through 2 short stories a week, so if your teacher was able to get you guys through multiple novels, I'm impressed and jealous. I devoted 2 full classes to "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," and half the kids wanted to quit the class. They don't have the reading comprehension skills for David Foster Wallace, let alone James or Faulkner.

Ebert: Novels.

I had hopes that the younger population might be swinging back into reading with the popularity of J.K. Rowling's "Harry Potter" series and the subsequent film series. I have enjoyed them immensely; much more than I ever thought I would before I picked them up. I've personally reviewed the last three novels for the San Antonio Express-News; and every time that a new film comes out, I publish a blog in my DVD Extra column that outlines as many differences between the film and the novel that I can remember.

Yet the explosion of texting and condensed communication, along with the travesty that is "No Child Left Behind," means that children are spending less time reading for knowledge and pleasure; and more time studying to the standardized tests that will make them the compliant wage slaves of the future corporate state.

But I am encouraged by the enthusiasm that has been sparked by the Kindle and other e-book readers. Two of my nieces have received Kindles for Christmas, and I have directed them to sources of free books from the Gutenberg Project. And a co-worker's 10-year-old child saved up her own money to buy her own Kindle after first sampling her mother's.

So if it takes glitzing up the old classics with new technology to get people to read again, I'm all for it. Anything that gets people to read instead of vacantly watching tripe like "American Idol" (my opinion), is all to the good.

They may start with "Potter" and the "Twilight" series. But hopefully that leads to J.R.R. Tolkien, Bram Stoker, Mary Shelley. Going further afield, there's Mark Twain, Rudyard Kipling, Issac Asimov, Robert A. Heinlein. Hell, as long as they are reading, I'm okay with potboiler masters Tom Clancy, Clive Cussler and Dan Brown. Or even "Star Wars" and "Star Trek" novelizations.

Reading is one of our escapes from the brain gendarmes that is Faux News, Rush Limbaugh, your average fundamentalist preacher or your anti-secular school board. One hopes that the future of "Farenheit 451" or "The Book of Eli" doesn't come to pass; but digital storage may be the only way that the master works survive to be successfully passed on.

First a small correction, Simenon is not French, he's Belgian. He ended number 10 of our "greatest Belgians ever competition" (with Jacques Brel or Father Damien at number one depending on which side of the language barrier you are).

Personally, I also love reading. Mostly science fiction, fantasy, historic romans. And now and then I try to pick up a more serious book. Lolita, crime and punishment, no country for old men, blood meridian, the plague...

Even though I loved both No country for old men and The road, Blood Meridian didn't really tick for me. But then, there are hundreds of other books who might.

Science Fiction is all too easily dismissed. There are some great pieces of sci-fi who really make you think. I am legend is about loneliness. The forever war is a brilliant book which retells the Vietnam war. And Philip K. Dick has written some highly innovative novels. But a lot of people will never read them, dismissing them as pulp.

I think this quote from Tom Stoppard's "Arcadia" is relevant, not that I agree with it in its entirety

THOMASINA: ....the enemy who burned the great library of Alexandria without so much as a fine for all that is overdue. Oh, Septimus! -- can you bear it? All the lost plays of the Athenians! Two hundred at least by Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides -- thousands of poems -- Aristotle's own library!....How can we sleep for grief?

SEPTIMUS: By counting our stock. Seven plays from Aeschylus, seven from Sophocles, nineteen from Euripides, my lady! You should no more grieve for the rest than for a buckle lost from your first shoe, or for your lesson book which will be lost when you are old. We shed as we pick up, like travelers who must carry everything in their arms, and what we let fall will be picked up by those behind. The procession is very long and life is very short. We die on the march. But there is nothing outside the march so nothing can be lost to it. The missing plays of Sophocles will turn up piece by piece, or be written again in another language. Ancient cures for diseases will reveal themselves once more. Mathematical discoveries glimpsed and lost to view will have their time again. You do not suppose, my lady, that if all of Archimedes had been hiding in the great library of Alexandria, we would be at a loss for a corkscrew?

Rubi-kun:

Rand's not being read by Ebert, obviously. He thought fans of her work would be disappointed with boring, nonsensical, technologically-outdated-at-inception scenery porn.

"The grave can hardly make more mute those who were voiceless when alive--dust to dust, muteness to muteness. But the silence that dogs the established writer's noisy obituary, with its boisterous shock and busy regret, is more profound than any other.
Is it just me, or is Ms. Ozick a lousy writer? The above paragraph is meaningless. I find this to be ironic. Please read George Orwell, "Politics and the English Language." http://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/orwell46.htm
And I should probably turn off my computer, and quit wasting time. I have "The Jungle" by Upton Sinclair waiting for me on my Kindle.

I'm with Eli Katz, an earlier commenter, on this one. As much joy as dear Calvin Trilling has brought to my life, I'm happiest with the genre writers. Oh, I've wanted to be "well read." I have a copy of Anna Karenina sitting around the place as we speak. I got part of the way into it and kept banishing the thought, "She jumps in front of a train," from my head over and over again every time I wanted to quit. "Knowing how it ends" isn't the same as how you get there, I admonished myself sternly. Then, I finally just never picked it up again ... not because I knew she jumps but because ... I just didn't care enough to keep wading, plowing, and slogging, I guess. Flip to the cast of characters page, flip to the text, flip to the cast of characters page, flip to the text.

It was WAY too much like work (I proofread and "apply formatting" to the work of geologists for a living) and, even though I dutifully admired it and anticipated the opportunity to seem unimpressed with myself when I ever-so-lightly dropped the fact of my having read it into a conversation, it wasn't assigned to me by a teacher, it wasn't current with people I talk to regularly and, in the end, it just plain didn't hold me.

I fear the list you had at the top of your article. I fear that my life wouldn't feel enriched so much as my time stolen if I tried to hew to the line of reading laid out there.

But Patricia Highsmith? Oh, yes, I've read her and I LOVED her stuff. I saw my life pass before my eyes a few times, as her impeccably clean, knife-sharp prose skewered me. I'll take my affection for genre stuff and call it good. After all, I still go to Ashland, Oregon, to SEE Shakespeare performed in repertory (which tidbit I simply could not resist dropping into the conversation).

I've been reading for pleasure my entire life, a dozen, two dozen books a year ramping up since I was 16, and it hasn't enhanced my life or increased my success in any way. I'm pretty much the world's biggest loser and most pathetic user. Why do I even continue to pretend I'm doing something worthwhile? It's not. No thinking, no writing, no video games, no TV, no internet, no job, and now I'll stop reading books. Just emptiness.

Ebert rolls out his Bookmobile not for classic and modern lit nostalgia but for his Acute Normalcy bias. The higher degree of literacy, the stronger the bias.
Illiterates who would skip the Hemmingway books in favor of adventures in Ketchum, Idaho, starting with some whisky at a bar in Sun Valley, (drinking age, 19!) --would be accepted as a poor reader yet valued classmate among the high functionals, back in the days...
The good old days where those who read religiously were in the majority are long gone. Trying to bring back classrooms and communities where teachers are literacy proficient is a dream come true fail.

One of my goals in life is to be well read. I have Chabon, Hemingway, McCarthy, Roth, Marquez, Vonnegut, Bukowski and a plethora of others on my shelf. Then I read your list in the intro, and sadly I can only recognize--not even claim to have read-- about three names on that entire list. You sort of alluded to it, but being well read is a relevant term. There are thousands of "classic" works out there, and odds are we will not even scratch the surface. But you said it spot on in your conclusion; at the end of the day the point is simply to read. The more people who read, the greater the chance that novels and the authors behind them will keep treading water. Anyways, I wish more people did read, if they did we would all have more to talk about.

Normally I read through all the coments before saying anything, but this time I had to stop halfway through because I was getting annoyed. What, exactly, is a "genre writer" supposed to be? Novelists write works of fiction. One book cannot be more fictional than another, because they are all, all of them, wholly false. None of them happened. If one novel takes place on board a spaceship and another in a nineteenth century country estate, that does not make one more literary than another, or more valuable to the individual reader.

The value to the individual reader is what counts. It is the collective judgment of countless individual readers over the course of centuries that will identify the great books. Centuries. Not decades. In 500 years, how many of the authors listed at the beginning of this article will still be read? The answer is, we simply don't know-- but the smart money says it won't be very many of them. Now, if these are the books that matter to us, then good: read them and re-read them and save them and recommend them to friends. That is the process that keeps a great book alive. But don't get suckered into any sort of snobbish delusion that tries to identify which books of today are the great books that everyone should read. That decision is not ours to make. We only get to decide which books matter to us, and by us I mean a bunch of disaggregated individuals.

That said, an earlier commentator was right in saying that this is a very provincial list. It seems wholly concerned with novels, and with very recent novels at that. (A guy like Hemmingway counts as recent.) Where is Caesar's account of the conquest of Gaul? Where is the Mabinogion? Where is The Journey to the West? These are beautiful, entertaining, and deeply influential books, and they form the foundations of the various cultures that poduced them. One can have only a poor understanding of one's own culture if foundational books like these are never read. Somebody who stuck with Ozick's list wouldn't be well read, that person would be poorly read.

In response to Paul J. Marasa, if you are going to bring up Marx, then I am going to reach back to Aquinas. Adam Smith made clear that one proper role of government in the economy is to ensure justice. Without justice, capitalism fails. Thomas Aquinas defined justice as the act of giving to a person that which is due him. We know whether a thing is due a person if, by taking it from him, we do more harm to ourselves that we do to that person. Keeping in mind that ownership is defined as enjoying a monopoly on a thing's use and disposition, we then see then that Marxism (and all its derivatives) creates rampant injustice by doing away with private property. That injustice damages primarily the collective society that commited it, as per Aquinas. Marxism never had a chance; it was a formula for national suicide.

Roger,

I always read your entries, but I am always wary about posting, as by the time I arrive, the conversation has been going on for so long. I can't imagine that you're still reading, three days and nearly 200 comments in, but sometimes a subject arises that strikes me just so, and I find myself wanting to participate, even though my words will likely disappear as just another comment on just another website.

I am 31 years old. I have been a reader for as long as I can remember. My family is made up of readers. Our Christmas presents are generally books, given to individuals, that are then passed from hand to hand over the course of the year.

I was adrift in high school (and, to be fair, perhaps I still am), but it wasn't until my junior year that I realized that studying literature could actually be enjoyable. Rarely had I enjoyed reading what I was supposed to be reading, and frequently put off my homework in favor of whatever book I was reading on my own time. I ended up studying literature in college and turned that into an MEd, with a focus on Middle School Language Arts.

And yet, thinking back over the past decade of life and study I can't think of a book I have read that is over a hundred years old. After I got my survey classes out of the way, I studied the Romantics for a year and loved it, but my love has always been, and likely will always be, contemporary writers. There is endless amounts of creativity being poured into literature (and pulp!) right now, and it's growing every single day!

I am very happy to see you recognize contemporaries in your initial post and in your responses, to see you recognize that reading in general is still reading. But what saddens me is the mob of people who, for whatever reason, believe that reading is in the decline, that someday soon we will simply no longer be readers.

It constantly frustrates me to hear this gloom and doom, like one day there won't be any books. Like there will ever be a time in the history of our species that our children won't know how to read. A kid doesn't want to read Dickens in an English class? Not a shock. I didn't either. A kid would rather read an illustrated novel? No shock there. Fifteen years ago I too would have preferred manga to A Separate Peace.

Shouldn't we be happy that kids actually WANT to read these days? Words on a page are still words on a page. We shouldn't expect them to want to read the "classics" or Shakespeare before they are even capable of understanding them. What we should expect them to do is simply read. Read Harry Potter. Read Batman. Read Twilight, read 007, read Stephen King, read anyone and anything they can put their mind to. Reading anything will still expand their vocabulary, will still increase their literacy. And, eventually, they will tire of whatever it is they are reading and will move on to something else. Who cares if you think it's dross? If it sparks a child's imagination then your opinion does not matter. That's what's so wonderful about literature (and film and video games and music and every other creative endeavor). I can love something you detest, and vice versa and, in the end, we both have an opinion and that's it. The world is still here.

We, as a people, are reading far more now than we ever were (that's a statistic I just made up), we're just reading websites, novels, magazines, video game subtitles or instructions, technology manuals, etc. There is more for us to do every single day now, and that's not a bad thing!

What we need to be doing is encouraging kids to read whatever they like. They're kids! They don't need to be forced through something uninteresting to them! They're little sponges!

Anyway, thanks for having this space where people can speak their minds.

Mr. Ebert, as a 19 year old who reads your work religiously, I can assure you that you will be read for many, many years to come.

I have always enjoyed reading for pleasure, I suppose it is just the result of my upbringing. I was the kind of kid who responded to the release of the LOTR movies by reading the entire trilogy when I was 11, something that I haven't been able to do since.

Within the past few months I have begun to make a conscious effort to become better read. I was inspired in this undertaking, interestingly enough, by experiencing Shakespeare for the first time since my early high school years and discovering that I loved it. Taking on Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Dickens and more in the time since has assured me that my commitment is a worthwhile one, even if my current journey through Joyce has me a little over my head.

Don't worry, the lists you were worrying about are going to be a great help to me.

This thing all things devours:
Birds, beasts, trees, flowers;
Gnaws iron, bites steel;
Grinds hard stones to meal;
Slays king, ruins town,
And beats high mountain down.

I can't speak for every other college student, but as a graduating senior and English major, I would add John Dos Passos, Nella Larsen and Charlotte and Emily Brontë to the list of authors that are still being read (and frequently assigned by professors.)

We may be few and far between, but there are still plenty in my generation who want to be "well-read." I'd choose Hawthorne over "The Hills" any day.

At Powell's Bookstore, on the South Side in Hyde Park, they used to give out little bookmarks with every purchase. I hope they still do.

The inscription read: "For of the making of books there is no end; and much study is a weariness of the flesh."

Why has that stuck with me all these years?

Roger, surely you have one or two of these still floating around at home?

Mr. Ebert,
I really enjoyed your essay on personal reading. Three personal experiences made it reasonate with me.

The summer of 1975, I landed a summer job as an Upward Bound resident assistant on our campus, Barat College. It was a huge improvement over the prior summer back home, running a bottlecap press for a plastics factory, night shift. At Upward Bound, the Reading Lab director kept telling us to grab material in the lab and keep giving it to the kids: crossward puzzles, science fiction, comic books -- you name it, it was in that reading lab. We sat down and talked to each teenager about their reading. If a child made a connection between the printed word and getting information or having fun, that was the first real step. We also had vocabulary words of the day. The cafeteria began buzzing with conversations using "nefarious."

The following fall metted out a tonsillectomy, then a scholarship year at Oxford University. 1975 was the year before the British equal education and employment acts went into effect. It was a push at the great male bastions of Englsh education. The girls were coming and the boys were uneasy. If there were American coeds on campus, they were likely to be debs from Back East who looked like Candice Bergen. They kept asking me if I was from Canada. If there were any light-skinned Puerto Ricans from workingclass origins on campus, I never met them. You cannot begin to know how it felt to spend hours reading, in our library, in the Radcliff Camera, in Paris, on a train to Edinborough, and have a whole circle of people invested in talking about ideas. No apologies or fast boredom.

As a teacher, I hope to bring even a fraction of these experiences with reading to my students. Now, we are told that the electronic apparatus will be our salvation. I'm not convinced. Yesterday, I held in my hand a fresh copy of my new poetry chapbook. It felt and smelled like a book. I could go back and forth and linger. It is not an information pod, anymore than the fine films can ever be reduced to a clip shown on an IPod. In invited my attention, not fractured it even more.

A few years ago we met during the filming of an episode of "Early Edition." We were outside the Biograph. I thanked you for introducing "Once Were Warriors" to us on "At the Movies." Don't read film journals, and few other film reviewers. Too often, they real like pre-chewed gum or marketing reports.

Thanks again, and take care,

Elizabeth Marino
Poet and Instructor of English, NEIU

Ebert: Reading on the train to Edinburgh. Hey, I've done that. What a great year you must have had.

I also prefer books to Kindles, etc. But so many people here say they're reading more now because of Kindles. So many great books are essentially free. That can't be a bad thing.

I think the big issue in those authors no longer being read as much is that we're well into a new century, and while many are "recent," those authors are no longer "contemporary literature"--they're the literature of a particular century. They'll still be widely read in, say, undergraduate "20th Century Literature" classes. But they're now the literature of a former century, the spirit of an age other than today's.

Makes me feel older, but still...

