Customer Reviews

Classics for Pleasure

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Meandering (at a delicious, leisurely pace) through Michael Dirda's CLASSICS FOR PLEASURE, one feels as though he is riding shotgun through a world of both well-known and unknown wonders with an expert guide. And though Michael Kinsley, in his blurb, writes, "Michael Dirda is the best-read person in America. But he doesn't rub it in," he forgets to add this: Dirda seems to fervently hope you will not only appreciate his literary expertise, but will also rise to meet it. His voice is that generous and unpretentious.

Dirda divides his mostly 2-4 page descriptions of classics you should read into these novel categories: Playful Imaginations, Heroes of Their Time, Love's Mysteries, Words from the Wise, Everyday Magic, Lives of Consequence, The Dark Side, Traveler's Tales, The Way We Live Now, Realms of Adventure, and Encyclopedic Visions. Those titles alone are like browsing colorful glossies at the travel agency. You can't wait to jump in.

In Realms of Adventure, Dirda shows his range of tastes, including writers as varied as Rudyard Kipling and Dashiell Hammett. In reviewing H. Rider Haggard's KING SOLOMON'S MINES, Dirda shares a typically fascinating piece of trivia: "He [Haggard] had reportedly boasted that he could write a better novel than Robert Louis Stevenson's TREASURE ISLAND. His brother challenged him to prove it, and KING SOLOMON'S MINES was the result." At the end of the essay on Haggard, Dirda plays coy: "Is it better than TREASURE ISLAND? As a boy I thought so, but happily there's no need to choose between them." Nevertheless, Dirda's job is done. The less well-known H. Rider Haggard's two books, KING SOLOMON'S MINES and SHE are added to the reader's (THIS reader's, anyway) already listing "To-Be-Read" pile.

Which brings me to this: Bibliophile's beware. Dirda's beguilingly delightful insights into the works of some 88 authors will literally charm you onto turf where angels formerly feared to tread ("angels" being your former reading self). In the section Encyclopedic Visions, he even makes Edward Gibbon's HISTORY OF THE DECLINE AND FALL OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE sound tempting. Not that I'm going to go there anytime soon. First there are too many formerly unknown or forgotten shorter classics I want to visit: Jean Toomer's CANE, Edward Gorey's AMPHIGOREY, Lucian's THE TRUE HISTORY, and E.T.A. Hoffman's short stories, for starters.

Bottom line? This is a great resource to own for those of us who love to live by the oft-repeated words, "So many books, so little time." It's a problem we not only can, but love to, live with...

Michael Dirda is the go-to man for great reading. If you want to find intensely pleasurable reading in titles you never thought to pick up, he will expertly guide you and easily convince you of what you should read next. His tastes range from the conventional classics to the unexpected gems to genre writing and titles far afield from the usual literary lists. His enthusiasms are infectious, his tastes are broad, his explanations of why the title chosen is worth your while are persuasive.

As with his previous books, Dirda is the informed cicerone through the labyrinth of literature, a dependable companion whose advice is wise, witty and informed by the love of books. Hours in his company is time well spent.

So infectious is Dirda's delight in the passion for living that goes into a good book that I found myself eager to read all his recommendations - including those authors I have already read and disliked for one (obviously inadequate) reason or another.

Stunningly well read, Dirda appreciates a well-turned phrase, an individual style, a keen wit, or a powerful intellect. He illuminates his choices with quotes, artfully tantalizing plot summaries and biographical snippets. Story is key. "Nearly all the works covered tell great stories, whether these are fictional, historical or biographical."

What isn't here is The Canon. No Shakespeare, Homer, Dickens or Jane Austen. They can be found elsewhere, particularly in John S. Major's revised edition of Dirda's childhood inspiration, Clifton Fadiman's "The Lifetime Reading Plan." Dirda avoids the obvious masters to focus on "several key authors passed over by Fadiman and Major, many important writers of what one might call the popular imagination, and a few seemingly minor figures who deserve to be better known."

So, from Sappho to Agatha Christie, Thomas More to Jules Verne, "Beowulf" to "The Maltese Falcon," Dirda extols the insights and idiosyncrasies of a broad range of talents and niches. His essays are personal, witty and brief - he covers almost 90 books in little more than 300 pages and readers will almost always long for more.

He divides his book into 11 thematic sections, i.e., Words from the Wise; Traveler's Tales; Realms of Adventure, and chooses seven to 10 authors for each. Most are at least familiar, but a few are obscure (at least to me). The 16th century astrologer and thorough autobiographer, for instance, Girolamo Cardano, appears wildly entertaining and the Scotsman William Roughead spent much of his life attending murder trials and writing about the "bold artists" whose common characteristic was self-conceit.

A Pulitzer Prize-winning book critic for "The Washington Post," Dirda clearly had a lot of fun writing this concise, exuberant, and exquisitely organized book. Readers will be tempted to read, or re-read, every one of his selections.

Pulitzer Prize winner Michael Dirda (Washington Post Book World) introduces readers to almost ninety of the world's books in Classics for Pleasure. And he does the introductions in a delightful manner. The book includes his favorites, in many of the genres we all read today. The book is broken up into eleven sections that cover a particular theme.

Dirda's aim is to encourage readers to delve into some of the wonderful, but lesser known books of the recent past and from what we might term, `the olden days.' And don't think that this book is a tired and worn volume of books that don't matter. There are marvelous works; some with which you may be familiar and others that will be new to you. I guarantee that you will find titles you wish to reread and new to you that you'll want to check out. Dirda's summaries and bits of biographical data add to the enjoyment of the book and may even be the encouragement needed to pick up a title.

