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A Potpourri
of Lit'ry Observations
by
Richard H. Cracroft
Thanks for your
lively conversation about and comments on the several book lists
and the Readers' List of Most Influential Books. I've enjoyed them,
well, most of them.
Several of you
reminded me that Margaret Atwood is Canadian; I forgot. I hereby
solve the problem by adopting her (vicariously)-we LDS do it all
the time.
Several others
sent in their tardy nominations for "Most Influential Books." Sorry,
but there's no more room at the inn for your fascinating selections.
One or two of you faulted me for 1) calling Walden a novel; and
2) for liking Walden-but I think it ought to be on any list; fiction,
non-fiction,
cookbooks, sports; it is a wonderfully refreshing and spiritually
uplifting book (if you read it under pressure return to it and be
refreshed).
Some of you
said you would like to see W. Somerset Maugham's personal list of
favorite novels: Here it is:
W. Somerset
Maugham's Ten Greatest Novels*
1. Tom Jones,
Henry Fielding;
2. Pride
and Prejudice, Jane Austen;
3. The Red
and the Black, Stendhal;
4. Old Man
Goriot, Honoré de Balzac;
5. David
Copperfield, Charles Dickens;
6. Wuthering
Heights, Emily Bronte
7. Madam
Bovary, Gustave Flaubert;
8. Moby
Dick, Herman Melville;
9. War and
Peace, Leo Tolstoi;
10. The
Brothers Karamazov, Fyodor Dostoevsky.
*from A
Passion for Books, edited by Harold Rabinowitz and Rob Kaplan
(New York: Times Books/Random House, 1999; you might be interested
in an updated edition of the book Good Reading: A Guide for Serious
Readers, 21st Edition, edited by J. Sherwood Weber [New American
Library, 1980]).
I think it is
a pretty good list; personally, I love each of the books he lists,
and have taught most of them at one time or another--though I might
order them a bit differently. What do you think? Certainly there's
nothing definitive about his list. Make your own.
Lists abound:
Here is a list, recently published by Orem, Utah Public Library:
Orem Library's
Best
"Ten big, thick
wonderful books as recommended by Anna Quindlen":
Gone With
the Wind, Margaret Mitchell;
Vanity Fair,
William Makepeace Thackeray [one of my all-time favorites]
East of
Eden, John Steinbeck
The Forsyte
Saga, John Galsworthy
Buddenbrooks,
Thomas Mann [another of my all-time favorites]
Can You
Forgive Her? Anthony Trollope [his Barchester novels are all
wonderful!]
Sophie's
Choice, William Styron
Underworld,
Don DeLillo
Lonesome
Dove, Larry McMurtry
It is as good
a list as any to begin a reading list for the rest of 2001. Though
here is another interesting list:
The
Ten Books One Would Save in a Fire (If One Could Save Only Ten)*
Pride and
Prejudice, Jane Austen
Bleak House,
Charles Dickens
Anna Karenina,
Leo Tolstoi
The Sound
and the Fury, William Faulkner
The Golden
Notebook, Doris Lessing
Middlemarch,
George Eliot
Sons and
Lovers, D.H. Lawrence
The Collected
Poems of W.B. Yeats
The Collected
Plays of William Shakespeare
The House
of Mirth, Edith Wharton
*from Anna Quindlen,
in A Passion for Books, edited by Rabinowitz and Kaplan,
1999, p. 173.
(Think how much
we could read if we muted all of the t.v. commercials and read during
the break.)
One of you asked
about my reading habits: I have read for anywhere from 20 minutes
to 2 hours every night for the past 50 years-it adds up to 6-8 books
a month. Yes, during my first (and second) mission, as well. I have
a list of forty or so (church) books I read during my mission-all
sent to Austria and Switzerland by my mother, who also sent many
books to my investigators and those I baptized; mother encouraged
my reading-even when she knew I was doing it by flashlight at 1
a.m. (she silently replaced the batteries for me). One midnight,
when I was sixteen or so, she asked me to read her a particular
tale from Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, when my bursts of laughter
brought her to my room; she laughed so hard at the tale that she
fell on her knees; then, having second thoughts, she said, "it's
a classic, so it must be all right." And it was.