I work at a military library and The Divine Comedy is a big favorite for some reason. A couple of classics dear to my heart are An American Tragedy and A Farewell to Arms. I went to a Great Books Institute titled The Raptures and Ravages of Love last fall and had the happy assignment of reading the Hemingway novel. Another happy find has been The Best American Short Stories of the Twentieth Century. The 1999 selection was Annie Proux's Half-skinned Steer--amazing and unforgettable. Another great experience has been 100 One Night Reads which has directed me to Conrad's Secret Agent. Also a book by Bob and Ray is listed.

The list in the second paragraph presents a conflation of novelists with literary critics.

This would be like determining whether someone had seen great films by how much Jonathan Rosenbaum (or Roger Ebert) they read. Not a bad metric, but an imperfect one.

"They don't have the reading comprehension skills for David Foster Wallace, let alone James or Faulkner."

An English Lit Grad Student said this upthread. It reads as if he's saying Wallace is easy by comparison to the other two and that simply cannot be anyone's opinion.

Roger,

Wow what a great post and the comments are just as good.

I know that I am not well read but have always tried to read well (have read 12 of the authors on the list so need to buy a Kindle next time in Chitown and get cracking).

I thought you might have Alan Paton's Cry a Beloved Country as you spent time in CPT, I believe.

Although I grew-up on the South Side I have lived in Joburg for 21 years so I really did get further south than 111th Street. I still read the Lonigan Trilogy every other year and also Algren. Nelson was pretty grumpy when I ran him down in a saloon in Patterson even when I told him I was a ¼ Polish. But he like me picking up the tab.

Don’t think Coetzee or Gordimer with be much read in the future but think that Fugard's (where is his Nobel?!) plays will be performed. What about Malcolm Lowry and Under the Volcano? Now back to Fitz. I think the same could be said of his short stores if you eliminate The GG. I would recommend Bruccoli’s collection of his stories which show his pure genius. I used to print a few of these out and give to the baseball and rugby players I was coaching. Short stores are a great way to entice young men (and women for that matter) with their somewhat short attention spans. Anyway to spark that appetite. Also pretty strange that the Aussies have only won a single Nobel. Love Miles Franklin’s My Brilliant Career.

Take care and keep up the superlative work.

Cheers,

Gary Burns

Well-read.

Just what does that mean, anyway?
Who decides?
When I was a kid, I read whatever came to hand.
There was always somebody (sometimes an adult, sometimes another kid) who'd tell me that what I was reading was not worth the time or effort, that it was beneath me, that i ought to read something more "worthwhile", a really "Good Book" as opposed to something popular.

When you're told that sort of thing often enough, one of two things happens:
1) They beat you down and you read the Better Book they want you to read - and you go in hating it and come out hating it even more.
2) You ignore them and go your own way, reading what you enjoy.
Mostly, I've opted for (2),

By the standards voiced by many of the commenters here, I guess I don't qualify as "well-read".
My only experience with Edmund Wilson is his famous attack on detective fiction, "Who Cares Who Killed Roger Ackroyd?"
As it happens, I reread that one again last night, in preparation for writing this .
To my admittedly less-than intellectual mind, Wilson came across as a petty, self-satisfied snob. It wasn't just that he personally didn't like mysteries - he didn't want anyone else to like them either.
That's an attitude I find all the time among snobs, whether literary, cinematic, musical, social, you name it.
"You're not really reading/listening to/watching that, are you?"
"You're not trying to tell me you actually like that junk!?"
The words Wilson used - "wasteful of time and degrading to the intellect" (I think that's an accurate quote) - leave no room for compromise. Neither does "Literature is on our side" - which means that as far as Wilson is concerned, I'm not.
Well, too bad. If "Bunny" could not at least appreciate the humor in Rex Stout, that was his loss - and my everlasting gain.
Wilson wrote his dismissals of detectiove stories before the onset of Mickey Spillane. What do you suppose he would have made of I, The Jury?
Or of those who came in Spillane's wake, like Jim Thompson, David Goodis, or the whole Gold Medal school?
And how would he have handled the fact that these same writers have started to pick up belated regard in academic circles?
( I understand there's a movement afoot to get Mickey Spillane's work into the Library of America. Wouldn't that be a kick in the head?)

I also looked back last night at one of Jean Shepherd's stories from In God We Trust, All Others Pay Cash.
In this story, young Ralphie has a crush on his fifth-grade teacher, Miss Breyfogle. He really wants to impress her with his next book report, so he looks around his house and finds in his parent's bedroom an impressive volume that he knows will impress Miss Breyfogle. Using standard 5th-grade techniques for bluffing a book report (still in use today as far as I know), Ralphie submits his report on ...
You know, I really don't want to spoil this one for anyone who hasn't read it. Find the book yourself, and see what happens to Ralphie.
Afterward, think about it in the context of this whole thread.

Up above, somebody mentioned Jasper Fforde.
I seem to recall mentioning him many threads back as someone you might like, Roger.
If you haven't tried Fforde yet, don't waste another day. Start with The Eyre Affair the first Thursday Next book.
I believe the only problem you might have with these stories is that you are no longer able to laugh out loud. Jasper Fforde will make you want that back.
(And while you're at it, check out his website. I'd link to it, but ... oh hell, you know.)

I'd have liked Maugham to have made the cut, if only for the sake of "Of Human Bondage."

After seven years working(volunteer) for the most literate, professional friend(public school teacher)...We found ourselves hating each other...On our last day driving home to city from border area school, he who I adored decided to try and terrorize me by running through the train tracks downed rail crossing gates. Listen people, these muslim brotherhood men are not who they appear to be. I Immediately set the bum up with an out of county University Phd to "reference my work",,,and lo and behold the two of them bonded together in their own ‘contempt for women quagmire’. Born and bred in the briar patch, dummies!

John Berryman is underrated. If I am the only one of my young generation reading him, then... I'm glad to know that at least one knows and reads. Cheers and good health, Roger.

I've read almost everything you've mentioned
and then some
e.g. all of Henry James
all of Dickens
Robertsobn Davies
most of Thomas Pynchon
& David Foster Wallace
and the list goes on

to cheer you up I suggest you peruse
http://s11.zetaboards.com/thefictionalwoods/index/
where a group of Voracious Readers
share their reading pleasures and displeasures

over 77,000 posts about hundreds of authors

I'd been engulfed in the world of graphic novels for the past decade, partially because I worked for the Comic Book Resources Web site but mostly because I just loved them. Two years ago when I moved to Los Angeles to become a Screenwriting Fellow at the American Film Institute Conservatory that reading dropped off considerably...mostly because I just couldn't afford to spend $40 every week on new comics. I was still reading, but mostly books on Cinema.

A little over a year ago I read a fantastic author profile in the New Yorker about W. Somerset Maugham and decided to pick up one of his books. It was "Theatre" and I was immediately hooked. Soon I was diving into his short stories about India and reading multiple books at once (not as confusing as you would think). I think his "Of Human Bondage" is one of the best books I have ever read.

As Maugham was beginning to wind down, the New Yorker published another article about Agatha Christie. She had never seemed to be my type of author, but I was very interested in studying the structure of her stories (in relation to the structure of screenplays) and thought "Why not?" I had read (the Cliffnotes version of) "And Then There Were None" in high school...I think. I picked up "Five Little Pigs" in Borders and was shocked at how great it was. Have you read it? The detective tries to solve a sixteen-year-old crime by interviewing the five suspects and comparing and contrasting their stories. Comparisons to "Rashomon," and not negative ones, should be invited with the book.

Now I'm getting into Truman Capote. After adoring/being-appalled-by "In Cold Blood" and "Handcarved Coffins," I'm reading "Other Voices, Other Rooms," which acts as an odd sister book of Harper Lee's "To Kill A Mockingbird." Both have the same settings, similar storytelling drives and similar characters (there's a Lee-type character in "Voices" and a Capote-type in "Mockingbird").

I'd humbly recommend that you consider adding all three, Maugham, Capote and Christie to the above blog entry. Maugham and Capote may not be widely read today, but certainly just as much as several of the authors mentioned, and their body of work just as fascinating and entertaining. Christie is the closest to your "potboiler" statement, but I would classify her above that for the sheer perfection of her mechanics alone. And though she isn't well known for her character depth and emotion, she was still able to create two of the most enduring, fascinating characters of the 20th Century.

I've begun gathering up paperbacks of Raymond Chandler for my next author. I tried reading him in my teens but think I was too young to get it. Perhaps now will be different, and I'm really looking forward to it.

'The truth is so easily lost, Dori. When we lie to ourselves, we open the door to a world of madness.' (just ask a Perez)
Like the muslimedia tells USA, Australia, Japan, etc., "the severe weather is threatening the spread of oil spilled in the gulf." ?WTF? really, BP, YOU LIE! The truth is just the opposite: Their Oil Spill is causing wildly erratic and extreme weather, killing thousands, and gaining in intensity --as the gulfstream has been frighteningly stalled. This is their disaster! Yet their minions who collect millions continue the BP LIE!
The truth scientists are silenced and their reports are buried because of the inconvenient truth about their Gulf Oil Spill directly related to WORLD RECORD SEVERE WEATHER! Money(OIL)Media-Madness has a fat ass, mega-fatter wallet, our small balls, and the Islam idiots victorious bowel movement rolling over the mindless followers of propaganda propping up their OIL-POOP!
Go F*** YOURSELVES. Lies are lies, even when the world of madness follows.
Intellectual masturbation is overrated.

Consider Longfellow: so popular in his time that to get him to dinner was a social coup. People stood and spontaneously clapped when he entered a room. He was the American Virgil. Today, I don't see him even on the syllabi of 19th century American literature classes half the time.

Chaucer dealt with this so well a world ago in "The House of Fame." Another one for the list? Which list?

--Peter

I would probably add William Maxwell, John Cheever, Eudora Welty, and Wright Morris to Ozick's list.

Thank you ! I've been catching up on classics lately - my son is a Peace Corps Volunteer in Tanzania and busy as he is - there's still a lot of time to read by the solar-powered lantern at night (and once the full moon was bright enough to read outdoors). He says "don't send me short books". We are now reading "Ulysses", just finished Moby Dick; he recommended "Cutting for Stone" for a more recent good read and I just sent him a copy of Tennyson's "Idylls of the King". We keep looking for more recommendations - thank you again!

Celine's Journey to the End of the Night will be around for quite a while to come. Sartre, although probably more for a play (Huit Clos) than anything else. Although some might not call Bukowski literature (I would), he'll be around for a while. Robert Penn Warren shouldn't be on that list, his short story Have you seen Sukie? should be enough for immortality. Brendan Behan, especially The Scarperer (not so much Borstal Boy), will be more popular later than he is now. As you wrote, it's not a list, but we all do have our favorites.

Does anyone want to be well-read? Yes! And her name is Leith Colen, author of "The Book Bag: An Autodidact's Literary Newsletter for those who want to read more than just best sellers."
Roger, her story is amazing in that she never really read anything of substance until age 50--and she's read more than 1,000 books since then. Here's an article from the Berkshire newspaper from 2001: http://www.iberkshires.com/story/1540/www.halloween2-movie.com/
thebookbag@hotmail.com

Hmmm. I'm thinking my next Kindle ebook purchase will be Bellow's Augie March.

My next hardcopy will be Andrew Breitbart's "Righteous Indignation".

Ebert: I'd recommend doing it the other way around. Books for literature, Kindle for information.

growing up i wasn't allowed to watch TV. We had a small selection of videotapes that on occasion we were allowed to watch, this i think was a wise decision by my parents.

i was late in learning how to read. There were so many hours spent in remedial reading classes struggling to get this sequence of letters and words to form itself into a story. As you can tell by my grammar, some of these literary lessons never really became part of my life.

I remember the exact moment when i learned to read. not how to put letters into a word, or how to string those words into a sentence, but when the words disappeared and a movie began in my mind. I was lying in bed next to my mom trying to read aloud the phantom of the opera, putting each word in order, trying to make sense out the chaos of letters on the page. I was incredibly frustrated because i just couldn't get it right, i couldn't make sense of it all. sure i could make out each word, but it took so much effort it left me close to tears. a switched turned in my head at some random moment, and i SAW the story i was reading. the page disappeared and i heard the characters speaking, saw them moving. i had learned to read, and i have never stopped.

I am a compulsive reader, i carry a book with me everywhere i go. if i have a free second, and nothing to read i find something to. Nothing to read while chewing on a sandwich at work? I'll read the description on the salt containers, or read the warning labels on the heat lamps. in high school i was famous for being able to walk through the hallways, stand in line at the cafeteria, eat lunch, attend class, walk to the bus, and walk home while reading. oddly enough i didn't get harassed because of this behavior.

My greatest dream/worst fear is to end up like the sean connery character is Finding Forrester, a recluse that spends all his time reading and writing alone in his apartment. the fact that my chosen profession is very different from this is a grounding that keeps me sane.

The list that you quoted are all important authors, and the idea that they are no longer read is a fallacy, but that's not the point. when an author publishes something it is no longer theirs, it belongs to us. if we chose to read it, ignore it, never hear about it, worship it, ultimately has absolutely nothing to do with the person who wrote it. Memes travel from person to person, and what might be popular now could slide into obscurity later, conversely the opposite is just as true. Don't give up hope that these writers will be read, and don't despair that they aren't now.

mike

Comment count has doubled since I wrote mine. Just cruised backwards up the list and spent a wee bit of time copying and pasting into a document that will live in my google cloud.

Many suggestions in some of the comments that I just couldn't let get away from me. Life is good.

Thank you again, Roger, for writing this journal entry.

Yea;.....pick me....yeah..........me........pick me .....pick me!

There isn't much more one can ask for from you,
there is enough for me to keep on going for some time now;
and catch up with you, just bear with me here; I feal you.

I had an on and off bumpy ride for the past six months,
now that I have things back in motion, already have
seven or eight in the works.

Oscar.....fetch boy; fetch......aaah nevermind,
hey; don't walk on the grass; there's life down there, hey;
don't go in there; that's not a hole........it's my straw hat
upside down; bring it to me.........what am I saying;.........
go, go.......feal free to do whatever you want.

Congrats on the show; me like it big times,
where did you find this dude Ignatiy Vishn-
evetsky; he's pretty good with that chick;
they make an interesting team.

"Setting aside living writers..." and you don't set aside Marquez! I believe he would have a different opinion, and he's the only one on your list whom you could ask.

For what it's worth, I think at least a few of the names on the list you quoted don't belong there at all, but some others probably do. I imagine Ozick formulated her list from her own anecdotal experience, and not library or book sales statistics. My own perspective is no different, of course, but I've read some of them recently in a college literature curriculum. To suggest that Norman Mailer and Susan Sontag are going unread is baffling to me.

I certainly do remember noticing generational differences even among my professors in the books they were personally conversant in, outside whatever their specialties were. It seems that whatever void is left from a good writer falling out of fashion (and out of print), is filled continually by new grist arriving at the publishing industry mill, and so new readers' minds are shaped differently.

As for you, I predict that you will be remembered long after every copy of every iteration of Leonard Maltin's Movie Guide has collapsed into dust. Incidentally, I had a "film as literature" professor who quoted from your reviews so often that we called him "Professor Ebert" behind his back, so your old ambition in that regard has partly been fulfilled.

Oh, and this is off-topic, but you should google "2d glasses". They flatten 3D movies so that you can have a normal two-dimensional experience, although I suppose you'd still have to pay the 3D ticket price.

I'm not well read, but I have read My Antonia. I loved it, and still think about it from time to time.

The twelve members of my book club are just finishing up Main Street, so perhaps Sinclair Lewis can be upgraded from "not at all," to "not so much." I read a number of his major works in my late teens and early twenties, so this is round two for me.

If your great friend Bill Nack could travel to all of America's high schools performing his "Concert of Words", many more of those authors on the list would be read.

I had the privilege and great good fortune to hear him at Rancho La Puerta. He makes the words come alive and reminds us how vital the thoughts and rhythms of those authors' works still are.

However, I suspect there are still many teachers and professors who are attempting to do the same.

I read every day but must scramble to find the time. Family, Friends, Hobbies and Career have usurped the calender! Was a time when I would spend an entire day reading. Literally, wake up, pick up book, read while assuming various positions of repose in various rooms of the house. Take a 20 minute break for a snack and a drink. Read. Notice it's dark, go to bed, read. Finally stop when the brain loses all ability to focus in the wee hours. Not very healthy for the body.

It's difficult to be wow'd by a novel now-a-days. I mean wow'd like when you were young and everything was new and your heart and mind were just opening up to the world. Everything is brighter to the eye unfamiliar with the light, like stumbling out of an afternoon matinée into summer sunshine. Yet reading great books will ignite those lamps of the mind. After awhile the next flash becomes just another star in the constellation. I miss those days of being totally engrossed in a novel. They are few and far between.

