Category Archives: Lists

• Love eighteenth-century literature? Know someone who does? Check this out then. It’s Mall Flanders, “accessories for reading eighteenth-century British literature.” It’s got Brobdingnag and Lilliput University T-shirts and sweatshirts, two different Tristram Shandy mugs, a Robert Burns mousepad, an Alexander Pope clock, Academy of Lagado tote bags, and a Pamela journal. If I kept a journal anymore, I’d make sure I kept it in a Pamela journal. It’s also got these stickers — I must get my hands on this Tristram Shandy plotline sticker:

• You’ve probably already seen the Un-suggestor (link via Maud), a Library Thing service which tells you what you don’t need to read. You type in a book you own or have read, and it comes back with un-suggestions. What interested me about it was that when I typed in Mrs. Dalloway, I got back a whole bunch of religious books. I don’t need to read Rick Warren’s The Purpose Driven Church or John R.W. Scott’s The Cross of Christ or Millard J. Erickson’s Christian Theology or Max Lucado’s Just Like Jesus. Thank heavens. Similar books came up when I typed in Swann’s Way, although the Harry Potter books came up too. The religious book results amuse me because I’ve got a brother who reads just those things. How did we end up in the same family? Well, long story.
• Finally, I was interested to find this article (via Reading Matters) by Genevieve Tucker in The Australian. It’s on book blogging, and it’s pretty good. After a glowing mention of Metaxu Cafe, she says, “it’s the conversation with other readers that is bringing them back again and again to share their considered readings and thoughts, rather than a constantly shifting, shimmering page of book news and snippets of the here and now.” That strikes me as exactly right.

This will be a pooter-ish post, one that might get me soundly mocked. But, in the spirit of Danielle’s post from yesterday and in the spirit of book-blogging solidarity, because many people think lists and reading plans and TBR piles are fun, here we go!

Inspired by another one of Danielle’s posts, I’m going to try my own list of books I’d re-read. I’d like to re-read more than I do because, if the book is a good one, the second time around feels so much richer. I sometimes retain so little of what I read, and I’m afraid it’s because I rush through things and don’t absorb them properly. But there are so many wonderful new books out there … anyway, here’s a list of things I’d likely turn to if I got the urge to re-read.

1. Anything by Jane Austen, even though I’ve already re-read the novels a lot. In fact, I’ve read all her major novels except Northanger Abbey multiple times; I don’t even know how many times. I turn to them when I want something comfortable and familiar and lengthy; they feel like an indulgence. I’ve also been assigned many of her books for various classes. What I haven’t done is read her juvenalia, which I really must do some day.

2. The Moonstone. I’m guessing that many of the books in this list will be ones I’ve already read multiple times. I can be such a creature of habit. The Moonstone is wonderful fun and I never seem to tire of it; I think I’ve read it twice, although it’s possible I’ve read it a third time. At any rate, I’d be happy to read it again. What I really like is the way Collins tells the same story from multiple perspectives.

3. Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse and/or Mrs. Dalloway. To the Lighthouse I’ve read at least twice; I’m not sure about Mrs. Dalloway, but I love them both.

4. A.S. Byatt’s Possession. I’m not being original here — Danielle mentioned this one too — but it was so much fun. This is one I’ve read only once.

5. The Anne of Green Gables books. I’ve read these books who knows how many times, but I’ve never re-read them as an adult. It would be interesting to see if my responses to them would change.

6. Anything by George Eliot. I’ve already read Middlemarch and Daniel Deronda twice and Adam Bede and Silas Marner once. I read The Mill on the Floss in High School, so that’s probably the one I’d choose were I to read Eliot again. What can I say — I love the Victorian novel.

7. Crime and Punishment. I read this book during college, I think, in the summer, and was enthralled. I’d like to go back and see if I have the same intense experience.

8. The Phillip Pullman series. I read this just last spring and tore my way through them; I’d get a kick out of doing it again. This sounds like a wonderful thing to do during the holidays — just hunker down and read fun novels really fast.

