Reading I've Liked

by Clifton Fadiman

Excerpt from Reading I've A Personal Selection Drawn From Two Decades of Reading and Reviewing, Presented With an Informal Prologue Ad Various Commentaries D. Appleton-century Co., Inc., for their permission to quote from The Salzburg Tales by Christina Stead, Copyright, 1934, by D. Apple ton - Century Co., Inc. The bobbs-merrill Company for their per mission to quote from Abe Martin's Pump by Kin Hubbard, Copy right, 1929. Mrs. Kin Hubbard for selection of excerpts from her husband's writings. Harcourt, Brace and Company, Inc., for permission to reprint Noon Wine by Katherine Anne Porter, Copyright, 1939, by Katherine Anne Porter; and to reprint two essays from Abinger Har vest by E. M. Forster, Copyright, 1936, by E. M. Forster. Brandt Bran'dt for the selection from Seven Men by Max Beerbohm, copy right, 1920, by Max Beerbohm and published by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.; and for selections from Adam and Eve and Pinch Me by A. E. Coppard, Copyright, 1922, by A. E. Coppard and published by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. The Clarendon Press, Oxford, England, for permission to quote from F Owler's Modern English Usage. J. M. Dent Sons, Ltd., London, for permission to include W. F. Harvey's August Heat from The Midnight House. John Dos Passos and his publishers, Harcourt, Brace and Company, Inc., for permission to reprint excerpts from u.s.a. By John Dos Passos, Copyright, 1937, by John Dos Passos. Doubleday, Doran and Company, Inc., for permission to reprint three stories from The Mixture as Before by W. Somerset Maugham, Copy right, 1940, by W. Somerset Maugham; to reprint one chapter from Madame Curie by Eve Curie, Copyright, 1937, by doubleday, doran Co., Inc.; to reprint an essay from Rodeo by R. B. Cunninghame Graham, Copyright, 1936, by Doubleday, Doran Co., Inc.; to reprint an essay from The Hogarth Essays, Copyright, 1928, by Doubleday, Doran co., inc.'harper Brothers for permission to reprint in its entirety My Life and Hard Times by James Thurber, Copyright, 1933, by James Thurber; to reprint a selection from America's Growing Pains by George R. Leighton, Copyright, 1939, by Harper Brothers; to reprint two chapters from Serve It Forth by M. F. K. Fisher, Copy. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

Genres: Books About Books, Nonfiction, Anthologies

Paperback

First published January 1, 1958

About the author

Clifton Paul "Kip" Fadiman was an American intellectual, author, editor, radio and television personality.

Reviews

[Mike Coleman · Rating 5 out of 5]

The editor, author and 1950s TV personality Clifton Fadiman had the good fortune in 1941 of being able to assemble a volume of works he enjoyed and appreciated, and it's our good fortune that he did so. Works by E.B. White, Katherine Anne Porter, Ludwig Bemelmans and John Steinbeck provide splendid examples of the best of the best fiction produced in the early part of the 20th century, and the 1941 zeitgeist, with the rise of fascism and rising interest in psychoanalysis, is beautifully mirrored in works by Thomas Mann and Conrad Aiken, respectively. It is also a pleasure to see that Fadiman selected W.F. Harvey's short, terrifying story August Heat, which recently turned up in another collection, our friend Michael Sims' first-rate assembly of Victorian short stories, The Phantom Coach. My parents had Fadiman's book in their library for many years. Sadly, it didn't survive the multiple moves in their later years, but this volume, which I recently ordered from a used bookstore happily named Twice Sold Tales, will stay on my shelf for a good long time.

[Adam Nelson · Rating 5 out of 5]

I didn't read all the selections in this book because many of them are published in their own anthologies along with the authors' other works, so I thought I'd search them out sometime as part of my lifetime reading goals. I love Clifton Fadiman. He was a big part of my childhood. I had his 3-volume "World Treasury of Children's Literature," which I personally read cover to cover and hope to read with my boys someday. I was looking forward to how Fadiman wrote and anthologized for adults, and I think there were similar treasures to be had here. This collection was first published in 1941, and I read the first edition. His perspective is very interesting, as he often alludes to the impending World War, at the point of this publication more of a concern or a crisis. He includes a letter from Thomas Mann after he was exiled from Germany and stripped of his academic titles/honors. That Fadiman indicates this letter would probably have significant permanent importance is quite prophetic. I can't wait to read more Mann, as Fadiman agrees with the mythic status of this writer, and Fadiman is not one to freely give out compliments. I was amused to read his perspective that The Grapes of Wrath, while a great novel, is nevertheless a book of its time and not likely to be very widely read in later years. Also, at the time of publication, Virginia Woolf had just recently committed suicide, and Fadiman has interesting thoughts to offer regarding her reasons for taking her own life. Hemingway, of course, is still alive, and it's just as interesting to read perspectives on the writer and his work that don't allude to his own suicide. I was reminded of James Michener's Iberia, which was full of the spirit of Hemingway and his love affair with Spain. Hemingway was a breathing entity throughout that epic travelogue.