I'm all over the place with my reading now. Just for fun I went and got the pile on my nightstand. There are eleven books there! Terrible mess! I suppose I'm like every other reader, I go through phases. Lately it's a biography fixation, since six of the books fall into that category.

The subjects are Anthony Hopkins and Robert DeNiro, two of my favourite actors. Then a bit of politics with Memoirs, an autobiography by Trudeau. Followed by HitMan, which tells the story of a sports figure whom I greatly admire - Tommy Hearns. To bookend this standard fare I have an oft-time surprising biography of the Marquis de Sade, which is turning out to be engrossing and not gross, which is what I assumed it would be when I bought it on a whim. Finally there is a nicely written book entitled The Urban Saint, which is about a very well known Winnipeg Pastor named Harry Lehotsky. Harry died of cancer after spending years helping the poor.

Beyond these six I have two monsters in The Count of Monte Cristo and War and Peace, which remain unfinished and are starting to gather dusk. I'll get back to them eventually. I'm most of the way through the Count but had to put it aside after Dumas turned me off with a string of lame chapters in an otherwise entertaining read. Next to last I have some science with Feynman's Not-So-Easy Pieces and a truly excellent history of the great debate between Einstein and Bohr about the nature of reality, written by Manjit Kumar and entitled Quantum. Finally there is a book called The Three Pillars of Zen, which is something I pick up from time to time. I'm quite fond of it actually, having read it a number of times.

Now that is just one nightstand. I have similar piles in every room and tend to pick up and read whatever is most convenient - armlengthwise - at the moment. I'm not sure why I have to have them all out and around all the time. I do have bookshelves, but were I not forced from time to time to restock said shelves, or rebox said books I'm certain I would die in a freak book collapse accident.

Sometimes I think a Kindle would be a good fit for me. I see Randy Master mentions his every now and again. I can't quite make the leap however. I had one in my hand a number of time but always put it back on the shelf at the store. There is something about a paper book that I'm very loyal too. It has the proper feeling to it. It knows how to initiate the ritual of a good read.

Ebert: I'd recommend doing it the other way around. Books for literature, Kindle for information.

Amen. I'm 29, which would put in the prime Kindle demographic. But I don't get it! Give me real paper to hold and flip through any day. I imagine that by the time I'm 70 (if I'm fortunate enough to live that long), kids will look at me as being the strange old man that still likes paper. Perhaps they already do. Anyway, I couldn't agree more.

I've noticed a strange development in my reading. Although a lifelong rural Missouri resident, almost all of my favorite authors are British. And this without any special affinity to Great Britain. I've simply concluded that there is just that much more in common between the two cultures than I would have already expected. I don't see how else I could relate so well. Give me Wodehouse, Dickens, G.K. Chesterton, Tokien, C.S. Lewis, Owen Barfield (oh, to be a fly on the wall at the gatherings of the Inklings!!), Patrick O'Brian, T.S. Eliot (American born, I know), George Orwell, Daniel Defoe, George Eliot, Agatha Christie, that old cat named Shakespeare, and the list goes on. This is not something I can explain in myself; I can only say that it is.

There are others too, of course. The Brothers Karamazov is, and really, anything by Dostoyevsky is, as good as it gets (the Pevear / Volokhonsky translations are marvelous) . Hugo, Les Miserables especially. My favorite living author is Richard Russo, without question. Until recently there wasn't even a close second on that list. But I discovered The Road by McCarthy, and, well, now there is a close second. There are so many others I've enjoyed in fiction and non-fiction: Saint Augustine, William F. Buckly Jr. immediately come to mind.

One thing I don't do is make such an obvious distinction between what might be termed high and low literature or literature and pop fiction. I get it, don't get me wrong. When I read Lehane, who I really like, I recognize that it's not Orwell or Dickens or Shakespeare. But, I don't think less of it for that. What can I say, am I to be blamed for being a sucker for the detective genre?

Anyway, I'm slowly building what I hope will be an impressive library in 40 years. I graduate from graduate school in May and that should help free up even more time for reading and watching movies. So while I can't say I'm well read yet, I think I can say I'm slowly on my way.

While I agree with many that the aforementioned "essential writers" are indeed essential, I find it fairly disturbing that not one of you included Gore Vidal on your lists! For me, Vidal is one of the absolutely indispensable American writers, and all around men of letters. His "Narratives of Empire" series are sublime, and his essays must reads.

What's your take on Vidal Mr. Ebert? Would love to know.

- Stephan Helgoth (Age 24)
California

..so the point of the list is that these authors were once considered great and important and are no longer read. The communication student in me wants to know on precisely what basis Ozick/Ebert think they are no longer read (research, anecdotes, anything - and yes, these things matter) but I am sure they are both well-informed and in constant contact with readers of all kinds.

Wrong on a couple of points, at least as it applies to me: I have read Sexton and Lowell and will read them again. I will probably get to Ginsberg, Mailer and Edmund Wilson eventually. The rest I have never heard of.

I started making a list of authors I'd read, until I grew tired of it:

C.S. Lewis, Dick King Smith (whose book "The sheep-pig" became the movie "Babe". I started the list from my earliest memories of reading), Mary Shelley, Ayn Rand (yeah I know that doesn't count), Dostoyevsky, Gogol, Pushkin, Lermontov, Turgenev, Solzhenitsyn, Tolstoy, Nabokov, Plath, Hughes, Sexton, Lowell, Lorca, Rumi, Hardy, D.H. Lawrence, Grahame Greene, Lawrence Durrell, Anais Nin, Paul Bowles, Jane Bowles, Kafka, Hesse, Thomas Mann, Louis Couperus, Thomas Harris, Stephen King, John Grisham, Bret Easton Ellis, J.G. Ballard, William Peter Blatty, Proust, Camus, Sartre, Hugo, Dumas, James Baldwin, Ralph Ellison, Alex Haley, Scott Fitzgerald, Zelda Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Malcolm Lowry, Herman Melville, James Salter, Asimov, John Wyndham, Anthony Burgess, Nancy Mitford, Maggie Gee, Steinbeck, Henry James, Truman Capote, Carson McCullers, Andre Gide, Garcia Marquez, Katherine Mansfield, Conrad...and so on.

I'm currently re-reading Wu Cheng'en's "Journey to the West" which is a pretentious way of saying I am reading the abridged Arthur Waley translation "Monkey". I've read enough to have nothing to prove, to have an inkling for what is out there and to know that there is much great literature I will miss out on before I die, and that I can only focus on reading that captures my immediate interest. I have read Henry James before and will read him again but right now "Monkey" will suffice.

I don't want to be well-read, I just want to read and being well-read just happens to be a likely consequence of this desire.

I have just finished my first novel. Or, I've brought it to a measure of completion. I am going to submit it into a competition for unpublished authors. When I lose I will enter it again next year by which time I am sure it will be in a vastly different form.

It seems improbable to me that my work will ever reach many people in my own time, let alone into the future, even if it were to be published. Which is scarcely the point since I write, just like I read, for pleasure (or to exorcise demons).

Roger:

I wonder how much of the lack of reading is on the parents? I have three children, and my wife and I spent a great deal of time reading stories to them when they were very young. It seems to be a natural progression to move from being read to, to picking up the book for yourself. Fortunately, each of the three have.

Coincidentally, or perhaps not, all three excel in school. I do believe there is a connection between reading at a young age, and progression in school, perhaps something in how the brain develops from processing the written word, as opposed to viewing Teletubbies.

While their reading habits are threatened by Nintendo DSs, computer games, and television, we have placed limits on those. Reading is never limited, even when grounded. We believe it's too important to take away.

As you mention, what they read is not as important as the fact they do. While I'll occasionally drop in a suggestion (A Wrinkle in Time, The Lord of the Rings trilogy, anything by Twain), they have progressed well on their own. The Harry Potter novels were devoured by my oldest, and our two younger ones are now discovering them.

And is there anything better than discussing a book with your children, one you have both read? The joy of this is what compelled me to read Twilight, simply so I could discuss the book with one of my daughters. Fortunately, we both felt the same way, so further exploration of the series was unnecessary.

The youngest, my boy, loves the Percy Jackson series, and I enjoy having discussions with him about gods and mythology. Even a series as lightweight as that still will later point him toward some deeper research, as he seeks to learn more of the mythos.

Even the simplest reading opens the mind, and piques curiosity. Will they read Fitzgerald for pleasure? Perhaps. But as long as they continue to read, I believe they will continue to learn, and to grow.

Once again you re-visit the seemingly precarious status of literature in the modern world, Mr. Ebert. As I mentioned in a similar blog, the three main obstacles to being "well-read" are self-discipline, incentive, and time. It is heartening to read that so many posters on this blog have surmounted those obstacles.

Even more encouraging is that many posters are reading because they simply enjoy it, and not because they are attempting to fulfill an arbitrary book quota. These posters are defying the deleterious effect of so many English teachers who have sullenly crammed the classics down the throats of so many disillusioned students who, as a result, have treated the classics as emetics.

This blog provides a cumulatively comprehensive, worthwhile reading list. In my opinion, if you can read even a relative handful of works from the list, you can be considered "well-read". The key, however, is reading with pleasure and independent comprehension. What do YOU get out of the book?

In that vein, what is your opinion of Cliff Notes and similar literary digests? Are they good supplemental literary information, or merely cheats? Is it advisable to read them only after you finish the book?

P.S.: After a fairly long literary draught, this English major with a B.A. in English from Tufts and an M.A. in English Literature from Northeastern has made a tentative return to the classics. I started yesterday with something "accessible" and "easy", Hemingway's "The Sun Also Rises". I am already halfway through. At least I realize that the novel is rather more than a languid, meticulous travelogue.

I can't resist from answering the question in the title, though I'm sure plenty of other commenters already have, but yes, yes (with a resounding barbaric YAWP!) Yes! I want to be "well-read". No matter what it takes. I'm studying history in the UK, but despite all of that dense literature I need to pour through, every time I walk into my apartment I feel the urge to hold a book, to let it lead me to the next one. I pick up one Latin-American author, and it leads me to a book of poetry by a countryman, which leads me back to William Carlos Williams, which leads me back to Dos Passos, who leads me to Thackeray.... I can't imagine any other life. In two weeks, I'll turn twentytwo. On any given day, I'd forgo technology to spend more time reading.

It's times like this I wish I didn't have the necessity of sleep. I hate knowing I won't live long enough to read all the great books; at the same time I love knowing there's such a rich mine of literature, waiting for me any time I feel like digging.

Your 'mind to mind' comment is spot on!

Being well read - as a desirable state of being - seems to be viewed differently now when compared to even just a generation ago. During my lifetime (I'm 45) we've gone from 3 channels of TV to an everflowing and boundless stream of information via the web. You can't even finish one on-line reading experience without the distraction of 10 or more imbedded links seeking to send you off down one-after-another rabbit holes of enticing but often useless information. As a culture we seem to care about different things. Cultural literacy used to mean understanding references from Shakespeare, the KJV, Greek mythology, and the classics, to name a few. Now it means being up to date on Charlie Sheen's shenanigans. Sad.

That said - I am a life-long voracious reader, but I've followed my interests and not a list. Yet, I've always wanted to be "well read" in the way you describe. Reviewing this post I've only touched on about 25% of your suggested library. Thanks for the input.

I've read only a few of the books and authors that you write of, but you peak my interest in what they have to say.

Roger, your written voice is as influential as your spoken voice ever was. When you are not writting, listen for God's voice. His, like yours, is influential and worth listening to.

I scanned (but alas, did not have time to read) the 214 previous posts, but didn't see one category of books: those which illuminate science in a brilliant and accessible way.

Given the rate at which we are destroying our planet's natural resources, books such as Jared Diamond's "Collapse," Wade Davis's "One River," and Alan Weisman's "The World Without Us" are vital reads.

Other great scientist authors include Stephen Jay Gould, E.O. Wilson, James Trefil, and Richard Dawkins.

With boundless respect for the literary classics—and I agree that few people want to be well-read these days—I'd suggest that we should all spend more time reading the works of the authors above. They give us a chance to understand the natural world that supports us...and help us see the incredible complexity of ecosystems which have evolved over billions of years—and also the increasingly damaging effects of our existence on Earth.

Scott

While this might seem tangential at first, it isn't really....

If it is produced on stage today, we call it a 'musical' while if it were produced on stage a hundred years ago or more we call it an 'opera.' Yet if you watch The Magic Flute (I love Bergman's filmed version! seen it like 12 times), it is definitely not intended to be 'high-brow' any more than some of Shakespeare's comedies were.

Homer's Iliad and Odyssey are still great stories, that's why they endure.

The Riverside Shakespeare! I still have my college-issued edition (the 1973); it was one of only a handful of books that I didn't resell to another student back then. Love it. Was just looking up something from "Much Ado" about a month ago. Discovering that you and I share the same affection for it has somehow made my day. Thanks!

Foo.

The 'Great American Novel' was published in 1869.

What was it, you ask?

I'll leave that as exercise for the reader.

Hint: It's a book men don't read, but women never stop reading.

I love you, Roger Ebert! Not only because you're the most spot-on movie reviewer for me, but because you wrote this marvelous blog. I've read (and will continue to read) many of the writers you mentioned, and am eager to explore the many more you've now introduced to me. There's a quote stenciled on the wall of my local library that goes something like, "The problem with new books is that they keep us from reading the old books." In searching (unsuccessfully) online for a name to which this quote can be attributed, I discovered the following: "It is a good rule after reading a new book, never to allow yourself another new one till you have read an old one in between." — C.S. Lewis
Sounds like a good rule to follow!
By the way, my 18 & 20 year old children both grew up as and continue to be avid readers-for-pleasure. Things go in cycles, and perhaps book reading will eventually become the new retro fad.

Ebert: I'd recommend doing it the other way around. Books for literature, Kindle for information.

*Looks at ebert skeptically

while I have you.... we agree catch-22s unfilmable; given last weeks events; is atlas shrugged filmable?

Very interesting article. The idea of being "well-read" is important to me only inasmuch as I read what I want when I want to for my own pleasure, intellectual or otherwise. That I haven't heard read any of the writers that Ozick mentions, even if I have heard of several of them, is disheartening. It's interesting the you mention Blood Meridian in the article, because the idea of cultural endurance and extinction is extremely important in that novel. McCarthy, I agree, will endure. Do you think the other three "major novelists of their time" that Harold Bloom listed along with McCarthy will endure (DeLillo, Pynchon, Roth)? Also, are you excited for Paul Thomas Anderson's adaptation of Inherent Vice? I definitely am.

I know it's completely beside the point, but... does anyone else find Cynthia Ozick's writing style to be just a little overwrought? It's as if she wants to plant the idea in our heads that she is one of the "literary Figures", with a capital F, whose legacy is in danger.

And yes, Cynthia, there *are* plenty of folks who continue to read the authors you mentioned. The other day I was listening to a fantastic rendition of Ginsberg's "America" on my ipod-- it's from an old Tom Waits album and you can find it on youtube (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9v-ANXLaViw). (Roger, you might want to check this one out sometime. I know Ginsburg wasn't exactly obsessed with quality control, he's admitted as much in interviews, but he did write some good poems besides "Howl").

Roger,

Thanks for the post! I have a BA in English, and I'm going back to University to get my teaching certificate in Secondary Language Arts. We need to foster a love early for these authors (and others) in the young people. We need to talk about great writers and get excited about them again. I've not read every one you mentioned... maybe every other one, but we all find our own definition of quality. I skipped Augie March and read Henderson the Rain King, maybe I'll have to go back. Here's a few that might jog your memory- all I can attest to is that I still read them-

TS Eliot
Ezra Pound
James Baldwin
Langston Hughes
JD Salinger
Jack Kerouac
James Joyce
Sylvia Plath
JRR Tolkien
John Updike counts now I guess.

Every one a true artist.

It was 1980 and I was 15 years old old. My contemporaries were reading things like "Flowers in the Attic" by Virginia Andrews. I remember flipping through it briefly and discarding it just as fast; boring. Besides, I had other things on my mind.

The Police had released a song called "Don't Stand So Close to Me":

"The song deals with the mixed feelings of lust, fear and guilt that a female student has for a school teacher and vice versa, and inappropriateness leading to confrontation. The music and lyrics were written by lead singer Sting, who had previously worked as an English teacher. In a 2001 interview, Sting denied that the song is autobiographical. The line "Just like the old man in that book by Nabokov" alludes to Vladimir Nabokov's famous novel Lolita which covers somewhat similar issues."

And how I discovered Labakov's "Lolita" and subsequently Tolstoy's "War and Peace" in Grade 10.

Lolita was unlike anything I'd ever read before; in truth, I admired how it was written more so than what it was about, the subject matter of no particular interest to me. I just wanted to know "who" that old main was.

