The Top Ten

Happy Birthday Critical Mass

2007-04-30T13:23:00.000-07:00

The National Book Critics Circle continues its Campaign to Save Book Reviewing by featuring an interview with Top Ten contributor Roxana Robinson and a link to a terrific editorial on the subject by another Top Tenner Michael Connelly. Another list maker, G.D. Gearino, offers some smart insight into the matter at his website (which has a super cool homepage).

The NBCC's mighty blog, Critical Mass, that is the hub of this heroic effort is celebrating its first anniversary today. Like the parent organization, Critical Mass, is an all-volunteer labor of love. NBCC President John Freeman and fellow board members, especially Rebecca Skloot and Jane Ciabattari, devote countless hours to maintaining America's best litblog.

Their efforts reflect how the efforts of a few people can make a big difference. Imagine what a difference all of us can make. That is why it is essential that each of us do what we can to support book reviews.

To wit: John brings me the happy news that about 4,100 people (and counting!)have signed the NBCC petition against the Atlanta Journal-Constitution's decision to do away with its book review editor. Signers include many distinguished writers and Top Ten contributors (see asterisk). Won't you join them here.

* Andrew Hudgins
* Erin McGraw
* Melissa Bank
* Kathryn Harrison
* Louis D. Rubin Jr.
* Edwidge Danticat
* Bobbie Ann Mason
* David Mitchell
* David Lodge
* Richard Powers
* Lee K. Abbott
* Meg Wolitzer
* David Anthony Durham
* George Saunders
* Reynolds Price
* Michael Connelly
* George Pelecanos
* Ian Rankin
* Adam Haslett
* Allan Gurganus
* Clyde Edgerton
* Philip Caputo
* Roxana Robinson
* Fracine Prose
* Peter Cameron
* A.M. Homes
* Donald Harington
* Madison Smartt Bell
* Heidi Julavits
* James Lee Burke
* Karen Joy Fowler
Harlan Ellison
Norman Rush
Richard Ford
Anne Applebaum
Michael Lowenthal
Kim Addonzio
Chris Abani
Judith Freeman
Ngugi wa Thiongo
Clay Risen
Ben Fountain
Ken Foster
Erik Reese
Hester Kaplan
Audrey Niffenberger
Gish Jen
Adam Braver
Don Lee
George Garrett
Julia Glass
Anne Fadiman
Kevin Young
Gary Shteyngart
Karin Slaughter
Ali Smith
Fay Weldon
Ariel Dorfman
Tracy Kidder
Larry Dark
Craig Unger
Whitney Terrell
Maureen Corrigan
Chimamanda Adichie
Allan Kornblum
Emily Barton
Hisham Matar
Michael Upchurch
Sean Wilsey
Lorraine Adams
Kenneth W. Davis
Karen Spears Zacharias
Debra Spark
Silas House
Meghan O’Rourke
Judith Thurman
Lisa Alther
Peter Kurth
Joshua Ferris
John Wray
Carolyn See
Joseph Skibell
Robert Crais
Lynn Tillmann
Joan Acocella,
Tina McElroy Ansa
Benjamin Kunkel
Michael Parker
Tom Barbash
Kelly Link
Victoria Glendenning
Christine Schutt
Aaron Hamburger
Victor LaValle
Chris Offut
Hettie Jonies
Marina Warner
Alan Shapiro
Helen Schulman
Diana Abu-Jabar
Jill McCorkle
Jim Shepherd
Hannah Tinti
Chris Bohjalian
Darin Strauss
Mark Winegardner
Alaa Al Aswany
Adam Shatz
Martha Southgate
Alix Ohlin
Denis Lehane
Todd Gitlin
Julie Phillips
Troy Jollimore
Robert Draper
Craig Nova
Rick Perlstein
Roland Merullo
Shari Goldhagen
H.W.Brands
John Dufresne
Ron Rash
Melissa Fay Greene

Newspaper book reviews

2007-04-27T08:01:00.000-07:00

I grew increasingly alarmed during my three years service on the board of the National Book Critics Circle by the reduction of newspaper book sections across the country. So I proposed a campaign in which we would raise awareness about this issue and make the case for why our work matters.

