Great Books: The naked truth about the worth of literature : cannot always be resolved in terms of black and White

Many readers are troubled, I gather, by their failure to have read what they are told are the Great Books.

My own confessed delinquency in this endeavor is taken by some as a mitigation of their own.

In saying that I have never been able to finish “The Brothers Karamazov,” I did not mean to discourage others from attempting that classic, nor to foreclose yet another attempt on my part.

If I do try it again, though, I intend to keep a chart listing all the names and nicknames, so I can keep the characters straight. Until I got the nicknames sorted out in “War and Peace,” I thought there were three times as many characters as there were.

Several readers have confessed their embarrassment when, in conversations with educated friends, some literary allusion is thrown in.

We may be talking about Gary Hart, and someone will tilt his head and remark with an amused smirk, “Of course we all know what Proust had to say about that sort of paradox.”

Well, we all don’t know; unless we have all read the complete “Remembrance of Things Past.” At moments like those there is nothing to do but change the conversation to the NBA draft.

Along with me, Barbara G. Head, development officer in corporate relations for the University of Redlands, describes herself as “a failed literary person,” but she observes that perhaps “like alcoholism, admitting it is the first step toward recovery.”

Ms. Head notes that as an undergraduate she was too busy preparing for law school to study literature and that law school then left her little time for extracurricular reading.

“Now that I am in the ‘working world,’ I find myself totally unable to spar with colleagues in the literary arena--the Arts and Literature section of Trivial Pursuit is my downfall!”

Anyone who is not conversant with any of the fields covered by such games as Trivial Pursuit is well advised not to play them, since one has no control over the questions one may be asked to answer. In an ordinary conversation the clever Philistine can steer the conversation away from any subject that might expose his ignorance.

There is the kind of literary bully who is always telling you that if you haven’t read this book or that you can’t claim to have an education.

He is likely to say, “Of course you’ve read Goethe’s “Dichtung und Wahrheit,” and on being informed that no, in fact, you have not, he regards you with disbelief, disappointment and rejection.

Literary persons are not always to be trusted. Dan Brennan of Huntington Beach recalls that he spent the summer of 1940 in William Faulkner’s house, and that one day he asked the famous novelist what he thought were the best novels of the 20th Century.

He said that Faulkner listed “Buddenbrooks” as the best, then threw in the following--not necessarily in order: “Lord Jim,” “Nostromo,” “Great Expectations,” “Bleak House,” “Ulysses,” “Moby Dick” “Nigger of the Narcissus,” “Madame Bovary,” and Shakespeare’s Sonnets and “Henry V.”

Assuming that Faulkner included Shakespeare in deference to his timelessness, it is still curious that six of the other nine works he named were published in the 19th Century. “Lord Jim” was published in 1900, which was the last year of the 19th Century, but I will allow it as a 20th-Century book.

I suppose Faulkner might have been drinking.

Lois R. Koch of Santa Maria is annoyed with me for “downgrading” Dumas Malone’s six-volume biography of Thomas Jefferson, which I have recently acquired.

Mrs. Koch says that she and the other women in her office recently presented that set to their employer, a doctor, on his birthday, and that they fear he might have been dismayed on reading my notice.

I did not downgrade Malone’s set. I merely noted that a reader, Jeffrey Lantos, had called it “less than compelling,” and I observed that, if that were true, it might help cure my insomnia.

Mrs. Koch says: “I feel that anything worth reading is worth sticking to until the end, then it can be evaluated. Surely, being a fair man, you will not put this mark on something you yourself have not read in its entirety.”

Certainly I do not mean to disparage Malone’s work on such slight evidence, but I do think we have the right to decide that a book is boring long before we finish it. If a book doesn’t grab me within the first three chapters, forget it.

Charles A. Smith of Fountain Valley points out what he considers a perplexing juxtaposition of stories in the View section of June 11.

One is a review of Allan Bloom’s book, “The Closing of the American Mind: How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today’s Students.” The other was a story about “Vanna Speaks,” the biography of Vanna White.

Smith says: “I have never seen Vanna on television, where I gather she does a wonderful job of turning over the letters for the Wheel of Fortune game show, but I have seen pictures of her modeling lingerie in a recent Playboy, and she is certainly attractive and appears to be in excellent health.

“I wish I could draw some grand conclusion from the presence of Vanna White and Allan Bloom, both well-known current authors, on the same page, but I can’t, other than to say that there is a great deal of room for a wide variety of books in the American market place. . . .”

Not having read “Vanna Speaks,” I make no judgment.