Probably the best portion of this anthology besides the works themselves is Fadiman's long introduction. While it goes for around 60 pages+, it never feels long-winded or that it stays past its welcome, and that's because Fadiman is very aware of his audience. He doesn't pander or patronize. He has a high wit that at times reminded me of the joy of reading Alexander Pope and Samuel Johnson. It is no easy read, but it is very rewarding, and I especially enjoyed what he had to say about the reading of pulp and trash fiction. Fadiman has no patience at all for it, but he gives the admonition that if you MUST read lowly literature, at least challenge yourself occasionally with writing that is smarter than you. I find this to be especially important now. We have celebrated, and rightfully so, such works as Harry Potter, Percy Jackson, and other hit young adult series, but at what point are all of us grown adults going to return to challenging higher literature and read it for the sake of feeding our minds? I've been guilty of settling into merely entertaining genre works myself, and some of it actually CAN be a challenging read, but mostly it's there for surface-level entertainment. We celebrate the mere reading of ANYTHING, and I remember when Harry Potter came out, everybody was just glad children were WANTING to read. Okay, so we've returned to an era where children want to read. That's great. And adults now want to read, too. Awesome. Why don't we read something hard every once in a while? Just because it's hard doesn't mean it doesn't amuse. Read some Pope and Johnson. Shoot, read Mark Twain and Shakespeare! Much of their writing isn't easy, but boy does it delight when you get it. At some point, we have to stop celebrating the fact we read 50 Shades of Gray because, hey, I read a book!

[Andrea · Rating 5 out of 5]

This man inspired me to find the old, the strange, the books I had never heard of and start to read with and eye to the flow of words rather than just their content. Beyond bringing my reading tastes into new genres with one book I began to crave more the jewels of wisdom or comedy between the abtracts from the other writers. It also brought me to a place of grabbing random books from the bookstores and seeing where they took me.

[Tamara aka SoMysteriousLee · Rating 5 out of 5]

Just downright interesting, and gets you looking into more books to read or add to your collection. My copy is a well loved hardcover, copyright 1941. It's on my "you can look but don't touch" bookcase :P

[Jimbo · Rating 4 out of 5]

Find anything you can read in the old bookshops by this brilliant scholar who introduced society to a great deal of worthy literature.

[Mark · Rating 2 out of 5]

Reading I’ve Liked gives one the same appealing feeling as does the reading-list component of a good college syllabus, highly curated and individually distinctive, and prompting by its mere existence an additional set of considerations, of the sequencing and the contexts—original and new—of the selections, on top of the merits of the selections themselves. That sense of well-being and comfort comes from the confidence that one is in good hands, and Clifton Fadiman’s are very good indeed. There is a true sense of curation, originating from a genuine and distinct point of view that is so often missing from compilations, which sometimes seem to speak for themselves rather than for a person; though the title might seem to be implied or to go without saying, it best reflects his approach here, including what he likes rather than aiming for conscious canon building or edification. “I have made no attempt to ‘balance’ the reading ration, to have equal proportions […] I included what I liked of the work I had read,” he writes in his introduction. His specificity of taste manifests itself in the specificity of his selections—he often cites his ambivalence to an author and/or the bulk of an author’s work, or even the rest of a work that he is excerpting, and notes of many pieces that they are not necessarily representative of their writers’ corpuses, or even the larger texts from which they are selected. He includes the introductions of two books which are themselves, he notes, nothing special; in another case, he includes two scene-settings sections of a book of interrelated tales in the explicit hope that the selections will appeal to the reader and lead him to seek out the actual stories that follow. While he seeks neither to conform to nor to establish a canon, Fadiman takes note of it when appropriate—especially when discussing what stands the test of time in his introduction (it’s interesting to note, for example, his comment that interest in Virginia Woolf had fallen off at that point, given how strongly interest in her seems to have resurged since)—often to mention that some of his inclusions were obscure or already deemed unfashionable (the fact that many of the authors whose work was included seem to have faded from the public consciousness—or at least enough so to never have entered my own—adds to the pleasure of being introduced to them). I wondered if, to the extent that Fadiman considered factors beyond the criterion reflected in the title, he in fact consciously chose to limit the inclusion of notables of a certain order, who were already both in fashion and well known; there are a handful of exceptions, including Hemingway, whose included story is preceded, like all of the works, by an introduction by Fadiman, which in this case alone includes two earlier pieces of his, which suggests that in most cases, he may have been getting a chance to champion someone in print whom he hadn’t previously been able to.