Unfortunately, my notion became a necessity almost immediately after I left the board in March, as book reviews around the country suffered a series of cuts. NBCC board member Art Winslow chronicles this bloodbath in a recent column.

Under the leadership of John Freeman and Jane Ciabattari, the NBCC has launched an impressive campaign to document this troubling trend and to fight it at its website. Writers such as Nadine Gordimer, George Saunders and Rick Moody have joined book review editors - e.g. Marie Arana (Washington Post) Bob Hoover (Pittsburgh Post gazette) - and others (i.e. Catherine Brady, president of AWP, the Association of Writers and Writing Programs) to argue for the necessity of books coverage to a healthy culture.

This is a lot to read. I'll return with my thoughts on the subject next week.

Top Ten on the Air

2007-04-04T10:07:00.000-07:00

Tom Perrotta and Gail Godwin were gracious enough to join me this morning on Minnesota Public Radio. Host Kerri Miller did a great job — and hats off to producer Chris Dall who prepared the broadcast. Have a listen.

Here are their lists:

GAIL GODWIN
1. The Portrait of a Lady by Henry James
2. Emma by Jane Austen
3. The Secret Agent by Joseph Conrad
4. Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
5. Middlemarch by George Eliot
6. The Power and the Glory by Graham Greene
7. The Death of the Heart by Elizabeth Bowen
8. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce
9. Seven Gothic Tales by Isak Dinesen
10. Atonement by Ian McEwan

Gail Godwin’s novels include "The Odd Woman," "A Mother and Two Daughters," "The Good Husband," and "Queen of the Underworld."

TOM PERROTTA
1. Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes
2. Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
3. Père Goriot by Honoré de Balzac
4. Howards End by E. M. Forster
5. The Good Soldier by Ford Madox Ford
6. My Ántonia by Willa Cather
7. Sister Carrie by Theodore Dreiser
8. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
9. Rabbit Angstrom by John Updike
10. Where I’m Calling From by Raymond Carver
Tom Perrotta is the author of five works of fiction, including the novels "Election," "Joe College," and "Little Children."

The Truth about David Sedaris

2007-03-30T15:18:00.000-07:00

Scandals involving memoirists such as James Frey and Tim "Nasdijj" Burrus have led many reporters and critics to wonder about the veracity of work published as "nonfiction."

Last effort - by Alex Heard of The New Republic - focuses on an unlikely subject, David Sedaris. In a long article, Alex Heard cites various instances in which the humorist embellished or fabricated episodes inn hiss bestselling works.

Without challenging Heard's findings I asked - what's the big whoop? - in a column last Sunday. The link to my piece provided by a popular website for journalists, Romenesko, sparked a very interesting discussion on the purity of nonfiction.

Various folks weighed in — the anecdote about Sedaris supplied by Jerome Weeks, former Book Editor at the Dallas Morning News, is particularly revealing.

The most interesting responses, however, have come from Mr. Heard, who responded to my column and then responded to a Newsday interview in which Sedaris sort of fires back at him.

Good stuff!

Somerset Maugham's Top Ten

2007-03-30T06:25:00.000-07:00

Nigelbeale.com observes that Top Top Ten List in my book — that is the ten biggest vote getters from all 125 lists on the list — is very similar to the list compiled by Somerset Maugham 50 years ago.

Here's Maugham's list:

1. Tom Jones by Henry Fielding
2. Pride and Pejudice by Jane Austen
3. The Red and the Black by Stendahl
4. Le Pere Goriot by Honore de Balzac
5. David Copperfield by Charles Dickens
6. Madame Bovary by Gustav Flaubert
7. Moby-Dick by Herman Melville
8. Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte
9. The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky
10. War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy

Here's ours:

THE TOP TOP TEN LIST
1. Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
2. Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
3. War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
4. Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
5. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
6. Hamlet by William Shakespeare
7. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
8. In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust
9. The stories of Anton Chekhov
10. Middlemarch by George Eliot

Jonathan Lethem

2007-03-28T11:37:00.000-07:00

I had the great pleasure of sharing a cup of coffee with Jonathan Lethem on Tuesday (fear not germaphobes, we each had our own mugs of shade grown, free trade, organic Joe). (Interesting story: One of the early owners of my paper, The News & Observer of Raleigh, was Josephus Daniels. While serving as Woodrow Wilson's Secretary of the Navy, he banned alcohol in the service. The next best form of stimulation became known as a Cup of Joe, or so the story goes.)

