Literary self-improvement

This is the time of year when we tack up new calendars and resolve to change our lives, to stop smoking or start flossing, to pay off credit cards, keep a diary, bike to work, learn Spanish, cut carbohydrates …

Most of those New Year’s resolutions will be broken several weeks before Groundhog Day. We lack the willpower or the support group.

But in the spirit of the season, I propose literary self-improvement: Set yourself a reading goal, to work your way – either alone or as part of a book group – through some of those books you always meant to read, the ones from that lit course you could never work into your schedule.

Two new books – “Bound to Please: An Extraordinary One-Volume Literary Education” by Michael Dirda, and “Shakespeare After All” by Marjorie Garber – could help you accomplish that.

“Bound to Please” (Norton, 525 pages, $29.95) is a collection of literary essays, mostly book reviews. Dirda, a Pulitzer Prize-winning book critic for the Washington Post, earlier wrote a charming memoir, “An Open Book,” about growing up as a bookworm in a working-class Ohio town.

The essays in “Bound to Please” have been arranged more or less chronologically by subject, starting with those on the Greek historian Herodotus, the Bible, Ovid and the Arabian Nights, so you could almost use it as a textbook for a self-study survey course. I think that’s what the publishers had in mind when they gave it the weighty subtitle: “An Extraordinary One-Volume Literary Education.”

It’s nothing so daunting (or boring) as that, especially because Dirda’s style is so unpretentious. “All my writing,” he says in the introduction, “has been aimed at the semimythical common reader, and usually one who is sleepily flipping through the newspaper while sipping coffee on a Sunday morning.” (Sound like anyone you know?)

All sorts of classics are represented: Pepys, Boswell and Johnson, Blake, Flaubert, Dostoevski, Emerson, Shaw, Proust, T.S. Eliot and plenty more. But there are also fine reviews of books by such contemporary writers as Umberto Eco, Thomas Pynchon, Annie Proulx and Don DeLillo. And there’s a section on masters of popular fiction including P.G. Wodehouse, Edgar Rice Burroughs and Terry Pratchett.

There’s more than enough in “Bound to Please” to fuel any number of New Year’s reading resolutions, but it’s also a nice book to keep around just for the time when you’ve run out of something to read and need a suggestion.

Of course, if you’re out to improve your literary education, there’s really only one place to start: by reading all those Shakespeare plays you’ve never got around to. And this is a good time to do it.

Not only did this year see the publication of Stephen Greenblatt’s wonderful biography “Will in the World” (W.W. Norton, 386 pages, $26.95), but now Greenblatt’s Harvard colleague Marjorie Garber has come out with what I think is the best one-volume critical guide to the plays, “Shakespeare After All” (Pantheon, 1,008 pages, $40).

Garber has been teaching Shakespeare for 30 years, at Yale and Harvard, and in extension courses, outreach programs for college and high school teachers, and almost anywhere she can find an audience. I think it may be one of the marks of Shakespeare’s infinite variety that she didn’t burn out on the subject long ago.

There’s really only one word that comes to mind to describe Garber’s book: solid. That’s often a synonym for “dull,” but what I mean by it is that her essays – there’s one for every play – are stimulating and informative without being flashy.

“Each age creates its own Shakespeare,” Garber says, introducing her central thesis that the plays are “living, growing, changing” works of art. Our age has re-created “Romeo and Juliet” as stories about gang warfare in New York (“West Side Story”) and Miami (Baz Luhrmann’s film version), “The Taming of the Shrew” and “Othello” as teen flicks (“Ten Things I Hate About You” and “O”), “Henry IV” as a movie about drugged-out street hustlers (“My Own Private Idaho”), “Hamlet” as a tale of corporate intrigue (the 2000 film with Ethan Hawke).

Garber also wants us to reconnect with the plays’ origins on the Elizabethan and Jacobean stage, where “Women were played by boys, kings by commoners; night scenes, staged in the middle of the afternoon, were created by language.” The power of illusion, of suspension of disbelief, is central to the experience of Shakespeare.

“Shakespeare After All” is full of stimulating insights: for example, that in “The Merchant of Venice” “each character is constantly threatening, or promising, to turn into the other sex”; that “Henry IV, Part I” is set in four distinct “dramatic worlds,” each of which corresponds to one of “the genres of Shakespearean drama: history, comedy, tragedy, and romance”; that “Hamlet” “is about the whole question of boundaries, thresholds, and liminality or border crossing.”

Observations like these are tossed off with a disarming casualness throughout the book, but she doesn’t follow them up with tedious explication. Instead, she leaves them as morsels for us to savor on our own time.

Savoring the insights of these books – now, that’s my New Year’s resolution.