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What Books Don’t You Need to Read Before You Die?
The Internet world inundates us with lists about things we need to read or do or see before we die: thus “Fifty Places You Must Visit Before You Die,” “The Twenty Movies You Must See,” “Twenty-Five Herbs You Must Integrate into Your Cooking,” and on and on and on.
In the literary world, we have the Modern Library’s 100 Best Novels of the 20th Century list and Radcliffe College’s competing list. For broader historical coverage, you have The Guardian’s 100 best books of all time , or the 50 greatest books of all time,which is a synthesis of 107 great books lists. Time has a list of 100 best novels (1923-2005). Heck, there’s even one entitled “50 Books to Read Before You Die.”
I have mixed feelings. I believe in the idea of a canon of the greatest works of literature. There are novels of such transcendence in their literary qualities or their universal themes that anyone would be edified by seriously reading them. In this group of greats, I would include masterpieces like Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov; Conrad’s underrated Nostromo, all of Austen’s works (though a case can be made against Mansfield Park and Northanger Abbey), any of several works by Dickens (e.g., Bleak House, David Copperfield, or Great Expectations), Cervantes’ Don Quixote, Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, Cather’s Death Comes for the Archbishop and My Antonia, Twain’s Huckleberry Finn, and others.
There is a strong inference in most of these lists that suggests if you, the reader, consider yourself intelligent or educated you’d better get these books read, pronto! On the other hand, if you don’t read most of them, turn in your “I’m a decently educated and moderately well-read person” card.
A bit of much-needed counterculture is beginning to develop. Thus, a few years ago, The Telegraph published “Not the Fifty Books You Should Read Before you Die.” On this list were a few books that I greatly admire (Emma, Nineteen Eighty Four), but far more that I too would place on a list of books that one can safely, even aggressively, ignore. Among these were the perennial top-ten novel Ulysses and Lolita (about which more below), as well as other famous books like The Great Gatsby, War and Peace, Les Miserables, One Hundred Years of Solitude, Ian McEwan’s Saturday, or The Metamorphosis. It also includes several pop culture, pop psychology favorites as Eat, Pray, Love, The Alchemist, Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus. Others on the list are The God Delusion and my personal favorites, The Da Vinci Code and Twilight. Of course, the books on the Telegraph’s list make no pretense of being of equal literary value.
So let me address two books that—if you’re looking for permission—you need never read ever: and you may fail to do so with a clear conscience.
First is Nabakov’s Lolita. Yes, I know the writing is wonderful and supposedly something is going on below the surface that redeems the book. I’ve never found the redeeming stuff, so all I was left with was a middling-long novel recounting the mind and acts of a middle-aged pedophile. Maybe this is a metaphor for something high and good, but the subject matter is so utterly disgusting, I’m unable to get past it.
Second is Joyce’s Ulysses. I actually finished it during the past week, aided by the brilliant narration of Jim Norton (and a female narrator, whose name wasn’t mentioned who narrated the final section: Molly Bloom’s long soliloquy while half asleep). If you do decide to read, read it along with the narration, which is superb. Ulysses makes every top ten list—and as often as not it’s no. 1. Now, I admire Joyce’s technical ability: his early set of short stories (Dubliners) is superb. And the final story in Dubliners, “The Dead,” is on my list of top five short stories in the English language.
But then Joyce abandoned straightforward narrative for the experimental: so we end up with long sections of stream of consciousness, sheer wordplay, impenetrable puns, suddenly shifting narratives, allusions that make no sense without a detailed understanding of Irish and Dublin history, a host of unseemly characters, including some that are utterly boring (Stephen Dedalus never does a single thing that makes him interesting).
My fundamental problem with the book is that it’s filled with linguistic pyrotechnics without the leavening influence of a plot, characters, and narrative that makes sense to the normal, unenlightened reader like me. A great half-hour fireworks show works great. But 672 pages of fireworks with little else becomes a big bore. I’m not alone. Ron Rosenbaum, the eminent Shakespeare scholar, a few years ago wrote a column, whose premise was that Ulysses is greatly overrated, with the exception of one chapter: the penultimate (entitled “Ithaca”).
My conclusion: you don’t have to read Ulysses or Lolita, and can retain your credentials as an educated person.
This is all a long introduction to a larger question: What books—classics or otherwise—can we willfully, with malice aforethought, refuse to read, and still die having lived a fulfilling life?
Published in General
I think it is a great book. But it seems to make a lousy movie.
