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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
This is a book for adults. I think you’ll like it this time.
I’ve tried and failed. Cooper was a good conservative, though.
No. He’s a well-kept secret. A few of us on Ricochet are big fans of Life and Fate, but Grossman has never attained the fame he deserved.
I personally think Life and Fate is one the best twentieth-century novels.
Grossman was primarily a journalist who made his name writing about the Battle of Stalingrad (much of which he used as the central action of his great novel).
The man could flat-out write.
Read The Deerslayer, if only to more fully appreciate the funniest book review ever written: “Fenimore Cooper’s Literary Offenses.”
See, Twain is who ruined it for me.
This puts me in mind of Alan Jacobs hilarious send-up of the vastly overrated Khalil Gibran.
The actual Khalil Gibran is a complete waste of time and brain storage, but the send-up still has me chuckling more than seven years after I first read it…
Not Cooper?
There are stretches of FCLO that I can quote from memory: “and had borne the more preferable fragments of the victim, patiently on his shoulders to the stopping-place.” LOL.
Also, just that formation “Cooper People.” whenever I’m reading something bad, I inevitably start thinking of the people in the story as “[Writer] People.”
I think it is good to keep in mind that tastes change as you get older. A book you could not penetrate in your callow youth you may come to love in your middle years. I think Lolita is wonderful novel. I was over forty when I read it. I doubt I would have enjoyed it if I had read it a decade earlier. James Joyce, however, I still cannot grok.
The Turning of the Screw by Henry James was another story it took me fifty years on the planet to come to enjoy.
J.D. Salinger has nothing to say to me.
Nor Dickens.
Nor Faulkner.
Nor Hardy.
Nor Tolstoy.
I like Saul Bellow, Joseph Conrad, Evelyn Waugh, Kinsley Amis, Gene Wolfe, James Salter.
Speak Memory and Pale Fire by Nabokov are superb.
Hemingway I can take or leave, depending on the piece. Pynchon, no. Auster, no. Roth, sometimes, but not very often.
Fitzgerald, not really, no. Mailer, horse laugh, no.
The so called genre writers George V. Higgins, Elmore Leonard, and Patick O’Brian are more important artists than some of those listed above, in my opinion. Which could change. Over time.
This post made me giggle; I will add to the list of not necessary lit:
1. Finnegan’s Wake although I did like Ulysses
2. The Metamorphosis
3. The Catcher In The Rye
The actual Khalil Gibran is a complete waste of time and brain storage, but the send-up still has me chuckling more than seven years after I first read it…
***
“Not that any of the rest made sense either,
But you, my reader—you know what I mean.”
Heh heh. Thanks Mama Toad.
Don’t go much for the nautical genre myself, but Patrick O’Brian is undoubtedly a master and commander of the English language. I expect his work to age quite well.
Dr. Zhivago—long, tedious, couldn’t make it to the end. Of course, I was 17 when I attempted it. Maybe now, 40 years later, I could appreciate it?
Carcat74:
Well, maybe. I tried it on for size just this year and it did not fit. I could not get past the opening funeral scene. There are limits past which mortal man must not be expected to go.
Lord of the Flies to my mind is about the depravity of man. Its also only about 200 pages, and easy enough to read. I don’t really see why you wouldn’t read it.
Moby Dick is extremely tedious. I finally pushed my way through it a year or so ago. I learned way more than I ever wanted to know about whales, and most of it is wrong!
Anna Karenina is a fantastic book, as well as Bleak House. Both exhibit there own times and places and exhibit strong story lines about moral and immoral behavior and the consequences thereof. Bleak House also rages against what Dickens saw as the completely broken down legal system in the Chauncery courts. Morality and arguing against broken government systems, thats a twofer!
But a must read is Twain’s “Fenimore Cooper’s Literary Offences“. Twain’s critique is absolutely withering.
Having read no Hemingway, about 25 years ago, I tried his last book, Islands in the Stream. It wasn’t that interesting, but his descriptions of the tall cool drinks that slaked the thick hot Everglades thirst have stuck with me. I have loved gin and tonics ever since.
I can’t believe no one’s mentioned Proust. In Search of Lost Time (seven volumes) is simply awful. The man desperately needed a good editor. Unfortunately for the reader, he didn’t have one.