"War and Peace" was an exercise in determination and resolve: I refused to let it beat me. And eventually, finished what I can only describe as the world's most overrated book. But here's the thing - both were located in the adult section of the New Westminster Public Library and where I stumped upon everything else: from Jane Austen to Milton's Paradise Lost.

Recently, I saw Danny Boyle's play "Frankenstein" and it's because I'd read Paradise Lost (I've got a copy of it on my bookshelf) that the play was able to resonate for me.

Does anyone want to be well-read?

HELL yeah. :-)

Otherwise, all you'll get is the surface of things. Which is like spending your entire life in the shallow end of the swimming pool where context can rarely be found, let alone learned.

What though the field be lost?
All is not lost; the unconquerable Will,
And study of revenge, immortal hate,
And courage never to submit or yield

- Paradise Lost: book one

As a 15 year old, I found that extremely inspiring. :-)

But only because the courage not to give up when all seems lost, can apply to more noble pursuits, as well. Case in point: remember the opposition to giving women the vote? Yet here we are. And it had to be fought for, drawing upon the same courage that aided Lucifer: the unconquerable will.

Few were aware of Milton when I was growing up, at least those amongst my peers had never heard of him; again, it was the 1980's and we were teenagers. I only stumbled upon it because curiosity about a song led me to a section of the Library where Paradise Lost could be found.

That was over 20 years ago and why I've ultimately concluded that only the curious are well-read now.

Note: Siskel and Ebert were on PBS talking about a film called "My Dinner with Andre" the day I stumbled upon their show for the first time. It's because of that segment, I wound-up seeing the film. I'm susceptible to articulate enthusiasm.

It often gives me pause for thought, you see. And once my mind is engaged, curiosity quickly takes over and then there's nothing to be done, save give into it.

Smile.

Two previous posters mentioned Hawthorne. Both favorably. He certainly has survived the test of time. Poe is of course a great genius, but it seems to me that some of Hawthorne's writings actually surpass Poe's because Hawthorne wrote some horror stories that were as good as Poe's, while being more profound than Poe's—and most other writers of any generation. Poe is given credit for inventing the short story, but that simply reminds me of what Isaac Newton said in his Principia, "If I have seen further than other men, it is because I stand on the shoulders of giants."

A week or so ago, I did a close reading of "Young goodman Brown." I found that it not only merited a close reading, but that it also reads better when one takes the time to let it sink in. Every detail adds to the tension that Hawthorne builds. It truly is a horror story, and in its short span, it is as profoundly insightful about the human condition as Shakespeare's best works.

Today, horror films are presumably designed to scare people. But how many of them actually make the audience think (I mean something worth thinking)?

How depressing to read that list. I have read a lot of Ginsberg (though not for years), a little Paley, some Berryman, some Lowell, and that's about it for that list. And I consider myself reasonably literate. Dickens, there's the stuff. Substantive, yet compulsively readable. Probably the novelist who has given me the most consistent pleasure. I find I don't read as many novels these days. Seems like in my 20s I read poetry, in my 30s fiction, in my 40s I find myself reading history. But now I want to go read David Copperfield. And yes, Catch-22 is unfilmable, though it might work as a miniseries...but only if you can bring back Martin Balsam as Colonel Cathcart.

I'm an eighteen-year old who has been reading for pleasure since I was 7. I certainly hope that statistic you quoted was wrong; otherwise, I feel disappointed in my generation. At the moment, I'm plowing through Ayn Rand's "The Fountainhead" and Steinbeck's "East of Eden". Why? Because I can, and I want to.

Oh, sure, I read so-called YA literature, as well (I suffered through the Twilight books, and greatly enjoyed Suzanne Collins' "Hunger Games" trilogy; I also read the Percy Jackson and Harry Potter books for fun), but that's beside the point. Teens need to be spending less time with athletics and more time with books. I once read that the literacy rate for American adults was at an all-time low of 54%; that statistic was likely as accurate as yours, and again, I certainly hope variables were overlooked.

Anyway, let this be a lesson to educators and school boards: stop cutting the arts and literature programs, and stop promoting athletics and sports-based scholarships that instill pipe dreams of sports grandeur in the malleable minds of teens. All that does is promote illiteracy and raise the number of uneducated, lower-than-blue collar workers out there.

Thanks for the interesting read, Mr. Ebert! It's a very thought-provoking topic.

Roger,

I commented on this blog a couple days ago and then returned tonight to check out the subsequent comments. My reaction to these comments can be summed up in a single word: WOW. It seems that Ms. Ozick's pessimism is unwarranted. There are plenty of serious readers out there. What we really need are more serious writers of the caliber of Faulkner, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Pynchon, Nathanael West, Cormac McCarthy, et al

Hi Roger,

Always enjoy the way you write. I recognize some of the writers you mentioned, have read some. I agree, always for pleasure. I finally read Sun Also Rises, used it as a model for my first novel (unpublished - somewhat, sigh, self-conscious it seems for modern consumption). I love what I've learned from re-reading that one as many times as I have. And his short stories. Haven't been able to get into anything else, though I love the guy from my heart. It's also heart-to-heart this reading thing, no? Coetzee's Slow Man is one I've been reading for the pleasure of the writing. I've always wanted to read Mahfouz, crave Dickens from time to time. Lately I've wanted to read Dumas' Monte Cristo because of the sci-fi film anime series that has left myself and my sons stunned. My sons read, one more than the other. The one who reads a lot reads a great deal. Reading continues and I think that's what counts. Whitman freed me in my youth. I smiled to know you keep him close. Tom.

Never read Jude the Obscure... or Tess of the d'Urbervilles. Why would someone do that to a reader?

as usual, roger, you are right on the money.

i do believe people with a brain of high intelligence and a certain sensibility will always read "great literature", however that term may be defined. witness the enduring power of cervantes, dante, et al.

my one exception with your comments is with regard to the omission of hawhorne. i have always believed THE SCARLET LETTER to be one of the most perfect works of literature ever devised by man or woman, of this or any other time and country.

"A medium made only of words doesn't impose the barrier of any other medium. It is naked and unprotected communication."

It's interesting that a film critic is making this claim. I've always seen film (and by extension photos) as a more unfiltered form of communication than print because it relies on sight and sound. Print does indeed seem to impose a "barrier:" our mind's interpretation. When we read the sentence "He swung his arm back and forth," we have to imagine the man and give him characteristics. Is he young, old, short, tall? What is he wearing? Where is he swinging his arm? If we filmed the man, these questions could be answered without the need for additional sentences.

The 'Great American Novel' was published in 1869.
What was it, you ask?
I'll leave that as exercise for the reader.
Hint: It's a book men don't read, but women never stop reading.

Well, that's surprising--I never realized women were that fond of Huckleberry Finn... ;)

Ebert: "Little Women," I'll bet.

I have found Willa Cather to be a very readable and important part of American literature, and am glad to hear you bring her up again.

Maybe it's because I'm from that midwest immigrant background that her books feel so incredibly alive. I don't love all her books, but I believe My Antonia and One of Ours are my favorites. One of Ours, especially, is a very personal book for me.

I was also surprised to see Borges, who I just discovered last week. I'm afraid he is probably going to be one that is not as much read as he should be. I said to my professor, "What's something weird and fiction?" She said Borges, and so I found him through chance as sometimes one needs to do. The very first story upended me completely and I am certainly now a fan. I liked "The Lottery in Babylon" so much that I read it through three times in one night. Thankfully they're all quite short!

And much like my great grandfather lives on in me through the stories my father has told, any writers that may have "faded" will likely live on in the next set of writers. So that's not so bad.

I don't know, man. People are reading these things. One day as a teenager I picked up Robert Penn Warren's All the King's Men out of boredom as it was lying there on the family book shelf. Ratty copy rotting into dust, knew nothing about him or it. But it gripped me and I still think about it and mention it over 25 years later. These things happen with books. There's a lot of reading going on out there. Ideas are memes, ideas are viruses, and Normal Mailer's view of what it means to be naked/dead, that stripping down to the essentials of a personality, is an idea that colonized a piece of my thinking 15 years ago and gets stuck back into things I do today, though I rarely mention Mailer himself. These things get imprinted on our thinking and go back out there. Four billion people, lots of readers. Not all writers are going to dominate society. But bit by bit they can have moments of our private time, and that is valuable territory to occupy.

Books CAN NEVER be ART

because, you know, i have the arrogance and pretensions to believe i am allowed to dictate what can be art and what can't, even if i am demeaning and diminishing people's passion from a completely ignorant and uneducated point of view.

Ebert: Gee, I guess you're right.

Some more modern American literary authors whom I believe will stand the "test of time": Richard Ford- His books, the Bascombe novels in particular, are a timeless portrait of America. Raymond Carver- He mastered realism and minimalism in fiction, though he would hate to hear that being said of him. His short stories will live forever. Jonathan Franzen- He is in the rare and unique position of being a "popular" author that is not considered a "pop-culture" author. He has mass appeal, yet he has managed to elevate his novels to a literary level. The late David Foster Wallace- I have to mention him (He and Jonathan Franzen, ironically, were close friends and rivals) Not for every taste (like James Joyce in a way) but if you take the time to read him and understand him, you will realize that he is in a class of his own. Alice Munroe- (I do love women writers as well) Like Raymond Carver, her stories are never excessive, but they have the ability to cut to the core of the readers emotions. Another woman, Joyce Carol Oates- Novelist and short story writer; she is a master of the form. There is enough in her canon to appeal to almost anyone.
There are so many more, George Saunders, David Barthelme, Tobias Wolff, Denis Johnson. Of course, the list goes on and on. Now that i look over this list, I realize that Roger was right, some of these authors might endure, but most probably will not. I think it's just my wishing that everyone could find the things that i have found inside these master works.

-Happy reading.

I could quit my job, visit an optometrist for new glasses, lay in a supply of Visine, and read nonstop for the rest of my waking days and STILL wind up suffering a sense of what I haven't read. As an English teacher, even at a rough-and-tumble "at risk" high school, I carry around this sense of futility and spuriousness. Like you I've fallen under the spell of Cormac McCarthy. I, too, just got through a rereading of Blood Meridian! The people I know who count themselves avid readers just read crime thrillers. I have sampled good ones, like James Lee Burke, Dennis Lehane, and Michael Connelly. But I don't have many people I can talk to about McCarthy or Dostoyevsky's Notes from Underground (cited by one of your readers above) or Shakespeare or Hemingway or Dickens! Your blog reminded me of the one you did about rusticating in South Africa with tea and biscuits, never lonely because you had books. I have to believe people will always love curling up with a book. On a final note, how come every time I coerce a kid into reading a novel, and then they see the movie, they announce the book was better? There is an irreplaceable imagistic richness to the reading experience. I get 'The book was better' even from viewers of the film To Kill a Mockingbird. Thanks, Roger.

Not the writer, but the spirit or call it what you will, the human characteristic of observing, engaging and contributing to the edification of the broader human experience lives on. These writers you list, for example, participated in it for awhile, then ceased to exit. But the activity is kept alive without them directly though and, by ever dwindling means of influence, indirectly. During their lifetimes it was theirs to keep the torch lit, as it were. The torch has been passed. What is more interesting is the human characteristic to engage and participate in an apparently pointless existence, rather than fetishizing any particular form of same, personal tastes aside.

However, you have expressed a sense of glimpses I catch, once in a while, when I see pictures of long gone Hollywood stars, and of world-reknown artists, even those who currently occupy space and time, realizing that all will pass into complete obscurity and oblivion. As will I.

But, like them, I will have participated in my way. And to bemoan that via quantification (influence / time) seems to me to miss the point, or at least, miss an important part of it.

On a different note: Pound said it best perhaps when he suggested that a book ought to be to a reader as a burning light, a light burning in the reader's hands. That is why I read. I cannot relate to the heatless monotony of reading something because to do so means one is "well read". I'd rather be thought of as well hung.

I'm surprised that among all the classics cited here there's been no mention of the essays of Montaigne -- perhaps because the focus has been on fiction, though not exclusively. It is amazing to think that in the European tradition the most enduring and unsurpassed novelist (Cervantes), playwright (Shakespeare), and essayist (Montaigne) were a trio of writers of practically the same generation, almost half a millenium ago.

Yet another obstacle to bibliophilia stems from the "nutritive" demands English courses have foisted upon countless students. Too many English teachers have regarded great literature as vegetables - generally good for you but also unpalatable. In other words, read it, you probably won't like it, but it's good for you. As we mature, if we can allow ourselves to sample readings that please our emotions (the "smorgasbord approach"), we will eventually read something that benefits our mind as well.

"The Hamlet Syndrome" - also perpetuated by imperious, didactic English instructors - can also hamper good reading. I define "The Hamlet Syndrome" as the reluctance to read a much-dissected and opined-upon work of literature because of the futility of finding something new to say about it. Yes, you will uncover treasure that has been dug up before. However, if you can bring your own unique perspective to bear upon the work, you will likely find new, deeply personal themes there as well. If you can read without any preconceived notions, so much the better.

Let me add one additional book to the list: the Authorized King James Version of the Bible.

Not only more beautifully written, but also in many instances more literal than the trendier and biased NRSV (for the Left) or NIV (for the Right).

And certainly not the update New King James (NKJV). . . the real one.

Roger:

Was it G. B. Shaw who said of W. S. Maugham: "Maugham is one of the best of our second-rate writers."

I think one can look to the publishing imprints and smaller publishers which are doing wonders for books that may otherwise be forgotten as a beacon of hope. Top among them may be New York Review Books, which--like the Criterion Collection does with cinema--releases novels, short story collections, memoirs, and others in a uniform visual template (differentiated by different colors and cover art.) I'm sure their efforts have enhanced the reputations tenfold of many comparatively obscure authors.

Of today's authors, who will be remembered and read in fifty or one hundred years? Stephen King, I imagine, even if just for sheer popularity (though he's an excellent writer, to boot).

Great post. I was embarrassed reading Ms. Ozick's list to find that not only had I not read any of the authors, I had only heard of two of them. Then I scrolled down to find that you'd only read two of the authors, so I didn't feel that bad. Then I realized that you'd actually said you'd read all BUT two authors on the list. Then it was back to embarrassment.

I am an avid reader. I don't think there's been a period longer than a week since middle school where I haven't been in the middle of a book. But admittedly, I'm not much for the classics. I don't know if it's the stigma of them, or that I was forced to read them at a period in my life when I was too young to appreciate them, but for whatever reason, I lean much more towards contemporary authors. I remember when I was younger being absolutely captivated by "Around the World in Eighty Days," but that's the only one that's stayed with me. Like you said, some things you have to discover for yourself, so maybe at some point I'll get into them. I did recently purchase collections of Twain, Dickens, and Poe (bargain at Costco), so I think those will be good places to start.

I agree with you that Cormac McCarthy's work will endure. "Suttree" and the "Border Trilogy" were some of the most beautiful, painful things I've ever read. I will never forget the first hundred pages or so of "The Crossing," where Billy captures the wolf and the journey they undergo together. The ending of that journey was one of the most heartbreaking things I've ever read.

A couple authors I'd add: Philip K. Dick. Even if everyone else forgets him, I know Hollywood won't; his work gets adapted more than any other sci-fi writer I know of. But his books are much more than mere science-fiction. They're political, metaphysical, moving and intelligent, and quite often damn funny. "Ubik" is one of my favorite books of all time. The second author I'd add: Gabriel Garcia Marquez. "Love in the Time of Cholera" is hands-down the greatest love story I've ever read. That novel took ahold of me like fews other have, and I'll never forget it.

Leslie Fiedler (one of the writers cited in the Ozick article) was noted for predicting that Stephen King was the only author of the 20th century who would be remebered a hundred years later. Personally I have some Mary McCarthy, Susan Sontag and a great deal of Edmund Wilson on my shelf, and all the comments here point to a prognosis much more optimistic than Fiedler's. I think that even as reading broadly for pleasure becomes less common and the general public drifts towards television, gaming or other forms of entertainment the "naked and unprotected communication" (a perfect phrase for it) offered by a deep encounter with a good book will always be a draw for those seeking something more meaningful, personal and intense.

Reading is by its nature a quiet, private act. There are many of us who read and savor without feeling the need to share with an outside world. I'm an intense reader, but also an intensely private one. I am curious about blogs; have attended a few book group meeting; have even enjoyed seeing, and sometimes dipping into, Oprah's recommendations. But I myself do not feel compelled to share what I read, or how I feel, with other than a few intimate friends.

There are many people who read, and I include in that count a great many delightful young people I know. They don't always read what I do; but many of them have enjoyed what I have, and there's plenty to go around. I don't think at any point in history can it be said that the "average" person read a great deal. That hasn't changed. But the exceptional younger readers will do fine.