I am trying the read Heart of Darkness right now, and boy is it difficult going because there are no paragraph breaks, very little dialog, etc. Maybe the problem is that I am reading a free Kindle version that seems to have no formatting, i.e. no line breaks, etc. just one long stream of text.
The list of lists linked above puts Toni Morrison ahead of Chaucer. So much for the wisdom of crowds.
I loved The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton but the only Dickens novel I have ever gotten through is A Christmas Carol. I have tried Les Mis but couldn’t read it.
I avoid anything with an Oprah Winfrey Book Club sticker on it.
Not even sure that what happens in Lord of the Flies is what happens in the absence of formal civil institutions. I don’t think you can decivilize (is that a word?) people by eliminating institutions any more easily than you can civilize them by creating institutions. This is why nations are hard to create out of thin air and destroy by conquest. To his credit, I think Golding understood this at a basic level and that’s why the book is about boys. From a conservative perspective it may be useful as an illustration of male nature, but there are far better books for that.
About time somebody said it! I love Vonnegut, and while I thought Slaughterhouse was a fine novel, it’s not his best, and none of his novels are life-changing. If Vonnegut’s not your thing then skip him. I feel the same way about The Sound and the Fury. Faulkner is my favorite author, but I would recommend As I lay Dying, Absalom, Absalom!, and the entire Snopes trilogy over The Sound and the Fury.
I view Vonnegut as a good, though not great, writer. Slaughterhouse is pretty powerful stuff. I love The Sirens of Titan. It seems like his reputation is slipping: there is something sixtyish about his books.
I like Faulkner a lot, though my favorites tend to be his short stories (“A Rose for Emily” has one of the great endings for an American short story), The Unvanquished, and Light in August (which is a way of saying I like it when he writes in a more traditional narrative style), But I like it all: even Absalom Absalom (which I finally made my through after several failed efforts).
Another thought. Many of us tend to identify with an era: for me, it’s nineteenth century and early twentieth English and Russian novels and stories (e.g., Austen, Dickens, Trollope, Conrad, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and Chekhov). One of the reasons I like Vasily Grossman is that his books are (1) very Russian and (2) have a 19th century feel about them (even when the subject is the Soviet Union in and around WWII).
On the other end of my spectrum are modern American writers like Updike (with the exception of some of his short stories), Roth, Mailer, DeLillo, Barth, Pynchon, et al. I don’t like the writing and I really don’t like the subject matter.
My one big exception is Marilynne Robinson (especially Gilead), who brings a very nineteenth-century feeling to her writing (I think she’s the heir of Willa Cather).
I want to qualify my opinions by stating that I think there are too many great books to waste time reading bad, or even obviously mediocre, examples. This is especially important in my case, because I’m dyslexic and read excruciatingly slowly. As such, I’ve started but failed to finish many of the books commonly espoused to be great works of literature.
With that out of the way, here are some of the “Greats” I didn’t find worthwhile:
I would characterize Lolita and Wuthering Heights as terrible stories, but superbly written. There’s no need to read them except as examples of masterful prose.
One thing I’ve noticed but never understood is why so many of the “great” works of literature that I didn’t enjoy reading made great movies. Perhaps this ties in with Skipsul’s 0bservation regarding audio books. I thoroughly enjoyed film adaptations of works by Hemmingway, Conrad, and Forster. Is it just me, or is there something to this?
PS – In this case, “Anything” means I’ve tried several works by the author and have no intention of trying more. It doesn’t mean I’ve tried all the author’s works.
I’m even more enamored of War And Peace: I think those tangents make the gems what they are. Without the tangential detail, for instance, the scene where Natasha succumbs to Anatole’s seduction – mostly internally since she didn’t in actuality do much of anything – which sparks her moral and psychological crisis wouldn’t mean nearly as much without us first having traveled so much plain road with both Andrei and Natasha.
I struggle with the meaning too. I gather that it explores the futility of reconciling infinite possibility with choosing/settling, the impossibility yet allure of perpetual avoidance of opportunity cost.
Otherwise, there are many gems od descriptions and characters.
I’d also place Catcher in the Rye as very overrated. I do think the prose in The Great Gatsby is beautiful, but didn’t care for the story or characters.
A couple of books I had to read in high school that I disliked was “A Separate Peace” (a very unlikable narrator and a very contrived killing off of a likeable one) and “Madame Bovary”- to paraphrase Joss Whedon- “I don’t like books that don’t like people.”
