Larry M. Coleman

I’m taking a class over the summer, and although it doesn’t start until June 23, almost five weeks from now, I want to be ready. Summer classes go at twice the pace, and this class would be a beast in a normal semester: 13 books, lectures, two response posts per week, and a 20-page paper all in 6 weeks. Not something to wait until the first day to get started on.

Over the weekend, I was shopping early for my books and I came across this review of The Epic of Gilgamesh. Keep in mind that the class is called “Masterpieces of World Literature” (HUMA S-110 at Harvard) and Gilgamesh certainly qualifies. I’ve blanked out the last name to protect the dumb:

I don’t even know where to start with this one. Maybe with the history? The book isn’t a book per se, it’s a collection of cuneiform tablets. You might remember those from middle school history class. They look like this:

These date from over 2000 BC. I shouldn’t have to say this, but BC stands for “Before Christ.” So 2000 BC means 2000 years before Christ. It would be quite the trick for something that was written two millennia before Jesus existed to be against Jesus. It would be like Pontius Pilate being anti-television. He would have no idea it even existed because it would come almost 2000 years after he died.

Which leads to the next point, which is that many, many things that appear in the Christian Bible come from this book. Yes, Gilgamesh is so much older than the Bible that many of the authors cribbed straight from Gilgamesh. So it would, again, be quite the trick for a book that is the source of many biblical stories (including the great flood) to also be going against the Bible.

Finally, I’m not sure why someone would even buy a book about Gilgamesh expecting a Christian story. I’ve read the Bible cover to cover more than once, even the boring, skippable parts (no, I don’t mean the Ten Commandments), and Gilgamesh isn’t in it anywhere. It makes as much sense as buying a Doctor Seuss book and then complaining that it’s anti-Superman.

The bigger issue (besides the reviewer not bothering to spend ten minutes on Wikipedia to learn something about the world) is the immediate rejection of any idea that seems even remotely to challenge this person’s beliefs. I’m still not sure how it could, but somehow he found a way. That’s what indoctrination does: it makes you reject anything except what’s been carefully curated and deemed acceptable.

It works both ways. Refusing to read Huckleberry Finn or To Kill a Mockingbird because they contain the n-word misses the essential point that both Mark Twain and Harper Lee were vehemently against the conditions their characters were placed in, and refusing to engage with Gilgamesh because of some supposed anti-Christ verbiage (or whatever the problem is; I honestly don’t know because it can’t be anti-Christian due to the laws of spacetime) means missing out on an extremely important work of humanity.

Reading should sometimes be about coming into contact with ideas we wouldn’t have come across otherwise. That’s how we grow. A good book is a valuable chance to have a conversation with another mind. Like all minds, we won’t agree with everything. Those points of disagreement are what expand us, unless we want to spend our lives like Lyle the reviewer and shrink away from everything. I don’t roll up like a potato bug anytime I come across something that doesn’t fit my beliefs, so one of the books I’m reading right now is The Screwtape Letters by C. S. Lewis.

If you don’t like a book because it’s bad, that’s one thing. For example, I hated Ernest Gaines’s A Lesson Before Dying because it was poorly written, trite, and ham-fisted. It was so godawful that I read it 26 years ago and I still remember how bad it was. Other people, like the English professor who assigned it, thought it was great. On the other hand, one of my favorite books is To Kill a Mockingbird and other people think it’s as boring as reading the instructions on the care and feeding of pocket lint. However, I did not hate A Lesson in How not to Write Before Dying because it had an underlying message of racial injustice. It was a bad book that had something good to say.

Is there a bad book that has something bad to say? Sure there is. The only reason Atlas Shrugged isn’t the worst book ever written is because Rand’s The Fountainhead is even worse. But how do I know this? Because I read it. I read it knowing its reputation. I knew what it was about. And I read it anyway because coming into contact with ideas you find abhorrent is how you grow and it’s the only way to intelligently debate with people who don’t think like you. You have to know their ideas before you can oppose them. So I slogged through 1100+ pages of Ayn Rand, who sounds like she’s writing late-steampunk Cornelius Vanderbilt fanfic, just to see for myself. When I was done, did I call for it to be banned? Nope. I gave it to my stepson to read so he would know that there are people out there who actually effing think like this.

Any belief that can’t stand a challenge is either one that needed to be changed anyway or one that’s too brittle to be worth having in the first place. Not all contact with others is battle, but as Sun Tzu said in The Art of War, “It is easy to love your friend, but sometimes the hardest lesson to learn is to love your enemy.” We learn to do that by reading things we don’t necessarily agree with, which is important because Sun Tzu also said, “If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.”

Good luck, Lyle. You know neither yourself nor others because you’ve chosen not to. I hope the rest of you do not make the same mistake, so here’s the reading list for the class I’ll be taking. In addition to The Epic of Gilgamesh, there is:

• The Odyssey by Homer
• The Thousand and One Nights
• The Tale of Genji by Murasaki Shikibu (I’ve been looking forward to reading this someday anyway because it is considered by many to be the first novel)
• The Lusiads by Luis Vaz de Camões
• Candide by Voltaire (read it once, been wanting to re-read it forever)
• The Real Story of Ah-Q and Other Tales by Lu Xun
• Love in a Fallen City by Eileen Chang
• Ficciones by Jorge Luis Borges (if I had to pick my single favorite author ever, it would be Borges)
• Death and the King’s Horseman by Wole Soyinka
• East, West by Salman Rushdie
• The Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri (a long, long, long-term project is to read something by every Pulitzer Prize winner, so this will check a box)
• My Name Is Red by Orhan Pamuk

What a cultural melange: Greek, Arabian, Japanese, Portuguese, French, Chinese, Argentinian, Nigerian, Indian/British, Indian/American, and Turkish! This mix and this experience is exactly what literature is supposed to give us. Bonus points if you can make it through them all in a month and a half even without having to write a final paper at the end. Have fun!