Some of the offerings come from Jules Verne, Agatha Christie (a personal favorite), Louis-Ferdinand Celine, Lao-Tzu, Soren Kierkegaard, Frances Hodgson Burnett (oh, the Secret Garden!), M.R. James, C.P. Cavafy and more.

It's a reference book to keep on your shelf. Warning: If you loan it out, it will not be returned.

Armchair Interviews says: Classics for Pleasure is more than book or short story recommendations.

To many the idea of reading the classics for pleasure and as leisure choice may seem incongruous, but CLASSICS FOR PLEASURE offers a rebuttal to this notion, arguing that classics are so because people have found they withstand the tests of time. Essays from a Pulitzer prize-winning author introduce nearly ninety selected world classics from horror and adventure to children's literature and poetry, grouping them thematically and reviewing the works that have influenced literary and social traditions for generations. Both high school and college-level holdings will find it revealing.

Dirda points out that he has not dealt with the A team of classics; they have been covered to his satisfaction in Fadiman & Major's NEW LIFETIME OF READING PLAN [Harper]. If you have not read most of these, many would recommend you do so before reading far into Dirda's lower-level collection. He does a very good job introducing the books he includes. Notable are his treatment of well-known authors such as Plutarch, Cicero, Lao-tse, Beerbohm, Perelman, Kierkegaard, Erasmus, The English Religious Tradition, Samuel Johnson, E. T. A. Hoffmann, Le Fanu, Defoe, Cather, Welty, Conan Doyle [Sherlock Holmes], Kipling, Chesterton, and Agatha Christie. These are better than some in the Fadiman-Major volume. But too many of Dirda's picks seem to assume an inexhaustible taste for the macabre, decadence, vulgarity, sexual perversion, and/or cynicism, despair, and psychosis. "If it bleeds, it leads." E.g.: the "scabarous" [Dirda's word] John Aubrey, H. P. Lovecraft, J. K. Huysman, Eca de Queiros, Celine ["not be able to stomach"]. Many of our modern writers are more dominated by these topics than the rest of us, but it is troubling that Dirda seems to think such a hefty helping of this is a key to our "pleasure." For this sort of thing, he cut out the essay on the great Boethius which he had already written for this volume. Apparently sensation and despair are more "pleasurable" than joy and peace.

This is a book that will make you wonder what you've been doing all your life, even if you call yourself a "Book Person." Michael Dirda, reviewer for the Washington Post, must be the best-read author in our times. Here, he gives you a collection of brief encomia, summaries of books you've heard about but never read, books that might be called 'second-tier," not quite Shakespeare, Tolstoy, Dante, Sophocles but nevertheless worth our attention. The only negative is that it has totally disrupted my late-life reading plan, so that I've ordered, read, or plan to read Sappho, Perelman, Oblomov, Lucian, Gaskell, and numerous others that I have neglected. This is a guide-book of sorts that,if you have the courage, you should have in a prominent place on your bookshelf.

Full disclosure: This book has made me a fan of Michael Dirda. He's smart, witty (but not obnoxiously so), extravagantly well-read, and writes lucidly and entertainingly, without condescension. Simply put, he's charming. You couldn't ask for a better guide to help you navigate the classics.

The list of classics discussed in this book is not your parent's list. More specifically, it is not Clifton Fadiman's list. In his introduction, Dirda pays homage to Fadiman's "Lifetime Reading Plan", which he stumbled on as a teenager, and which guided his own reading path. He goes on to explain that "Classics for Pleasure" deliberately ignores most of the authors discussed by Fadiman; as these are likely to be familiar to most readers already, "it seemed more useful - and fun - to point readers to new authors and less obvious classics".

In approximately 90 essays, Dirda covers a considerable amount of ground. He groups his authors into eleven categories:

Playful Imaginations
Heroes
Love's Mysteries
Words from the Wise
Everyday Magic
Lives of Consequence
The Dark Side
Traveler's Tales
The Way We Live Now
Realms of Adventure
Encyclopedic Visions

Homer, Virgil, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Cervantes, Goethe, Austen, Dickens, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Proust, Mann, and Joyce are all missing from this book. This allows Dirda to cast a broader net, including such authors as Diderot, Jaroslav Hasek, Zola, Ernst Junger, Cavafy, Spinoza, E. Nesbit, Cardano, Frederick Douglass, Sheridan LeFanu, H.P. Lovecraft, J.K. Huysmans, Elizabeth Gaskell, Zora Neale Hurston, H. Rider Haggard, G.K. Chesterton, Frazer, Malraux, Ovid, Petronius, and Philip K. Dick.

The complete list may be found in the Table of Contents:
Classics for Pleasure

I can't really do justice to the legerdemain that Dirda exhibits in almost every essay in the book - the way he gives you just enough background information to pique your interest, picks out just the detail from a book, or the author's life, to get you hooked, gets in a few key insights, then exits elegantly stage right, with exactly the right parting remark that seals the deal. Even if you had no interest at all in an author's work before reading what Dirda has to say, by the time he's done, you are likely at least to want to give it a try.

The man is a silver-tongued charmer, I tell you. And I mean that in the best possible way. This is a terrific book to help expand your reading horizons.

I was expecting this to be a 10; it barely scraped in at a 7. I could not wait for it to be published; I stopped by the bookstore three times, hoping to find a copy before the official publication date.

And then when I actually got the copy and started to read it? You must be kidding me. Who would read these books? The summaries did not even intrigue me. I, who have been known to write down titles recommended by first graders, wrote down a single recommendation from the scores Dirda mentions. Big disappointment.

I love everything else from this man. But this was not my cuppa tea.

This book made me feel good about just wanting to read to be lost in a story or idea just for the heck of it.