There's still something to be said for having the handful of truly great novels under your belt, so to speak. They are potent little cosmoses that you can get into total understanding. I mean, you may not be able to have total understanding of them in your youth or pre-Work development and all that, but once you are able they exist to be acquired in that sense. Of course, epic poems are the same and pretty much all other categories of literature, yet still a great novel will have a higher content of human nature and 'ways of the world' in it. In the worldly sense. Maybe not a profound language like a Homer, or deep patterns of anything like a Thucydides, but something more 'fully orbed' in the human nature, societal dynamics realm.
I write the above to inspire me to finish Tom Jones. I'm still in the 400s...
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What happened to me? I read the complete Shakespeare in 2002. But you know what? It was the only thing I was doing at the time. I dedicated myself to it alone. That is the key.
Something that bothers me too is the fact that of my seven great novel list I've only read complete two:
War and Peace - has been read
Anna Karenina
Brothers Karamazov
Moby Dick
Don Quixote
Tom Jones
Vanity Fair - has been read
I read Don Quixote complete in an abridged version.
On the other hand I know I've been through all these levels of influences. I was good at knowing how to 'get' each level and not get stuck. You can't read a library, I knew that back then. I 'have' Dostoevsky even though I havn't read Brothers Karamazov complete, in other words.
Let it go...
Let it go.....
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