n+1; What We Should Have Known: Two Discussions

n+1 Discussions

by Andrew S. Jacobs, Keith Gessen, n+1

Cultural Writing. Literary Criticism. The two discussions in WHAT WE SHOULD HAVE KNOWN took place at the offices of n+1 in the summer of 2007. Eleven n+1 editors and contributors--including Caleb Crain, Meghan Falvey, Mark Greif, and Ilya Bernstein--met to talk frankly about regrets they have (or don't have) about college--what they wish they had read or had not read, listened to or not listened to, thought or not thought, been or not been. The idea for the discussions was prompted by a desire to give college students a directed guide, of some sort, to the world of literature, philosophy, and thought that they might not otherwise receive from the current highly specialized university environment. They were also an attempt to answer the "canon"-based approach to college study in two ways: by identifying canonical books produced by our contemporaries or near-contemporaries--something conservative writers have always refused to do--and, second, by articulating a better reason to read the best books ever written than that they authorize and underwrite a system of brutal economic competition and inequality.

Genres: Nonfiction, Essays

128 pages, Paperback

First published October 15, 2007

Reviews

[Donald · Rating 4 out of 5]

My college career is an untraditional one. I dropped out of high school after my sophomore year and planned never to attend college. I kept that up into my 20s. Then a combination of intellectual stagnation - I was reading lots and lots but had nobody to talk about books with - and just life stagnation led me to start taking a few random college classes. I took a class about the American Revolution (excellent, learned an immense amount), Logic (helpful, also learned that I didn't like formal logic), Greek history (sorta okay), etc. I definitely have some regrets about how I approached these classes, but ultimately they were okay.

When I moved to Philadelphia I applied to the University of Pennsylvania and Temple University. I applied to the former because it was closest to my apartment, not knowing it was a famous school (seriously!). I applied to both schools assuming I would pursue Jewish Studies. I wanted to learn Hebrew and read Torah, as well as modern Jewish philosophy. Somewhere along the way I shifted courses and devoted myself to classical languages. I'm still doing Jewish scholarship (half of my summer will be doing just that in Princeton and Middlebury), but my main interest is Plato. Penn is not the intellectual environment I want, which isn't surprising, but I am getting an excellent education in classical philology. I am reading important books and thinking about important questions. I am being challenged.

That long introduction is a way of saying that my experience with college is totally different from that of the people in this book, all of whom went to college right after high school (as far as I can tell). I have a totally different set of regrets than the regrets of the authors. Sometimes I regret not going to St. John's College or the New College in Florida. Both would have been 'good' for me in a lot of ways, but my teenage self might have fought against them. It was really important for me to be humbled and challenged before I could begin to actually become educated, and I'm not sure if those places would've done that. Maybe teenage hubris can only be broken with time. I regret reading so much anarchist and communist stuff instead of reading Great Books or books that challenged what I believe(d) in. I regret not reading more poetry.

Final verdict: I think a lot of people will hate this book or scoff at it, but I liked it a lot. It'd be a good thing to read if you're going to school.

[Sean Carman · Rating 4 out of 5]

A charming pocket dialogue on the tender perils of the literary life. Keith Gessen leads several N + 1 editors and contributors (Ben Kunkel, Chad Harbach, Caleb Crain, and Marco Roth, among others) in two round table discussions of literary regrets, lightly edited for publication and bound in this stylish dark blue paperback. Gessen kicks off the first discussion by proposing three categories of regret (books we should have read earlier, books read mistakenly instead of other books, and things we wish we had known), but the discussions encompass a wider circle of regrets -- paths the writers and editors wandered down but wish they hadn't, writers they wished they had or hadn't admired, ways of thinking that might have gone against their better judgment. It's really fun listening along. There are a lot of amusing exchanges, but this was probably my favorite:

Gessen: I want to move onto life choices. Does anyone regret the profession they have chosen?

Grief: I have no profession. Whatever profession I do, I regret it.

Kunkel: What do you . . . mean? What are you talking about?

Grief: I regret it!

Kunkel: What?

Grief: Whatever it is that I've become.

Gessen: You've become a philosopher.

Grief: No philosopher would think so.

Gessen: You've become an editor.

Grief: But that's something to be ashamed of.

Kunkel: An essayist? A critic?

At which point Grief launches into a wonderful small tirade about how pathetic it is to be an essayist.

Four stars!

[Brian · Rating 3 out of 5]

What a good idea for a book: two groups of smart thirtysomething writers gather, in person, to talk candidly about books they wish they had and hadn't read as teenagers and as college students. (This pamphlet presents lightly edited transcripts of the two conversations.)

I enjoyed reading it and I recommend it.

I wish that each conversation were fuller; a chaptered text based on a series of discussions, maybe, rather than two hasty one-shots. I also wish that each discussion were broader in scope. Only philosophy and high literature are considered; this constraint feels unnecessary and perhaps unconscious. What about Mad magazine, Playboy, R.L. Stine, etc?

