how much of a grounding in the classics/canon do you have

Another way to think about this is to compare fiction to rock. A dilletantish (and even a hardline punk) attitude might be to scorn erudition. But isn't it more fun to know that the Strokes dude sounds not only like Lou Reed, but the guy from the Feelies, too? And then that refreshens both VU and the Feelies? To return to fiction, don't you get more out of Pynchon when sensing the echoes from Nathaneal West, and then vice versa? Or am I just a nerd?

The worst people (the dark tossers of the book world) are the ones who read "the classics" without pleasure. If you don't like it or it shoots over your head, try something else. There are so many books!

Lee's analogy about the gym is accurate. Not that i've ever been.

::goes outside for a smoke::

I see what you're saying but you can't enjoy things from every conceivable angle, which is why there are discussions groups so you can get other perspectives on it.

To take the analogy to music appreciation you'd have to learn music theory and not everyone can have that background but on the other hand some of those ppl might not go and enjoy live music or may be able to get things from that environment.

The most well-read authors and critics I know of (Guy Davenport springs, as usual, to mind) never talk about "the canon" the way Harold Bloom or Bill Bennett do. They just expect that readers, at whatever level of familiarity, will be somewhat aware of or--more importantly--curious about the past, will realize that ideas recur and writers refer to each other, and that they'll have a habit of investigating the roots of the things they like. Exactly like a Strokes fan who decides to check out Television, then moves back to John Coltrane, etc.

My answer is to start writing, alluding to stuff I know very few people will have read. If I can't join 'em, I'll beat 'em!

I got interested in Greek classics reading Xenophon's Anabasis that I picked up second hand for a quarter, during a couple of years when I was a college dropout. From there I moved on to Homer, Herodotus, Plato, the dramatists, other historians and poets, even the orators. All in translation. Mostly in Penguin, but Loeb Library also. (No other way to read the Cyropaedia, for example.)

I rummaged around in the Romans pretty throroughly, too, but the Greeks had ten times the flair. Ovid's one of the better Romans. Catullus, too, of course.

Once a person has gone the whole course in the classics, the taste for Tudors and such is an easy step, since you've read what they read and understand all the allusions and much of the mindset.

I start to lose the thread in the nineteeth century. All those writers of epic novels to contend with. Too damn many of them. In the early 20th century, I pick the thread back up for a while and know a lot of the, um, seminal authors. After WWII I'm lost again.

I believe the real secret of getting to know these classic authors is to approach them straight up, for your own pleasure and edification entirely, with nobody telling you what to read next, telling you how to appreciate them and most certainly NOT making you write book-appreciation essays for good grades or class credit.

Hell, if these things have any enduring value it will show up all on its own. If the thing can't live on it's own, it's shur'nuff dead. But all you have to do is read Archilochos and you know right off he's not dead and never could be.

I have read and loved about half of Shakespeare, large chunks of Chaucer, and then merrily skipped from the Elizabethans to the eighteenth century, mostly because I am easily bored both by puratanism and by unnecessarily long accounts of rich people having sex. I will confess a love for Dr. Johnson, however, disagreeable curmudgeon that he was. Seamus Heaney's translation of Beowulf, for those who want to go back that far in the English tradition, is quite good.

My specialty, as a reader (because I think readers do have specialties determined by taste and personality) and as a critic, is for the novel and the short story, so the works I concentrate on are generally speaking not that old. I have read Richardson, Fielding, and Defoe enough to know that they all have redeeming virtues, although those virtues are not now what they were when they were alive, while Sterne and Austen (if you read Austen carefully) are compelling in that they are relevant now for what they were then. I am quite fond of the Victorians, mostly because they knew how to craft exquisite prose, although they left the good bits out of their stories. George Eliot's work is so well put together I had to get up out of my chair and walk around the first time I read Silas Marner, just to surpress my joy.

On my bookshelf you'll also find Burton and Rabelais along side four or five clumsy Norton volumes, mostly untouched, not because I won't enjoy them, but because I'm not ready for them yet.

I am extremely comfortable with the Modernists (Joyce in particular), and most comtemporary writing that does not try to substitute aesthetic renunciation for deep thought (just because you want to question or challenge notions of beauty does not make your two-hundred page spewing of unimaginative obscenity interesting or, for that matter, particularly challenging). I read a good deal of Canadian fiction, and this last few years I have branched into more or less contemporary literature in translation, with excellent results. The contemporary American fiction scene baffles me, mostly because its critics (and a good many of its writers) seem to think it exists in a vacuum, which is idiocy--the recent discussions in the blog world about the "current state of literary fiction" spring readily to mind, as they completely ignore what's going on in Britain, Canada, and other countries, and the proponents of the various "sides" seem unable to place American lit in any sort of international context.

That being said, I love Harold Bloom and his take on the canon. I, like him, believe in the ability of the canon to expand and take in a wide variety of styles, forms, and writers, but like him I do not believe that the (unjust) exclusion of past writers (Aphra Behn, comes to mind, as does Zora Neal Hurston) does not justify the inclusion of others based solely on their sharing non-literary traits (such as sexual organs or a certain amount of melanin) with those who are now rightly being recognized as authors of the first order. I have no difficulty bearing the title of "elitist", so long as it is recognized that my elitism is intellectual (in that it relates to talent, skill, force of personality, intellect, or any similar factor which contributes to an author's greatness--Coleridge is not great because he is white and male any more than Hurston is great because she is black and female).

Also, Bloom has a love for literature that most of the critics I have read who have emerged since the sixties lack completely. He cares, both broadly and deeply, about poems and novels and stories. Five years of serious literary study and I can count on one hand the number of critics or theorists I've read who seem to truly care about literature.

I'm finding this more and more as I get older, and it's the 1930s-1940s with me – I'm actually worried that my reading is getting narrower.

This should go in the "I'm embarrased to admit" thread but I have a hard time with any fiction written pre-WWI, even supposedly "popular" writers like Dickens and Conrad I find a slog because of the formality and denseness of the language, I value briskness and clarity in a writer and it seems like they take pages to say what a Graham Greene could do in a sentence. This is in no way a fully-informed opinion you understand, just a cursory familiarity with the Victorians and I've yet to – voluntarily – go any further back than that.

I have read a lot. But the more I read, the more aware I am of how little I have read. There is always some book or other whose author alludes to something I haven't read. - Skirk

Yeah, I agree with that, wholeheartedly.

Famous classic writers I've still to try: Twain, Hawthorne, Balzac, Gissing, Mrs Gaskell, Butler, Turgenev, Gogol.