Wednesday, October 10, 2007 | by nathan

Classic Literature

This via The Palinode:

Over at Amazon, you can apparently buy the entire Penguin Classics library for $7,989.50, which, it turns out, is a savings of exactly $5,326.34 (40%).

Imagine that for a moment, if you will: this is a collection of exactly 1,082 books that - let’s be generous and say you actually WILL read one of them a week for 1,082 weeks - would take you damn near 21 years to read. Fine, okay, you say, you’re not doing anything for the next 21 years, literarily speaking, but seriously? Where are you going to keep an extra 1,082 books? In my pittance of an office/library there are far more books than shelf space, and I still make bi-weekly trips to Borders and Full Circle, where I totally buy books I won’t read until next year. I still haven’t finished my "Grand Master Reading List" from HIGH SCHOOL.

But hey, if you’ve got $7989.50 to spare (shipping is free) and you’re pretty sure that you won’t want to read anything from the 1960’s on for the next 20 years, I absolutely say go for it. To be honest, I can’t think of a better smell with which to infuse one’s house than that of a whole bunch of brand-new paperbacks, especially if they’re classics.

Reminds me of a story:

After my parents split up my brother and I started spending summers with dad. Dad lived in a house rented to him by his best friend G.E. for virtually nothing, a truly cozy little place where sometimes, in the summer, the air conditioning went out but which felt like home from the moment he moved in. I really liked it there, and dad liked having us. We’d get paid for doing the chores: we traded off weeks doing the dishes and making the beds, and every Saturday one of us would mow the lawn, for which we got paid an extra $10. At the end of the summer dad doubled whatever we had saved from our summer earnings.

The first day of summer dad posted lists of books he thought we should read. It was our duty, all summer, to always be reading something; there were no time limits or anything, and if we didn’t read a book from the list that was fine, as long as we were reading. This is how, by age 15, I had come to read a whole bunch of the classics, a few of them several times over, but one in particular became a sticking point for me and dad: Treasure Island.  

For whatever reason, I just didn’t want to read it. Sure, it was about pirates, whatever, but dad was pushing it really hard and I didn’t want to read it. So, at first, I lied and said I had read it, but of course I got caught and punished. So after that it became a battle of wills. Dad started acting like Sam I Am from Green Eggs and Ham, pushing that stupid book on me at every turn. But my mind was made up: I would not eat it in the rain, I would not eat it on a plane, not in a boat, not with a goat. I never, ever read Treasure Island.

Now my dad is older, and proud of me, and not a day goes by when I don’t worry about him a little, living in Arkansas on his own. He and I are so much alike that at times I am alarmed and humbled by it. Alarmed, because I remember that when I was a child I didn’t get him at all, or where he was coming from, and humbled, because now I feel like I do get it; I get it so well that I often think that no, I must have it wrong, there’s no way I’m there yet, except every time we talk it’s perfect simpatico.

I think I might head to a book store at lunch and buy a copy of Treasure Island. I’ll push back whatever else is on my reading list and, after nearly two decades, finally let dad win this tiny little battle of attrition.

Oh, and by the way? This is what that entire Penguin Classics Collection looks like on someone’s shelf: