An Untitled Post About Books (Which I Suppose is A Title of Sorts, Just Not a Very Good One)
Thanks to Bohemian Rhapsody for a post that will probably end up killing an afternoon. After the “Read The Rest of This Entry” link, you’ll find a list of 106 books that someone, somewhere, decided that people keep on their bookshelves to make them look smart. While I know some people use books as furniture (cf. Nicholson Baker’s “Books as Furniture” in The Size of Thoughts), I guess I’ve never felt the need to impress someone with my reading list. If I did, I probably wouldn’t keep Dinosaur Bob or Bloom County Babylon in good company with Shakespeare.
Books I’ve read and purchased, I’ve bolded; I’m sure that there are books here that were on everybody’s required academic reading at one time or another, but if I liked it well enough to buy it and read it again, it goes into that category. Books I read at school and never really read again, for one reason or another, I’ve italicized. The rest I’ve just left as is. Here goes nothing…
Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
Anna Karenina: This is a book that I “appreciated,” but didn’t much enjoy. A lot of literature is like bran muffins; you know it’s supposed to be good for you, people are always encouraging you to try it. But even though you know the benefits of a particular thing, you just can’t get past the taste.
Crime and Punishment: I actually enjoyed this one, and would like to re-read it one of these days.
Catch-22: I have a weakness for absurdism and black humor; Heller does both to perfection here.
One Hundred Years of Solitude: If you like your fiction dry and literal, Garcia Marquez’s writing, both here and in Love in the Time of Cholera probably won’t be your cup of espresso. I like the whole magical realism thing, though, so I enjoyed both.
Wuthering Heights: Once was enough, thank you.
The Silmarillion: See notes for The Hobbit, below.
Life of Pi
The Name of the Rose: Saw the movie, and actually feel a bit guilty about it. I know that Eco’s supposed to be a phenomenally talented writer, but I haven’t actually read this or any of his other works.
Don Quixote: I will read this as soon as I find a good, unabridged, translation. Suggestions welcome.
Moby Dick
Ulysses: I have to admit, I’ve started this twice and haven’t gotten all the way through it yet.
The Odyssey
Pride and Prejudice
Jane Eyre
The Tale of Two Cities
The Brothers Karamazov
Guns, Germs, and Steel
War and Peace: I will never purchase this book, because I strongly doubt that I would so much as start it, much less finish it… which defeats the purpose of having bought it in the first place. There. I said it, and I feel better.
Vanity Fair
The Time Traveler’s Wife
The Iliad
Emma**
The Blind Assassin
The Kite Runner
Mrs. Dalloway
Great Expectations**
American Gods
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius: Much as I hate to admit it, I never read anything of Dave Eggers’ after this. Not because I didn’t like this book, mind you, but because I liked it as much as I did. I guess that some part of me thought the subsequent stuff would be a letdown after that.
Atlas Shrugged: After reading Anthem, which presents a brief overview of Ayn Rand’s philosophy, I decided not to go much further. It’s not that she’s a bad writer; I just disagree with the philosophy past a certain point. People who take Rand as a blueprint for life are like people who take The Prince as their template; they may be highly successful in their own little ways, but should probably be avoided.
Reading Lolita in Tehran
Memoirs of a Geisha
Middlesex
Quicksilver
Wicked : the life and times of the wicked witch of the West
The Canterbury Tales: Enjoyable, in a strenuous sort of way. The easiest way to get through this is by reading it aloud, which gets you all sorts of funny looks on public transportation.
The Historian
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Love in the Time of Cholera
Brave New World
The Fountainhead: See notes under Atlas Shrugged
Foucault’s Pendulum
Middlemarch
Frankenstein
The Count of Monte Cristo
Dracula
A Clockwork Orange: One of the only instances in which I liked the movie better than the book. Anthony Burgess was a gifted writer and linguist, which is half the problem with this book; the slang, which is an amalgam of Russian, English, and a handful of other things, is close to impenetrable, and it’s distracting to have to keep flipping to the book’s glossary repeatedly. The film retains much of the plotting, minus the plodding. And minus the glossary, since the visuals and action generally give enough context to make sense of what’s being said.
Anansi Boys
The Once and Future King
The Grapes of Wrath: Like Woody Guthrie between covers. Steinbeck’s best work, hands down.