Whenever I wanted
to get a chuckle out of her thereafter, I would simply mention that
wonderful, bawdy old tale by Geoffrey Chaucer, and we would both
break out in shared laughter.
Thirty Great
World Novels (from Other Nations than the U.S. and Great Britain
This month I'm (ouch!) sticking out my neck once again (see my audacious
lists of British and American novels in my January and February
"Classic Corner" columns in Meridian). Here, then, is another subjective
and arbitrary list gleaned from others' lists and my own interests
and reading over the last half-century. I have pared from the list
two dozen novels that I think are very good; but I have kept in
mind the charge by the Proctors: that these books should form a
list from which readers might select books they may wish to read
or purchase for their personal libraries.
I have made
no attempt to list the best books from or to attempt to represent
the literatures of every country. Of course I have omitted some
great books. I present here, my hat in my hand, and with no claim
to having been comprehensive, a modest list of selected novels which
seem to me-and others--to be "uplifting, of good report, and praiseworthy,"
for a variety of (literary, cultural, and spiritual) reasons, and
which endure as being among the best and the most intellectually
and culturally influential novels in the West (the Occident) in
the past three centuries.
These are some
of those "core" books which, along with many on the lists of American
and British novels-and those listed by readers in the March column--are
part of the shared Great Conversation among educated people everywhere-touchstones
of our literary culture. Let me know where you find egregious omissions-and
you shall:
18th Century
Continental Novels (and Earlier):
Cervantes Saavedra,
Miguel de. Don Quixote (1505-15). Spanish.
Goethe, Johann
Wolfgang. The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774)
Voltaire. Candide
(1759)
19th Century
Continental Novels:
Balzac, Honoré
de. Old Man Goriot (1834). France.
Dostoevski,
Feodor. Crime and Punishment (1856). Russia.
--. The
Brothers Karamazov (1880).
Dumas, Alexandre.
The Count of Monte Cristo (1844). France.
--. The
Three Musketeers (1844).
Flaubert, Gustav.
Madame Bovary (1857). France.
Hugo, Victor.
The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1831). France.
--. Les
Misérables (1862). France.
Stendhal. The
Red and the Black (1830). France.
Tolstoi, Leo.
War and Peace (1866). Russia.
--. Anna
Karenina (1877).
20th Century
Continental Novels:
Camus, Albert.
The Stranger (1946). France.
Kafka, Franz.
The Trial (1937). Czechoslovakia.
Koestler, Arthur.
Darkness at Noon (1941). Hungary; England.
Thomas Mann.
Buddenbrooks (1901). Germany.
--. The
Magic Mountain (1924).
Pasternak, Boris.
Dr. Zhivago (1958). Russia.
Remarque, Erich
Maria. All Quiet on the Western Front (1929)
Saint-Exupéry,
Antoine de. The Little Prince (1943). French.
Wiesel, Elie.
Night (1960). Rumanian Jew, holocaust survivor; now U.S.
citizen (often classified as U.S. author).
20th Century
Latin-American Novels:
Borges, Jorge.
Labyrinth (1962). Argentina.
Fuentes, Carlos.
The Death of Antonio Cruz (1964). Mexico.
Garcia Marquez,
Gabriel. One Hundred Years of Solitude (1970). Colombia.
20th Century
Far-Eastern Novels:
Tanizaki, Junichiro,
The Makioka Sisters (1957). Japan.
Kawabata, Yasunari,
Snow Country (1969). Japan.
20th Century
African Novels:
Achebe, Chinua.
Things Fall Apart (1958). Nigeria.
Paton, Alan.
Cry, The Beloved Country (1948). South Africa.
20th Century
Middle East, About:
Thomas Edward
Lawrence (Lawrence of Arabia), Seven Pillars of Wisdom
(1935). England.
Next month:
The Best Mormon Novels.
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