maaseru sent me
this link, knowing it was just the kind of article that I love to pounce on, for several reasons.
For one thing, it starts out talking about lists. You know how I love lists, especially literary lists. It says:
Let's not mince words: literary lists are basically an obscenity. Literature is the realm of the ineffable and the unquantifiable; lists are the realm of menus and laundry and rotisserie baseball. There's something unseemly and promiscuous about all those letters and numbers jumbled together. Take it from me, a critic who has committed this particular sin many times over.
I suspect he is rather proud of his sin, and so he should be. Menus and laundry, indeed! Lists are a literary achievement of a very particular type.
I think I need to read
The Top Ten even if just to scream and grumble about it. As might be predictable, at first glance the lists look rather pretentious to me. Writers who are fashionable among the literati, but who are not necessarily
good - meaning that I don't necessarily like their style. Or I do like their style, but I am suspicious of their reputation. Nabokov, for instance. A brilliant stylist. But also fashionable, and that makes me look askance at him. I love Dickens, and since he is not fashionable, he seldom makes these lists. But why, or why not? Is he too popularist, too inclined to humour? What makes a writer
great? Why is Dorothy Dunnett not on everyone's lists? I heartily approve of the inclusion of
Scaramouche, of course.
Of the ultimate Top Ten list I am faintly (but only faintly) ashamed of how few I have read:
- Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
- Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
- War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
- Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
- The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
- Hamlet by William Shakespeare
- The Great Gatsby F. Scott Fitzgerald
- In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust
- The Stories of Anton Chekhov by Anton Chekhov
- Middlemarch by George Eliot
I have read
Madame Bovary (it bored me), 1/4 of
War and Peace (read that first part three times before giving up, I just can't get past the Battle of Borodino),
Lolita (loved it),
Huckleberry Finn (meh),
Hamlet - many times, unquestionably the best of the best and then some, and
The Great Gatsby (liked it a lot but it isn't on my top ten lists, not even my top 100). I must admit, the list doesn't make me want to run out and read
Anna Karenina or
Middlemarch, which sound boringly schoolteacherish to me. Am I misjudging? Reacting to prejudice? Under an erroneous impression? Why does the rest of the world like Tolstoy more than I do?
Ever since seeing
Little Miss Sunshine, though, I've been thinking I should read Proust. People talk about Proust in the abstract - I can't recall any of my friends actually ever saying they've read him. Is it their guilty secret, or has he just not come up in conversation? Or is he one of those writers who is universally admired and universally unread?