How Reading Changed My Life Read Online Free PDF

poundage. To me
The Forsyte Saga
was worth every ounce, and every time I came to page 700 my heart would start to sink at the thought of it finishing—and to soar at the thought of starting it again. Even today it is impossible for me to read the final sentence without tears, recognizing in Soames’s cri de coeur the universal human yearning of us all: “He might wish and wish and never get it—the beauty and the loving in the world!” To end a novel with an exclamation point—how audacious I found that!
    For the purposes of intellectual argument I am prepared here to mount critical opinion against the greatness of
The Forsyte Saga
. I still find it a good read, but no longer a masterwork. In the rereading the book feels less satisfactory than it once did, more plotted than lived, Irene more an idea of a woman than a reality. Perhaps I have read too much since I first read it, at age thirteen—the book was in Mrs. LoFurno’s basement, bound in blue cloth—but the triangle between Soames and Irene, Irene and her lover, the architect Philip Bosinney, seems to owe more to
Anna Karenina
than it should, and has less real passion.
    But saying this feels like criticizing the face of alover. The nose may be large, but, oh, the net effect!
The Forsyte Saga
still entrances me; I still find it full of the real roiling emotions of ill-matched marriage and thwarted passion, age and regret and parental love as velvet and thorny as a rose. I own it in a very old edition, the pages of which are loose from their binding, a paperback issued to commemorate the television series, and a well-preserved hardcover edition with an only slightly damaged dust jacket, published by Charles Scribner’s Sons. Unlike most books I love, I do not press it upon other readers, even the ones I know best. It would be difficult for me if, for example, my eldest child, my inveterate reader, pronounced it boring or foolish. As for casual acquaintances, I do not care if they read it or not. This is my book.
    But I cannot read it without remembering the one-word reaction of the chairman of the English department at my college, when I timidly mentioned it during a discussion of the Great Books, two words which he always said in a way that seemed, ineffably, to emphasize those capital letters. He was talking
Tristram Shandy
at the time; I should have known better. I own perhaps 5000 books today.
Tristram Shandy
is not among them. I do not miss it.
    “Galsworthy!” he spit out with a mixture of condescension and disbelief, as though he had found a pit in a fruit that had promised to be seedless. And so a dream died.
    (In defense of the professor, he was not alone; V. S. Pritchett wrote a withering assessment of
The Forsyte Saga
, describing it as “the skill of a gentleman amateur on the surface of social life.”)
    That was how I learned that
The Forsyte Saga
was something I was expected to outgrow, like sucking my thumb, and that it was not likely to be found on any learned reader’s list of the so-called Great Books. What books would appear on such a list has become the subject of endless, often tiresome discussions about The Canon (again those capital letters). The discussion took fire, producing much heat, little light, during the last quarter of the twentieth century, when both women and people of color moved from the shadows of some sort of intellectual half-life to a place, more or less, among their male Caucasian peers. Students began to read Ralph Ellison and Anaïs Nin, Colette, and Toni Morrison. As a result there were endless discussions, papers, and books about whether The Canon was being replaced by a polyglot assortment of lesser, more politically correct readings. At an intellectually lively Ivy League university like, say, Columbia, it was possible to start a pitched fight on a walk across campus merely by suggesting that the name “Sappho” should join the names of Plato and Locke on the limestone frieze of Butler Library. The despotism