On Friday, The Guardian published an article by author Patrick Ness entitled “Patrick Ness’s Top 10 ‘Unsuitable’ Books for Teens”. While the recommendations for each of the 10 (actually 9) books amounted to a scant few sentences each, several of them were quite witty, and I loved his hypothesis that some books are better read when you don’t quite understand their content.
1. The Catcher in the Rye by JD Salinger
The obvious first choice, but not necessarily because of its literary reputation. It needs to be read when you’re young. If you first meet Holden Caulfield when you’re too old, the desire to give him a good slap might impede your enjoyment.
6. Dracula by Bram Stoker
Next, a couple of classics that are better in your teens. Dracula first because it’s still fast-paced, scary and appealingly pervy. Plus, it’s important to know that vampires don’t play baseball. And honestly? They never would.
Via The Guardian
His tenth recommendation was that he couldn’t really recommend a lot of the books he read as a teen because they were simply too lurid or too adult, which made me laugh firstly because he’d prefaced the list saying that it was good for teens to over-reach and find something thrilling and slightly dangerous about reading. His non-recommendation was an endorsing recommendation for any teenagers reading the article to run, not walk, to their local library or bookshop to get their hands on some of these not-recommends. It also made me laugh because my favourite book as a teenager was Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being.
Despite owning a copy (sadly not the one with this cover, which is my favourite), I have not reread the book since my freshman year of college when I used part of the book in a paper. Even then, I just flipped through it to find the pages I needed. I sort of want to reread it and I sort of don’t. I have read several of Kundera’s books since then and found them all lacking a certain je ne sais quoi. This has only served to further the way I feel towards The Unbearable Lightness of Being. Furthermore, there is this sense of mythology I have ascribed to the book. It was recommended to me by one of my (at the time) closest friends and an intellectual who I greatly admired. It also, as Ness said, had a certain allure of the illicit about it both because of the subject matter, but also because it was one of the first novels I read that was not written by an American or British author. At the time, I was also studying on my own to take the AP English Lit exam, so I was desperately trying to push my boundaries.
The book resonated with me for no specific reason(s) I can pinpoint. Even years later, when asked on a job application to write about how a piece of art influenced my life, I chose this book partially because I didn’t have any other ideas, partially out of laziness, but also, perhaps, because there was a grain of truth in what I said even if I felt like what I was saying was high-blown bullshit. I wrote that the book was the reason I decided to major in Comparative Literature. In truth, it was not the central reason or even the secondary reason, but I can’t deny that I still love to read the passage about compassion as co-feeling and it stirs the cockles of my literary heart as I admire how Kundera combined linguistics analysis into his prose.
All languages that derive from Latin form the word “compassion” by combining the prefix meaning “with” (com) and the root meaning “suffering” (Late Latin, passio). In other languages—Czech, Polish, German, Swedish, for instance—this word is translated by a noun formed of an equivalent prefix combined with the word that means “feeling” (Czech, sou-cit; Polish, współ-czucie; German, Mit-gefühl; Swedish, med-känsla).
In languages that derive from Latin, ‘compassion’ means: we cannot look on coolly as others suffer; or, we sympathize with those who suffer. Another word with approximately the same meaning, ‘pity’ (French, pitié; Italian, pieta; etc.), connotes a certain condescension towards the sufferer. ‘To take pity on a woman’ means that we are better off than she, that we stoop to her level, lower ourselves.
That is why the word ‘compassion’ generally inspires suspicion; it designates what is considered an inferior, second-rate sentiment that has little to do with love. To love someone out of compassion means not really to love.
In languages that form the root word ‘compassion’ not from the root ‘suffering’ but from the root ‘feeling’, the word is used in approximately the same way, but to contend that it designates a bad or inferior sentiment is difficult. The secret strength of its etymology floods the word with another light and gives it a broader meaning: to have compassion (co-feeling) means to not only be able to live with the other’s misfortune but to also feel with him any emotion—joy, anxiety, happiness, pain. This kind of compassion (in the sense of soucit, współczucie, Mitgefühl, medkänsla) therefore signifies the maximal capacity of affective imagination, the art of emotional telepathy. In the hierarchy of sentiments, then, it is supreme. (p. 19-20)
