Read any good Montaigne essays lately?

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By D.L. Stewart, Staff Writer 2:15 PM Saturday, September 24, 2011

According to a column in Newsweek lamenting the lack of reading by today’s texting, tweeting teenagers, this country is producing “civilizational illiterates” who have fallen far behind teens in the Shanghai district of China in reading ability.

To close this gap, the author suggests, our teenagers need to turn off their cellphones and immediately read the following books listed on the Columbia University undergraduate core curriculum:

Virgil’s “Aeneid,” Ovid’s “Metamorphoses,” Saint Augustine’s “Confessions,” Dante Alighieri’s “The Divine Comedy,” Michel de Montaigne’s “Essays,” William Shakespeare’s “King Lear,” Miguel de Cervantes’ “Don Quixote,” Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s “Faust,” Jane Austen’s “Pride and Prejudice,” Fyodor Dostoevsky’s “Crime and Punishment” and Virginia Woolf’s “To the Lighthouse.”

Of course, adults have been lamenting the lack of reading by teenagers since Virgil was in junior high. And the author’s claim that teenagers who don’t read books like those will be “cut off from the civilization of their ancestors” doesn’t particularly worry me. As an ancestor of several of those teenagers, I’d have to say that our civilization wasn’t all that great, anyway.

What does concern me, though, is that not only haven’t I read all the books on that list, I’m embarrassed to admit that I’ve never heard of some of them.

I did catch “Pride and Prejudice” when it was on PBS a few years ago, but that was mainly because my wife wouldn’t let go of the remote control. And I vaguely remember reading “Crime and Punishment” in college, but all I remember about it is that it had something to do with crime. And punishment.

It’s not that I don’t read books. I love to read books. Reading books helps me pass the time while I wait for my television cable box to reboot.

For the record, in the past five years I have read exactly 163 books. The reason I know the exact number is because I keep a list on my computer. I started the list after I brought home John Grisham’s “The Client” from the library and got to page 112 before I realized I’d already read it four times.

And the shelves in our condo are crammed with books. Except where they’re crammed with family photographs, empty CD cases and ceramic statutes of dogs with pushed-in faces. Many of them are the great literature of Danielle Steele and James Patterson. The rest are cookbooks.

So, like the tweeting, texting teenagers of America, I’m probably way behind those teens in the Shanghai district of China and I doubt that I’ll ever catch up.

But if Hollywood ever makes a movie of Montaigne’s “Essays,” I’ll be sure to go and see it.

Especially if it stars Julia Roberts.

Contact D.L. Stewart at  dlstew_2000@yahoo.com

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