Michael Dirda ends Classics for Pleasure by quoting Ralph Waldo Emerson, who said, “There are books...which rank in our life with parents and lovers and passionate experiences.” Dirda agrees, and so do I.

Within the covers of this book are some of Dirda’s favorite authors and books, explored briefly but with an enthusiasm that makes you want to rush out and read them all, or revisit those you already have an acquaintance with. He has obviously made an attempt to select less obvious, but equally worthy, authors and works. Although he introduced me to a few authors I had never come across before, reminded me that I was intending to read some classics I still have not gotten to yet, he still managed to hit on a few favorites of mine as well.

My favorite parts of the book:

1. Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier - a book I have loved since I was a teenager and have read multiple times. His comments about this book are the best I have ever read. “Rebecca says less about love than about the snares of passion, the ache of jealousy, and the shifting balance of power between a husband and wife. And, this astute observation that in the end both de Winters find themselves surrendering to memories, alive to what was rather than what is. Perhaps Rebecca does triumph after all. The novel, after all, bears her name.

2. His dissection of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, which made me want to re-read it immediately.

3. The Secret Garden by Burnett, which is one of my all-time favorite children’s books. Dirda observes But a good children’s book should be a good book for any reader, of any age. He is absolutely right, and I can attest that this book meets that standard.

4. The short biography of Alexander Pope, one of the authors I studied in my college courses, that reminded me of why I fell in love with 18th Century literature so long ago. Jonathan Swift penned, In Pope, I cannot read a line,/But with a sigh, I wish it mine. And, T.S. Eliot said the modern test for liking poetry is whether or not you like Pope.

5. His praise of Isak Dinesen as both a storyteller and a chronicler of her times and experiences in Africa.

Lest you think I only appreciated those sections that dealt with authors I already loved, let me mention that he made me enthusiastic to read Zola’s Germinal, E.T.A. Hoffman’s short stories (which sound like they might have been conceived by Poe), E. Nesbit’s Five Children and It, H. Rider Haggard’s She, and Chesterton’s The Man Who Was Thursday. Two of these were already on my radar, but the others were unknown to me when I first opened this book.

There is a great temptation to tell of every author Dirda includes, because each of them sounds so interesting and promising, but that would make this review the length of the book and it would border on plagiarism. So, I’ll just encourage you to get hold of the book and see which of these authors you most love reading about.
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Michael Dirda could make a phone book sound like a masterpiece! ( )

Great introduction to some not-so-well-known classics of literature. Found myself making a long reading list from this useful index. And the author's synopses are fun to read, in and of themselves - especially for the volumes that you're probably NOT going to read. ( )

I was expecting this to be a 10; it barely scraped in at a 7. I could not wait for it to be published; I stopped by the bookstore three times, hoping to find a copy before the official publication date. And then when I actually got the copy and started to read it? You must be kidding me. Who would read these books? The summaries did not even intrigue me. I, who have been known to write down titles recommended by first graders, wrote down a single recommendation from the scores Dirda mentions. Big disappointment. ( )

(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted here illegally.)

For those who don't know, Michael Dirda is a Pulitzer-winning literary critic, author of several of those "guides to challenging books for those who don't usually like challenging books;" and now we have his latest, 2007's Classics for Pleasure, essentially more of the same, this time picking even more obscure works precisely because they haven't been featured yet in any of his previous books. And as far as that's concerned, I suppose it's fine for what it is, although I always seem to have the same problem with guides like these: they tend to be more valuable to me as simple laundry lists of books I should check out, instead of for the essays explaining why I should be checking them out in the first place. And so as a result, I found only some of the short (three- to five-page) write-ups here interesting, mostly when he looks at titles from antiquity and is merely explaining what exactly is going on in them to begin with; but I found other large sections of the book dull and pretentious to the point of being unreadable, especially when he's trying to convince us to care about this or that highly obscure Victorian poet or modern academic novelist. Also, despite his many exhortations to the contrary, be warned this is a book primarily designed for academes who already have a broad knowledge of literature going into it; Dirda in fact has a bad habit of referencing hundreds upon hundreds of other writers in these essays without giving us even a clue about who they are or how the comparison is apt to begin with, for example like in this throwaway line from his write-up about French author Marie-Madeleine de la Fayette -- "This short book is, in some ways, the novelistic equivalent of a tragedy by Racine, and the agonies felt by the princess are no less acute than those of Titus" (a great observation if you happen to already know who Racine and Titus are, utterly f-cking pointless if you don't). It's one of those books that will immensely appeal to some, and you know already if you're one of those people; if you're not, it can be very easily skipped.

Out of 10: 7.2 ( )