The Poisonwood Bible
1984: I’ve lost count of the number of times I read this book, ever since Mr. Blanken (you had to be there) first mentioned it back in 1983. It was an interesting read to me then, but it’s downright frightening now. Orwell wasn’t wrong, just off by a few years.
Angels and Demons: Dan Brown writes enjoyable fiction, but I can’t for the life of me think why someone would have his works on their shelves to “impress” someone. I remember when The DaVinci Code was first out; people would come up to me* and tell me they’d read it with a tone of voice and look in their eyes that suggested I should applaud their supreme effort. It’s like listening to a kid that’s finally learned to tie their own shoes.
Inferno: Read it, liked it well enough. But I have yet to meet anyone–aside from a handful of college professors–that’s read Purgatorio or Paradiso.
The Satanic Verses
Sense and Sensibility
The Picture of Dorian Gray: To this day, I’m wary of anybody that quotes Wilde liberally in everyday conversation. Was he funny? Sure. That doesn’t mean you are. Especially not if you’re footnoting it while you’re saying it. (”Well, as Oscar Wilde said in The Importance of Being Earnest…”)
Mansfield Park
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
To the Lighthouse
Tess of the D’Urbervilles
Oliver Twist
Gulliver’s Travels
Les Misérables
The Corrections
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
Dune
The Prince: See comments under Atlas Shrugged
The Sound and the Fury
Angela’s Ashes
The God of Small Things
A People’s History of the United States
Cryptonomicon
Neverwhere
A Confederacy of Dunces
A Short History of Nearly Everything
Dubliners
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Beloved
Slaughterhouse-five: Need to re-buy this one, actually, since I’m not about to return to Armpit Elizabeth to get back the copy I lent to someone and never got back.
The Scarlet Letter
Eats, Shoots and Leaves
The Mists of Avalon
Oryx and Crake
Collapse
Cloud Atlas
The Confusion
Lolita
Persuasion
Northanger Abbey
The Catcher in the Rye: Maybe it’s just me, but I think that you have to be a certain age for this book to have much of an impact. It certainly didn’t seem as “deep” to me at thirty as it had when I was sixteen.
On the Road
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Freakonomics
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: This may be a perfectly good book. The thing is, when enough people who you find a bit kooky (that is to say, living on a college campus at 40) or downright scary tell you that a certain book is their favorite, it starts to become incentive to avoid it. For me, this is that book.
The Aeneid: If you’re going to read Homer, then you more or less have to read Virgil just to see what happens next.
Watership Down
Gravity’s Rainbow: I’m glad to have read this book, if for no other reason than the fact that when I read Infinite Jest, I had some idea of what David Foster Wallace was on about.
The Hobbit: Fairies, wizards, goblins, Hobbits, and all sorts of pseudo-mythological creatures in a semi-Medieval setting, combined with half-baked Christianity isn’t my idea of a rip-roaring good time. Substituting talking animals for the pseudo-mythological creatures (as in C.S. Lewis) didn’t quite do it for me, either.
In Cold Blood
White Teeth
Treasure Island
David Copperfield
The Three Musketeers
Madame Bovary
Now, a note on Austen and the Brontes: I read a handful of works in high school and college because they were assigned to me. They can’t have left much of an impression, since I can’t even remember which ones. This isn’t to disparage the talents of the writers themselves, but just a matter of taste. The time period, the stories, et cetera, just weren’t my thing.
*I worked in a bookstore at the time.
Tags: book culture, fiction, Literature, reading lists
May 26th, 2008 at 11:20 am
Your thoughts on The Time Traveller’s Wife? I hated to finish it. Her accuracy in details on Chicago was staggering. She even wrote about the restaurant where Mike and I had our first date. I loved, loved, LOVED this book.
May 28th, 2008 at 9:11 pm
This list annoys me. Maybe not the list per se, but the complete lack of methodology for choosing these books. Right off the bat, I don’t buy the presumption that the books make you look smart. I divide them roughly into two simple categories: classics and popular literature. (I see a subcategory of the pop lit, strangely enough, that I’d call “books Amazon.com thinks I’d like”. Maybe it’s just me.) I didn’t think that reading books that everyone else is reading (perhaps because Oprah told them to) makes you look smart.
