Do you consider yourself to be well-read? How important do you think it is to be so? Any English majors here?

[dlauv]

I'm an English major and I'm not well-read at all - although probably better-read than average. I don't think being well-read is as important as the critical thinking skills the courses teach you, nor as important as understanding how literature developed due to the intersectional contexts behind it; but, being well-read doesn't hurt.

I'd say being well-read means more to creative writing majors - poetic and prose. They get far more utility out of it. Assuming "well-read" here means a quantity.

By that I mean you learn a lot about form and what rules in writing you can break and bend, and have your pick when it comes to allusion and inspiration. This is of course something audiobooks can only partially teach.

 

[frankenstrat]

I consider myself to be more so than many of my peers but A) that might not be saying much and I'm certainly not up on a huge amount of classics and B) I don't know that it's hugely important. I'd be willing to bet it varies person to person. As long as you can develop into a well-rounded human the means shouldn't be the end-all.

 

[Psychonaut]

1. Do I consider myself well-read?
No.

2. How important do I think it is to be so?
It's important to develop critical thinking skills that are typically acquired through reading, but I don't think it's important for everyone to have read a specific set of "essential" works.

3. Any English majors here?
Yes, I majored in English (with a focus on utopian/dystopian lit) and Writing (with a focus on poetry). I currently teach in that subject area. Most of the literature I read these days comes about because I assign books to my classes since I know I won't read them without that obligation hanging over my head.

 

[Deleted member 9932]

Well read in textbooks from my field of studies? Very much so.

 

[KorrZ]

Not really.

I haven't really read many of the classics outside of what was required in school.

I do read pretty much nightly though I always aim for at least 1/2 an hour before bed so it takes me awhile to get through a novel. I generally tend to focus on history books and fantasy fiction (currently reading through Wheel of Time series)

 

[Deleted member 58401]

I'm an English major and I'm not well-read at all - although probably better-read than average. I don't think being well-read is as important as the critical thinking skills the courses teach you, nor as important as understanding how literature developed due to the intersectional contexts behind it; but, being well-read doesn't hurt.

I'd say being well-read means more to creative writing majors - poetic and prose. They get far more utility out of it. Assuming "well-read" here means a quantity.

By that I mean you learn a lot about form and what rules in writing you can break and bend, and have your pick when it comes to allusion and inspiration. This is of course something audiobooks can only partially teach.

Click to shrink...

This is very well-said. I learned very early in life that I wanted to write, and that my writing got better when I was actively reading something at the same time. I was like 10, so later I learned that what I was really doing was imitating voices and styles, but I took away the right lesson. You have to read vigilantly to be worth anything as a writer.

 

[Parch]

The older I get the more I just want to read non-fiction.

Click to shrink...

Me too. Non-fiction is all I read now.
Audiobooks have also increased my interest in reading.

 

[Deleted member 24052]

I'm an English major and I'm not well-read at all - although probably better-read than average. I don't think being well-read is as important as the critical thinking skills the courses teach you, nor as important as understanding how literature developed due to the intersectional contexts behind it; but, being well-read doesn't hurt.

I'd say being well-read means more to creative writing majors - poetic and prose. They get far more utility out of it. Assuming "well-read" here means a quantity.

By that I mean you learn a lot about form and what rules in writing you can break and bend, and have your pick when it comes to allusion and inspiration. This is of course something audiobooks can only partially teach.

Click to shrink...

This is very well-said. I learned very early in life that I wanted to write, and that my writing got better when I was actively reading something at the same time. I was like 10, so later I learned that what I was really doing was imitating voices and styles, but I took away the right lesson. You have to read vigilantly to be worth anything as a writer.

Click to shrink...

110% the truth, right here.

My writing also improved when I started reading more in my free time. Not only that, but on top of improving my hobby skill I also benefited from finding a love of books which I had lost for a time during my 20s. Movies and video games can have fantastic narratives, no doubt. But there is rarely a substitute for reading a good book.

 

[Vish]

I'm horribly read because I have no attention span for it. I have to be really motivated to sit down and read.

 

[Lilyth]

I like to read a lot and have read many of the classics, but latent smartphone addiction has been making it difficult lately.

If anyone has suggestions to effectively limit my smartphone usage, I'd be glad.

 

[Lucreto]

I was always poor at English, I was having trouble punctuating sentences, spelling and my critical thinking is absolutely rubbish. I wouldn't be surprised if I have some undiagnosed learning disability.

I haven't been able to read for leisure for nearly 4 years. I just don't have the time after work. If I do get the time I get 3 pages in and start falling asleep. I bought some light reading books mostly Terry Pratchett books to try and improve my grammar and move on to something harder.