The breadth of Fadiman’s taste is significant, and pleasing as reflected in the unexpectedness of some of his inclusions, the likes of which I wouldn’t have even necessarily known existed (such as an encyclopedia review); indeed, the novelty of some of these pieces may have been as large a part of what appealed to him as anything. (Sometimes, as in the case of said encyclopedia review, and the earlier selections from an English usage guide, the inclusions proved for me more interesting conceptually than in execution; both seem to go on at too much length in too much the same manner, exhausting their appeal, and I wondered whether, while Fadiman felt comfortable isolating segments of work, he did not feel comfortable segmenting work beyond its original divisions.) He notes a philosophy article as standing out due to its type, as he also does regarding the usage guide, though I think in so doing, he does not give himself enough credit for the diversity of the included material, which includes biographies (more and less formal, not to mention John Dos Passos’s contributions within the context of fictional works), the aforementioned two introductions, journalism, philosophical discourses (in the form of lecture and treatise), the usage guide, reviews, satirical shorts, essays (personal, humorous, and otherwise), food writing, autobiography (humor), a judicial decision regarding a literary concern, a naturalist’s diary, letters, an excerpt from a speech, short stories, novels excerpted, novels in full, and of course fiction in a number of rather different tones and moods, with the one exception—the only selections formally grouped—of five short stories that Fadiman associates with each other “because they illustrate as many different ways of manipulating outré themes” (which would likely now be classified as genre [or at least genre-adjacent] fiction). Even the individual selections of Fadiman’s often cover an interesting range of tones, suggesting again an eclectic taste and diversity of interests.

As mentioned, nearly every inclusion in Reading I’ve Liked was new to me, and I greatly appreciated the exposure. (I was familiar with at least the names of some of the authors, but even in those cases where there was some awareness, I was often given my first opportunity to explore any of their work [which in some cases I had hoped for for some time], or an opportunity to read a new work of an already appreciated author—in some cases, again, ones I had long been interested in.) It’s hard to imagine having come across much of this material otherwise, in part because some selections—the biography of Marie Curie by her daughter is the one that first came to mind—I would not have necessarily thought compelling to me, either because of impressions about the subject or author, and some of which turned out to be quite good (and some even great), even if they didn’t necessarily prompt me to want to sample the author or subject further (in some cases because of Fadiman’s advice—to refer again to the Curie biography, he specifies that he has set forth the best chapters).

Those introductions of Fadiman’s that I keep referring to are reliably some of the best parts of this compilation (the same, appropriately scaled up, is true of his delightful 57-page introduction to the volume as a whole). In that overarching introduction, Fadiman says, “as to the commentaries that accompany them, I would say only that they are not intended to be criticism [indeed, he is modestly insistent in said introduction on his role not as a critic but as a book reviewer] but rather the most informal kind of personal annotation. Mot of them are examples of what Swinburne called ‘the noble pleasure of praising,’ for this is a book of enthusiasm. The commentaries need not be read at all, if the reader so wishes, for each selection is perfectly comprehensible without their aid. I guess I just enjoyed writing them.” His enjoyment writing them was matched, wildly, by mine of reading them; it is hard to imagine the experience he proposes of reading Reading I’ve Liked without attending to them. There is an enthusiastic, generous spirit to them, as if he wants to share the specificity of his fondness with us; in one case, he offers a lengthy list of brief quotes from the author whose work follows, in a burst of surplus enthusiasm. (This kind of infectious appreciation often made me more inclined to read more of certain authors than the work itself ended up doing.) In advance of a series of fictional excerpts from a lengthy series, Fadiman illustrated a number of types of narrative techniques in order to give an idea of the author’s unique style; before the last, he deprecatingly added, “Tired of little pictures? Here’s one more.” I was not, at all. His commentary on and expert preparation of the reader for each selection made the experience of reading it interesting, even when it was subpar on its own merits; they offered a pleasing framework of comparison that was nice to have to keep in the back of my mind, as something to think about, like the choice of sequencing. It is in this manner, as much as in his selections themselves, that Fadiman so clearly represents his personal point of view which gives this collection such cohesion; when he said, of certain images and scenes,“these pictures, ever since I encountered them years ago, have lain quietly in the back of my mind with that same odd persistence possessed by one’s lovely or terrible memories of childhood,” I immediately knew exactly both the kinds of passages and the kinds of memories generated by them.

Because of Fadiman’s skill at creating a maximum of anticipation, it is perhaps inevitable how difficult it was for the following pieces to live up to his words. I was so regularly excited by his introductions, and commonly enough felt let down afterwards, that I wondered if he was almost doing them a disservice, but I suspect the opposite was actually the case—rather, he prepared me optimally by casting the pieces in the best possible light and made me feel like they were being given the best possible stage, and given that premier exposure, I felt more confident in my ultimate judgements of their worth, which, in aggregate, were that they rarely lived up to their billing, though they sometimes did, or even exceeded it.

