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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 enjoyed The Sun Also Rises. It was like a Hunter S. Thompson travelogue without the psychedelics.
In reading through the comments here, something struck me: English teachers can truly make or break an appreciation for an author. Some books are flat-out beyond the grasp of the high-schooler or college kid assigned to read them, and a too-young or out-of-context exposure to an author’s work can leave you with a sour taste that never goes away.
Some, like Catcher in the Rye, work well for the young. I loved it in 10th grade, but wanted to smack Holden when I was 30.
I had to read Faulkner’s Unvanquished in 10th grade too, and could not finish it. Tess of the D’Urbervilles was another one that was difficult to master when young, I just missed so much of the subtext.
There is also the awful tendency to assign “socially meaningful” works in school. I am convinced the longevity of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Scarlet Letter is due primarily to lingering Baby-Boomer sexual rebellion and religious antipathy. Re-reading it I find it a dreary tortuous work with all the social commentary subtlety of a jackhammer.
Yet we continue to get novels on marital infidelity (lots to pick), middle-aged angst (Death of a Salesman), unwed mothers cast out by horrid parents (Tess), etc. all assigned to those too young to have experienced enough to understand any of it.
Hemmingway is assigned too young – Old Man and the Sea gets better as you get older I think, it’s no work for a snotty teenager.
Many of these authors wrote on lighter subjects, things more understandable to kids. Why not just have kids read some ripping good yarns first, save the meditative weighty social commentaries until they’re older?
Good thread. Rather than add to authors and works already noted, I’ll add Buckley’s Blackford Oates spy fiction. Read a couple: the first was OK, the second felt like a chore by the end.
Yeah, I like Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer and Life On The Mississippi very much, but otherwise I find that he can be too withering, too sarcastic, too clever in take-downs. I like sincerity. I like forthrightness. I dislike the underlying narcissism. I dislike the dogma couched in anti-dogmatic postures.
Great writer for the ages with very much to say of lasting value, but his shortcomings grate on me after awhile.
Best review of this book I’ve ever seen.
I loved Lolita. And it never seemed to me like a straightforward story about a pedophile, there was always a metaphorical aspect of decadent Europe trying to seduce a young America. In the end, America is already too corrupt on its own really to be seduceable.
I could never get through “Catcher” as a teenager, even though I tried many times. At 40, I could see the flaws, but also the appeal.
But wait! I’m just getting started!
You’re right. And it’s short. But I do like it.
I had my student read Willa Cather’s Shadows on the Rocks, a gorgeous book set in Quebec, before forcing him to endure the silliness of The Scarlet Letter. Mostly, I wanted him to have read Scarlet Letter, since it is kind of part of the American lit canon, and realize what a terrible book it is, especially compared to the beauty of Cather. There is almost no love and mercy in Hawthorne, but Cather abounds in it. Also, Hawthorne’s characters are so caricatures, and Cather’s so real and breathing.
J.D. Salinger does not have a large published body of work, and Catcher in the Rye is not his best work, but I love reading him. Every so often I give myself the pleasure of sitting down with Nine Stories again, Raise High the Roofbeam Carpenters, or Franny and Zooey. I always come away feeling well fed.
Glad to see my opinion of Hawthorne is shared.
Oh absolutely. I think way too many books get promoted solely because they tick certain boxes. Classroom settings are particularly guilty of this. (And I spent more than a decade writing literature curriculum, so I’m probably kind of guilty, too.) I have an essay building in me about how social politics — specifically identity politics — kills the enjoyment of reading. Someday I’ll write it.
It’s most noticeable to me over on Goodreads, where you can find among the reviews for practically any book, readers who obsess about whether there are enough female characters or whether they’re properly depicted or whether the author was guilty of racism or sexism or some other negative-ism. The worst is when readers try to apply 21-century social thinking to books that are 100 years old or older.
And this is one reason I’m trying to read older books. You can’t really develop a proper sense of our culture, the world, of history, or of our place in it if you confine yourself to modern books.
I appreciated this piece at The Federalist: Consuming Only Modern Stories Will Cement Your Brain into a Rut.
I still have to finish Cather’s My Antonia. I never got very far into it, but I did get up to the bit with the Russian Wedding Party and the pack of wolves. :: shudder ::
” Read proudly-put the duty of being read invariably on the author. If he is not read, whose fault is it? I am quite ready to be charmed, but I shall not make-believe I am charmed. ” – Emerson
I am loath to make such a list, and at my age one of the joys of life is that there’s no such thing as required reading. There are books and authors that I once swore I’d never read for one reason or another but accidentally and in time found out I was gravely mistaken. I used to hate Gertrude Stein on principle, having never read anything by her. Then I read ‘ The Autobiography Of Alice B Toklas ‘ by mistake and it charmed the HELL out of me and lead me to enjoy other books by G S. So…….
# 48 (The Scarecrow) ” 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. ”
When I was young I thought Vonnegut was so completely Brilliant! that I read and reread everything I could get. But then he became a self parody and an authoritative voice of opinion onEVERYTHING and pissed me off. I’ve reread lately some of his earlier books, ‘ Player Piano’ and ‘Mother Night’ which have held up well and which I strongly recommend. When I was a Vonnegut Fanatic I couldn’t stand reading Henry James novels, but over time I have changed and now appreciate James and enjoy his work, but KV is ‘ meh ‘.
oye! How did I miss this thread?