 

[deftones r cool]

I like to read a lot and have read many of the classics, but latent smartphone addiction has been making it difficult lately.

If anyone has suggestions to effectively limit my smartphone usage, I'd be glad.

Click to shrink...

Turn it off or leave it in a different room while readinf

 

[Tanaka]

I read a lot, probably about a book a week, but wouldn't really consider myself well read. I mostly read thriller/suspense novels with some occasional mystery or sci-fi/fantasy novels thrown in.

 

[The Albatross]

I think I'm well read. I'm usually reading two books, one book that I'm listening to on Audiobook and another that I'm reading. I tend to listen to non-fiction and history, and I tend to read more contemporary lit and novels in print. But sometimes I mix it up too.

I read more classics earlier in life, not so much now. There was a time in my life where I wanted to be thought of as well read, and so I focused a lot on classics or great literature, and... today... eh, not so much. I've got about 30-45mins to read each night before falling asleep, and it's rare that I read something published before ~1960.

 

[StrangeRoboMemory]

So this thread is a bit old, but some people were interested in my PhD reading list in English, so I tracked down a few things. First, a list of foundational reading - this was recommended reading that the program expected you to have completed, at bare minimum, as an undergrad/MA student before entering. Second is my first semester reading list...couldn't track down the others, but I'll look. I cut out all of the articles and papers we had to read and just left the books, though there's some scholarly stuff in there (some might find it interesting). Lastly, posting the reading list that I prepared when I was faculty advisor to the undergrad sci-fi/fantasy book club.

I can pull up some other stuff if folks are interested.

Foundational Reading
------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Classical World

Odyssey and Iliad by Homer
Plato's Socratic dialogues - Gorgias, Meno, Symposium, Republic, Crito, Apology, Phaedo
Oedipus Rex and Antigone by Sophocles
The Oresteia (Agamemnon, The Libation Bearers, and The Eumenides) by Aeschylus
Medea and Bacchae by Euripides
Lysistrata and The Frogs by Aristophanes
Poetics by Aristotle
Poems by Catullus
Poems by Sappho (Anne Carson translation)
Horace's Odes - Carpe diem, On Virtue, On Happiness, Beauty is Fleeting, Now is the Time to Drink!
The Metamorphoses and The Art of Love by Ovid
Epidicus by Plautus
Aeneid by Virgil

Medieval and Renaissance

Beowulf (Seamus Heaney translation)
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
The Song of Roland
Le morte d'Arthur by Thomas Malory
The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer
The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri
The Prince by Niccolò Machiavelli
The Faerie Queene, Book I by Edmund Spenser
Doctor Faustus by Christopher Marlowe
William Shakespeare's plays - A Midsummer Night's Dream, Macbeth, Twelfth Night, Hamlet, King Lear, Richard III, Antony and Cleopatra, Romeo and Juliet, Julius Caesar, Othello, The Merchant of Venice
Poems by John Donne
Paradise Lost by John Milton

18thand 19th Century

Candide by Voltaire
The Sorrows of Young Werther by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
A Sentimental Journey by Laurence Sterne
A Critique of Pure Reason by Immanuel Kant
"A Modest Proposal" by Jonathan Swift
Poems by William Wordsworth
Poems by Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Poems by John Keats
Poems by Lord Byron
Poems by Percy Shelley
Manifesto of the Communist Party by Karl Marx and Frederick Engels
Moby-Dick by Herman Melville
David Copperfield by Charles Dickens
Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky
Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte
Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte
Poems by Emily Dickinson
Pride and Prejudice and Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen
Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
Tess of the d'Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy
Beyond Good and Evil by Friedrich Nietzsche

20th Century

Mrs Dalloway and To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf
The Interpretation of Dreams by Sigmund Freud
The Stranger by Albert Camus
The Wasteland by T.S. Eliot
The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Wings of the Dove by Henry James
A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway
Dubliners and Ulysses by James Joyce
Three Lives by Gertrude Stein
In Search of Lost Time, Book 1 by Marcel Proust
The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann
Women in Love by D.H. Lawrence
The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov
Dialectic of Enlightenment by Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno
If on a winter's night a traveler by Italo Calvino
Giovanni's Room and The Fire Next Time by James Baldwin
Native Son by Richard Wright
Passing by Nella Larson
The Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon
One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
What We Talk About When We Talk About Love by Raymond Carver
Discipline and Punish by Michel Foucault
Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o
Beloved by Toni Morrison
Gender Trouble by Judith Butler

Graduate Program Course Reading: Semester 1
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Trends in World Literature