I found it intriguing to consider the specifics of possible reasons for the success or failure of certain inclusions, which tended to return to consideration of the lengths of various pieces, though without my being able to come to any meaningful conclusion. The Kin Hubbard epigrams, unusual in this collection for their extreme concision, are an overabundance of pith that might be at least somewhat better appreciated taken in small does; despite the brevity of the individual elements, the overall sense of being too much of the same is a similar problem as with the encyclopedia review and the usage guide. On the other hand, two of the pieces that were most successful were the two books—James Thurber’s My Life and Hard Times and Katherine Anne Porter’s Noon Wine—that were included at their full lengths; both were among my very favorites, and I wonder if it was not entirely coincidental. However, one can’t attribute this entirely to their wholeness, as there was a range of quality among the short stories which were included in their entirety, nor to their length, which might even be considered a potential hindrance, given the fact that there were much shorter pieces that found it hard to earn their lengths. The choices can be somewhat curious at times—in the case of The Magic Mountain, Fadiman, who admires the book as a whole, intentionally chooses a chapter—one of only two included pieces with which I had previously been familiar—that is an uncharacteristic departure from the book’s style, since the effect of that book is so dependent on its wholeness; it could be argued that the counterpoint of the chapter in question was also dependent on the wholeness of the rest of the book. One almost doesn’t mind the failures in a book like this, though, as they seem to develop yet further one’s sense of Fadiman’s personality, and the specificity—I’m almost tempted to say whimsicality, though it doesn’t feel quite right—of his taste, which in some cases he goes so far as to acknowledge might be at odds with that of the public (he says “quite candidly I doubt that many readers will care for this story” of Sarah Orne Jewett’s [someone else apparently already unfashionable by the time of his writing]; I did, for the record).

Even the pieces I didn’t like, as such, I often found interesting, and I went so far as to feel affection towards some (though not all) that were not entirely successful. In general, the nonfiction selections that seemed most successful were those that had an urbane and witty tone like his own (perhaps because he was a more expert judge); the fiction selections seemed more successful than the nonfiction ones overall, perhaps because they are more typically suited to operate with the framework an anthology. The pieces I liked best were Noon Wine, Somerset Maugham’s “The Treasure” and “The Facts of Life,” Ring Lardner’s “The Love Nest,” My Life and Hard Times, Max Beerbohm’s “James Pethel,” and of course Fadiman’s introduction; also nice were Hemingway’s “The Snows of Kilmanjaro,” Sarah Orne Jewett’s “A White Heron,” Virginia Woolf’s “Mr. Bennet and Mrs. Brown,” and all three chapters from Dos Passos’s U.S.A. trilogy; and uniquely interesting were the selections from Donald Culross Peattie’s An Almanac for Moderns, the naturalist’s appealingly personal account of the passing of the year. I feel sure to return to all of them fondly.

[Sam Rennick · Rating 5 out of 5]

Do you remember the old Saturday Review? You know, the one with writers like John Ciardi and Cleveland Amory and Goodman Ace? A brilliant publication, filled with wit and erudition. And where did the wit and erudition come from? Why, from the men of letters, of course. Clifton Fadiman belongs in this company. Now, the man of letters has gone the way of the dodo bird, which is to say, extinction. But so very much remains. Fadiman composed two anthologies (that I know of), "Reading I've Liked," published in 1945, and "The World of the Short Story," published in 1986. I give the edge to the former, including its superior title, but both are eminently worth reading. You'll like some of the stories, not others. That's inevitable. What you will never dislike, however, are Fadiman's comments about the stories and their authors. Emphatically included is Fadiman's lengthy introduction to "Reading I've Liked." It is superb. Boy, he lets loose with all sorts of observations. For example: "I must admit that I could never exercise any Christian charity on that old gander who said with lardy self-satisfaction that whenever a new book appeared he reread an old one;" and "I have tried perhaps ten times to read 'The Brothers Karamazov' and each time given up in a rage directed equally at Dostoevsky and myself;" and "After all, what is art? It is the mode by which the solitary heart of any one man bridges the gap which separates him from all of his brothers, mankind in general." Fadiman eventually comes to like "The Brothers Karamazov," but I beg to differ. It's a dreary tale. As for "lardy self-satisfaction," how can you dislike that? There are a billion words on the Internet, but not, I think, these. Fadiman's two anthologies will keep you enthralled many an evening. Five stars.

[Avis Black · Rating 1 out of 5]

Fadiman's generation sure had a pitifully narrow reading world. I've read plenty of good but obscure books published before his lifetime, but I'm sure he never knew about them, or would have disliked them if he had. He was a good little boy and liked what he was supposed to like so his betters would pat him on the head.