I'm not despondent about reading. We circle around to what is there, and today the world of books is wide, deep, and marvelously accessible. We circle the icebergs and navigate as we can. As the sailors once said, "it is necessary to sail; it is not necessary to live" [navigare necesse est, vivere non est necesse]. Or to put it another way, being well-read isn't important. Reading is.

You left out Henry Miller and Lawrence Durrell.

Oh, and Kenneth Patchen, one of the greatest and most underrated poets of the 20th century.

Ea yr I make a pt to read at least one classic novel that I missed in college (and I missed quite a lot) and have discovered many wonders such as Magic Mtn, Middlemarch, Buddenbrooks, Suttree, and, yes, Auggie March.

I prefer time-tested works and rarely read a bestseller. Sometimes, I reread something that impressed yrs ago to see if it still resonates--Look Homeward, Angel touched me deeply 30 yrs later.

The best contemporary novels I've read in the last couple of yrs are A History of Love by Nicole Krauss and The Sea by John Banville.

Tks for this thoughtful post--I enjoyed it as I do your thoughtful film reviews.

Isn't that such a fantastic phrase? Well-read! I would love to be fluently realized with Ernest Hemmingway, D.H. Lawrence, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Charles Dickens, James Joyce, and so forth, but I am biding my time -- which is another way of saying the likelihood of my reading their works before I die is piss-poor. To be one with yourself, family, friends, country, and everything in between seems to be the way of 2011, not well-read.

Occasionally I'll reread Toole's "A Confederacy of Dunces," Miller's "Tropic of Cancer," Vonnegut's "Cat's Cradle," Conrad's "Nostromo," Ellison's "Invisible Man," and Dick's "Ubik," because those are my favorite novels of all time. I choose to bask in the nostalgia and reinterpretation. A battle of my present mind and past mind mediated by the writer's timeless-regardless-of-time vision. That, for me, is being "well-read."

Yes, it is also selfish to neglect additional authors who spill their creative guts on the page, but I'm a screenwriter (and novelist dabbler), and for some reason I feel as though I will dilute or contort my writing voice.

There is a selection of books and screenplays that I have read and still refer to for comparison and sheer momentum inspiration, but there is a fear of being inferior to a new cracked seam or PDF file. And in holding such an outlook, I somehow hoist myself into a subliminal superiority over those neglected writers. On the flipside, the viewpoint of my "favorite novels and scripts" could be seen as being uppity, as if I read those works and know them through and through to instill in myself a notion of being an equal to the authors (or more than an equal -- everyone has an opinion on how a masterpiece could be a better masterpiece).

Still, the undercurrent of jealousy and intimidation lies within those unread margins. As if I'm staring into the night's star-ridden sky and cannot bear to hold my gaze for too long on a certain patch of twinklers.

Recently, my opinion about fellow writers and their works of art has evolved.

In November of last year, I finished work on the upcoming film "The Help" as a production assistant and editor's aide (my first feature length film!). That was not only a turning point in my film career in terms of connections and so forth but also the unveiling of my connection with everyone in the production. As cliche as it sounds, the atmosphere felt like a family. My radar never could shake the ambiance of familial artistry (and never tried).

And so, creating a film is an intimate miracle, as with writing a novel or biography or article, or constructing any art form. We feed off each other's attention and enthusiasm. Any respectful artist is an addict for his own work to be enjoyed, hated, critiqued, debated, and most of all, known. Every writer is a distant cousin of another writer, and the great-uncle of a sculptor, and...FILL IN A RELATIONSHIP TO A TYPE OF ARTIST, REPEAT...

May I read at least one more new script and novel in the future before the sand leaves the hourglass.

Thank you, Ebert, from one stranger to another. As a fellow human who chose to compose a universe with language, thank you and may your fingertip journey never end.

Even though you say that it does not matter with which books you start reading with, there is a clear discrimination between “serious novels” for adults and, well, the Twilight-Harry-Potter-stuff for kids.

I am a faithful reader of your reviews, Mr. Ebert, and since I have stumbled upon the Harry Potter books (during an otherwise completely wretched vacation) I thought that you might actually enjoy them.

Of course you are familiar with the story by now (I would have found the movies incomprehensible without reading the books), but the plot is not what makes the books such a pleasure to read. For me it were these three points:

First point: The language. You have once described the language of Jane Austen (J. K. Rowlings favourite autor, by the way) as “limited but very vivid” and that may describe J. K. Rowlings style best. English is not my mother tongue but I completely forgot I was reading a foreign language at the very first page (similar to reading your reviews but I have to look up a lot more words to completely understand them…). Even though Ms. Rowling has some favourite words (“out of thin air”) her English is not an insult to the reader as that of those Dan-Brown-fastfood-novels.
Second point: The details. In the movies one may wonder how to keep track of the many, many characters (using the rule of character economy in a whodunit situation here will definitely lead nowhere – there is always a dozen of characters just standing by for no other obvious reason). During the novels this is not a problem because every character is so clearly sketched that you do not need to be a fanboy to remember him or her until the next book. You can also soon navigate different places like Hogwarts, Privet Drive, Diagon Alley or the Ministry of magic even if they’d switch off the light – Hogsmeade you can almost smell! That is because in these books you always know exactly what people eat, what the play, which homework they have to do and how all the neat magic works.

The last and maybe most important point is that J. K. Rowling takes her audience very seriously and she has grounded her novels in profound humanism. In the first three novels that may not yet be evident as they are from an eleven-year-old-kid perspective to whom it is clear who the evil and the good guys are. Still you can sense that J. K. Rowling has a heart for those who are not strong, cool or pretty (Hermione is a lot less confident and beautiful as in the movies and Ron, the forgetful Neville and loony Luna are drawn with great affection). During the later novels iconic and beloved characters like Dumbledore or Harrys father grow more and more ambiguous (this shift of perspective on Dumbledore is an important motif in the last novel, which had to be skipped completely from the movies) while the sinister Malfoys and Dursleys are allowed their motivations, fears and doubts. Throughout the books the subjects of Death and the loss of a loved one are dealt with an unusual intensity.

Still the books do not qualify as “serious” literature. But they are great entertainment that may eventually inspire some readers to pick up Mark Twain or J-P. Melville. They are not that far away.

So if you have some time left, you do not have to be in a special mood to start these books. Being on a plane or laying in bed late at night are just fine to pick them up. In my case I sat exhausted and hungry in a wet, dim tent and they saved my day.

Canons change, and writers once thought indispensible seem less so with changing times. From your list, for example, Robert Lowell was once seen as the greatest living American poet, yet even toward the end of his life tastes were changing. People were more likely to be reading his friend Elizabeth Bishop, and I suspect that is still true today. This does not diminish Lowell's talents, however, and there is still much to discover and enjoy in his poetry. So it is with many of the writers on your list. Once upon a time the canon was stuffed with classical authors; now few read more than a play or two by Sophocles, either the Iliad of the Odyssey (seldom both), and, perhaps, a bit of Plato.

Is this a loss? Undoubtedly, but history is a merciless gardener, but, one has to remember, for every work or author weeded out of the public consciousness, space is created for other talents and visions (even if they too should prove to have a shorter flowering than one might have supposed).

I have recommended Willa Cather to dozens of people, I think. Most of whom have never heard of her. I picked up one of her novels for the first time not because she was well known or necessary to read in order to become well read, but because My Antonia sounded interesting when I was 14 years old. I have since read every novel she ever wrote with the exception of One of Ours, for which she won the Pulitzer. I am saving it, because I am certain that there will come a time when I need a book by an old friend. One that I can count on.

I think that's the key to becoming well read: reading what interests you, and doing so often. People who read authors with the intention of being well read have missed the point. And they are always playing catch up. They have to wait 20-40 years in order to even guess if someone will be added to the list of authors who will last the test of time.

That said, some amount of catch up is always necessary. John O'Hara has been dead longer than I have been alive, but Gibbsville, PA is next on my bedside table. And Bellow's Henderson the Rain King immediately after that.

Ebert: All you really have to do is start reading Willa Cather and you will gain, as you say, a friend for life.

I have read many, not all, of the authors listed. Right now I'm reading Thomas Wolfe, whose work I somehow missed to this point. Reading William Gay (whose work I came to through your review of a film based on his short story "I Hate to See That Evening Sun Go Down") pointed me back to Wolfe. That is how I come to stumble upon many things, through happenstance and luck, and by reading, reading, reading.

I work at a university, but luckily do not qualify as a "professorial specialist." My humble B.A. from a small liberal arts college, combined with 30 years of magazine and book editing experience, landed me a job with a scholarly journal (on management, alas, not literature). Most of my colleagues hold Ph.D.s or M.B.A.s or J.D.s, yet despite the initials after their names they are embarrassingly illiterate.

In the hope that some of your readers also enjoy stumbling upon recommendations, I offer the names of Richard Ford, Richard Bausch, and Lorrie Moore (her short stories, not so much her novels). Support local libraries and bookstores. Starbucks and Ralph Lauren do not need anyone's money.

Ebert: "Look Homeward, Angel" made such an impact on me as a teenager. I returned to it three years ago with some trepidation, but found it held up very well.

Another thoughtful post Roger, and I’ve enjoyed reading all of the book recommendations in this Comments section. I’d like to add just one: Saint Francis by Nikos Kazantzakis – a well written, engaging, passionate and moving account of the spiritual journey and struggles of Francis of Assisi.

I subscribe to Mark Twain's idea that a classic is "...something that everybody wants to have read and nobody wants to read."

I am still young and reading is still daunting to me. Though I enjoy it to hear others talk of it with such knowledge of vast libraries with authors I have either never heard of or whose names I've heard as whispers. I have read the basics Twain, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and I currently trying to march through Charlototte Bronte's, Jane Eyre. But I fear this isn't enough.

Mr. Ebert, I have the greatest respect for you, but:

Ozick is a truly despicable racist and I really don't think decent people should be giving her the time of day. She is and has been a proud spear-chucker for the most extreme Israeli right, with a long history of defaming Palestinians and defending all manner of violence against them.

In the Wall Street Journal's op-ed pages a decade ago Ozick argued that Palestinians as a whole consitute a homicidal mass, a "culture of death" (her words) whose sole contribution to the world is murder and hatred. She explained that Palestinian mothers -- every one of them -- harbor no love for their children and feel pride only when they blow themselves up. She said that a primary goal of Palestinian society is to educate its children to kill and hate Jews. This is just genocidal rubbish of the sort that should call into question her authority to comment on anything at all, or to be published in anything other than far-right zionist journals like the New Republic.

Great article. As you point out, John O'Hara is rarely read today. I think that is too bad for us. In spite of (or because of) his obsession with social climbing, he wrote some terrific novels, and I think he is one of the great forgotten American novelist. Somerset Maugham should probably also be on the list as great but quickly fading and worth checking out. Thanks for writing this. Anything that promotes reading of this nature is worth writing and sharing.

Ebert: He's formidably readable.

Well, I for one more loved this post. Reading has been essential to my life, to my development (such as it is) as a human being. And it's been my door to a rich inner life as well. I never lack for something to think about--more the opposite as I'd just like more time for deeper thinking about lots of things. I don't want to flap around in the shallows, I want to head into deeper water and hope I can swim!

BTW, I just launched a new site for my online magazine about books at http://www.FEASTofBooks.com - take a look, I think you'd like it!

Graham Greene -- still read, still great and will still be read 50 years from now. I'm surprised you didn't list him, since, not only are his books outstanding, but several movies have been made from them, some of them recently.

Ebert: I didn't consider myself to be making a list.

I had to smile when I read this, because it occurred to me that "haphazardly" and "randomly" are words only Roger Ebert would use without seeing the irony. I think we are all a bit like that. Sometimes we are inclined not to give ourselves the credit we are due. I remember the Jerry Seinfeld joke where he mentioned "limited editions" of automobiles: "Yeah, they're limited to how many of them they can sell."

I'm limited to how many hours I'm awake during the day—which is not nearly as many as I would like. Several years ago, I haphazardly read every one of the Pulitzer Prize-winning novels in much the same way that Roger watches movies. I decided to read them in the order in which they were published. (Yet, I only read all of them.)

Roger listed reading as a hobby. It's nice to love your job. I think it's safe to say that he's read all of Roger Ebert's books and movie reviews. Add to that something like 70,000 posts, all the movies, magazines, and the like, and we're talking about some serious eyestrain. So, reading novels probably does seem like going above and beyond the call of duty.

I have this book on my desk called "Literature: An Introduction to Reading and Writing." The "Introduction" part of the title elicits a chuckle. Anyone who makes it through the book and completes the exercises in it will indeed be well-read. It's 1,671 pages long and has extensive assignments. Unless you're a teenager, it seems like the work of a lifetime. Sort of like being a full-time movie reviewer is. I'm dubious about whether anyone has actually made it through the entire book, and done all the assignments—but greater fetes have been done.

I'm sitting on a copy of Mythologies, waiting for summer to come calling with an extra moment or two to spare. Incidentally, Roland Barthes might have some thoughts about the last bit of this entry--"A medium made only of words doesn't impose the barrier of any other medium. It is naked and unprotected communication. That's how you get pregnant. May you always be so."--to say nothing of Saussure.

But, as an afterthought, I suppose you are right, in a way. Words reach out through time and space to promise the possibility of companionship. I told a dear friend, when we were both feeling unusually lonely, that even if we could not find friends among our peers, every writer with words of frustration to echo our own and photographer or filmmaker whose images opened a window onto experience as we had known it could be considered a confidant. I think we read ourselves in a small way when we find someone whose words[, images, or sounds] speak to us.

I've seen e.e. cummings mentioned once in the comments, and I was tickled by the sidebar link to "the boys i mean are not refined." Thank you for bringing that clip to my attention. cummings is my favorite poet by some measure, and that particular poem was with me on a particularly harrowing night during undergrad.

Scanning the comments, I noticed a few scientists and science majors butting in among the English majors and literature students, so I'm sure one more won't hurt. Richard Feynman's The Pleasure of Finding Things Out is a must-read. He writes as though he were telling stories over drinks. [R.I.P.] A personal favorite that also demands recommendation is Alan Lightman's Einstein's Dreams. For a "physics major-turned-humanities student," it is a rare nexus between poetic prose and the elegance of those realities that do not require base language to express themselves.

I've read nearly all the authors you mention, and I'm shocked to imagine them UNread.

Yes, some of that accomplishment is due to being a PhD type, but I read Henry James when I was eleven, and over 30 years later, I'm still at it.

Just to name one of those authors.

They are dear to me.

Well, I have nothing profound to say. This is about love, and gratitude. Some of those writers kept me afloat.

Any problem with including the "Beat Generation" authors with the classics mentioned in the article and by the commentators?

Greetings Mr. Ebert! It is an enormous loss that so few people read as in the past. I also agree that the Kindle is a good thing, as it encourages people to read. I also like paper books. A problem for me is that I am in a location(The People's Republic of China, Hangzhou), where it can be difficult to get paper books in English. Also I am in a graduate program, so there is a lot of reading involved. I'm afraid that a Kindle may be in my future. I also like John O'Hara, very much, although no one I know personally knows of him at all. I was captivated by William Faulkner one day at the local library(years ago, in Seattle) when I happened to pick up a copy of "The Mansion". One other name that I would throw into this discussion would John Fowles. On that same library bookshelf I happened to pick up a copy of, "The Magus". I suspect that the Kindle may well be just what literature needs for people who increasingly are getting all of their "Content" from the web and handheld devices, apparently. I am part of that problem as I enjoy texting people as much as the next person. It will also be a(is?) a huge boon to the poor suffering publishers(smile).

Ebert: Fowles is so good. His "Daniel Martin" is not to be overlooked.

Roger,

"Why do I think reading is important? It is such an effective medium between mind and mind. We think largely in words. A medium made only of words doesn't impose the barrier of any other medium. It is naked and unprotected communication."

I'm going to respectfully object to the portrayal of words as "naked and unprotected" as opposed to, say, pictures. And I object partly in defense of graphic novels that I anticipate will, before long, command the respect and admiration that the work of people like Dostoevsky and Faulkner commands now. But I also object on general principles: Words do not flawlessly communicate the thoughts of their author or speaker. I won't go so far as to agree with Burroughs who claimed that "language is a virus that came from out space," but I do agree that language is as barrier-like as are pictures.

Hello Mr Ebert,

While I am tempted to concede that fewer people read fewer things than people in the past used to, I am aware also that there are more people who can read - especially English - and many more avenues of accessing reading material than before. That said, however, our collective attention spans may have atrophied due to the constant strain of expressing semicoherent thoughts in 140 characters, and then giving up.

