1. Critique them. Failing that, criticize.
The Cynical-C Blog regularly posts selections of one-star Amazon reviews of classic literature, film, and music. I’m all for questioning the canon. But most of these reviews are dedicated to the fine art of missing the point. I couldn’t help pulling out a few of my favorite assertions about books I’ve read and taught. Here they are, verbatim:
I dont care if Homer was blind or not this book is like 900 pages too long.
…every one says the aurthor george orwell is so trippy and wierd but i think he’s just trying to cover up for the fact that HE CAN’T WRITE. please george do us all a faver and stop writing books.
This book is a must if you wanna lull yourself to sleep. The opening was great, but then all these horrendous allusions kept popping up… I guess Melville should have decided if he wanted to write a book about hunting for whales or scientific stuff about them. Then the book would have been better.
I should mention, though, that the negative reviews of Anne Frank’s diary are less amusing than they are frightening…
2. Read them at work, stealthily
A couple years ago, the New Zealand Book Council created a sneaky little site called Read at Work, in which poems and short stories masquerade as Microsoft Office programs in folders on a faux desktop. So you can read Tolstoy, Dickinson, Twain, Wilde, Poe — all while seeming to be hard at work on a “PowerPont” presentation!
The way the texts are shoehorned into graphs and bullet points is amusingly inventive. I found the selection of New Zealand authors to be most informative, given that my grasp of Kiwi lit is pretty shaky. Make that nonexistent…
3. Make sculptures out of them
One of my favorite moments in Italo Calvino’s If on a winter’s night, a traveler is when the Reader meets an artist who sees books only as raw material for sculpture and, instead of reading them, destroys them in the process of creating his art. It’s scathing. Surely even Calvino, though, would find something to love in Thomas Allen’s book art photography, in which he carefully cuts out and bends away the figures on pulp novel covers and combines them to create three-dimensional scenes, which he then photographs.
Post a Comment