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the problems with recommending books
Aug. 11th, 2006 12:57 pmRe-reading books that changed our lives, we realize that they have the potential of filling in gaps for others, yet are unlikely to have the same life-changing possibilities for them that they did for you. Everyone starts from different emotional and intellectual circumstances.
That said, I have nevertheless been recommending Frank Morley's The Great North Road to certain friends, as the type of comprehensively different imaginative look at British history that has seldom come my way in the years since Morley's book came into my hands as a Christmas present in 1960. Morley makes some hypothesizing leaps that turn out to be a bit wrong, but most of his intuitions and vividly exact reconstructions of what happened and why at various key points are as startlingly right now as they were when I first encountered them.
Some of the reflections on Alfred the Great's dilemma of how to cope with an entire midsection of Britain dominated by Danish immigrants, in fact, have a resonance of which Morley had no way of being aware.
But the poetic yet historically precise passages that sent me off in quest of numerous books (and objects in museums) wouldn't have any such effect on other readers, today or earlier.
Likewise, John Leonard's 1999 collection of reviews, When the Kissing Had to Stop, which should not be confused with someone else's much earlier novel of the same name, completely summed up our cultural condition for me at the time. Leonard is a consummate stylist whose disgruntled yet fascinated overview of a culture in immense transition coincided with my own inchoate musings at many points. At many others, Leonard brought me up to speed on novels and cultural phenomena I had neither time nor inclination to investigate at first hand. And of course, if we find someone's opinion well founded on topics we already know about, we assume they will be equally reliable and careful on topics of which we don't have first-hand knowledge. But in the case of certain polymaths I will not name who influenced me in my youth, it turned out that their accuracy on matters I knew well was matched by their misunderstandings of matters that I didn't know at all. They just spread their misunderstandings across vast bodies of knowledge that they could read in the original languages. So, caveat lector.
Even when I disagree with his evaluations, I personally think Leonard knows what he is talking about almost all of the time (and would not presume to be able to identify the times when he doesn't).
Morley's book should be brought out in a new edition someday, and Leonard should be given more reviewing opportunities than he seems to get nowadays.
That said, I have nevertheless been recommending Frank Morley's The Great North Road to certain friends, as the type of comprehensively different imaginative look at British history that has seldom come my way in the years since Morley's book came into my hands as a Christmas present in 1960. Morley makes some hypothesizing leaps that turn out to be a bit wrong, but most of his intuitions and vividly exact reconstructions of what happened and why at various key points are as startlingly right now as they were when I first encountered them.
Some of the reflections on Alfred the Great's dilemma of how to cope with an entire midsection of Britain dominated by Danish immigrants, in fact, have a resonance of which Morley had no way of being aware.
But the poetic yet historically precise passages that sent me off in quest of numerous books (and objects in museums) wouldn't have any such effect on other readers, today or earlier.
Likewise, John Leonard's 1999 collection of reviews, When the Kissing Had to Stop, which should not be confused with someone else's much earlier novel of the same name, completely summed up our cultural condition for me at the time. Leonard is a consummate stylist whose disgruntled yet fascinated overview of a culture in immense transition coincided with my own inchoate musings at many points. At many others, Leonard brought me up to speed on novels and cultural phenomena I had neither time nor inclination to investigate at first hand. And of course, if we find someone's opinion well founded on topics we already know about, we assume they will be equally reliable and careful on topics of which we don't have first-hand knowledge. But in the case of certain polymaths I will not name who influenced me in my youth, it turned out that their accuracy on matters I knew well was matched by their misunderstandings of matters that I didn't know at all. They just spread their misunderstandings across vast bodies of knowledge that they could read in the original languages. So, caveat lector.
Even when I disagree with his evaluations, I personally think Leonard knows what he is talking about almost all of the time (and would not presume to be able to identify the times when he doesn't).
Morley's book should be brought out in a new edition someday, and Leonard should be given more reviewing opportunities than he seems to get nowadays.