I have not read (or even heard of) most of the names you mentioned; I have - and continue to read, reread - Faulkner, Hemingway, Joyce and some others. I'll keep an eye out for some of the ones I haven't next time I'm at the bookstore. We appear to have only a very delayed feedback loop in place between the U.S. and Islamabad.

I do not read - and believe I am in the silent majority in this - for anyone's satisfaction except my own. I would like more people to be well-read if that makes for an interesting conversation from time to time, or if I discover good reads more easily that way. But I am young. I have enough to read for however long I might require. I am patient. What more is there?

I'm probably better read than most but not as well read as many others. It's always frustrated me. So many books, not to mention movies as well, so little time. I feel like Burgess Meredith in the classic Twilight Zone. What has always concerned me are people I know older, the same age and younger than I who have absolutely no interest in reading the great books or seeing the great films, viewing it as if it's homework and once they've left school, they abandon that pursuit entirely. I think you see that point-of-view played out in the political arena, where ignorance has become a badge of honor for some, where Michele Bachmann claims she stopped being a Democrat after meeting her husband when both were volunteers on Carter's campaign because she read Gore Vidal's Burr and thought it was "snotty." That's quality literary criticism and a solid reason to change your entire political philosophy. I know I will shuffle off this mortal coil without having read or seen all I should, but I long ago tried to settle on a middle ground where at least I would know of those books and films I never got around to unlike others who will go through their whole lives never having even heard of them and being all the poorer for it.

Roger,
Cynthia Ozick's melodramatic self-aggrandizement aside, the grave is no more cruel to the author than to anyone else. If his or her work has been truly influential, it diverts the current of art forever. Even if someone has not read Dostoyevsky or Shakespeare, they will find their work everywhere in the films of Kurosawa. Very few people have actually read Ulysses, and even fewer Finnegans Wake, but can you imagine the works of Thomas Pynchon, David Foster Wallace, or Tom McCarthy without them? Where is Coetzee without Beckett? And where are any of them without Kafka, Proust, or Woolf?

None of this is to say that we should Ignore the works of these canonical writers. But the importance of Joyce is not his personality, biography, or "Figure," but rather the words he put down on the page. While Ozick mourns the death of the writer's "presence," I would rather celebrate the importance of the writer's works, forged in a language he or she did not create but rather borrowed and twisted from some other set of writers' works.

The other day, my six-year-old nephew told me about how his grandfather dislikes eggs: "He hates them. Why would anyone eat such queasy things?" When a six-year-old uses a narrative technique pioneered by Goethe and championed by Flaubert, that Is true influence. I hope that my nephew will one day read the works of all of these writers and more, but to see and feel the importance of their art all around us seems far more important than bowing before their cold dead statues.

You are thinking of James Wood, not James Atlas. Wrong then, wrong now.

Ebert: I've corrected that.

Let's say he was wrong. What is the Great American Novel, or is the designation itself foolishness?

Frankly, I'd like to be more well read, but I can't abide by the very modernist writers who throw out narrative and clarity of writing for mere annoying experimentation or endless pages of esoteric descriptions of silly things like rooms, landscapes etc. So when I go serious in my reading, I always go to the 19th century since they don't seem to clog up writing with experimentation. I wish I was more ambitous with my reading, but frankly I disagree with Ebert, I think in images, not words so it's a lot harder to translate words into something in my imagination, so reading is a lot more taxing to me than probably to a lot of others who comment here.

Not to mention, I think english lit is badly taught in school. Books become a chore, you read a boring book because it's "good" for you. There's no contextualization to the novels (and some need a lot of contextualization for the book to have an impact) and it's all reduced to "how do I feel about the characters?" and "why did this character do that?" analysis. So in the end, real literature is intimidating and a chore and certainly not exciting.

I remember someone in my high school class attempted Kafka's "The Trail" as an experiment and could not say anything about it except he didn't get it, was distressed that he felt like he was supposed to like it because Kafka was important for some reason and was simply proud that he finished the book. And I don't think my lit teacher knew what to do except to give him kudos for finishing the book. I think to appreciate good literature, serious literature, requires some training in critical thinking and reading strategy that is not really taught in school.

Besides, we're in the age of images, not text, so it's no surprise that contemporary writers who write challenging books are writing to a niche audience. The novel was the main arena of storytelling people participated in the 19th century, today, it's film and television. It's dubious to make any judgements about that isn't the tired old "everyone is getting stupider, remember when everyone in school read Charles Dickens?"

I guess I'm responding to the snobbism I feel is exuding from Cynthia Ozick's statements that open your blog entry. She sounds like an out of touch academic who's always groaning about the death of something and the downfall of anyone under 30 because they didn't read Susan Sontag. If you want people to read more sophisicated material, then the reason should be more compelling than just "ooh, it's just good for you to be well read and here's a list of people you need read." Reading a book is a real time and mental commitment that needs to be justified for a lot of people who don't put reading on a high priority list. Besides, I think I can get a lot more out of a two hour Visconti film than reading anything as horrid as Susan Sontag.

Just out of curiosity, how about African & Asian writers? Mr. Ebert, can you recall any memorable works from the African & Asian literature of 20th century?
(i suppose it is a given that there are always issues of translation and availability for the literary works from Africa and Asia)

I would like to be considered well read, yeah. I just recently finished War and Peace and was seismically overwhelmed with some of the talking points Tolstoy made about war and the men in charge of it. I felt like I was an adolescent listening to a top tier college professor discuss points that I could not ascertain yet, let alone fathom on my own. It lead me to believe that reading opens you up to a whole world of critical thinking.

I'm 85 years old this morning and recall how, on my 7th birthday,
I got my own library card at the East 68th Street branch of the
NYC public library.
I haven't stopped reading since - right now it's Beckett's Malone trilogy...but I'm also hooked on thrillers, cookbooks and poetry. At least I am this week; next week who knows.

I recall Walter Kerr, the drama critic, advising someone who was deploring his child's fascination with comic books, to let the child read whatever pleased him because his reading taste would change and he soon would tire of comic books and look for more substantial fare. I agree - my grandson reads anything he can find that relates to Star Wars. Great! He'll be reading "The Dubliners" someday I'm sure.

I won't begin to recommend what anyone should read however I do suggest that the best introduction to Shakespeare is by
watching his plays on dvds on vcrs. I was fortunate enough
to hear several of his plays on WNYC weekend radio broadcasts by the Old Vic players before I ever read one line.

His plays translate beautifully to radio; Elizabethan theatre had few props and lighting so he had to describe who, what, when and where. See the first few lines of Hamlet and one example, or listen to 'Antony and Cleopatra' to know it in all its glory.

Enough...time to go celebrate with my children, their children a few friends and Beckett.

I grew up in a small rural South Georgia town. The income of most of the residents ranged from dirt poor to middle income. The only thing one could really do in such an environment to escape the confines of poverty was to read. By the time I graduated from high school, I had read nearly every book in my high school library; books by Sinclair Lewis, Faulkner, Dickens, Steinbeck etc. Through reading, I could transcend the hum drum life of a small town and go anywhere I wanted and become anyone I wanted. Reading was a life saver. I established a love of reading that has lasted my entire life. I could not imagine a life without the joy of reading.

For me, reading was important growing up because without the internet to bring the world to your fingertips, reading was all I had. It introduced me to a world outside my small, suburban town, and allowed me to explore it, without even leaving. That adventure, that exploration through reading, is what led me to adventure and exploration in life. Without it, I would probably still be in that small, suburban town - having never left and never really experienced life.

Yesterday, I checked google news, and found 1,700 article about the arrest of Terry Jones in Dearborn, MI.
Jones had announced plans to protest outside the Islamic Center of America in Dearborn. A judge had him arrested at the airport, saying that his plan would "incite violence" and Terry had to post a 'peace bond." Terry refused.
There is an attack on our Constitutional Freedom of Speech. A court has no legal right to prevent Symbolic Speech outside a mosque, no matter what the pretext. America is, IMO, on the brink of losing our Freedom to speak... because judges and even Supreme Court justices don't understand the First Amendment.

I work in a bookstore - indeed a Barnes & Noble bookstore, who still like to boast they're the world's largest - and the economic downturn has had a very sad side-effect. Simply: We don't carry as many books. And those we do carry seem to be by the same hundred-or-so authors that can be considered guaranteed sellers.

The names of the writers in your lists above? We see very few of their works available on our shelves. It's all celebrity cookbooks, fad diet books, romance novels, current bestsellers and our largest-growing category, teen paranormal romance.

Our 'classy' faux leather bound classics editions do contain perennial titles considered to be timeless, but they also boast the works of Douglas Adams and the 'Wicked' series. I suppose being a faux classic goes with the faux leather.

And yes, many titles are available through e-readers such as the Kindle and nook, but I doubt a young reader will have the same magical experience of trolling the shelves of a musty bookstore that they'll have scrolling through a list of titles on the internet.

Reading for pleasure seems to be a disappearing experience for young people (who should get offa my lawn, by the way), and whenever I hear someone boast - boast! - that they've never read a book they weren't assigned in school I don't feel angry at them. I just feel sad for them. For all they're missing. For worlds unvisited and characters unmet.

Ebert: As long as there are still used book stores.

Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe is an example of great African literature.

What do people who don't read do with their time?

Thank you for giving James some positive publicity. I have just started reading The Europeans and, against my expectations, I'm finding it easy (by which I mean enjoyable) to read. I know we're not doing a list, but Orhan Pamuk.

Regarding the Great American novel, I find it amusing to watch all the Captain Ahabs attempting this (a little dismayed as well at the trend for 1000+ page new novels). As a concept I find it a little strange. Was there 'the Great Russian novel'? I wouldn't want to choose between Anna Karenina, War and Peace, Fathers and sons, or Crime and Punishment.

I view being well-read (a long way off in my case) as like climbing a mountain. Some people look at the peak or tricky parts and view it as impossible, never starting. I realised after a while that my goal isn't reaching the top, but enjoying the climb.

Shee-it, I haven't even got time to read my own stuff. I'm told there's a bunch of it sitting in the archival library of a fawncy, fawncy university waiting to be opened after I am dead.

Or in 100 years, whichever comes first. And that is the story of one who writes "what people don't realize what they need" for ya.

Thank you Natasha Badhwar, and XOxoxOX. I forget whom you quoted.

Every day since winter broke I've been tossing computer affairs aside, picking up a well-loved, browned and highly tattered paperback I've had for years and stepped outside. Outside I find a naturally ergonomic spot in the desert sand, beneath any secretive juniper bush, lay down and endeavor to read for pleasure.

Two or three neighborhood dogs will join me, dig snooze-holes for themselves in the silt and settle in for a snooze while I read. Reading for a human is like snoozing for a dog. The imaginations of both float pleasantly into a larger dimension.

Then up come Clay, Harley, Sammy, Solar, Midnight or Naughty. Looking up from the desert silt, I'm surrounded by thousands of pounds of equestrian love-on-hooves who need once again to determine what my old paperback tastes like and whether or not there's any horse candy in my right pocket. It tickles.

I once read that one can learn more from watching an animal than from reading a book. That's my excuse for getting through only about half a page this way daily. At least I don't let them chew up what's left of that old paperback.

Time to go feed 'em.

thinking of you as I read this article

Shirley

You mention you had met five of the authors listed at the beginning of the entry. Care to share a story from any of those encounters?

You sir, are amazing.

Reading got me through a long sleepless night with extreme back pain this holiday weekend.

John Grisham: "The Confession". On my Kindle. Hitting the "next page" button all night through until I reached the end.

Ah, the power of fiction. I nearly wept halfway through with his compassionate description of a mother cleaning and dressing the body of her deceased son at a funeral home.

I could have done without the barely-shaded bashing of political conservatives in the book. Why would a best-selling author want to alienate half of his audience in a piece of fiction. Poke a stick in our eye, so to speak. Not wise. I guess he wanted to express his "progressive" side.

Bringing the Kindle to EbertFest...

Mr. Ebert,

I was so inspired after reading this blog that I dropped by the book store after work today and bought "The Bostonians" and "Portrait of a Lady." I haven't read James since college and am rather ashamed to admit it.

Here's to reading for pleasure -- and to being well read.

I'm not nearly as well-read as I'd like to be. As a result of several youthful indiscretions many years ago, I found myself with plenty of time to read. In the ensuing, indiscretion-free years, I find myself frittering away hours online, hours that would be better spent with a good book. Nevertheless, to add my less than educated two cents, I've always enjoyed E.L. Doctorow, and I think his work will stand the test of time. I've sensed a bit of a critical backlash against his work in the recent past, but I think it will pass. "Ragtime", "Billy Bathgate", and "World's Fair" are all treasured favorites.

yes I said yes I will Yes.

I didn't see Douglas Adams listed -
listening to Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy got my sons reading.
And where's Ken Kesey? Sometimes a Great Notion is my nominee for Great American Novel.
I also love John Crowley (I know, he's not dead, but he is a wonderful writer).
Little, Big is my all-time favorite book.
And Jostein Gaarder - at my house we love The Solitaire Mystery.
My husband & I are taking a university Adult Ed class on Moby Dick - they raised the enrollment ceiling from 30 to 40 and still had a waiting list - the dept couldn't believe it. But it's a truly modern novel, experimental, political and bold.
And for South Americans, my fave is Machado de Assis (Epitaph of a Small Winner, Quincas Borba etc).
Phillip Pullman's Dark Materials trilogy are better books than JK Rowling.
And I loved the Dune series, and
read Lord of the Rings 30 times.
And what about Primo Levi and
Italo Calvino?
And Russell Hoban?
I read S Beckett's short story Dante & the Lobster to some 20-somethings in a cafe in Florence - they were spellbound. The final sentence is a knockout blow.

No Flannery O'Connor??? You must have read some of her wonderful short stories. "A Good Man is Hard to Find" is a work of pure genius, and I believe that she is up there with William Faulkner and Eudora Welty as one of the great southern authors of the 20th century. Once I read one, I can't put it down until I'm done with the whole collection.

OK, So here's the list that you entered.

Austen
Balzac
Bellow 
Borges
Camus
Cather
Chekhov
Conrad
Dickens
Dostoyevsky
Eliot, George
Forster, EM 
Faulkner
Fitzgerald
Flaubert
Greene, Graham 
Hemingway
Hugo
James, Henry 
Kafka
Marquez
Murdoch, Iris 
Nabokov
Orwell
Poe
Powell, Anthony
Simenon, Georges 
Stendhal
Tolstoy
Trollope
Twain, Mark 
Waugh, Evelyn 
Wharton
Wodehouse
Woolf, Virginia

Taking it as offhand comments about something important, I thought it'd make a good list for me to work through. So I've knocked off the author's I've already read--not that many, I fear. I'm wondering if--as a comment or as another quick journal entry--you could list one "starter" book by each author.

It would help me get started. Don't think too much, just put one down.

Balzac
Bellow 
Camus
Cather
Chekhov
Conrad
Eliot, George
Forster, EM 
Flaubert
Greene, Graham 
Hugo
James, Henry 
Kafka
Nabokov
Powell, Anthony
Simenon, Georges 
Stendhal
Tolstoy
Waugh, Evelyn 
Wharton
Woolf, Virginia 

Interesting post, Mr. Ebert! I was puzzled not to know any of the writers on top of the article. One thought I had: "Maybe it's because they are XX-century Americans?" (I am not American)

Then I saw a comment by Eli Katz:

"Now, compare it to this list: Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, James M. Cain, Jim Thompson, Graham Greene, Ross Macdonald, Cornell Woolrich, Patricia Highsmith, John D. MacDonald, John Le Carre, Elmore Leonard, Frederick Forsyth, Eric Ambler, B. Traven, Isaac Asimov, Philip K. Dick, J. G. Ballard, Ray Bradbury, Robert Heinlein, Orson Scott Card, Ursula LeGuin, Douglas Adams, Theodore Sturgeon, George Orwell, Jack Vance, James Hilton, Frank Herbert, Anthony Burgess, Aldous Huxley, and so on."

Funny, these are Americans too, I've read many of them, and I know the names of the ones I have not read!

I read on whims too. I love XIX century literature, medieval stories and mythology. I enjoy reading and watching plays from all places and epochs (this includes the XX century). But, somehow, when it comes to the XX century novels, I tend to go to fantasy, sci-fi and children's books - my big exception would be Maugham.

Anyway, this post will encourage me to be on the lookout for other writers I usually overlook.

My present reading schedule has me alternating an NYRB title for every two or three book that I finish. After having enjoyed and, yes, learned from my temporary immersions into the beautiful, funny-sad stories of L.J. Davis, Tove Jansson, Maria Dernout, Edward Lewis Wallant and Elain Dundy, among others, I could only feel grateful for the privilege of the contact.