Good stuff, guys! :)
This is a real problem. We want our kids to read meaningful stuff, but much of the good stuff requires the reader have a few decades of real life in order to appreciate. I re-read The Old Man and the Sea a couple of years ago (I’m in my early sixties). My book meant far more to me because I understand the old man so much more.
The Scarlet Letter will resonate with few 17 year olds.
I’d like to see more of books like Lois Lowry’s The Giver used in high school. It has some huge themes, but is written for younger readers.
I remember hating The Scarlett Letter and probably won’t re-read it. Does anyone remember Silas Marnier? I remember extreme indifference to the book in high school, but thought I might revisit it.
I know Gran Marnier.
overated: Dickens, Hardy, Wharton, Rand. Delightfully underappreciated: Magnus Mills, Penelope Fitzgerald, Bukowski, HS Thompson prior to long period of self parody. I won’t disagree with the Gatsby haters, but the Pat Hobby stories are hilarious. At my age I no longer have to read the high brow crap that is good for me. Quite liberating really.
I like George Eliot, and enjoyed Silas Marner lo these many years ago. I really liked her Middlemarch, which I read more recently (15 years ago versus 25 years ago) but I know some people find it tedious.
If you like that kind of thing, the miniseries of Middlemarch done by the Beeb in the 1990s is fab.
Anything on the Self-Help shelf at the bookstore; anything by E. L. James.
I have loved everything I’ve ever read by Cather. In my opinion she is the great under rated American author. I’d put her against the best of the best. My Antonia is the great American novel almost no one has read.
Actually Ulysses is funny and a blast to read. But you do need a helping guide to get through it.
My wife took this photo, I think it combines your themes:
Taking off one of my earlier remarks, I expanded some of my thoughts into their own thread here.
I feel compelled to comment in defense of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. I wouldn’t want people to dismiss it based on Ball Diamond Ball’s review. It has been a very long time since I read it, but from what I recall many of the stated criticism’s are fair, if overstated. Pirsig would say that quality is there, but it’s up to the reader to find it. Yeah, I know that sounds like new age gobbledygook, but if you read the book you may conclude there’s some truth to it.
It’s quite possible the book is sophomoric, but since I was a HS sophomore when I read it I may not be the best to judge. Back then I was a secularist-utilitarian, obsessed with rational choice – in other words, a textbook rationalist – though I could not have describe myself in these terms at the time. Reading Zen changed me, and those changes were profound and immediate. I liken the awakening to what many conservatives say they experienced upon reading Rand, although in my case exposure to Rand a couple years prior had no real effect on me. She was preaching to the choir.
Zen definitely isn’t great as a novel, but I don’t think that is its purpose. The book is a vehicle for a message. It’s not badly written. It’s easy to read and understand. While the prose isn’t elegant, it’s not entirely artless either. If you consider it in two parts, it’s definitely mediocre as travel fiction, but I found the flashbacks to Phaedrus’ life both interesting and instructive, even if disorienting at first. (I thought it was intended as a lesson in getting past immediate and superficial impressions to the substance, but, again, I was 16.) It’s certainly true that it’s not intellectually rigorous, but it’s a novel, not a treatise. I never really took the metaphysics of quality very seriously, so I can’t say how it stands up as philosophy. Furthermore, I don’t think it’s important. What was critical to me is that he made observations that required explanation, and offered explanations which, even when not entirely plausible (Quality isn’t God & Value isn’t Soul*), contained nuggets of wisdom nonetheless.
The lessons I learned and internalized from reading Zen include:
Undoubtedly, many people come to understand these things without reading this book, but Zen found me in a hermitage of rationalism and opened my mind to the value of spirituality, emotion, and empiricism. It provided tools I needed to see other people in a different light and better relate to them. It empowered me to cope with things I didn’t understand rather than dismiss them as distractions as I had before. I may have arrived at the same conclusions on my own, or by way of some other influence, but it would have come later and more slowly.
None of this makes Zen one of the great novels of all time. Perhaps it’s a self-help book for people with specific character flaws. In that sense, just because it’s influential doesn’t mean it’s great. However, given my experience and its popularity, I’m inclined to think it’s worth reading.
*In his defense, Pirsig never suggests Quality=God or Value=Soul, but I spent considerable time wondering if that was his point. While I never settled on the answer, I concluded that the novel wouldn’t be any different if he explicitly stated these equalities. I’m pretty sure his concept of Quality is more rooted in the Tao or some other eastern metaphysics that I’m only vaguely familiar with and can’t wrap my brain around.
No, that honor should go to Danielle Steele…not that anyone serious would call her a writer. I read one of her books just to see what the draw is and oh my goodness, you could not find a more obvious plot, a more repetitive and circular, droning narrative.
The thing about Lord of the Flies is, these were British School Boys. They were supposed to be the epitome of civilization; that whole “Dr. Livingston I presume” thing. If they had banded together, worked it out, and managed to assemble for themselves a working society (like in, say, Tunnel in the Sky) it would have made a novel, if not a particularly memorable one. I’d also argue that the whole “humans are bastards” theme is diminished in our case because it’s in literally every other work of fiction we consume these days. (Seriously. Name one program outside of children’s whatnot that doesn’t have that as a strong subtext.)