9. Philip Lopate’s The Art of the Personal Essay. If I haven’t read all the essays in that book, I’ve read most of them and they are definitely worth returning to.

10. Swann’s Way. Yeah, I read it just last summer, but this is a book that rewards multiple readings and I can already see that I’m going to want to look at parts of In Search of Lost Time again.

11. Flaubert’s Parrot by Julian Barnes. I love this kind of smart, quirky, unconventional novel.

12. Flannery O’Connor’s short stories. She’s so fascinating and odd and she’s such a master of the short story, I can see myself re-reading some or all of them. Maybe her novels too, both of which I’ve read once each.

13. Mary Oliver’s book of poems American Primitive. Poetry is an obvious thing to re-read — it can be so complex and rich and it’s short and so doesn’t require a huge time commitment — and yet I didn’t think of it much as I was making this list.

I could probably think of more, but I was beginning to slow down toward the end of that list; I guess when I re-read I tend to turn to the same very small number of books, mainly Victorian or early 20C novels. I could have put Tolstoy and James on that list too.

A while back people were writing quite a lot on that book 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die, and thanks to Bookslut’s recent mention, people seem to be doing it again. So I clicked over to the list and counted how many I’ve read. Whew! That was hard work. I can’t believe I just spent all that time counting. I’m not entirely sure I didn’t miscount. But my estimated total is 185 books read from the list. There are a lot left!

But … it’s not as easy as that. If you’ve looked at that list or a similar one and tried to do your own count, you probably have noticed how difficult it can be to figure out what you’ve read and what you haven’t. For me, I wasn’t sure whether or not to count books I’ve listened to on tape or CD. Ultimately, I decided not to count those. And then there’s the category of books I know I read when I was very young and now hardly remember. Yeah, I read To Kill a Mockingbird, but I really don’t feel I should count it because I couldn’t tell you a thing about it. And then there are books I’m not sure if I read or not. Did I really read Of Mice and Men, or am I remembering incorrectly? Which Graham Greene books did I read? And then there were a couple titles of short stories, and I wasn’t sure if the list was referring to the short story only or if the title was also a title of a collection. I’ve read “The Yellow Wallpaper,” but is that story the thing the list is referring to?

If I only counted those books I could write a reasonable summary or review of, my 185 number would be a lot smaller.

I did a lot better in the earlier centuries than in the 20th and 21st. I rocked in the 18C. I could complete that century without too much trouble: 16 books left. Well, that would be a little bit of trouble. But I’m not planning on following that list. I’ll hang on to it for a good source of ideas when I want them, and that’s it.

And then there’s Susan’s Thursday Thirteen list: 13 Classics to read in 2007. My list is a day late, and it’s not a list I’m committed to, but I thought I’d play along anyway. Here’s my list of 13 classics I’m considering reading in 2007:

1. Marcel Proust, The Guermantes Way, Sodom and Gomorrah, The Captive, The Fugitive, and Time Regained. If I can’t think of 13, I’ll separate these out and count them individually, but for now, I don’t want to bore you with too much Proust.
2. Anne Bronte, The Tenant of Wildfeld Hall. I’ve had this book around for a while. Someone mentioned it’s kind of gothic, so maybe it’s a good October 2007 read.
3. Frances Burney, Cecilia or Camilla. I’ve read her other two novels already, and now it’s time for these two. Or one of the two, at least.
4. Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote. This is a major one I need to tackle.
5. Virginia Woolf, The Voyage Out.
6. Virginia Woolf, The Years. Must read more Woolf.
7. Thomas Mann, Buddenbrooks. This is on Susan’s list also, and I’ve had it around for a long time. It looks like a great long, absorbing read.
8. Gertrude Stein’s Three Lives. Another one I’ve had around forever. A recurring theme in this list is “books I’ve had around forever but have been avoiding because they are slightly intimidating.” Time to get over this.
9. Elizabeth Gaskell, Cranford and/or Wives and Daughters. I love 19C novels, so I’m expecting to love these.
10. Balzac’s Cousin Bette. I’ve never read Balzac and would really like to.
11. William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience (see #8).
12. Thomas DeQuincy’s Confessions of an Opium Eater. Who can resist that title?
13. James Hogg, Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner. Ditto. I’m fascinated by confessions.

