I have never read Hamlet. It’s probably the most famous play in the Western world, written by probably the most widely known playwright; the role is considered the apotheosis of the craft for actors. I haven’t read it, not a line of it. I’ve never seen it performed on stage or screen, either. Occasionally, I consider remedying that oversight, because the play seems like one that I should have read — what kind of self-respecting former English major hasn’t read Hamlet, after all? — and then I remember that while I rather admire Shakespeare’s sonnets, I cannot abide his plays, and I’ve gotten this far in my life without reading Hamlet without any ill effects, so I’ll just settle down on the couch with the new RFK biography instead. But can I not know anything about Hamlet beyond the fatuous Who Wants To Be A Millionaire-level “melancholy Dane” and “alas, poor Yorick” references and still consider myself well-read? What makes a person “well-read,” anyway?

Do I even have the qualifications to answer that, admitting as I do that I’ve never read Hamlet? I’d like to think so, but I’ve never read Moby Dick, either, or Spenser’s Faerie Queene, or a word of the Henrys James or Miller. I’ve read exactly one Faulkner and one Saul Bellow, and I hated every word of them both; the same goes for the lone Pynchon I fought through in college (you know, the short one), and for Mark Twain and Charles Dickens. I couldn’t finish Heart Of Darkness. After Player Piano, I ran screaming from Vonnegut, and my brother practically had to pay me to read Slaughterhouse Five. I got three pages into Vidal’s 1876 and passed out cold. That’s three pages counting the publisher’s information, folks. Whole reams of “important” poetry went over and around me during college, and in four years in the English department, I didn’t read a single work of literature published between 1600 and 1800 — a disturbing fact that became evident to me as I studied for my comprehensive exams, at which point I whipped open the door of my room and rushed next door to Ernie’s room and burst in without knocking and grabbed her by the shoulders:

“Please, promise me they won’t put Dryden on this thing.”
“They wo –”
“PROMISE ME!”
“They WON’T, God! Who’s Dryden?”
“I don’t know, that’s the problem.”
“Is he the ‘Modest Proposal’ guy?”
“No, that’s Swift. Oh my God — I knew something. I knew something from the eighteenth century! I know one thing!”
“Oh, you know more than that. You read Rasselas already, right?”
“Um.”
“You know — Johnson?”
“I think I flipped past it once.”
“Oh, it doesn’t take long to read.”
“How long is ‘doesn’t take long’?”
“Two hours? Three hours? Something like that.”
“Dude, I don’t have that kind of time.”
“You have two days, dude.”
“I know, but…Tennyson.”
“Ohhh, gross.”
“I know, right? And what’s with his name, anyhow? What did people call him — ‘Lord Tennyson’? ‘Lord Alfred’? ‘Alfred, Lord’? ‘Alfre Woodard’? That just bugs me. And furthermore, Byron.”
“Ew, Byron. But you know who’s really ew? Shelley.”
“Oh, I know.”
“Like, way to drown yourself in a rowboat.”
“I KNOW! And way to not do it before writing your crappy poetry that we would have to read in school.”
“I hate that guy. I hate that guy, and I hate the urn guy.”
“Keats?”
“Yeah. And you know who else I hate? I hate JB for making fun of me when I pronounced ‘Yeats’ ‘Yeets’ instead of ‘Yates.'”
“Everyone hates JB.”
“You had a crush on JB.”
“But it was one of those hatey crushes. So the crush made me hate him even more.”
“Oh, whatever, you were all like, ‘oh he’s nice’ and then you were giggling.”
“Shut up.”
“‘He knows a lot about the gyre.'”
“Shut UP!”
“‘Want to come over to my room and see my Maud Gonne biography?'”
“SHUT UP.”
“Dude, you have a problem with guys in your English precepts.”
“No I don’t. Who?”
“That Andrew guy?”
“Who? Ohhhh, that guy.”
“Remember that line about — what was it he said to you?”
“‘I really like your take on conceits.’ Oh, dude, that was one of the worst lines ever.”
“What does that even mean?”
“Which part?”
“Any of it.”
“You know, John Donne.”
“Dude, that is so bad.”
“No shit. And I fell for it too.”
“Yeah, I remember.”
“I hate John Donne too, while we’re on the subject.”
“So do I, dude! I hate that guy! And I hate that — the guy — Macho Perkins!”
“You mean Henry Rollins?”
“No, no, the other guy, with the annoying stupid line breaks?”
“Gerard Manley Hopkins?”
“Yeah, that guy! That guy is bugging me right now.”
“That guy’s always bugging someone. So is T.S. Eliot.”
“At least people care about Eliot.”
“Name one person we know personally who cares about Eliot.”
“Lord Monroe.”
“He doesn’t count.”
“Okay, you’re missing the point. The point is that I have to know what happens in The Iliad.”
“Why?”
“That’s what I’d like to know. I’m not a classics major.”
“Well, I’m not a boring major, either, but I still have to know ‘Beowulf.'”
“Oh, ‘Beowulf.'”
“I hate Beowulf, and I hate his mother.”
“It’s Grendel’s mother.”
“I hate all of them, whoever they are. And you know what else I hate? I hate Canterbury, and I hate tales that come from there.”
“I hate Dawn and her rosy fingers.”
“I hate Molly and her peeing.”
“I hate Achilles and his heel.”
“I hate the best of times, and I hate the worst of times.”
“I hate Ajax and his cleanser.”
“He needed it, dude. He got dragged around the walls of Troy three times.”
“That’s Hector.”
“Okay, he needed it after dragging Hector around the walls of Troy.”
“That’s Achilles.”
“I hate Achilles.”
“See? See what I mean?”
“Oh, yes.”

