The Top Ten: Writers Pick Their Favorite Books

The blog of The Top Ten author J. Peder Zane.

Mary Gaitskill's Top Ten
Thursday, March 22, 2007

A common concern contributors expressed to me about "The Top Ten" was the number: 10. This struck them as an arbitrary limit (it is) that would force them to exclude too many worthy titles. I agreed, then explained that while I was restricting each of them, it was in the spirit of a vastly inclusive project. Indeed, the 125 contributors selected 544 different titles. The message of the book is not — here are the only ten books you need to read — but: Here are hundreds of great books awaiting your discovery, each of which is considered by at least one distinguished writer to be among the ten greatest books ever written.

Nevertheless, I promised them that I would note their concerns in a substantial way. Thus, the book includes Mary Gaitskill's marvelous essay on the difficulty of picking just ten books.

Here's Mary's list:

Mary Gaitskill
1. Ulysses by James Joyce
2. Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
3. Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov
4. Bleak House by Charles Dickens
5. Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
6. To The Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf
7. Gusev, a single short story by Anton Chekhov
8. Peter Pan by J.M. Barrie
9. Dead Souls by Nikolai Gogol
10. The Hunchback of Notre Dame by Victor Hugo

Mary Gaitskill has written the story collections Bad Behavior and Because They Wanted To, and the novels Two Girls, Fat and Thin and Veronica.

Here's Mary's essay, "Only Ten?"

The difficulties of choosing ten best books are obvious: When you last read a book has much to do with how large it looms on your radar. You may remember a book you read twenty years ago with such a surge of feeling that you must honor that surge (once removed from “urge”) even if you aren’t sure what you would think about the book now. Or you may barely remember a book you loved, not because it isn’t great, but because your mind has absorbed and enfolded it in such a way that its piercing qualities are temporarily blunted or hidden, perhaps to become vivid again ten years from now when your mind performs one of its periodic seismic shifts, disgorging the story and its characters anew: Nana and Silk roaming the streets of Paris; Rabbit and Thelma in the tub; Ishmael fantasizing that he might reach out to tweak the imaginary nose of a whale as the Pequod careens around it.

Based on memory, you sometimes can’t tell if a book really was great or if it just hit the spot that needed hitting at the time. (Or not: Joyce’s "Ulysses" is at the top of my list because I re-read it three years ago. If I hadn’t, I would’ve remembered it as it appeared to my undergraduate mind — as an assignment.) There are all the authors you haven’t read, which in my case are Balzac, Eliot, Shakespeare, and most of Dostoevsky, to shamefacedly name a
few. Then there is the peculiar issue of proximity, which is the reason there are no contemporary authors on my list. It isn’t that I can’t think of any; John Updike, Philip Roth, Marilynne Robinson, and Haruki Murakami are only a few that might be considered great. But I can’t see them clearly enough to judge their greatness. I can’t see them for the same reason astronomers practice their business in isolation from the cities; there is too much artificial light. It is hard to separate the light of the book from the live beams of many fierce minds — themselves pale and seeping in the context of a violently lit modernity.

The books on my list are visible to me from hundreds of miles away: "Lolita," so dense with feeling, thought, and beauty that you can’t see it in all its dimensions at once any more than you could see an enchanted forest in its entirety; "Pale Fire," a tragicomedy about the dream world shimmering under corporeal life, and the skulking hero’s equally ardent and ridiculous attempt to find a bridge to that world through a misdirected love — a strange misconnection harboring an imaginary connection more real than reality; "Bleak House," with its great rattletrap plot, steaming forward on a kinetic, dreamlike storm of characters and images that are made of words, but which transcend words to become conduits for essential forces; "To the Lighthouse," a marvel of clarity and precision, yet suffused with a vague, iridescent verbal
haziness that is gorgeous on the page; "Ulysses," too beautiful and vast to describe in the space I have here. "Madame Bovary"; “Gusev”; "Peter Pan"; "Dead Souls"; "The Hunchback of Notre Dame"; the titles alone describe whole star systems that give off light strong enough to see hundreds of years away.

Some of my contemporaries and near-contemporaries have doubtless written books, that is to say, created stars, in close proximity to these. But at the present time they are invisible or only
partially visible to me.

Posted by J. Peder Zane at 8:06 AM
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