Closely Observed Trains and I Served the King of England by Bohumil Hrabal
Snow Country and Thousand Cranes by Yasunari Kawabata
The Man Without Qualities, Books I and II by Robert Musil
The Savage Detectives by Roberto Bolano
Cairo Modern by Naguib Mahfouz
The Land of Green Plums by Herta Mueller
The Piano Teacher by Elfriede Jelinek
Blindness by Jose Saramago
My Name is Red and Snow by Orhan Pamuk
Arrow of God and "An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad's Heart of Darkness" by Chinua Achebe

English Renaissance in Focus: Power, Kingship, and sui generis Self-Creation

The Alchemist and Volpone by Ben Jonson
Samson Agonistes by John Milton
Coriolanus, Richard III and King Lear by William Shakespeare
Edward II by Christopher Marlowe
The Duchess of Malfi by John Webster
Arcadia by Philip Sidney
The Faerie Queene, Books 1 to 3 by Edmund Spenser
The King's Two Bodies by Ernst Kantorowicz
Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life by Giorgio Agamben
Wild Materialism: The Ethic of Terror and the Modern Republic by Jacques Lezra
The Beast and the Sovereign and Rogues by Jacques Derrida
A King and No King by John Fletcher and Francis Beaumont
A Game at Chess by Thomas Middleton

The Imperial 19th Century and its Discontents

Lord Jim and Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
Kim by Rudyard Kipling
Orientalism and Culture and Imperialism by Edward Said
Idylls of the King by Tennyson
Poems by Tennyson
Travellers in Africa: British Travelogues, 1850-1900 edited by Tim Youngs
The Four Feathers by A.E.W. Mason
Dracula by Bram Stoker
How I Found Livingstone by Henry Stanley
David Copperfield by Charles Dickens
A Personal Narrative of a Pilgrimage to Al-Madinah and Meccah by Richard Burton

Further Early Modernities

Life is a Dream by Pedro Calderon de la Barca
Poems by Luis de Gongorra
Gargantua and Pantagruel by Francois Rabelais
Essays by Michel de Montaigne
The Book of the Courtier by Baldassare Castiglione
The Lives of the Painters by Giorgio Vasari
Orlando Furioso by Ludovico Arisoto
Jerusalem Delivered by Torquato Tasso
Love Suicides on the Eve of the Kishin Festival by Chikamatsu Monzaemon

Theoretical Models

Of Grammatology and Writing and Difference by Jacques Derrida
On Deconstruction by Jonathan Culler
The Resistance to Theory by Paul de Man
Representation by Stuart Hall
Mythologies and Writing Degree Zero by Roland Bathes
The History of Sexuality by Michel Foucault
Truth and Method by Hans-Georg Gadamer
Between Men and Male Homosocial Desire by Eve Sedgwick
No Future by Lee Edelman
"Women on the Market" by Luce Irigaray
After Theory by Terry Eagleton

Science-Fiction and Fantasy Book Club Reading List
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card
The Forever War by Joe Haldeman
The Player of Games by Iain M. Banks
Titus Groan by Mervyn Peake
Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell by Susanna Clarke
Gormenghast by Mervyn Peake
The Drowned World by J.G. Ballard
A Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula K. Le Guin
Neuromancer by William Gibson
The Demolished Man by Alfred Bester
"The Fifth Head of Cerberus" by Gene Wolfe
Ringworld by Larry Nevin
Gateway by Frederick Pohl
The Colour of Magic by Terry Pratchett
Conan stories by Robert E. Howard
Dune by Frank Herbert
The Shadow of the Torturer by Gene Wolfe
Dune Messiah by Frank Herbert
The Stars My Destination by Alfred Bester
Small Gods by Terry Pratchett
The Claw of the Conciliator by Gene Wolfe
Roadside Picnic by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky
Hyperion by Dan Simmons
Children of Dune by Frank Herbert
"The Island of Dr. Death" and "The Detective of Dreams" by Gene Wolfe
The Sword of the Lictor by Gene Wolfe
Foundation by Isaac Asimov
More than Human by Theodore Sturgeon
Excession by Iain M. Banks
Guards! Guards! by Terry Pratchett
Childhood's End by Arthur C. Clarke
Dangerous Visions edited by Harlan Ellison
The Martin Chronicles by Ray Bradbury
Assorted stories by Ray Bradbury
The Citadel of the Autarch by Gene Wolfe

 

[Bigwombat]

I think I'm well read. My wife loves to read and it was awesome to hear when we dated. Most of my friends that live near me don't read and it's a total bummer. Like a total brain drain. One of my best friends admitted to me a couple of years ago that he thought the moon landing was fake. A coworker gets ALL his news from Facebook.

Fahrenheit 451 me now.

 

[Kieli]

I am not well read, but I love literature and love reading. My reading of fiction has plummeted since I graduated college, much to my dismay. I can use the excuse that I don't have time or that the time could be better well spent reading technical articles, technical books (within my field), but those are just excuses.