“In the matter of intellect, the difference between a Cooper Indian and the Indian that stands in front of the cigarshop is not spacious.” – Mark Twain
Yes! Yes!
I simply could not get through Atlas Shrugged. That’s two votes against….
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.
I was harangued into reading this Godawful book by a great friend, and I made him promise never to ask about it again after a two-minute post-game report on this miserable chore of a lump of longing to cure the power of sight.
It’s written by a crazy person, and framed as a bunch of preachy lectures from a formerly crazy person (nice try!) with a gruel-thin plot stretched over its knobby bones of droning on at a campfire, droning on at a mental institution, droning quietly to oneself in a helmet (he thought, he surmised, he mused) and then droning on once again to a cast of cardboard characters fit only to be droned at around another campfire. Or a gazebo in the rain. Or sitting Indian style around a busted motorcycle while droning about the virtues of a beercan shim on a Honda vs the original part on a BMW, which is not here anyway. Well one has the quality of working while the other has the quality of being correct. One has the quality of being where it is needed at the time.
Another character is the fauxtagonist’s son, who gets droned on a regular basis, and is withdrawn and possibly turning out crazy like his old man, probably from reading the [expletive] book. The lectures about sanity and quality are droned incompletely yet repetitively from crazy bad writer. The book is a shambles and betrays its actual origin as a Unibomber-esque manifesto (say what you will about Kaczynski, but the man is Kant and Hemingway next to Pirsig) which was rejected by a publisher without bringing at least a six-pack of schmaltz, and so a son, a road trip, some friends, a motorcycle, a mental case, and a book, all equally unbelievable were droned into being.
The method of the book is to conflate meaning of words and to interpret different senses of the same word as drawing disparate meanings together in order to extend syllogisms from true to false, good to bad, crazy to sane.
The theme of the book, aside from dreck, is quality, and I swear I almost lost my grits when, after slogging through this deathwish page by agonizing page, I drew to the end, and the very last page of the book was obscured by a glued-on card holder from some library staffed by monkeys. I never did find out how it ended. I don’t care.
Okay, I admit that I am not the most well-read of individuals on this thread, though I have probably claimed at some point in my life to have read all of these books, but I do think all of the Russians can be dropped as long as one has read Fathers and Sons by Turgenev. Oh, and please read Chekhov’s plays as well. That should do it for Russian literature.
Of the books on those lists, and I’ve read many of them, I would say Proust’s In Search of Lost Time is just overly slow, verly long, and boring. But I’ve only perused it. Also anything by Ayn Rand. It has nothing to do with her themes (afterall I read plenty of Liberals and just shrug off the ideology), but her writing and fiction skills are poor, and to drag oneself through those long novels is torturous. Oh, one other. Richardson’s Clarissa was torture. If you must read it, this is the only time I actually recommend the abridged edition.
LOL, you’re absolutely right. Mailer has to be the most over rated writer in American history. He was all persona and nothing else. Now that he’s passed he’s slowly fading from cultural memory, thank God.
I’m a bigger Russian fan than you, but Fathers and Sons and Chekhov’s plays are masterpieces. You’ve chosen well.
Now that I’ve read Ulysses so know one else has to, I think I get a guilt-free pass of Proust. Sounds awful.
Several people have mentioned Hemingway. In my twenties, his stuff was very appealing. I tried again in my forties, and found it all so contrived.
I can die happy and never read another word.
Exception: The Old Man and the Sea still works for me.
Also Steinbeck. His books, especially the Grapes of Wrath, makes lots of these best novels lists. With all due respect to Monterrey, CA, I find Steinbeck to be a decent commercial novelist: certainly not a creator of masterpieces.
I rather enjoyed This Side of Paradise.
Knotwise and Tabla Rasa:
Yes, Willa Cather is for grownups. I was assigned to read several of her stories in high school, and they were merely okay. But, when I re-read, after having lived a lot more of my life, they began to mean something quite different.
Death Comes to the Archbishop gets really powerful when you’re driving down a mountain, leaving behind the pine trees, entering the cedar-on-red-rocks environment. You can see the towering flat-topped mesas in the far distance through the sunset haze, and realize that you understand more than just the scenery about this book.
But Wuthering Heights will never improve.