We’ll see how I do!

You’ve probably heard about the Observer’s poll to find the best British, Irish, or Commonwealth novel from the last 25 years. Like the American version of a while back, they asked a bunch of famous literary people to vote and came up with a list. I didn’t like the American list at all, and got quite annoyed at the whole enterprise, but I’m not having that reaction this time. I’m guessing that’s because I don’t feel any “ownership” or any stake in this because it’s not “my” country — but as you can tell from my scare quotes, I don’t particularly like feeling that way. Why feel any ownership over American literature? I’m someone who’s spent an awful lot of time studying British literature anyway! A bad list is a bad list.

But I don’t really know if the Observer’s list is a bad one or not largely because I haven’t read much on it. That probably explains my non-reaction. When I saw the list I immediately bookmarked it as a source of future reading suggestions, while the American list did not inspire me in that way at all.

In case you’re too lazy to click over here are the top winners:

First place

Disgrace (1999)JM Coetzee

Second place

Money (1984)Martin Amis

Joint third place

Earthly Powers (1980)Anthony Burgess

Atonement (2001)Ian McEwan

The Blue Flower (1995)Penelope Fitzgerald

The Unconsoled (1995)Kazuo Ishiguro

Midnight’s Children (1981)Salman Rushdie

Joint eighth place

The Remains of the Day (1989)Kazuo Ishiguro

Amongst Women (1990)John McGahern

That They May Face the Rising Sun (2001)John McGahern

Of these, I’ve read only The Remains of the Day and Midnight’s Children, and I’ve listened to Atonement on CD. All these books I loved, especially the Ishiguro and McEwan. I’ve read other books by Martin Amis, but no Coetzee (although I’ve been considering it for a while), no Burgess (I haven’t been interested, but maybe I should be?), no Fitzgerald (I’m guessing I’m missing out here), and no McGahern (no idea about this one).

There’s a longer list of other nominations, which you’ll have to click over to read; I am familiar with most of the names but some are completely new to me.

What do you think — am I more interested in this list than the American one because it’s a better list, or because I don’t know enough about it to be disappointed in it?

Our town library is having its book sale this weekend, and so, of course, I checked it out. In an earlier post a month or two ago I said something about being disciplined and not buying books until I’m ready to read them. At the time I think I owned maybe 18 books that I hadn’t read. Well, that’s changing. I now own 33 books I haven’t read, which by the standards of a lot of you probably isn’t that many. But you can see where I’m heading. Library sales are hard to resist, and the books here cost only between 50¢ and $3, with most of them priced at $1 or $2.

I am sometimes a little uncertain what to buy at these things because I’m tempted to get a lot just because they are cheap, but then I wonder if I’ll actually, really read them. In a lot of cases I come across authors I want to read but not necessarily the book I’m most excited about. Should I go ahead a buy it because it’s only a dollar? Or should I not, because I’ll really be wanting that other book that sounds better than the one before me? I’m not always clear on my criteria for owning a book either. In order to buy it, should I have definite plans to read it at some point? Should I get it if I only might read it, just because it’s a dollar? And I like to have pretty-looking books too, which isn’t always what you find at library sales. Should I buy the older, ugly edition because it’s cheap, or should I be a bit silly and buy the new, pretty edition with the great cover? I can’t stand the mass market size books, so I’ll definitely pass over a cheap one of those for a trade paperback that’s more expensive. It probably shouldn’t matter what the book looks like, but … it does sometimes.