See, in college, the departments held comprehensive exams at the end of senior year. They varied in length — in the English department, you sat for two days’ worth — but we had to know pretty much everything written, said, or thought about our majors whether we’d taken coursework in it or not, and when I got the study guidelines sheet from the department office, it struck me how little I’d really read. I’d read a lot in my classes, and I’d read a few of the texts in high school or on my own time, but I’d also read a bunch of biographies and short-story collections that wouldn’t show up on the comps, and the amount of Jacobean verse that I wouldn’t know if it slapped me in the face had me really worried, not to mention sort of disgusted with the picayune “distribution requirements” with which the English department had held me hostage in a series of Victorian poetry seminars that I couldn’t have cared much less about, only to leave me without a shred of knowledge about the Romantics, anything written after 1966, or anything written during the two-hundred-year period I mentioned before. Or about Moby Dick. Or about Hamlet. Whoever composed the exam did include as one of the essay questions an invitation to critique the English department on the education it provided, and I accepted the invitation with bitter relish, reproducing the conversation above and informing them that not only did I not know enough, but what I did know, I knew against my will and had no genuine interest in. I’d read “Sir Gawain And The Green Knight” and enjoyed it; it didn’t show up on the comps anywhere. I’d never run across either Jane Eyre or Wuthering Heights in four years of English classes, and I found the exams riddled with Brontë references. I wound up my diatribe by informing the examiners that the three best and most comprehensive classes I’d taken in four years could be found in the East Asian studies department, the art history department, and the comparative literature department, and that my family hadn’t shelled out a hundred thousand dollars for me to read Mario Puzo in a college classroom, so they could either overhaul the departmental syllabus so that we got a solid grounding in all the disciplines, or they could let us read what we liked and take our chances, because I’d written no fewer than four full-length papers on the theme of blindness in King Lear in the last four years, and I could think of about a hundred better uses of my time, up to and including hitting myself repeatedly in the forehead with a hammer.

All this by way of saying that an English degree doesn’t make anyone well-read. Again, I like to think of myself as well-read, but my reading has huge gaps in it, and that’s just literature in English — and, given that my current stack of “to read” books has The Dictionary of Cons and Conmen at the top, that isn’t likely to change anytime soon.