Note: This handsome nine-dollar pamphlet is "free for college freshmen and other 18 year-olds." (Details at nplusonemag.com)

[Alan · Rating 5 out of 5]

If you read the bibliography of this book you will never have to go to college. Which is the point of the book. (It is free for college freshman and all 18 years olds, with ID). Having read this book, I feel like I am ready to go to college, even though I already have, and even though, like one of the panelists, " I regret it! I regret going to college!"

This is a very tenderly didactic, presumptuous, and generous concept--beautifully executed. A panel: "what do we wish we had known, what do we regret, about having gone to college?"

I loved it. This is going to plump up my reading list like nothing has in years. I am very touched by the fact that there are brilliant people who also so care about their younger selves that they are willing to speak plainly about their uncertainties, regrets, and reading lists.

[Gina · Rating 4 out of 5]

Love to read books about reading books! I liked “No Regrets”, the all-women follow-up, quite a bit more, but both are great resources for people with a lousy, rigor-free BFA who are learning how to read...now.

[Pria · Rating 4 out of 5]

oh no i need to read so many books and very quickly

[Elizabeth]

(bold of me maybe to log a self-described pamphlet as a Book) even tho i’m out of college i found a great deal of value in reading this, in the clarity and wisdom of the speakers; hard to know if/how it will shape my reading, my career, or my relationship with writing, but i feel it has impacted me in some numinous way. god bless n+1

[Lauren]

Two choice passages:

Keith Gessen: I didn't learn about the band Pavement until I read a obituary for them in Feed magazine in the year 2000. And Pavement would have made college... It would have made college more tolerable, but the point of the story is . . . I wish I'd known about them when they were still, you know, a band.

(I knew who Pavement was before college, KG, and it changed my life)

Meghan Falvey: When I was 27, I was like, "What have I done? Nothing." But for some reason, that anxiety ceased to have its ability to keep me up at night. I actually feel uncharacteristically, not optimistic, but rather just kind of free of the strains of one particular sort of culturally imposed period of one's life, without having done anything recognizable as entering the next one.

(Welcome to your thirties)

[Margaret · Rating 5 out of 5]

You know those times when you somewhat regret your choices in college? Maybe because you finally have some distance between you and that experience?

Well, even without a whole lot of regrets, this series of conversation transcripts of writers (or other people in the publishing/humanities professions) is amazingly interesting. It surrounds a lot of regrets about what they read when, or now that they are older what they would change if they could. It's a really interesting premise, and I loved snooping in other people's lives.

[Oriana]

Hmmmm. Gawker really convinced me to hate N + 1, which is probably incredibly silly, right? I don't even read Gawker anymore. So I should read this to make up for my totally unjustified dislike, right? Or maybe I should read Gessen's book first? Or maybe I should just stop fretting over such nonsense??

[Matthew · Rating 3 out of 5]

As a current college student, What We Should Have Known seemed like it would be a great read. I enjoy reading literature, but I sometimes don't quite know what's worth reading and what's best left on the shelf. Why not look to a book put out by N+1, a literary magazine I've learned I enjoy?

I agree with and could relate to a lot of what was said in this book, but in a sense I completed it without feeling like I gained much. I feel that the book doesn't quite explore the majority of the mentioned texts enough; in a sense, I wanted to understand why and how certain books had the impact they did on these people rather than just that they had an impact. This sort of defeats the alleged purpose of this book: to determine what is worth reading and what isn't. Only after reading, then, did I understand why the introduction candidly states that "That, anyway, was the idea." In general, the book feels less like it's for, say, an 18-year-old looking for advice and more for a thirtysomething (at a minimum) who is already out of college and is looking for reflection or further growth.

To its credit, though, What We Should Have Known does have some useful insights about other spaces worth exploring in college outside of some literary canon. This was still enjoyable to read and quite brief--not to mention a well-crafted book in general that I'll probably revisit a few years down the road.

[Gaelan D'costa · Rating 4 out of 5]

Found this book randomly, who knows where. Didn't know what it was about.

It was a pleasant read. It was a bit of an inside into the professional writers' mind (with a few different axes, of different genders and sexualities and some discussion of religion and immigrantness) from a place of vulnerability, so it was really about two panels' worth of people's mindsets.

As someone who tried and failed to be a humanities graduate student, it was comforting and enlightening to read their thought processes, to see the kinds of people who thrive or at least qualify for that kind of environment, and see what it gives you (in character, if not in monetary value) and to catch a little glimpse of how people ricochet off literary culture to work towards it as a vocation (and for myself, an immigrant whose family did not come from a literary or academic background, to see the kinds of things I had no awareness of and thus no foothold into that world even from an immigrant standpoint.

A good short read, a good window into the writer's world.

[Jordan · Rating 2 out of 5]

Significantly less enjoyable than the second volume. The first panel especially is frustrating and someone whose writing I enjoyed (Mark Grief) was just annoying. The participants in this volume seem much more concerned with status and how they are perceived, they don't 'play along' like the women in the second volume, they don't speak with sincerity like the women in the second volume, either. And because of that, it just doesn't work.

[eve · Rating 4 out of 5]

the women, by far, come off the best

[Christopher · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a funny, short book. No moralizing about the current state of reading, just some good guidance for young people to ignore while they waste their youth.