So, although I found many interesting things, I only bought five books:

• Alice Munro, Runaway. I’ve been wanting to read more short stories in general, and some Munro in particular, since she gets such high praise. In this case, I’m not sure if this is a great book to begin with, but … it was cheap.
• Alice Munro, Lives of Girls and Women. A novel this time.
• Jean Rhys, Good Morning, Midnight. This was a recommendation from a number of bloggers, who told me The Wide Sargasso Sea isn’t her best one, and that this one is better.
• Junichiro Tanizaki, The Makioka Sisters. I read about this in Jane Smiley’s book Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Novel, and I remember reading and liking an essay by Tanizaki and so thought I’d give it a try. I’ve read a decent amount of Japanese fiction and have liked it a lot.
• Giovanni Boccaccio, The Decameron. This one sounds like fun — a 14C collection of stories with the plague as their backdrop.

The sale continues today, and books will be half price. I’m tempted to go back …

Also, if you are interested, you can check out my latest post on Involuntary Memory, a blog dedicated to Proust.

In yesterday’s comments, Danielle, who, I’m coming to find, is a marvelous asker of questions, asked where to begin with the eighteenth-century novel.

Well. Such a question couldn’t make me happier because it gives me a chance to talk about one of my reading obsessions.

So – I won’t say where to start, but I’ll talk a bit about books I think are important in understanding the period and books that are fun to read. Sometimes these overlap, sometimes they don’t. When it comes to the 18C, it’s hard for me to tell what you would find a fun read. Any of them would be great places to begin.

True to yesterday’s post about categories, I’d recommend Aphra Behn’s novel Oroonoko, which isn’t in the 18C at all (1688) – it has the virtue of being short (which many, many 18C novels most decidedly are not), and fascinating in terms of genre – it’s sort of a novel, sort of a romance, sort of both – and connected with historical events. It has love, violence, travel, sweeping historical forces, all in 100 pages or so.

And there’s Defoe, who shouldn’t be missed. I happen to love Robinson Crusoe, and it’s a great book for understanding class, colonialism, capitalism, Puritanism, individualism, you name it, it’s in there. Well, there’s no sex. But there’s sex in his other books, which are also great places to begin: Moll Flanders and Roxana. Those give you great female protagonists trying to survive with their intelligence and wit.

As for Samuel Richardson, who is most definitely one of the most important novelists of the period, I’d read Pamela. Clarissa is great, but it’s so long it’s daunting. Pamela by no means conforms to any rules of structure and good fictional form we might believe in today, but it is just so great in the way it captures many 18C obsessions: class; sex; marriage; language, letters, and identity; the relationship of writers and readers; women and the body; anxiety over fiction itself.

And if Pamela irritates you, then you simply must read Henry Fielding (read him if you loved Pamela too), who found Pamela so annoying he wrote a parody Shamela, which is hilarious. Then Fielding wrote Joseph Andrews, which is another send-up of Pamela, this time more complicated and developed. The Richardson/Fielding pairing is very useful in understanding 18C writing – they capture two different types of novels, two ways of thinking about writer/reader relationships and what fiction should do, and it’s possible to read Austen’s novels as integrations of that Richardson/Fielding split – Richardson’s psychological interest and Fielding’s satire. Fielding’s best book is Tom Jones, but the Pamela/Shamela/Joseph Andrews story is too interesting to be missed.

I also really enjoyed Charlotte Lennox’s novel The Female Quixote: it’s her version of Cervantes’s story, about a woman who thinks the world is like one of the many French romances she has found in her dead mother’s library. And I loved Samuel Johnson’s short novel/fable Rasselas, about finding happiness. It’s a beautiful book, but sad. It makes no attempt to be realistic, so some people say it’s not a novel, but whatever it is, it tells a wise story.

I absolutely adore Tristram Shandy, which I keep mentioning around here. It’s hard for me to tell how challenging a read it would be for someone not familiar with the period. Some of the jokes might be hard to get. It’s a book about the impossibility of writing the story of one’s life, and it’s a book about sex and impotence, about philosophy and playfulness, about sentiment, but mostly about language – what it can and can’t do. If Tristram Shandy seems a bit daunting, you can try A Sentimental Journey, which has a similar tone and style.

Of course, there’s Evelina, which I’ve posted on before – an excellent place to begin.