Then, over the weekend, I got this email from a reader: “Last night while watching Ed, I was faced again with the fact that I have never read Walden. Okay, dammit, I’m going to read it. I hope this question doesn’t make you tear your hair out, but, um, in your opinion, what other works should any reasonable person have read by my age (29)? If you have already made a list of this type and I’ve failed to find it, could you post a link?” Er. Well, I’ve never read Walden either. I have no idea what a “reasonable” person “should have read” over the course of a lifetime, much less by a certain age; I mean, I started reading at age three, had knocked off a couple of Hemingways and Cry, The Beloved Country by age ten, and now feed my brain a steady diet of Brat Pack bios and crime compendia. I don’t read in any other languages, except Latin (useless) and Spanish (reading a one-act play requires a dictionary and a week and a half of total silence). All I have is a bachelor’s degree.

But you don’t have to read everything ever written to qualify as “well-read.” You just have to read a bunch of things, and to have a passing familiarity with the things you haven’t read. There’s a debate going on at Hissyfit right now in a topic called “Common Knowledge Isn’t” as to whether one’s religious upbringing should affect whether one knows what “Judas” means when used in a text. I say that it shouldn’t, and that if you’ve read anything in the last twenty years, you ought to know the reference; it’s become a literary allusion rather than a primarily religious one, and while you might not find “Esau” in a dictionary, you’ll certainly find “Judas.” But does not knowing that mean that a person isn’t well-read? I think it does. That’s an easy reference. Anyone who reads should have run across that one.

What else should the well-read person know? Well, there’s only so much time in the day, and if you don’t read Hebrew or the Cyrillic alphabets or Urdu, you’ll miss some stuff. But if you want to feel well-read in English, here’s what I think you need. You need to know the major stories of the Old Testament: The Fall, Cain and Abel, Noah and the ark, the diaspora, all that good stuff. You also need to know the story of Christ’s birth and the story of his death. This isn’t a religious thing; this is information you need in order to understand seventy-five percent of the major motifs in literature written after Christ’s death. If you skip over the minor prophets and all the crap in Leviticus about haircuts, the Bible moves pretty fast. Skim the psalms and the Song of Solomon if you have a minute; then read Revelations. It goes really fast and it’s actually hilarious (“and silence reigned in heaven for about half an hour”? Who decided on that number?). I think the well-read also need to familiarize themselves with the basic tenets of the world’s major religions. You don’t have to immerse yourself; just get the basics. Understand what “Shinto” means. Read a little Confucius. Know a few facts about Muhammad’s life. Know what Martin Luther did. Buy a secondhand copy of Edith Hamilton’s book of myths — or, if you have more time, Ovid’s Metamorphoses — and bone up on the Greco-Roman pantheon. You might not care about all of Zeus’s many mistreated girlfriends, but it’ll save you a lot of time when you get to the World War I-era poets. Learn the major figures in Nordic/Viking mythology.

You’ll need to know a fair bit of history and geography too — again, just get the basics. Don’t know the dates of the American Civil War, where the battles took place, why it started? Learn it; you can’t read Whitman without it. Don’t know how long the Depression lasted, how many Americans died in the Great War, when the influenza epidemic took place? Learn it; you can’t read Steinbeck, Ford Madox Ford, or Frost without it. I don’t have much of a history background either, and I’ve got to work on that, but the more you know about the time in which a book was written, the more you get out of it. If this paragraph sounds American-centric, well, it sounds that way for a reason. A lot of us don’t know what happened during Watergate. Watergate. If you don’t know the exact date of V-E Day, that’s one thing, but there’s a lot of general stuff you should know. (I’ve mentioned this book before, but for a relatively thorough overview of various societal spheres spanning about four thousand years, pick up The Timetables Of History. It’s set up chart-style for easy comparisons of politics and art and whatnot, and if you don’t know much about, say, World War II, it brings you up to speed on the big events quickly.)

