The Old Lit Professor’s Book of Favorite Readings

I remember my first reader.  I encountered it in the second grade. (After, of course, I had completed the first grade the reading adventures of Dick and Jane and their dog Spot.)[i]  My second grade reader was simply entitled Prose and Poetry.  I knew what poetry was.  It had funny lines that didn’t go all the way across the pages, and they rhymed.  But “prose” was a mystery. I recall asking my father what it meant, and after he had explained its nature, I, like Moliere’s M. Jourdan, discovered that I had been speaking prose all my life

I cannot recall a single selection from that schoolroom collection of long ago. But evidently the book planted in me seeds of fascination which would develop years later for gatherings of different writings.  The first flowering of this interest occurred when I took freshman English and was required to purchase Locke, Gibson, and Arms’s Toward Liberal Education;  my interest  in anthologies continued to develop as I took courses in branches of English and American Literature.  And, of course, continued to flourish as I became a teacher of English and literature and used readers or anthologies for my classes.

Although I prefer reading novels and plays, my love for anthologies has not waned over the years.  In fact, it has increased.  I find them invaluable for passing time in doctor’s offices or at airports and for reading in motel rooms or indeed for enlivening a rather slow-moving Sunday afternoon. My ideal anthologies are not those showcasing a particular subject, such as early American poetry or historians’ views of the Revolutionary War, but potpourris of short stories, poems, essays, historical accounts, excerpts from longer works, bits of literary criticism and so forth; that is,  collections of works entertaining and fascinating in their own right.  Ideally, such selections should be capable of being read individually in less than an hour and should offer a variety of authors and diverse genres.   My ideal anthologies are Louis Kronenberger’s  A Reader’s Companion (1945), an early volume in Viking’s portable library, and Gerald Bullett’s 1939 The Jackdaw’s Nest.

The sole purpose of such a collection is simply the reader’s enjoyment  rather than presenting some form of educational material.  In such a book, the prevailing standard simply has to be what the editor himself has found enjoyable.  Of course, the questions of the levels and kinds of enjoyment we may experience in reading or in taking pleasure in the other arts lead us to complex issues of what goes on in our minds when we read and experience aesthetic enjoyment.  Do we all experience the same degree of and kind of pleasure when we read Marvell’s “To His Coy Mistress”?  Do we all acquire the same intellectual stimulus when we finish Crime and Punishment? Do we all actually read the same novel when we encounter Light in August or Moby Dick?  Recent research would suggest that  “ no” would be the appropriate answer to each question.[ii]  Hence, the first criterion for the inclusion of each of the chosen selections is that I have enjoyed it, enough to read it more than once.