Been spending a bit of time each day with the new book project at http://requiredreadings.ca
As I’ve posted here before, it’s a page on which Meg and I are putting together a list culturally-significant writings across genres – fiction, non-fiction, poetry and plays. It’s a hell of a lot of work – the list sits at around 700 texts currently, and we know we are missing a whole lot. More, though, the task now is to write brief posts on every single item – not summaries, necessarily, but a couple of paragraphs on why the text is important and how it is had a lasting impact on the general consciousness. They are pretty quick to do, but I am fast realizing that it’s gonna be a long long while before I have everything up to date and can just do ongoing maintenance. I got Tarzan of the Apes up today, following yesterday’s foray into Gregor Mendel’s Experiments on Plant Hybridization and Wednesday’s Romeo and Juliet. But with 11 books down and hundreds more to go, it’s clearly going to be a slog.
On the other hand, I am learning alot through the process. It gives me the opportunity to reflect again on texts I have read, and think intentionally about why they matter and what they speak to culturally; and it opens a way for me to explore a wide range of things I have never read before by getting me to read summaries, learn about the places various books and ideas come from – essentially forcing me to have my own little coles-notes-type moment with stuff I would otherwise never think about, let alone look at.
So, for that alone I am pleased to have this little project to occupy me. No illusions that I’m going to end up particularly more well-read, but certainly more aware of what there is to read, and why people read it.
