English vs. Americans, and DH Lawrence
April 24, 2002 (4:59 PM) ( link )

Over the past weekend I got into a minor tiff with Yu Ping and Cheryl, who is also a Singaporean, about whether England or the USA has had better writers since 1776. I argued strenuously for the USA. But both Yups and Cheryl pushed for Britain (naturally enough). In particular, Yu Ping recommended that I read DH Lawrence's The Rainbow, Thomas Hardy's Jude the Obscure, and James Joyce's The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, all of which she had read for an exam while in Singapore.

So, today I checked out Lawrence's The Rainbow and will begin reading it. I expect to read Hardy's book next, and finally—perhaps over the summer—to read Joyce's (again). Joyce is interesting—of course I've read Portrait before, but I hated it; Dubliners was much more to my tastes (with "The Dead" being perhaps the best short story I have ever read, except perhaps for Raymond Carver's "Cathedral," or James Baldwin's "Sonny's Blues"). But I never re-read Portrait after growing up a bit, and I've found that books I once read as a kid are much better now—Great Expectations, Old Man and the Sea, even "Sonny's Blues," which bored me to tears the first time and then moved me to tears the second time.

I also checked out a book of poems by Philip Larkin, whom I have never heard about. But supposedly he's good. Now I've never been good with poetry; there are some poems I like a lot, but I tend to dislike beautiful language when it's not really about anything. To me it's sort of like dressing an ugly woman in a beautiful gown, except replace the concept of ugly with the concept of meaninglessness. Ok, so that doesn't work either. Anyway, I'll be reading a couple of Larkin's poems a day, which is supposed to be good for the soul if nothing else.