That could be is motivation. Or it could be that he acknowledged the appeal while also acknowledging the ultimate emptiness and unsustainability. On a much less extravagant and wealthy scale, I recognize most of those characters and I recognize the same drivers at play in my own experience.
Probable Cause: I find it ironic that we had to read it in high school, as it seemed to be a fairly tedious retelling of what it was like to be in junior high.
Ha ha! Maybe that is why I so despised Lord of the Flies in high school! I also felt The Great Gatsby and Wuthering Heights were both just obnoxious to read as a teen. I’ve even given GG another try as an adult, but, still…bleh.
However, Willa Cather is all good. Try reading Death Comes to the Archbishop as you’re riding in a vehicle across the Southwest and you’ll have a life-changing experience.
The collected works of William Shakespeare.
Two words: Dead Souls
In sci-fi I would say skip both Cory Doctrow and Charlie Stross. Thier stuff, while often starting with a good premise is either tedious or preachy.
I think I value Vonnegut more than some of you here, but then again I haven’t read most of the other books you’re talking about.
Slaughterhouse 5 is a fine book, and the movie they made from it is one of the best book/movie translations I’ve seen. Vonnegut once graded himself on all his books, and he gave himself an A+ for Slaughterhouse 5 and Cat’s Cradle. Some strong As and Bs and a few Cs in there, and I think he gave himself a D only for Slapstick and Happy Birthday Wanda June, which I confess I don’t remember much about (though I liked Slapstick a lot).
Cat’s Cradle is probably my favorite – lines from the Books of Bokonon have been woven into my thought patterns and basic line of bull (that we all have one of I hope) now for 40 years.
The Books of Bokonon contain one of my favorite poems:
“Tiger got to hunt, bird got to fly;
Man got to sit and wonder ‘why, why, why?’
Tiger got to sleep, bird got to land;
Man got to tell himself he understand.”
Also Tom Robbins added some content to Bokononism with his “peculiar travel suggestions are dancing lessons from God”, which always made me smile.
Vonnegut got a little too angry and bitter when he got older it seemed to me; I decided sadly one day that I couldn’t give him any more of my time. Same thing happened with Garrison Keillor. Or maybe he was always like that, and it was just that with his fiction I could dip my beak in to the level I wanted; I could absorb his art and make it apply to my stuff. Once he stopped writing fiction and began to opine on current events directly, the bitterness came through undamped.
Mine too.
Robbins is also a favorite of mine. In fact, almost everything I know about Finnegan’s Wake comes from reading Fierce Invalids.
I’ve read nearly everything by Vonnegut and Robbins for the same reason – I can think of few more enjoyable ways to pass a few hours. Their work is well written, accessible, funny, clever, and thought-provoking, but never so deep that I lose sleep pondering the meaning of it all. And I think a little of that is what’s missing from them.
Great books need to offer something more than entertainment. I wouldn’t be surprised if more of us have read the Da Vinci Code than any book excepting the Bible, but I venture to guess that few would characterize it as a great novel. Contrast this with any number of works by Faulkner, who requires much more effort to read, but whose books have changed the way I think about people, institutions, and social conventions. Great novels don’t have to be difficult, but they should leave their mark on the reader.
Chuck: Give Conrad’s Nostromo a chance. It’s very different from his other writings, and is a great political novel.
That said, isn’t it great we all have different tastes in literature? How boring would it be if we thought the same, read the same things, and all liked the same food?
Beautifully said. If it doesn’t leave a mark of some kind it wasn’t great (though it may have been worth your time).
You guys. This is why I come here.
Can we just write off James Fenimore Cooper and also Edward Bulwer-Lytton?
A few weeks ago I read Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises. By page 25 I was starting to feel hungover. If I didn’t know anything about Hemingway I would have guessed that he either died of alcoholism or suicide. Hemingway could definitely write, but how about a story? Just a bunch of drunk guys drinking, a middle-aged tramp being trampy, and “the Jew”. I learned a little about bullfighting, but I don’t really care about bullfighting. Best thing I can say about the book is, it’s short.
Will do. Made a note to check out Grossman too. Should I be embarrassed that I’m not familiar with him?
You hush your face.
Uh oh. He’s on my reading list. I’ve been warned . . .
It astounds me that The Sun Also Rises was the book that put him on the literary map. It was tedious. I never did quite understand what it was about, but I know I didn’t care about anyone.
Eeeerrgghhh! Between you and Tabula Rasa praising it I’m starting to feel like I should try reading it again. What I remember about it was that it was the most boring book I had to read in high school (which is saying something), and I live in the Southwest.
Or three lousy movies.