Now that you’ve armed yourself with factoids both sacred and secular, it’s time to start reading. But where? Homer. Ernie had a point; The Iliad is boring. Unless you like fight scenes, skip it and read The Odyssey or the first four books of The Aeneid (there’s a new translation that’s apparently quite good, and plus you can walk around muttering “Carthage must be destroyed” at people who annoy you). You don’t have to slog through every page of these, but at least buy the Cliff’s Notes to The Odyssey. The references and literary conventions in these epics come up again and again. Next, leaf through some classical poetry. Hit the highlights of Catullus’s poems to Lesbia and Horace’s “Odes.” Find the existing scraps of Sappho and read those (it’ll take you five minutes, tops). Know what Petronius and Apuleius wrote, but don’t bother reading them. You should also read the greatest hits of Plato and Socrates. I know, I know. I hate them too, but you need it for background. Then make sure you know what really happens in the Oedipus cycle. Know what Thucycdides and Aristophanes wrote, or at least the genre.

Ah, the medieval era. I’ll try to keep this short. You need to know what happens in “Beowulf.” You need to know what happens in “Canterbury Tales” and why it’s important as literature. The excerpts they give you in the Norton cover the subject quite nicely; there’s no need to kill yourself reading the whole thing. Learn the Arthurian legend, and the Tristan/Isolde legend. Don’t care about Sir Kay? Neither do I, but you need to know it to understand things that come after. Read St. Augustine. Wake up; read St. Augustine. Poke yourself with a knitting needle; read St. Augustine. Yes, it’s deadly. Yes, it’s Christian. It’s also a key tract on the philosophy of faith. Get as far as you can without your heart stopping.

And now, the past masters. You need a firm grounding in Shakespeare. I think three out of the big four — Lear, Hamlet, Othello, and Macbeth — should do you, but know what happens in all of them. You should also know Twelfth Night, Romeo and Juliet, Julius Caesar, The Taming Of The Shrew, The Tempest, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and the Henry cycle, but four out of those seven will cover it; again, know which characters go where and why they’re important. Knowing that someone said “et tu, Brute” doesn’t cut it. Renting the movies is fine. You also have to have read Paradise Lost. No, you have to. Yeah, I know, but you have to. Milton changed the English language with that poem, and you need to read it. Okay, just read up until Satan’s fall. It’s pretty good, actually. Know what John Donne and Ben Jonson and Marvell did.

Now it gets tricky, because after the seventeenth century, the field opened up and English literature just rushed in. You need Wordsworth, Shelley, and Keats. You need one Austen. You need one Dickens. You need one Twain. You need as much of Whitman’s Leaves Of Grass as you can stomach, plus When Lilacs Last By The Dooryard Bloom’d. You need some Hawthorne (if you can’t bear the thought of Hester Prynne, try his short stories instead). You need a smattering of Dickinson. The Victorian poets — feh. Not really necessary, and stultifying besides. Move on to Eliot, Pound, Yeats, and Frost. Yeah, you hate “Birches.” Everyone does. Frost hated it too. Stay the course. Try Joyce. Don’t do Ulysses alone; start a book group and get The Bloomsday Book. Dubliners is nicer.

After you surface from “Wasteland,” you can pretty much read whatever you like. I’d recommend heavy doses of Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Flannery O’Connor, Sartre, Dostoyevsky, and Camus, followed by liberal applications of Oates, Atwood, Toni Morrison, Cheever, Shirley Jackson, John Irving, Edith Wharton, and Evelyn Waugh. Waugh takes time to warm up; stick with it. Jackson sounds like Erma Bombeck at first; don’t let it fool you. Try some Raymond Carver. Try some Hunter S. Thompson. Read The Diary Of Anne Frank if you never have before. Read Elie Wiesel’s Night. Find a book of famous short stories like Max Brand’s “Wine on the Desert,” C.D.B. Bryan’s “So Much Unfairness Of Things,” and Saki’s “Tobermory.” Reread “The Tell-Tale Heart” and “The Secret Life Of Walter Mitty.” Read The Feminine Mystique. Read Native Son — yeah, the ending is awful, but read it anyway. Read Black Like Me. Make a day of it with the literary depression and read The Bell Jar and Styron’s Darkness Visible back to back. Then fry your neurons by reading Chopin’s The Awakening, Hardy’s Tess Of The D’Urbervilles, and Lillian Hellman’s Pentimento in that order.