And the language and the images linger even when I begin having difficulty remembering specific author names, or feel frustrated when some of my more "well read" acquaintances are stumped by the mention of authors who aren't, say, Lethem or Chabon, Rowling, Gaiman, Martell, Rushdie.

How many masterpieces are hidden in our ever expanding human library? Not all books will endure, of course. Not every new printed page will aspire to the legacies of the majors: Shakespeare, Tolstoy, Proust, James, Dickens. But we owe it to ourselves, as readers, to seek them out, with the kind help of aptitude, luck or the suggestion of earnest minds.

To paraphrase Anton Ego, "the obscure needs friends."

Right now I'm reading "The Habit of Being", a wonderful collection of Flannery O'Connor's letters, and the mere thought that her stories are little read today hurts me in a real, physical way: a bull's horns gorging their way through my gut. I feel the same for the obtuse tales of Avram Davidson, which, for all their strange stars and skies, are sadly difficult to find.

I do want to well-read, but I’m not sure it’s possible anymore. I mean look at how many really good writers are mentioned just in this thread so far. I read a lot, I’ve read at least one book big by all of the really big names of world literature of the last few centuries, but I haven’t gotten to even half of the neglected twentieth century writers Ozick mentions. Readers here have just recommended books I’ve never even heard of until now. There’s probably a thousand authors mentioned on this thread and they still haven’t gotten to Jonathan Swift, Lewis Carroll, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Jorge Amado, Octavio Paz, Jean Genet, Gertrude Stein, V.S. Naipaul, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Seamus Heaney (a good poet and he wrote my all-time favorite translation of Beowulf), Lord Byron, Dylan Thomas, Doris Lessing, Heinrich Boll or E.T.A. Hoffmann. And there are new writers getting their first books published every year, probably every week. And I could spend five years just reading Balzac. Oh well, time to stop writing and start reading.

Looking over all the comments so far, I think I know what the underlying theme of the entire piece really is:
Continuity.
All of us, regardless of our age, want for our lives to be a whole, with everything flowing from one stage to another, but somehow tying together.
The books we read, the music we listen to, the movies and tv we watch - we want it all to somehow be of a piece. Growing up in the '50s, as I did, this was actually kind of easy - and television was a major part of that.
The first movies I saw were on TV - "old movies" from the '30s (only twenty years before - many of the people in them were still alive and working in TV). In those days, the first movies available for telecast were poverty row jobs (available for next to nothing and short enough to fit into a TV hour) or "quota quickies" from England (which were usually more recent). To a kid, this was all of a piece - the past and present combined to form a fascinating whole.
Later on, when the big studios broke down and made their libraries available for telecast, the same principle applied:
The old combined with the new, producing its own version of history.
(The voodoo "science" of demographics had not yet been discovered; nobody knew that kids weren't supposed to be interested in things that happened before they were born.)

The same was true of books.
The first books I read as a kid were "old" - written well before I was born and no less interesting for that fact.
Actually, quite the opposite: stories that took place in times before my own life were more interesting to me for just that reason.
Our public library had the original Tom Swift books, wherein young Mr.Swift invented practically every technological advance in the early 20th century. I always looked first at the copyright page to check the date: the Swift books dated back to (I think) the late '20s and early '30s; I'd seen enough movies on TV to set the period in my mind as I read.
And I'm pretty sure I wasn't the only kid who could do that.
The Swift books were published by Grosset & Dunlap - the first publishing imprint I was ever aware of ( making me aware also of the idea of specialty publishing; this would come in handy in later years).
As I got older, so did my tastes - but not quite the way they were supposed to.
From kids' adventure fiction, I moved to adults' adventure fiction - specifically mystery and detective fiction. The heavy stuff - I'd get to that later; I had to explore Poirot and Ellery Queen and Nero Wolfe and Gideon Fell and the rest, all in paperback (and thus affordable to me) and all fascinating in a way "serious fiction" never seemed to manage to be.
This was confirmed for me in high school as I ran into the killer of reading: the Required Reading List.
The surest way to get someone not to do something is to tell him he has to do it.
The surest way to get someone not to like something is to tell him he has to like it.
The surest way to get someone to not understand something is to overexplain what it is that he has to understand.
Put those all together and you have the teaching of Literature in school.

I mentioned in a thread from long ago about how much difficulty some kids i knew in high school had in reading aloud from a text. For many kids, it was as if they'd never seen the alphabet before - you could hear them puzzling their way through the simplest words, punctuation throwing them further off.

I remember senior year English: our teacher was working us through an anthology called Points Of View. We were reading a short story by Truman Capote called "My Side Of The Matter", about a Southern man's disastrous encounter wthe his new bride's relatives, told in first person.
Our teacher (whose name I've unfortunately forgotten) decided to have us take turns reading this story aloud. This story has a number of funny lines, and I suppose she felt that hearing them out loud would enhance our experience.
Whe it came my turn to read aloud (being a showoff then as now), I decided to make it a performance. The following is one of the lines I had to read:
Eunice is this big old fat thing with a behind that must weigh a tenth of a ton.
This was the mid-60s, about the time Truman Capote was starting to become a presence on talk shows, but he wasn't yet an impressionist's staple; I just did the standard Southern accent from sitcom land, thusly:
Eunice is this big ol' fat thing with a behind that must weigh a tenth of a ton. (Think early Strother Martin.)
Before I read, all my classmates had read the words with no inflection, expression, or emphasis whatsoever. Just the words off the page.
After my "performance" - same as before. They might as well have been reading the ingredients from a can of paint.
I did not make many friends that day.

A year earlier, my junior English teacher (I do remember his name, but I won't say it for reasons that will be clear shortly) assigned our class to read Catcher In The Rye.
I must admit that this book made a hit with a number of the guys in the class, particularly the jocks.
Of course, I also must admit that the reason for this was that Holden Caulfield swears like a pirate throughout the story.
Imagine how the jocks felt: cussing for credit! (And this was the '60s yet!)
Our teacher was sort of oblivious to this; he told us all at length of what a great writer Salinger was, what he had to say and teach to our generation, and all like that there. The jocks nodded and waited for their next chance to cuss in class and not get written up for it.
This particular teacher spent much of the rest of the year trying to sell me J.D.Salinger; he though that JDS might have something for me that others might not get.
I nodded noncommitally, and decided not to tell him that I thought Holden Caulfield was the biggest jerk I had ever read about.
(In the years since, I've often read about how Jerry Lewis tried for years to buy the movie rights for Catcher In The Rye from Salinger; as late as his mid-40s, Lewis felt that he was perfect casting for Holden Caulfield. I have no idea if he still feels this way in his 80s.)

So anyway:
I've spent my life liking certain writers who never quite broke through to Literary Big Time; many are now long deceased and even longer out of print. I'd mention their names, but I imagine that the last thing you want is another list.

The thing is, I was raised to believe that authorship was a kind of immortality. Having a number of books with your name on them was something that lasted forever. I read books written in the '30s when I was a kid in the 50s, a teenager in the 60s, and an adult(?) in the 70s and beyond. I thought "Forever."
Boy, when I'm wrong about something ...

Lately, I'm just grateful for the books that have lasted my lifetime.
Maybe somewhere down the line, some stray descendant of mine will come upon the pile and pick something up, and it will make him laugh, or thrill him, or surprise him (or her, I know), or something.

One last thought:
I believe I may have mentioned elsewher the name Parnell Hall.
He's a mystery writer with a sideline in singing his own songs.
Got to YouTube at your first opportunity and listen to his songs, which are highly pertinent to this discussion.
I particularly recommend "Signing In The Waldenbooks (And Nobody's There)", "King Of Kindle" (both versions), and his latest, "Support Your Local Bookstore".
This means you too, Roger.
Next time this comes up, I expect to see a Parnell Hall song included in the post.

I think most well-read English people would actually read Hardy and the Bronte sisters before they got to Trollope. I've never enjoyed the Bronte's and Thackeray is the best! He makes Dickens look so... old.

hey, just wondering why my post never got posted. I thought it was pretty good-Just as good as some of the others posted. ok, thanks, that's all.

-bryan nolte

I am 15 years old. I mention my age because that seems to be a big deal. To people my age that is. Lately I cant stop reading. I so desire to read and to have read; to maybe escape from the influence of my peers. I'm afflicted by that Oprah invoked center-of-the-universe mentality I suppose. At the same time I fear entering the culture of the well-read. I fear that if I expose my convictions and their literary influences to the world it will only be to have them attacked by the more well-read more correct guy who is perhaps just a product of my imagination. So I'll just keep them inside I guess.

Why have our newspapers prevented readers from reading the truth? Why are you people returning to novels for comfort? What happens when indifference to human suffering becomes the norm? Are there any readers or writers concerned with how major news media have all remained silent regarding the message delivered to the United Nations by US Ambassador Susan Rice? Her report contained details of the use of rape as an instrument of war in Libya. All one can hear is deafening silence from the mainstream media and women's rights groups across the country. Have we become so jaded by the continual conflict that we just accept these horrific activities. Or is the silence a reflection that liberal groups will not challenge the behavior of an Islamic culture that treats degradation of women as sport.
men and Women, we ask you, Why?

I don't think it's possible to be well-read anymore - at least not in the classic sense of gaining a thorough knowledge of the literary canon.

As humanity has exponentially grown, so has the volume of literary output, especially with the advent of the graduate-level creative writing program, which has produced more mediocre writers than ever, and caused the world of literature to adopt the scientific world's ethic of publish-or-perish - by necessity. All those people need jobs, and accordingly they take care of their own.

It's not that people have outgrown fiction. People still love fiction, they just prefer it to be delivered in cinematic form. And why not? It is often more effective and delivers a more visceral experience, especially for those who are too busy to sit down with a book, not engaged by audiobooks, or simply not interested in wading through the difficult language of authors who are forced to write for each other rather than for their audience.

I am a teacher. My parents were teachers until they retired, as were my grandparents, and my wife, brother, and near-relations have all entered the educational profession. From that vantage point, I can tell you that the figure you quoted near the end of the article is, sadly, all too believable. More than any other profession, I believe teachers see society in all it's shades and hues; a professor, for instance, usually only sees other professors and university students, whilst a cook usually only interacts with other cooks or connoisseurs on a daily basis. Teachers truly see the future: we meet the cooks and carpenters, the academics and the mechanics, all of them in their formative stages. Sadly, whilst the best of us refuse to give up or give in, it does seem society is changing. As with all such times, the trick is to decide which change is inevitable and needs to be embraced, and which deplorable, and needs to be fought. The simplification of English is a change that is coming, like a juggernaut, and though I hope most teachers will stand in the way, I cannot help but feel that we will be trampled. Our society does produce thinkers, dreamers, articulate philosophers and academics...but, more and more, the trend I see in our children is for the simple. A word, phrase, or sentence must be simple for it to be understood by a majority of my or anyone's high school class: there is no drive or motivation see English as a tool for conveying complex emotions or themes. You see this phenomenon in film, more than anywhere else: my classes will not watch a film they consider a "talky" film. They have been long taught that anything important will be shown to them, and that ad nauseam, so they usually simply ignore dialogue. It is unimportant. The same holds true with other forms of communication: believe it or not, email is a tool used by only about 30 percent of students. They prefer the much smaller, simpler, and less intimate connection provided by Facebook status posts, Twitter feeds, or texting.

I don't wish to seem like another doomsayer, condemning the younger generation as all older generations have done. The truth is, I am just barely turned thirty. I love literature. I love Shakespeare. I love film. I have a passion for teaching that can be considered silly by most of society given how little educators are paid and how much disrespect we receive at the hands of most everyone. I am, indeed, not much older than the generation I am writing about. There must be a change, in society above all. We have long venerated youth and all it's positive traits: beauty, athleticism, prowess, stamina, etc. Unfortunately, in the last fifty years or so, we have also embraced, catered to, and, finally, venerated, the vices of youth as well. Witness MTV shows about pregnant and unwed teen mothers, shows that seem less about the responsibility about to fall on their shoulders and more about the oncoming child's place as that teen's latest fashion accessory. Witness the popularity of films like Jackass. As long as we keep indulging the vices of youth as we are doing, bending society to it's will and wants, instead of bending youth to the needs of society...seventeen minutes of reading time in a given week will be the norm.

Re: students now vs then:

A factoid from Peter Drucker (probably from somewhere in his wonderful memoir collection Adventures of a Bystander):

In 1947 [or maybe '48] almost the entire student body at Columbia were veterans, attending with the help of the G.I. Bill, almost none of whom would previously have been considered college material.

None of them were on academic probation.

Motivation is almost everything: nearly anybody can become well-read.

JeffinMO | April 18, 2011 9:28 AM | Reply

So many books, so little time.

Great line for a sweatshirt!

Excellent short bibliographic essay, I tend to agree with almost all your and Ozick's observations, except not well read enough on Henry James to have a strong opinion, but your thought on his style is right on the mark. One American you missed who seems to be very pertinent and still widely read is Flannery O'Connor. Incidentally, just found your website and these comments to your essay are very interesting and informative too.

"I learn that he average American teenager spends 17 minutes a weekend in voluntary reading."

Well, people are required to have the ability to read or skim fast and have a pretty accurate understanding of what they just read and apply it.

In my technical writing class, it was all about finding the most common and easiest way to explain something for the masses AND sound, well..sound.

You want to blame someone (or thing), I would not blame the kids. Blame society, blame the workplace.

We have to be productive you see. We have to make more stuff really fast for people who can no longer buy it and bankrupt corporations.

To keep a job, it is in our best interest to skim and not try to read to much into it.

FYI the kids that read the books you mentioned with thoughts and feelings are now called "emos". They normally drop out of school and have a hard time keeps jobs because they think faster than they move.

Just the facts please, no soliloquies.

"Reading for pleasure" can be a tricky business. I decided the read Proust years ago -- the original Moncrieff translation bought in a college bookstore. After reading the opening of Swann's Way -- 25 pages about eating a cookie -- I was more out my depth than ever before, but plodded on. As the book came spinning out of the clubhouse turn for its stretch run, I remained clueless. Then the Baron de Charlus, if I remember correctly, tipped his hat at the narrator, the proverbial lightbulb came on and I "got" at least some of Swann's Way. I felt as if Marcel had been dicking with me the entire way and then pulled an amazing parlor trick at the end. I went on to read and enjoy the entire work, call it Remembrance or In Search of. This may have been the literary equivalent of a bondage game (a comparison that no doubt would have delighted Proust, who could be quite the bad boy when out on the town, according to the wonderful two-volume bio by Painter).

Ebert: Full disclosure: I never got to the tipping point.

Despite the precariousness of its literary value over the years, I think Kerouac's On the Road should be read at least once in every American lifetime. It partakes of a characteristic of good art: something that can make you nostalgic for a time and place that you've never personally experienced. I also love that it includes (deep within one of its longest paragraphs; I have my parents' 1958 Signet paperback right here) the sentence "Everything happened." -- which I suppose obviates the rest of the book...

Ebert: It endures and is read and is valued.

It's very fashionable to beat our chests and decry the flagging nature of the current generation's readership, but let's be serious for a moment here.

Kids do not, as a rule, read Tolstoy. Nor Nabokov, nor Hemingway. They read whatever is popular, and that is what kids have always done. However, those kids eventually grow up, and start investigating the real gems of existing literature, reading those old masterpieces. Does everyone do that? No. They never have. I very much doubt that in 1950 people were walking down the streets with copies of Ulysses in their hands. Is it a classic? Yes, but that is because a relatively minor portion of the population read it, recognized its worth, and passed on the good word. I'm sure lots of people talked about it, but many fewer actually read the darned thing.

The good word will still get passed on. Don't despair. The wrinkle is that, in the information age, we're more privy to what people who explicitly are not well-read are reading. Nothing's changed. Things rarely do. Their window-dressing is rearranged, and they are displayed differently, but people are still going to want intellectual stimulus. The internet can't change human nature.

This was a great post. My only comment would be of my continued surprise that Sinclair Lewis is largely neglected nowadays critically and publically, if only because I believe "Main Street", despite flaws in dialogue and pacing, holds up remarkably well in this Town Vs. City, Secular Vs. Religious, Educated Vs. Ignorant Tea Party-tainted era of ours. Narrow-minded cries of elitism and socialism have not lowered in volume since it was published in 1920. I laughed aloud when, in listing grievances of the townsfolk against her, a confidant of the protagonist told her, "They dislike that you say 'America' instead of 'Amurrica'."

Lewis' style is also very crisp and evocative and has not accumulated dust, at least in my opinion.

