昨天遇到两个排行榜，抬举了2012年的“十大好书”。我只有一本“霍乱”，只听说过“红轮”，其他的连名字都没见过，可见我的读书之路偏离主流太远了，罪过罪过。

不知道两个榜的标准和数据来源，同时拥抱了“红轮”、“江城”、“乡关”，可见还是多元的选择。我检索了一下，对“江城”感兴趣了。原来是一个在长江边教过两年英美文学的老外写的——其中一章，“中国特色的莎士比亚”，从中国的文学政治化想起他在普林斯顿和牛津的同样遭遇：

For the first time I came to understand why literature so often slides away toward politics. I had struggled with this before; at Princeton I had majored in English, and after graduation I had spent two years studying English language and literature at Oxford. My original plan had been to become a professor of literature, but over time I became less enamored of what I saw in English departments, especially in America. Part of it was simply aesthetics— I found that I couldn’t read literary criticism, because its academic stiffness was so far removed from the grace of good writing. And I could make very little sense of most criticism, which seemed a hopeless mess of awkward words: Deconstructionism, Post-Modernism, New Historicism. None of it could be explained simply and clearly—just as my Fuling students stumbled when asked to define Historical Materialism or Socialism with Chinese Characteristics.

我本来也不明白那些云山雾罩的现代文学理论，还见有人借西洋名词来评论中国古典文学，更感觉稀奇恶心和好玩儿（要看借得怎么样）。原以为那是自己无知的无畏，现在见洋老师也不喜欢它们，我感觉好多了。