Are you well read? Am I?

The other day I was listening to an interview with Christopher Hitchens, who was talking about Kingsley Amis. I don't even remember what the subject was. But it got me to thinking that I haven't read anything by Hitchens in a long time -- or by either of the Amises, Kinglsey or Martin. Then I felt the sense of dread wash over me that I am altogether behind in reading British authors. What about William Trevor? Ian McEwan? For that matter, there are a still a few books by Charles Dickens, Thomas Hardy and Jane Austen I need to read.
And it's not just British literature. Right around the time the Berlin Wall fell and all those Eastern Euripean nations were shaking off the Soviet shackles, there was a lot of great literature pouring out of that region. Vaclav Havel, Milan Kundera, Tibor Fischer, Josef Skvorecky -- I was reading them all. But I am behind in my reading of Eastern European literature.
Don't get me started on Japanese fiction. A long-time passion of mine, it seems I used to stay current on anything by Haruki Murakami, Kenzaburo Oe, Akira Yoshimura. Now, I am so behind.
If I were just reading what's worth reading in recent American fiction, I'd be behind. But I see all these new titles from authors all over the world, and I torment myself that I need to read it all. Does everybody (every reader, anyway) go through this sort of torture? How much do we need to read to be considered well-read? And is that the purpose, to accomplish some vague goal of being well-read? Or is there really no goal to reading? What do you think?

Series Literature

I just finished reading Paula Spencer, a new book by Roddy Doyle. Doyle is best known -- where he is known at all -- as the author of the Barrytown Trilogy, the books The Van, The Snapper and The Commitments, which were all made into movies. Paula Spencer is his second book dealing with the woman he introduced us to in The Woman Who Walked into Doors, his wrenching 1996 tale of an abusive relationship. Paula Spencer is now single (her abusive husband was killed by the police in the first book), and a recovering alcoholic.

I have always enjoyed Doyle's books, but they are hard to recommend to people. If you recommend the Barrytown Trilogy, or now I suppose if you recommend The Woman Who Walked Into Doors and Paula Spencer, many people are turned off by the idea of 'series' literature, or of a sequel. I have found myself taken by this prejudice in my own reading.

Series are for romances, for westerns, for science fiction and other, 'non-serious' genres. Serious authors don't pen trilogies and ongoing series. They don't even do sequels.

But of course the literary world is full of excellent series. Several years back I read and re-read Cormac McCarthy's Border Trilogy, which had the problem of being not just a series, but a western series. I can't get anybody to read that who doesn't come to it independently, since it just sounds like Zane Grey stuff. John Updike put together one of the most amazing stories in American letters with his 'Rabbit' books -- Rabbit, Run, Rabbit Redux, Rabbit is Rich, et cetera. Yukio Mishima, the great Japanese author, capped his career (and shortly after, his own life) with his Sea of Fertility tetralogy.

So there's no point taking the old knee-jerk response to series literature. You have to find out for yourself which authors are good enough, and what is the literary intent of the series (or if there is a literary intent -- something more than dragging out the story.)

Have you read any series by serious authors that you would recommend?