And I could go on and on (I won’t) – but I think some of the novels of the late 18C are particularly interesting: Elizabeth Inchbald’s novel A Simple Story, Maria Edgeworth’s Belinda, Ann Radcliffe’s The Italian (for an example of the gothic – and if you think you’d like the gothic, don’t miss Horace Walpole’s Castle of Otranto or Matthew Lewis’s The Monk – these two are among the most bizarre books you’ll ever read).

Does anyone want to add a favorite?

I have some lists for today; the first one is of the books you all recommended when I asked for books that … I’m not sure what, exactly, except I asked for the kind of books I would like. Let’s call them books about books or about people who love books and books that are very often experimental and self-reflexively about reading and writing and that have a lot of passion too, or are just plain quirky and fun or quirky and serious, or simply books that are likely to make me happy.

On my original list was:

Julian Barnes, Flaubert’s Parrot
Vladimir Nabokov, Pale Fire
Mary McCarthy, Memories of a Catholic Girlhood
Dave Eggers, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
Nicholsen Baker, U and I

And I left off one of my favorite books ever, which I can’t believe I forgot:

Laurence Sterne, Tristram Shandy

So here were your recommendations:

A.S. Byatt, Possession and The Biographer’s Tale
Jaspar Fforde, the Thursday Next books
Thomas Wharton, The Logogryph
Muriel Spark, The Comforters
Jorge Luis Borges, Labyrinths
Anne Fadiman, Ex Libris
Primo Levi, The Periodic Table
Italo Calvino, If on a winter’s night a traveler
Christopher Moore, Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff
Kate Christensen. The Epicure’s Lament
Ursula Hegi, Intrusions
Peter Rushforth, Pinkerton’s Sister
David Lodge, Small World and Changing Places

Not a bad list, is it? If you have more suggestions, please let me know; I’d love to add to the list.

And then, one more list. I recently got some money as a gift and, no surprise, spent it on books. Here’s what I got. That the list below and the list above don’t overlap at all doesn’t mean I wasn’t happy with your recommendations; it often takes me ten years or so to get around things on my to-be-read list, but they are there, ready for the right time.

Curtis Sittenfeld, Prep — enough people recommended this one, including a favorite professor of mine, and I’m sure I’ll enjoy it.

Jose Saramago, Blindness — everyone seems to love him, so it’s definitely time I give him a try.

Orhan Pamuk, Snow — same as above

Elaine Scarry, On Beauty and Being Just — I’ve read an essay or two of hers and loved them, and this book looks very interesting. I’d also like to look at her book The Body in Pain.

Brian Greene, The Fabric of the Cosmos — time for some more science.

Frances Burney, Journals and Letters — time to find out more about Burney’s life. This one is in the mail right now.

I’ll be busy, won’t I?

Mike from Liquid Thoughts has these posts on Flaubert’s Parrot by Julian Barnes, and they reminded me of how much I love that book and others like it. What I want your help with is giving me other examples of similar books, if you can. If you haven’t read Flaubert’s Parrot, it’s about this guy who’s obsessed with Flaubert and who’s trying to find the parrot that sat on Flaubert’s desk, but it’s also about Flaubert himself, his life and writing. It’s very playful; Mike calls it “Barnes’s intellectual game he calls a novel.” It’s really a combination essay and novel, although essay may be too serious a word for it. It’s got a couple different chronologies of Flaubert’s life that play around with the very idea of author chronologies, and it has a chapter about the color of Emma Bovary’s eyes.

I put Vladimir Nabokov’s book Pale Fire in the same category, although I don’t know what I’d call the category, exactly. But I love Pale Fire – a novel about a madman who’s obsessed with a poet. The novel’s form is experimental – it consists of a poem and commentary by the obsessed madman. The story takes place in the commentary itself, which is wildly inventive and funny and revealing. This guy is the ultimate unreliable narrator. The book is about reading itself – the writer/reader relationship, interpretation, imagination.

These two novels are experimental and postmodern, and I like that aspect of them, but I also love the passion in both of them – they are both about a love of literature, expressed in odd and quirky (and sometimes lethal) ways.