Just read. Read everything you can get your hands on. If it interests you, read it. If you hate it, put it down and read something else. Read as much as you can. Read as widely as you can. Everything you read makes everything you read after that richer and deeper. You’ll never read everything; neither will I. I can think of a dozen authors right now that I probably should have recommended. I can think of a dozen poets that I read that did nothing for me (yeah, Swinburne, I’m talking to you), but at the very least they made me appreciate Elizabeth Bishop all the more. I can think of a dozen writers that someone, somewhere is wasting their time reading right now (cough UPDIKE cough) when they’d have way more fun with T. Coraghessan Boyle or Dorothy Parker. But if you read enough, and you care enough to learn about what you haven’t read, then you’ll become well-read. I think it’s one of those “the wise man knows himself to be a fool” things — I don’t think that knowing the difference between Tennyson’s “Tithon” and his “Tithonus” makes me well-read (and my junior-year paper on the subject would prove that beyond any doubt). For every author I know cold, there’s a score that I’ve never read a word of. But I love that. I love the fact that I could live to a hundred years old and still have a ton of stuff to read, just in English. An endless bookshelf — that’s what heaven looks like.

I still don’t know what it means to be well-read. I don’t know if it’s that you’ve read a lot, or that you want to read a lot, or that you read all the time and walk around with your nose in a book, bumping into stuff, or that you’ve mastered a certain subject or area. I don’t know. I don’t think Oprah knows; I don’t think college English departments know. I read a lot of material on the Internet — does that make me well-read, or a geek? I read a lot of true crime — does that make me well-read in true crime, or a geek? I can recite “Richard Cory” from memory — well-read, or geek?

“Geek.”
“Shut up.”
“I hate Richard Cory.”
“Everyone hates Richard Cory. Richard Cory hated Richard Cory, that’s why he killed himself.”
“No, everyone loved Richard Cory. That’s the whole point of the poem.”
“He didn’t kill himself because everyone loved him, though.”
“Oh, who cares? He’s dead and we hate him.”
“You know who else I hate?”
“Miniver Cheevy?”
“Hell’s YEAH I hate Miniver Cheevy. But I was thinking of the hired man. I hate the hired man, and I hate his stupid death.”
“How did the hired man die, anyway? Swinging from a birch?”
“Mending a wall?”
“Taking a road?”
“Going miles before he slept?”
“Reading the Cantos and dying of boredom?”
“You know, that’s got to be it.”
“I think so too. Oh my god, check this out: ‘i sing of Olaf glad and big.’ What — ew?”
“The hell?”
“I hate e.e. cummings.”
“Me too. It’s called a shift key, tough guy.”
“And ease up on the tab stops.”
“Totally. Hey, you know who I found out I don’t totally hate? Auden.”
“Auden’s okay. But you know who I’d totally kill if I saw him on the street?”
“Who?”
“Merwin.”
“Oh, dude. Merwin has GOT to GO.”
“He went here. I could kill him at reunions!”
“I think you should.”
“Who would stop me?”
“Not me, sister.”
“And I hope he’s standing right next to Galway Kinnell.”
“Okay, then I’d stop you. Kinnell’s okay.”
“What? You need to lie down.”
“He’s not as bad as Ashbery.”
“You know, you’re right. Nobody is as bad as Ashbery.”
“‘The poem is sad because it wants to be yours, and cannot.’ No, it certainly cannot. Because IT SUCKS.”
“I hate that poem.”
“Me too.”

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