In honor of Anton Chekhov's 150th birthday today, I decided to read some of his short stories. I've probably read Cheknov before in some literature class or other, but this time it was for my own enjoyment. I read "The Orator," "Oh! the Public!" and "About Love". They were enjoyable. I loved his humor, his unerring timing, and his truthful, but also loving, brief portraits.

His bio on the www.classicreader.com website quotes a letter Chekhov wrote to his brother in which he states his six principles of writing:
1. Absence of lengthy verbiage of political-social-economic nature; [That's OK, Tolstoy, we love you anyway]
2. total objectivity;
3. truthful descriptions of persons and objects;
4. extreme brevity;
5. audacity and originality; flee the stereotype;
6. compassion."

Also this week, J.D. Salinger died. The press says there will be no service. I wonder what Chekhov would have said. Perhaps this quote from "The Orator", brief and audacious will do: "It's awkward for such a whopper to be buried without a speech."

Help Yourself

It's January--time to read some good self-help or how-to books. On my shelf are

The Mayo Clinic Plan: 10 Essential Steps to a Better Body & Healthier Life
The Food-Mood-Body Connection by Gary Null
The Magic Land: Designing Your Own Enchanted Garden by Julie Moir Messervy
Suze Orman's Financial Guidebook
The New Moosewood Cookbook by Mollie Katzen
Mother Knows Best: The Natural Way to Train Your Dog by Carol Lea Benjamin

The best self-help book is one that gets read, and the ones that get read are the ones that tell you to do something you already want to do. If your self-help books are in two piles, one for the books you've read and one for the books you haven't finished, or even started, it may tell you something about yourself. This, like a tank top, is revealing, but not always flattering. In my "haven't read, or "haven't finished" pile are the exercise, finance and dog training books. My "have-read" pile consists entirely of cook books and books about reading. Hmph!

I just finished Steve Leveen's book The Little Guide to Your Well-Read Life. Leveen is the founder of the Levenger company that sells "tools for serious readers"--paper, cool pens, bookshelves, etc. I got a couple of good ideas from his book--both techniques to help you remember more of what you read. One is to take notes. He writes about the Cornell method which is to divide the page into three sections. Write notes in the left margin, key words and questions in the right and a summary at the bottom of the page. I tried this with Plutarch's Lives of the Noble Greeks, which I've been reading for some time. I ended up just making summaries in the right margins, so I guess it wasn't really the Cornell method, but even that small effort helped me avoid the "wait, what did I just read?" experience.

The other useful thing he talks about is to review the book soon after finishing it. He suggests keeping a "Bookography". I'd never come across the word "bookography" before. It turns out it isn't in the dictionary. I don't know why he can't just say "bibliography" which means a list of books, but the point is to keep a journal of all the books you read with a review or some notes that you write after you've finished the book. I've done this in the past, and I like to go back and read it to remember the books I've read. Evidently the Levenger company sells special notebooks for this purpose, but I just use my regular journal. I also keep a commonplace book where I write quotes and passages that I want to remember.

Leveen's book smacks of marketing, but I found it engaging and useful enough to make it into my "have read" pile.

Not for Sissies

Some time before I started school, my older sister sat down to the task of teaching me to read. I don't remember much about the lesson, except for her saying impatiently, "The, the the! I already told you, that word is the!" It was probably that beginning that gave me the attitude that reading is not for sissies. My sister (who later taught second grade) taught me that I would get one chance and one chance only to remember a word, so if I wanted to learn to read I'd better wake up and pay attention. I'm glad she did. Like all the other things she could do that I couldn't, I was sure that reading was something to be desired, and the harder it was to do, the more desirable it must be. I wanted to learn to read as much as I later wanted to go to school, wear her clothes, drive, have a boyfriend and all of the other interesting things that she did first.

My high school had a small library, and I once decided to read every book, starting with the A's. When I checked out James Agee's A Death in the Family, the librarian asked me which teacher was requiring me to read it. When I told her that no one was, she raised her eyebrows. I'm guessing that 15 year old girls hadn't been lining up to check it out. I probably didn't get much more out of it than all the kids who didn't read it, but it became a habit for me to try "difficult" books.

A few years ago I adopted a reading list consisting of 100 books. It's a little like my high school library project. I made a goal to read every book on the list in one year. It's been three years, and I've read the first ten books. Now I call it my lifetime reading list, giving myself the procrastinator's best friend, an indefinite deadline. And while I can procrastinate like there's no tomorrow, something surprising has happened, I haven't procrastinated. I've read the books slowly, but I've kept on reading. These books haven't been easy. That's OK. I never thought reading was for sissies.

Here is my personal lifetime reading list:
The Bible
Homer, The Illiad, The Odyssey
The Bhagavad-Gita
Aeschylus I--Oresteia
Sophocles, The Oedipus Cycle
Plato, Phaedo, The Republic
Euripides, Euripides One
Herodotus, The Persian Wars (also called The Histories)
Virgil, The Aeneid
Josephus, The Jewish War
Plutarch, Lives of the Noble Greeks and Romans, Lives of the Noble Romans
Eusebius, The Essential Eusebius
Augustine, The City of God
Bede, The Ecclesiastical History of the English People
Dante, The Divine Comedy
Geoffrey Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales
Niccolo Machiavelli, The Prince
William Shakespeare, Hamlet, Othello, Measure for Measure, King Lear, Macbeth, Antony and Cleopatra, Coriolanus, The Winter's Tale, The Tempest
Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote
Rene Descartes, Discourse on Method
John Milton, Paradise Lost, Paradise regained, Samson Agonistes
George Fox, Journal
John Bunyan, The Pilgrim's Progress
Jean Baptiste Racine, Athaliah, Phaedra
Moliere, Tartuffe, The Would-be Gentleman, The Precious Damsels, The Misanthrope
Jonathan Swift, Gulliver's Travels
Antoine Prevost, Manon, Lescaut
Samuel Richardson, Pamela, Clarissa
Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws
Voltaire, Candide
James Boswell, Life of Samuel Johnson
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Emile
Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations
Edward Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
John Woolman, Journal
Johann Wolfgang Goethe, Faust I, II, Wilhelm Meister
William Wordsworth, The Prelude
John Jay, Alexander Hamilton, and James Madison, The Federalist Papers
John Keats, Letters
Jane Austen, Persuasion, Emma
Stendhal, The Red and the Black
Soren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling, The Sickness unto Death
Honore de Balzac, Eugene Grandet
Karl Marx, Early Writings
Henry David Thoreau, Waldon, Civil Disobedience
Parley P. Pratt, Autobiography
Charles Dickens, Little Dorrit, Great Expectations
George Eliot, Middlemarch, Daniel Deronda
Gustave Flaubert, A Sentimental Education
Fedor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov
Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace
Sarah Orne Jewett, Country of the Pointed Firs
William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience
Fredrich Wilhelm Neitzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra
Henrik Ibsen, Peer Gynt, Rosmersholm, Ghosts, Hedda Gabler
Thomas Hardy, The Mayor of Casterbridge
Henry James, The Ambassadors, What Masie Knew
Anton Chekhov, The Cherry Orchard, The Seagull, Uncle Vanya, The Three Sisters
Joseph Conrad, Nostromo
James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams
Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain, Joseph and His Brothers
Marcel Proust, Swan's Way
John Maynard Keyes, The Economic Consequences of Peace
D. H. Lawrence, Women in Love
E. M. Forster, A Passage to India
Franz Kafka, The Trial
Herman Hesse, Steppenwolf, The Glass Bead Game
George Santayana, The Last Puritan
Montaigne, Essays