I've been meaning to get back into reading and what better way to do that than to pay a visit to my local library?

 

[sphagnum]

I like and have read a lot of "old stuff", and by that I mean anything from Sumeria to the 19th century. The older the better.

I have a hard time reading anything fictional written past, say, 1970 other than garbage Star Wars books as a guilty pleasure, and I have no idea why.

 

[Pet]

What's your native language, OP? Your English is pretty good.

 

[Pau]

So this thread is a bit old, but some people were interested in my PhD reading list in English, so I tracked down a few things. First, a list of foundational reading - this was recommended reading that the program expected you to have completed, at bare minimum, as an undergrad/MA student before entering. Second is my first semester reading list...couldn't track down the others, but I'll look. I cut out all of the articles and papers we had to read and just left the books, though there's some scholarly stuff in there (some might find it interesting). Lastly, posting the reading list that I prepared when I was faculty advisor to the undergrad sci-fi/fantasy book club.

I can pull up some other stuff if folks are interested.

Click to shrink...

As someone who didn't major in English, this is really cool to see! Would you say you you read most of the foundational stuff in your undergrad courses? I took two literature classes in undergrad, and we only covered about three of those. (Two of which I had already read, unfortunately.)

Also, I think I found a typo. Sorry to be that person. :P

Wuthering Heights by Emma Bronte

Click to shrink...

 

[Chopchop]

I majored in English but I don't consider myself well-read. I don't read regularly anymore (though I wish I did) and often disliked the classics that I had to read in school. I think many English courses in high school unfortunately drove most of the people I know away from reading, mostly through a combination of bad book choices and bad exercises that encouraged bullshitting your way through essays.

Having said that, I think it is important to read, or at least be open to the idea of reading. Too many people I know just refuse to read books just because "it's a couple of hundred pages" or something. You learn a lot of nuances in storytelling and writing style from reading, and that helps you communicate better in general. It also helps expand your critical thinking.

 

[Vincent Grayson]

I think reading and digesting the experience/perspective of people outside your bubble is super important. I find myself far less convinced that reading/knowing "the classics" (however you choose to define that) is of great importance.

I'd say I'm much more likely to consider someone who reads a lot of contemporary literary fiction (note, I'm not trying to cut out genre fiction so much as not considering the regular reading of random throwaway "fun" books to be particularly edifying) and non-fiction "well read", than someone who did a lot of reading of classic books assigned in an English major or similar.

 

[Deleted member 21411]

I'm trying to make a tradition of going to the library after work and read for a bit, using audio books helps me get my mind fully focused on the material... Nah I'm not well read but I can say I'm reading alot more these days

 

[iksenpets]

I read pretty regularly. Average like 100 pages a week in recent months, so nothing crazy, but regularly. "Well-read" is such a weird concept in the modern world though, where no one could possibly keep up with all the notable books out there.

 

[StrangeRoboMemory]

As someone who didn't major in English, this is really cool to see! Would you say you you read most of the foundational stuff in your undergrad courses? I took two literature classes in undergrad, and we only covered about three of those. (Two of which I had already read, unfortunately.)

Also, I think I found a typo. Sorry to be that person. :P

Click to shrink...

Ah, fixed the typo, lol. Yeah, I'd say that pretty much all of those were covered by my undergrad classes, though in a few cases, I read something similar or another work by the same author (like The Sun Also Rises instead of A Farewell to Arms), so you have to wind up cover some stuff on your own. The main thing is to have enough of a grounding in the basics to do well on the AP Exam in English Literature, which is the standardized test you take before applying to lit grad programs.

 

[John Harker]

I used to read like mad. English minor now.

Getting really into videogames has ruined my attention span for reading, though...

I never liked classics much, however. To me, classics -Western ones, at least- feel more like dead and bygone ways of looking at the world, and something in them almost always puts me off. East of Eden is probably the biggest exception I have.

I like science fiction, though, especially more literary stuff.

Click to shrink...

why not both!

English literature major.
Business adjunct program as my minor

been in the video game industry for over 15 years.
Read lots of books :)

 

[Deleted member 8861]

why not both!

English literature major.
Business adjunct program as my minor

been in the video game industry for over 15 years.
Read lots of books :)

Click to shrink...

I'm trying, haha :)

Got a bit back into reading over the last month after finishing up Neil Gaiman's Sandman.

 

[FlowersisBritish]

"Well read" is such a weird concept that doesn't really mean anything. To me, being "well read" only really means if you get into a conversation with someone about books, you can find a common, kinda random-ish book with someone and be able to talk to them about it. In that sense, yeah I'm decently "well read" but there are so many books I haven't read what's really the point of calling myself "well read."