The answer to "Why I Have to Read This Stuff?"

books:


	• Required Reading: Why Our American Classics Matter Now Andrew Delbanco, 1997 - 225 pages average customer review:based on 2 reviews view larger image
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Stay With It and Be Rewarded

I tangled with Required Reading in its opening pages. I had thought it was something more like The Lifetime Reading Plan and was dismayed when I thought I had stepped in some hardcore lit crit theory which can be a killjoy. The good news is, that's not what I stepped in. While Required Reading is rather like a capstone seminar and requires a college freshman's acquaintance with literature to really swim far with it, it is as engaging as it is edifying. It reminded me why I chose to major in lit back in school and was never sorry. To others who belong to that great English major diaspora, who find themselves lost among the Grisham worshippers, you can go home again with Delbanco.

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The answer to "Why I Have to Read This Stuff?"

Delbanco, a Columbia University professor, shows the reader what is so great about American authors such as Herman Melville, Kate Chopin, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Stephen Crane and others. I'm not sure that the writing style (sentence complexity and vocabulary, etc)matches the intended audience for this arguement. Seems to me that if you pick up this book and can gather meaning from some its more obtuse sections, you already know why we need to continue to read the "classics".

In an age of uncertainty over what constitutes our common heritage, Andrew Delbanco reconsiders our greatest writers and how they enlarged our sense of American possibilities and the expressive range of our language. In superb chapters on Melville, Thoreau, Wharton, Richard Wright, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Lincoln, and others, he shows how these writers celebrate the idea of the free individual while conveying the struggle to defend this ideal against hostile conditions and ideas.

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