They remind of some nonfiction books, too, such as Mary McCarthy’s book Memories of a Catholic Girlhood, which I love. This book takes the form of fairly straightforward essays on McCarthy’s childhood, but interspersed between the essays are meditations on the process of writing the essays themselves, the way memory works and doesn’t work, what is left out, what McCarthy’s siblings remembered differently. She’s playing around with the memoir form, trying to make it more honest, perhaps, trying to make it do more than it usually does, although she does the “usual” memoir thing very beautifully.

Also, I’m reminded of Dave Egger’s A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, another memoir that is experimental in form and which I loved reading. It’s got a fairly sentimental story as its core, but it’s surrounded by a complicated apparatus – footnotes, revisions, very funny introductions and prefaces, and send-ups of acknowledgement and copyright pages. I think a lot of people thought all that was gimmicky, but I felt it was all part of the emotional current of the book, all part of Eggers’s attempt to capture the essence of his experience. Somehow all that “ironic” (he has a long section saying he’s not being ironic), postmodern stuff came across to me as part of a very earnest attempt to portray an awareness and self-consciousness about his life and his writing – a way to capture life more accurately.

And also, Nicholsen Baker’s book U and I, nonfiction, about Baker’s obsession with John Updike. I loved this book although I have a feeling that it’s the kind of book that in one mood is captivating and in another is annoying. It’s so over-the-top, both in Baker’s obsession with Updike and in the prose – it has some of the longest most complicated sentences with obscure vocabulary you’ll find just about anywhere. I found it irresistible; Baker makes you love Updike, even if you don’t. I don’t love Updike particularly, but I’m willing to because Baker does.

These are books I’m tempted to read again, just so I can have the fun of blogging about them while they are fresh in my mind. I would try to make you love them too. They all fit in one category for me, although I’m not sure what I’d call it – experimental, self-reflexive books that take literature and reading as their subjects, and do so with passion. Can you think of a label? Even more importantly, can you please give me more examples?

Here’s my contribution to the “what would you save?” game going around the book blog world. The idea is to list the 10 books one would save in a fire, if one could only save 10, inspired by Anna Quindlen. I guess this makes more sense to me if I change it to the desert-island question — because if I’m saving things from a fire, I would go for the things I couldn’t replace, when I can buy new copies of most books. I suppose I could save the ones with lots of my writing in them or the ones that are signed. But when other people do the list, it seems to be books that they’d want to have with them when no others are available. So that’s what I’m doing. For other lists, see Lotus Reads, Liquid Thoughts, and Anna Quindlen’s original list, from A Work in Progress, with commentary by Danielle. Here’s mine:

1. The Bible
2. The Bhagavad-Gita
3. The complete Shakespeare
4. The complete essays of Montaigne
5. Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
6. The Life of Samuel Johnson by James Boswell
7. Middlemarch by George Eliot
8. The Brothers Karamazov by Fydor Dostoyevsky
9. Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf
10. Absalom! Absalom! by William Faulkner

Okay, on a different day, I’d pick a completely different list. This is a very serious list of mostly pre-20th century stuff, except for the last two. But if I’m going with the desert-island scenario, I’d want things I know I could spend a lot of time with.

What’s your list?

The creation of the list from the New York Times of the best American novel of the last 25 years and all the commentary on it is highly annoying, but I can’t keep myself away. If you haven’t read up on it, the methodology of the NYT was to ask a couple hundred writers and critics for a vote on the best American novel; 125 of them responded. The winner, Beloved, got 15 votes. The runners-up got between 7 and 11 votes. So, this means a very small group of people made up the list and a tiny group is responsible for the “winner.”

What I find annoying about all this is the way it’s an exercise in self-gratification and self-importance – the Times is established as a guardian of culture, it asks for votes from the guardians and creators of culture, and the books it chooses are pretty staid, canonical ones. I didn’t see anything that really surprised me. The Elegant Variation notes that no bloggers were asked to participate and wonders if the list would change if they were. Maybe, but it’s highly, highly unlikely the Times would include bloggers even though it should. That’s way too democratic and open-minded.