As a Canadian high school English teacher who holds a Master of Arts in English, I cannot help but laugh at the myths being tossed about here, beginning with this bizarre concept that some sort of “Readers’ Eden” existed at some point in the past. Within this Eden, the Literary Canon was the sacred gospel that everyone studied and was able to appreciate, and was safe from the threat of popular culture. The education system was perfect, turning out perfect disciples of the Literary Canon that ensured its purity for generations to come.

Of course, we do not actually have to go back too far to see this Reader’s Eden myth bares no resemblance to reality, starting with the education system. Everyone seems determined to forget that the public education system that serves all students from all walks of life is a very relatively recent development, and university or college as an “unwritten rule” for gainful employment even more recent. Prior to this, the highly literate, high standards education image of the education system that exists primarily belonged to the wealthy, particularly with regards to post-secondary education.

Of course, with a system that caters to the wealthy elite, the literary canon and its study in part were designed to help forge a clear distinction between the high class and the lower classes. The bemoaning of the lack of readership of many of the authors listed on this page is ironic because their readership was never large to begin with! T.S. Elliot is perhaps the best example: an author who wrote deliberately for a small, educated audience and was mostly only ever read for “pleasure” by a small, educated audience. These texts served just as much as status symbols as they served any other function.

I should note at this point that none of what I am writing here is intended as an attack on Elliot or any other author listed, or there talents and accomplishments. My point simple is that both the size and type of readership that currently exists now, as well as the perception of this readership, is vastly different from that which existed before, much like the education system, the number of students it serves, and the makeup of these students have changed. To believe that there was a large body of readers outside of the elite and academics who were reading the “greats” as opposed to now is specious at best.

Laments such as the one written by Cynthia Ozick are little more than the equivalent of an online post about how Batman fandom has declined because modern fans have not read the original works of Bob Kane. The only difference is the supposed “value” of Ozick’s writers, a value determined by…who? The same people who ignored H.P. Lovecraft’s works until it became fashionable to read and discuss them? Or lambasted science fiction as gutter material? Or those knock the works of Will Eisner without have read “A Contract with God” or “The Dreamer”?

Like Mr. Ebert, I have no plan of attack when it comes to what I read. At the moment, my stack of books to read includes “A Fall of Moondust” by Arthur C. Clarke, “The Shape of Things to Come” by H.G. Wells, Robert Warshow’s “The Immediate Experience” and “The Long Goodbye” by Raymond Chandler. Maybe I will love these books; maybe they will change my life. Or maybe I will find little of value in them. In any case, I will have read them because I wanted to for whatever reason. If no one else does, that is not my problem.

i'd be sympathetic to such calls from most, but ebert's been indulging his curmudgeon a bit much lately.

Over 70% of American children under the age of 7 have television in their bedrooms. The fact that hours of TV viewing are directly related to LOWER test scores in grammar school seems to have no effect on the insanity of the worst parenting practices known to civilization. Why Johnny can't read, or even care to, makes his parents bad boys!
Suffer the Children.

The following events happened this past Saturday afternoon (May 7,2011).
(I'd have posted them sooner had I been able to get the oedipusrexing computers at K-Mart to work.)

I had gone to Orland Park that day; I hadn't been there in quite some time. It's a bus ride that takes over an hour (not counting transfer layover), and I have to watch the time carefully, partly due to the sparing PACE service in that area, mainly because the stores in the Orland area are so widely spread out.

With about an hour to go before I have to get back to the Orland Place Mall bus stop, I've just come out of the Barnes & Noble at Orland Park Place. I figure I've got just enough time to get to the Borders that's just across LaGrange Road for a quick look-around. But when I get there, who should I see but somebody I know!

I met Bob Goldsborough for the first time at the 2005 Bouchercon here in Chicago. Bob was a reporter and subsequently an editor at the Chicago Tribune. He'd gotten into mystery writing as his newspaper career was winding down, starting out with authorized Nero Wolfe pastiches that had met with some success in the market place.

But Bob wanted to write about his own character, so he created Steve "Snap" Malek, a Tribune reporter who would get involved with events happening in Chicago's past.
He took his idea to a "small press", Echelon Press, which published his first Malek book, Three Strikes, You're Dead.

Since that first meeting I've met Bob every time he's put out a new Malek book: often at the Printer's Row Book Fair, sometimes at Centuries & Sleuths in Forest Park.

But back to Saturday:
There was Bob in the Borders, standing at a card table, with his books stacked neatly in front of him, including his newest, Terror At The Fair. He's trying to get the attention of anyone, so when my semi-familiar face comes into view, it's a major relief for him. We talk for a while; Bob tells me about his new book, which takes place at the 1949 Railroad Fair (which Ebert fans will recall was mentioned in Roger's review of Atlas Shrugged). Among other things, Bob mentions that Walt Disney attended the Fair, and it was there that he first got the idea for Disneyland.
So I pick up the new book, Bob signs it for me, and I take a quick sweep around the store looking for other things.
But when I head for the checkout, I pass Bob's table, and I overhear his conversation with a store manager, and I hear why Bob's really there:
He's trying to convince the managers to put his books on their shelves.
Not the whole Borders chain, mind you - just this one store.
This is what it's come to.
Bob Goldsborough, with many books to his credit (Terror At The Fair is the fifth Malek novel), has to put his wares in the store personally.
He's a genre author (called "midlist" in the trade): Strike One.
He's published by a "small press": Strike Two.
Now he has to market his books himself; that's just a step up from vanity publishing. Strike Three, maybe?
While I was at the checkout, I asked Bob if he was going to be taking his next book door-to-door. He said he was thinking about it.
I think we were joking.

More and more writers are being forced into self-publication, just to get their new work into print at all.
Others are going directly into Ebooks, bypassing print altogether.
Meanwhile, bookstores big and small are stocking up on sure-fire bestsellers, while the "midlist" writers get steadily crowded out.

Anybody here got an answer for this?
I don't.

So I'll just support my friend, like so:

Terror At The Fair, by Robert Goldsborough, published by Echelon Press. Trade paperback, around $15. Get it and enjoy it.
(And try to find Bob's other books while you're at it.)
(You too, Roger: if they don't "touch greatness", as you so snottily put it that time, they at least embrace "very good"ness.)
Support Local Industry

I wonder, what was Dickens' reputation back in the day? Was he a respected writer then, or just that time's Stephen King or John Grisham?

catch-22.; wow

its basically a darker,deeper forerunner to MASH. i swear i thought it waas a comedy after 7 chapteeers

amazing''.

"Sinclair Lewis, Not at all."

I read Main Street for the first time when I was fourteen or fifteen and it dramatically changed my perception of the world. Now I am twenty-two and I have read Babbit, Elmer Gantry, It Can't Happen Here, Arrowsmith, and many of his other works. I do agree, though, that he is not widely read nowadays, which is a shame given that he was really the best American satirical novelist since Twain.

I'm a few years out of college - University of Chicago as well, actually - and I've got more than my share of lacunae in reading list as well. Most of the list, in fact. And I'm missing a few of the greats - Trollope, Faulkner, Cather, Wharton, one or two others. But I'll get there. What worries me more is that I genuinely don't like some of those I've read. Perhaps I'm just not ripe enough for them yet.

You know whom I'd recommend to everyone for sheer entertainment? Tom Stoppard. I like Wodehouse and Thurber and plenty of others, but Stoppard is my main man.

Just blogged about why I'm willfully not "well-read": http://vg73790.blogspot.com/2011/05/once.html

I'm going to learn Samuel Johnson by heart. I hope that makes you happy Roger, I hope it makes northrope Frye happy too, for that matter, bless his wretched soul.

I think one of the major reasons why no one is well read anymore is the emergence of postmodernism/relativism, that says there's no such thing as good art/bad art and a Britney Spears album has the same aesthetic worth as a Faulkner novel. This attitude, which was so embraced by academics for so long, has resulted in a complete abandonment of aesthetic values (as you can tell, I'm a bit of a Harold Bloom fan). I'm as left-wing as anybody, but to abandon all these great books just because they were written by white males years ago seems crazy to me.

I just finished reading the Chuang-tzu, written 2400 years ago by Chuang-tzu. He was the butterfly dreaming he was a philosopher. Funny, wise, and eye-opening. But where is this in anyone's canon?

Every book prescribed by a teacher takes away time to read a different book.

Some would even argue that forcing high-schoolers to read Shakespeare turns them off from him for the rest of their lives.

What to do? Keep the libraries open. In a pluralistic world, we all have different agendas, and the most we can do is make the information available. Its consumption is a different matter...

"Haphazardly, by inclination."
That's the key, if there is one, as far as I'm concerned. Beyond that, worrying about being perceived as "well read" is about as useful as confusing eating well with being well-stuffed. People are often comically, pedantically, prone to mocking alleged gaps in other people's reading (I've been childishly prone to that well past the age when childishness was still age-appropriate) while being totally oblivious to their own. Or being outraged when some pet author of theirs is overlooked for a prize when an author they've never heard of is accorded the honor -- as if their not knowing about someone makes the person insignificant (witness the appalling jingoism of Americans when the Nobel prize rolls around and some certified Great American Author is not awarded the prize.) But what's especially sad is seeing young people mocked for reading, say, Harry Potter books or even (and it pains me to say it because I do think they're crap) the Twilight stuff. Look at the bios of many a canonical writer and I'm sure you'll find a lot of risible material among the writers he/she admires from his/her youth. It was grist for their mills. It's all good, ultimately.

I am writing on behalf of Ben Wood.
Ben has recently started his own fiction story site called Army of Puppets.
http://www.armyofpuppets.com

I have given myself over to pulp crime. But it is Walker Percy who always brings me back.

Thanks for this thought-provoking article Roger. I just discovered your blog, most interesting so it's on my 'favourites' list from now on. Very happy to see that you are still reading Saul Bellow - so am I, and Bellow has been - off and on - a companion since my high school days in The Netherlands more than 30 years ago. What else? You mention Camus; highly overrated in my opinion, although I really enjoy his beautiful essays. Not too keen on his fiction though. Much prefer Houellebecq when it comes to the French.

What else? American writers: apart from Bellow: Cheever and Nabokov are high on my list, as is Faulkner. As for present-day writers: Richard Ford is the only writer ever whose every word I have read - repeatedly. What genius! Will he still be read in 50 years' time? I definitely hope so!

I can agree with a lot of the 'canon' writers mentioned above, although my favourite as far as the Russians go is definitely 'Dead Souls' by Gogol. Such a shame that I hardly ever see anyone mention Eca de Queiroz (available in Penguin Classics), the Portuguese equivalent of Balzac or Dostojevski. And what about the Brazilians? Guess I'm blessed with all these great translations into Dutch. Try Machado de Assis, Graciliano Ramos or Autran Dourado. Absolutely wonderful. And last but not least Antonio Lobo Antunes from Portugal (for me a greater writer than Nobel laureate Jose Saramago) and Czech writer Bohumil Hrabal, both admittedly influenced by the greatest - and most controversial - of them all: Louis Ferdinand Celine. Still read in France, 50 years after his death, part of the country's canon, but also still very controversial. Ah well, the list is too long. Sure I forgot many names (the German WG Sebald comes to mind - superb!).

I have to disagree. As a 25-year-old, I have read- and loved- Anne Sexton, Sontag, Steinbeck, Trollope, Ginsberg, Hemingway's novels, Sinclair Lewis and more. Granted, I will admit that I am not a good representative of my generation and my perspective is warped by being steeped in academia (and by refusing to watch television). But to say that "no one" is reading these writers is ludicrous. My undergrad degree was not in English, I am not now studying English, and yet I would warrant that I am as well read as many of you much older than me. Let's mourn that "the majority" of readers are not now reading such writers "by choice" and not that "no one" is, please.

To piggyback onto my earlier comment:

I've recently become aware (by dabbling in cognitive neuroscience) that not everyone is able to automatically produce mental imagery when reading (i.e., you "see" images instead of words when you read). I thought it was a given, although even my well-read, professor, Ivy League educated husband admits that he can only "sometimes" do this. I wonder if this is a learned skill gained by reading a lot as a child and whether the decline in reading is caused at least in part by a great deal of people no longer being able to summon mental images... and whether there is a way to measure this using fMRIs (one would assume that specific parts of the brain would light up or be enlarged with the production of mental imagery). Does anyone know of any research on this topic?

Only read!

However, do not read to impress others or to accumulate meaningless literary points.

Read to enjoy; the profound themes will follow!

There, I have made the last, dispositive entry for this blog!!

An idle thought. V. S. Naipau uses a Salman Rushdie quote in his chick/dude writer quiz (which I failed). Rushdie is referenced here a couple of times, yet nary a peep on Naipau.

Was going to check V. S. out but decided to reread a fave instead - Richard Brautigan -Trout Fishing in America - the only great book ever to end with the word 'mayonaise.'

It is naked and unprotected communication. That's how you get pregnant.

Perhaps you're familar with Eric Hoffer (the auto-didact philosopher of the San Francisco shipyards), Mr Ebert? In his little book Reflections on the Human Condition he said something similar:

"There are no chaste minds. Minds copulate wherever they meet."

I purchased a copy of Nabokov's "The Original of Laura" on 30th December 2009 and have yet not read it. The prospect of reading it fills me with dread and having a brief notion of what is to come, the awful apprehension that a reading of this fiction will etch in the mind's eye the horrible calligraphy of certain unbearable truths of which now there is merely an inkling.

Surely anyone calling themselves well read, or working towards such onerous ends should familiarise themselves with the Marquis, if for nothing else, to bid welcome to the hitherto ignored, mostly invisible, but highly active, actor of yuck residing within their self.

N.B. Those who gasp at the great moraliser Nabokov's "Lolita", ought keep a defibrillator handy before embarking upon even the briefest of journeys with Donatien Alphonse François.

I to my cave must make, to dream the smell of paint in solitary hibernation.

There shall be no overflow, for I am no übermensch.

Sincerely,

Indian Idiot (H.W.)

P.S. Roger, Tom & Ebertrician friends, hello, I hope you are all well. Best wishes & goodbye.

P.P.S. Spare them a thought, those that chew their fingers to stubs. Bloodless. Ashamed to let exist a moment of truth, where the currency lies. They appear occasionally, whisper their existence, like the foul stench of the aptly named Amorphophallus, that finaly bitten into by time's tooth, cries a somnolent unerring elegy on the void's constancy and then, promptly, dies.

Ebert: You have been away too long.

Roger said: "You have been away too long."

All prisoners of time, we.

I've missed you so Rog.

How curious is life. I once described in a short story, electronic communication as inadequate, yet, I feel most at home here, which is perhaps why I had left it for some time. No one (or at least not people who consider themselves basically decent), likes to create .. .. if not upheaval .. .. an atmosphere let's say, at a place they consider home and I've a tendency to get sauced on my own sharpness, such as it is.

My return, though belated, and elated, I hope to keep abbreviated, so I relish dearly returning as I have today. Often.

As always, a distinct pleasure.

Indian Idiot (H.W.)

P.S. Have you read "The Inheritance of Loss" by Kiran Desai? I read it recently and would very highly recommend it. It is set largely in the hills of Bengal, not too far from where I am and is a very good read indeed.

Careful there - your male privilege is showing.

Consider this section of your writing:
Mrs. Gaskell. Dostoyevsky, Chekhov and Tolstoy. Kafka. Balzac, Flaubert, Stendhal and Hugo. Poe. Mark Twain. James and Wharton. The big four Americans of the first half-century, Cather, Hemingway, Faulkner and Fitzgerald. The smaller Americans, Chandler, Steinbeck, Hammett. John O'Hara? Not so much. Sinclair Lewis? Not at all. Nabokov. From Britain, Conrad, Evelyn Waugh, Greene, Forster. Anthony Powell, Iris Murdoch, Virginia Woolf, Orwell, Wodehouse. From France, Georges Simenon endures and Camus

Mrs. Gaskell, Evelyn, Iris and Virginia named but not Ernest, Henry, or George......

I attempted to comment on this post when it first appeared in April and was never able to get through. Apparently it struck a nerve with many readers who were also trying to comment. I will be brief. I have worked for the New York Public Library for the past 30 years, first in a rare book collection, and then in a small circulating library in Manhattan for the past 25 years.

I have been asked for books by ALL the writers on your list within the last six months, with the exception of John Auerbach. Most of them more than once. James T. Farrell, Stanley Elkin, Mary McCarthy and Daniel Fuchs were all being used for (reader-not library-initiated) reading groups in the last few months.

Why, oh why, are writers so goddamned EAGER to assume the Death of the Book?

Name one single way in which Islam has any sway over American thinking. One single way. You can't. Muslims are the most marginalized group that exists in this country.

you have warmed this frumpy English teacher/now children's librarian to my very foundations. Blessings on you, Roger Ebert, and long may you reign!