I basically read this so I could watch people have the kind of conversation I would like to have but virtually none of my friends really reads in a searching manner. More common, my friends read only nonfiction. So all I could do was read other people have this great conversation about learning and what they wish they had learned. It's a pleasant substitute for the real thing. The n+1 folks are passionate and enthusiastic and see the issue of what we should be reading (and how it informs our character) as a high-stakes question. Some good lists of books you should read too - both fiction and nonfiction, as well as conservative, liberal, and radical. I've added a few to my queue. I really like that they frequently are like, yeah, study poststructuralism, but find your way out of it - it opened some fruiful fields of study, but it has also closed some avenues that need to be re-opened.

Good sample exchange:

K: My example from my own life would be that I spent a whole lot of time reading Nietzsche, thinking Nietzsche, quoting Nietzsche on every possible thing. And then when I started reading Marx, I was like, "Well actually Marx would have done just as well emotionally, and it would have been a lot more useful analytically." But by then it was too late, because I'd already kind of passed the age when I could get really excited - when I could let a philosopher run my life.

M: When did you-

K: When I was 20.

M: -read Marx?

K: Oh. The Next year. When I was 21.

[Sarah · Rating 3 out of 5]

I'm really glad I read "No Regrets" first. This book frustrated me b/c it started out with a bunch of dudes squeeing over Henry Miller, so . . . no thanks, I'll read some women on the canon instead. But the very thing that "No Regrets" is missing at the end--critical thought on the importance of class and economic privilege--"What We Should Have Known" spends tons of time discussing.

Most helpful to me in here was a discussion of what it felt like to find a book that helped create an intellectual structure for understanding all kinds of other books. For most of these writers, those books tended to be Marxist histories. I've been thinking a lot about the old saw that "first you learn to read and then you read to learn." And perhaps we need a third step that characterizes how for the first decade or two of being a person who reads to learn you will find your brain collecting ideas but not having the necessary context to connect them. Until you find that structure that can connect the dots--probably by reading a book--and suddenly everything you read becomes part of this greater understanding of how culture and people work with and against each other in interconnected webs of thought and art and theory. So, "first you learn to read, then you read to learn. Then, one day, all the things you've learned from reading will come together in a unified theory of the world." (That was not graceful, but whatever. Hopefully you see where I'm going.)

[Hani Omar · Rating 3 out of 5]

Those of us who attended college near the end of the last century are perhaps well-familiar with a wideley circulated piece of half-baked self-help entitled "Been There, (Should have) Done That", a practical paint-by-numbers tutorial on how to become a careerist, people-pleasing gunner by the time you exit college. "What We Should Have Known" can be thought of in a similar vein, but its virtues are purer, more genuine. It is less a tutorial than a candid discussion - a collective recollection, if you will - on intellectual formation and how our perceptions of it change over the course of our lives. And much as I would love to recommend this book for anyone still in college, the sense of informed resignation permeating its pages will likely fly over the heads of anyone not yet graduated into their late twenties.

[Liam Kelly · Rating 5 out of 5]

As potentially obnoxious it is to become swamped with yet another list of books that you should read, this particular pamphlet was incredibly insightful. Surrounding the literary suggestions, was a lively discussion about why I should read some of these books. Nice variety of minds and book suggestions alike.

I felt like this is what I should be reading right now, fresh out of university. This pamphlet sort of phrases what my concerns were about coming out of college in general. Like what was it all for? they look after that question with a nice little bow tie and some treats to satiate my mind.

[Walter · Rating 2 out of 5]

I was excited to read transcripts of people sitting around talking about books they should have read in college, but they ended up mostly reproducing the Canon. Great idea; only an OK implementation. A more diverse cast of participants (all but one are in their 30s; most are White) might have come up with a more eclectic selection of books.

[G · Rating 3 out of 5]

In its quest for perspicacity I think n+1 sacrificed its sense of irony. That's not to say the book isn't worth reading - it is - but it's markedly less relevant than its oracular tone perceives itself.

[Sourav · Rating 3 out of 5]

A quick read that offers a fair number of insights into problems plaguing contemporary formal education as well as some guidance on how to better become genuinely educated in a more meaningful way. Probably targeted at those between the ages of 16 and 24...

[Josie · Rating 2 out of 5]

The panelists were right to be embarrassed by their contributions. If you are trying to list books for "life" do all the writers of the list have to have the job Writer? However they are wrong (mark grief) to think their actual writing (apart from this volume) has no utility.

[Anna · Rating 4 out of 5]

Actually very useful to a recent college grad who is regretting all the things I forgot to learn in school. I'm not even in the literary field, but this is a point in the right direction for a lot of questions I have.

[Shehab Hamad · Rating 3 out of 5]

Fun little plane read that will result in many 'canonical' books to be added to want-to-read shelves especially for us non liberal arts people.

[Wendy Liu · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very quick read. Good, but not really worth buying unless you're in the middle of an n+1 back catalog buying spree (like I am).

[Jen · Rating 4 out of 5]

I am filled with light hope that discussions like these are happening.