A.O. Scott wrote an essay on the choices (an essay which strikes me as arrogant in tone, suitably enough) and said that a lot of the people polled didn’t vote because they disagreed with the whole enterprise. What is “best” after all? And who is qualified to pronounce upon it?

I’m also annoyed because the list is so predominantly male. Yes, Toni Morrison’s Beloved won, and Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping is included as a book that got multiple votes, but other than that, it’s a lot of the usual suspects: Updike, Roth, Delillo, McCarthy. A passage from the A.O. Scott essay is revealing, I think:

We all have our personal favorites, but I suspect that something other than individual taste underwrites most of the choices here. The best works of fiction, according to our tally, appear to be those that successfully assume a burden of cultural importance. They attempt not just the exploration of particular imaginary people and places, but also the illumination of epochs, communities, of the nation itself. America is not only their setting, but also their subject.

The best books are culturally important, and they have something to say about America. And I think that cultural importance is coded “male.” Something more woman-centered like, say, Barbara Kingsolver, is about women, while Roth’s fiction is about our culture, and about America. Lists like these reflect the state of literary culture, but they shape it too, so the implicit message is that what really matters are the stories about men.

And A.O. Scott says something else interesting too: that if the question were “Who is the greatest novelist of the last 25 years?” instead of “What is the greatest novel?” the answer would have been Philip Roth. Or, if the Nathan Zuckerman books had been treated as one (like Updike’s Rabbit books are), then he would have won. As it is, Roth’s votes got split amongst several of his books. So Morrison’s win is shaped by the nature of the question asked.

So, if you were asked to name the best novel or the best novelist, who would you choose? Or would you not choose at all?

For those of you who like them, here are two lists, both from UK bookseller Waterstone’s. The first list is 30 books the booksellers think merit rediscovery. The second offers 25 insufficiently-recognized books recommended by authors and celebrities. This list includes a short write-up by the recommender. (Link via The Literary Saloon).

I’ve read only three books from the first list (Vonnegut, Russo, and Yates) and none from the second. Yikes! It looks like there’s lots of good stuff there. My only quibble is that I’m not sure Slaughter House 5 needs rediscovery — hasn’t that book remained quite popular? I fully recognize the purpose of these lists is to generate sales, but still, a good list is a good list. And there’s nothing to keep us from getting the books from the library, if we prefer.

Also, the short list for the Orange prize is out.

Two new books arrived in the mail recently, both about eighteenth-century literature. One of them is Privacy, by Patricia Meyers Spacks, where she tracks 18th C. concerns about privacy and the relationship of privacy and the public sphere in fiction and other prose writings. This interests me, well, because I find the 18th C. fascinating, especially the novel, but specifically because it promises to tell me about changing ideas of the self and of interior life, and, being an introverted person, I’d like to know more about the history of the private world and how reading and writing feed into it. One of the major lessons of the 18th C, it seems to me, is that those things we often take for granted, an interior self, privacy, have a history. This is a very obvious point, but it’s still fun to be reminded of it in new ways.

A story about Spacks: she came to a grad class I was taking quite a few years back as a guest lecturer, and the assignment was Clarissa. I’d done my best to get through the book, and had managed about 500 pages (one third). We were in class, and Spacks told us to open to a particular passage, and, in a moment of silence, a friend of mine opened her book and the spine loudly cracked. We all looked around nervously, hoping Spacks (and my professor) hadn’t heard that sound that made it very clear my friend hadn’t even begun the reading. But, honestly, who can read Clarissa in the middle of a busy semester? I was only able to finish the book over the following winter break.

I also ordered William Warner’s book Licensing Entertainment, a book on the history of the novel and its relationship with other popular prose genres of the late 17th and early 18th centuries. This is a book I should have read in grad school, although I didn’t.

I think I did, however, write about it in my comprehensive exams. I wonder if what I wrote made any sense whatsoever?

I do, generally, do my homework; it just takes me a few years sometimes.