I have not forgotten what I said about reading essays. I must have been feeling extremely ambitious, however, at the time. Did I really say three essays a week? Can I adjust that to a more reasonable number? Since I plan on reading one short story a month, how about one essay a month as well. Then, if by chance I end up reading three a week all the better, but I know I can manage one a month without too much trouble. I had to take back most of the books of essays I had checked out from the library (besides---too many to choose from---sometimes that is just overkill), but I did save the Updikes (I love having the illustrations to go along with the essays--maybe I can squeeze in a few essays before they too must go back to the library!). I am planning on investing in this anthology, though (the nice thing about library books--you can look them over before buying them). And for now I will work on reading through the 2005 Best American Essays, which is a series that has been issued yearly since 1985 that I bought the last time I went to the bookstore. A mere 25 essays--they are not too terribly long in length, and as one reviewer said, I will be getting a year's worth of reading (supposedly the best of the best) from a variety of excellent magazines.
All this has me thinking once again, just what exactly is an essay? Wiki says:
An essay is a short work that treats a topic from an author's personal point of view, often taking into account subjective experiences and personal reflections upon them. Essays are usually brief works in prose, but works in verse are sometimes dubbed essays. Virtually anything may be the subject of an essay. Topics may include actual happenings, issues of human life, morality, ethics, religion and many others. An essay is, by definition, a work of non-fiction, and is often expository.
Quite often essays are found in magazines, which has confused me a bit. Does that mean that an article in the Smithsonian about French painters is an essay or is it a journalistic article? Just where do you draw the line? I guess journalistic writing has it's own category. If you research something and publish it, then is it simply journalism? Does essay mean it is purely your own, no matter what the subject? Aldous Huxley is quoted as saying (once again taken from Wiki):
"Essays belong to a literary species whose extreme variability can be studied most effectively within a three-poled frame of reference. There is the pole of the personal and the autobiographical; there is the pole of the objective, the factual, the concrete-particular; and there is the pole of the abstract-universal. Most essayists are at home and at their best in the neighborhood of only one of the essay's three poles, or at the most only in the neighborhood of two of them."
I suspect that I read essays all the time without realizing that that is what they are. In any case, once I have gotten into the habit of reading them, and see the varieties of essays that are out there, it will probably be easier to identify them.
On a side note I found this article via Only Books All the Time, which I thought was interesting. Now I must pull out the book I recently bought by Patrick White, and slide it up the TBR pile! One publisher is quoted as saying:
"There is no point in publishing a work that is never going to sell more than 1000 copies. For a new literary author to sell more than 3000 books was a thrill."
I suppose the bottom line is the bottom line, but I do think it is sad that unless a publisher thinks it is going to sell more than 1000 copies it isn't worth publishing. Maybe it isn't worth publishing, but I wonder how many wonderful books are going to be lost to readers, because they won't be Dan Brown blockbusters.