In which we offer 11 Pieces of Advice for Recovering English majors

Read an Anthony Trollope novel. He gets rediscovered every couple of decades, and who knows, you might be at the crest of the next wave. Or not.

You’ve always felt that you needed to be older to enjoy Henry James. Well, guess what! You’re older. Theoretically, that means that now is the time. But you were probably wrong, and you’ll never be old enough, and that copy of Portrait of a Lady is still going to sitting on the shelf five years after they bury you.

Since you haven’t come close to reading a book by Charles Dickens since you read the Cliff’s Notes on A Tale of Two Cities, which is as close as you were able to get given that the midterm was the next day, why don’t you try one now? Read Barnaby Rudge. No one else ever has.

When someone tells you they hated Moby-Dick, act as if you a) read it twice, and b) loved it both times. Who is going to argue with you?

Throw away your copy of Finnegans Wake. Stop kidding yourself. You’re never going to get past the third page, so why pretend otherwise? All your handwritten notes in the margin that end halfway down the second page are a dead giveaway.

If you want to get back into the game, read something by a Nobel Prize winner. And no, reading the liner notes on one of your old Dylan albums doesn’t count.

Remember how you used to write poetry in high school? No? Good.

Admit that the only Jane Austen novel you ever read was Pride and Prejudice in junior year of high school and that you have no idea what all the fuss is about. Then to make up for it, watch Clueless again and realize that it came out 22 years ago and Alicia Silverstone is now in her forties.

The simplest way to avoid Proust is to claim that after Swann’s Way neither of the translations is terribly satisfactory, and that you were thinking of learning French so that you would be able to bypass the middlemen completely and stick with the original. The only difficult thing is keeping a straight face while you’re claiming this.

All you need to know about Russian literature is that, in The Brothers Karamazov, the butler did it, and in War and Peace, the guy gets the girl in the end. Knowing these two facts frees up a lot of time for activities other than reading.

Speaking of not reading, if you want to catch up without actually cracking open a book, pretty much every classic ever written is streaming on Netflix. So is Gray’s Anatomy. Be strong, my friend. Be strong.

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