There are 4 books you didn’t read that I can recommend:
Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
American Gods
Cryptonomicon
I enjoyed all these books greatly, although American Gods a little less so.
I know Tolkien’s not everyone’s cup of tea, but I really liked LOTR, which should replace The Silmarilion. I tried reading that a couple times and could not get through it. It reads like the “begat” section of Genesis, a history of a fantasy world that doesn’t even come up in LOTR. I still haven’t read The Hobbit, but I’m sure I’ll get around to it. I’ve never read any of the Narnia books, but I became interested after the most recent movie. Of course, my friend Miguel said that Tolkien chastised Lewis for incorporating - I kid you not - Santa Claus in the series. That’s probably the point at which I’ll bail.
The other book I’m surprised at is Quicksilver. I’ve loved every Stephenson I’ve read (which is most of them), but the reviews on that are just kinda bad. I’d say that’s the “looking smart” part of the list (books that are hard to get through), but Cryptonomicon was a great read. Snowcrash, of course, was incredible and far more popular.
Yes, this was a poorly crafted list. Maybe you could post a solid methodology for a choosing books that make you look smart. That would have real longevity. And you’re just the man to do it.
May 28th, 2008 at 10:06 pm
Here’s a thought: in your own opinion, what are five-ten books everybody should read, and why? Regardless of whether someone else will think you’re smart for having read them.
May 29th, 2008 at 6:53 pm
That’s an interesting question. The part I find interesting is that there are books I found extremely useful, but don’t want everyone to read them because I enjoy the advantages their knowledge gives me. I don’t want an even playing field. To be clear, I’d want friends (and family, the economically disadvantaged, etc.) to read them, but not everyone. However, there are probably a few books that would benefit everyone if we all read them.
The first is Getting to Yes, a book on negotiation. You might first think negotiation is a skill you’d want to keep for yourself, but this is essentially a book on fair dealing. It’s teaches people to come to an agreement about value using logic and evidence. So the more people read it, the more “fair” life becomes.
After that, it’s tough. I think you have to work backwards from the social values you want to instill in the populous. For example, let’s start with “war is bad (or shouldn’t be entered into without due diligence)”. I think everyone should see the documentary “The Fog of War - Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara”. The parallels to the war in Iraq, esp. with regard to misunderstanding the enemy, are striking.
You can continue like this until you’ve educated society as you like.
But I still want to read your post on how to pick books that make you look smart
May 29th, 2008 at 8:26 pm
Let me think on this one. I think that whether you realize it or not, you’re actually talking about two posts. One would be the books that’d actually make you smarter (or somehow improve your lot, without being “self-improvement”), and the other would be books that’d just be there to impress people.
May 30th, 2008 at 4:27 am
I see what you’re saying. Overall, I think I’m pretty good at finding books that make you appear smart by being able to apply their ideas to good effect. That’s what I was meant by books that give you an advantage. I’d also add blogs to this. The best bloggers are excellent sources of new ideas, and I like collecting new ideas. You never know when you might need one.
However, I was really talking about a set of criteria for books that (as you clarified) impress people merely by sitting on your bookshelf or your table at Peet’s Coffee. Of course, I’m not saying I’d do this, but I think it would be really amusing to read.
Now that I think of it, though, you have to determine which audience you’re trying to impress. And you might have to go a step further. I imagine lit snobs won’t be impressed by your reading of a classic - you have to be re-re-reading it. For your post, I was pretty much thinking of how one could impress writers or English majors.
Of course frequently the books that impress people are also the ones that make you smarter, but nobody gets around to reading. These are books that practitioners love to quote from, often because they want you to know they read them (and you didn’t).
In a way, it’s like our “Classic Movie Night At Larry’s”. Larry came up with this so we’d watch the classic movies that everyone talks about, but nobody’s actually seen. Citizen Cane. The Graduate. Rear Window. Having these movies on your DVD collection impresses people because even self-proclaimed film buffs often don’t watch classics. But the real purpose for us was film education and connecting the dots. It was cool to see just how often pop culture references those classics.
Either way, I freely admit to flaunting books when I’m reading in public. I’m not trying to look smart - I’m trolling for like-minded individuals. Likewise, if I saw some cute girl reading Neuromancer, it doesn’t matter if it’s her first time reading it, I’m going to strike up a conversation with her. Perhaps leading with, “Will you marry me?”