I’m always keen to hear Origin stories.
What sparked the emergence of an empire?
How did a great sports team evolve?
And what’s behind the evolution of 3ology?
I can easily answer the final question of that trio.
I’ve always loved playing games and competing in quizzes so it’s been a hugely enjoyable romp to actually come up with a game myself.
Being something of a pub quiz aficionado I’ve particularly enjoyed creating the factual Top 3 element of 3ology, not least because it’s been a great learning experience but also for the regular moments when it exposes how little I know … (ed: there’s a Socrates quote in there somewhere).
Here’s a recent Pub Quiz experience that led me into a certain amount of introspection.
One of the rounds involved identifying six famous novels from their covers alone, minus the titles and the authors’ names.
We had no problem with The Godfather, struggled with Moby Dick (the illustration of a whale should have been a clue), and completely failed to recognise Animal Farm and The Great Gatsby.
That wasn’t the mildly shocking bit.
That biggest shock was to come as our team realized that, between the four of us, we’d read a grand total of two of the novels of what are considered culturally significant classics.
In the days that followed I couldn’t stop thinking about it.
Mainly I was thinking that we had all failed in some way.
But then I asked myself, did it matter?
Sure, we had never read Animal Farm, but did that leave us worse off than those who had? Were we somehow less conversant with the society we lived in and our place in it than those bookworms?
Which led to another question. Is it even necessary to be acquainted with the literature, drama and poetry that form the bedrock of a nation’s culture?
In other words, do you have to have read Hamlet or its equivalent? Or seen it on stage? Or merely recognise the line: ‘To be or not to be’. Do you need to know that Hamlet even exists as a play?
Clearly there must be millions of people in the UK, who, on finishing school, gladly threw away their copies of The Canterbury Tales or Paradise Lost, never to look at a ‘great work’ again. The same must be true for people the world over.
Has it done them any harm?
Let’s leave aside the question of whether reading Jane Austen or Charlotte Bronte makes you better equipped to live in the 21st century. (I think it might be thanks to the, you know, insights into human nature and society. But I can understand anyone disagreeing.)
There is surely a virtue in at least a passing acquaintance with literary masterpieces, if only because great art shouldn’t be a minority sport like bee keeping or fell running, and certainly shouldn’t be the preserve of a cultured elite.
Reading is a good thing in itself, anyway. It exercises the imagination and stimulates the mind in a way screens do not.
And if readers of Sally Rooney or Stephen King graduate to George Eliot or Charles Dickens so much the better.
Not least because much of great literature is great entertainment. Bleak House may be 700 pages long but if you haven’t read it, you’re missing out.
There is one more argument in favour, of course — the more you read,
the better you do at quizzes.
Top 3 great literary works that, shamefully, I haven’t read
1. Ulysses by James Joyce — considered one of the most important works of the 20th century. Many have started it, far fewer have got to the end.
2. War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy — epic Russian masterpiece. It’s sheer length and scale is daunting
3. Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes — 17th century tale of a Spanish knight tilting at windmills is a pillar of European culture