In any event, Jonathan was in town promoting his new novel, "You Don't Love Me Yet" (what a great title). And he was gracious enough to sign the bookstore's copies of "The Top Ten" on page 91, where his list appears.

Jonathan Lethem
1. Great Expectations by Charles Dickens
2. The Trial by Franz Kafka
3. The Man Who Loved Children by Christina Stead
4. The Red and the Black by Stendhal
5. A Dance To The Music Of Time by Anthony Powell
6. Alice in Wonderland/Looking Glass by Lewis Carroll
7. The Black Prince by Iris Murdoch
8. New Grub Street by George Gissing
9. Tristram Shandy by Laurence Sterne
10. Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky

Not only is Jonathan one of the smartest people I've met — his mind works in higher gear — but he's also one of the most generous. Before "The Top Ten," he contributed a lovely essay on "The Loneliest Books I Read," to my first book, "Remarkable Reads." Check it out here.

Banville discovers Simenon

2007-03-26T10:30:00.000-07:00

Benjamin Black. The name sounds familiar, famous even. Where have I heard it before, you puzzle, while scanning the cover of his debut crime novel, “Christine Falls”?

Don't wrack the old bean too hard. There is a famous name somewhere but it's not Black but Banville — John Banville, the Man Booker Prize-winning author who has adopted Black as his nom de plum.

I mention this because of two connections to "The Top Ten." First, the Irish writer contributed a list to the book:

John Banville
1. Ill Seen Ill Said by Samuel Beckett
2. Notes from Underground by Fyodor Dostoevsky
3. Ulysses by James Joyce
4. Doctor Faustus by Thomas Mann
5. Moby-Dick by Hermann Melville
6. Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
7. Austerlitz by W.G. Sebald
8. Dirty Snow by Georges Simenon
9. Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift
10. Vanity Fair by William Thackeray

Second, in his Philadelphia Inquirer review of "Christine Falls" Frank Wilson notes: " Banville has been quoted as saying how impressed he was to discover recently Georges Simenon’s psychological thrillers, and this novel compares quite favorably to Simenon’s best."

Although the Belgian writer published more than 500 books during his singular career — the most famous being his detective novels featuring Inspector Maigret of Paris — he was news to me until the brilliant British mystery writer Iain Pears listed Simenon on his Top Ten list. It just so happened that the great New York Review Classic Series was in the midst republishing several of Simenon's novels. I read 'em and wrote about 'em. Wow. Thank you Iain.

To help spread the good news news about Simenon, Iain wrote a short piece for "The Top Ten." Enjoy!

Appreciation of Georges Simenon’s Maigret Detective Novels
by Iain Pears
The Maigret series of detective stories, written by the Belgian Georges Simenon, are part of that rare breed of books — the massmarket entertainment that also works as great literature. Simenon is the master of atmosphere; with the lightest of touches he is able to conjure up Paris in the 1940s and 1950s, a seedy, largely poor city of shabby concierges and downtrodden traveling salesmen, of cheap hotels and squalid nightclubs, of hissing steam radiators and grubby shirt collars.

Much of the narrative is liquor soaked — Maigret begins drinking after breakfast, interviews witnesses over brandy, and suspects over beer. Only rarely is a case concluded by unraveling clues; these are not whodunits. Rather, they are studies in character, of place, and of people. Simenon would have been a brilliant analyst. As often as not, the books end when Maigret (and through him, the reader) so understands the criminal that the suspect confesses all. Indeed, the
reader is usually left sympathizing with the criminal, whose crime is reacting to limited choices and desperate circumstances.

The books are so compressed they could almost be short stories, but Simenon populates them with an extraordinary range of characters — the overweight, perpetually sweating Maigret, his eternally patient wife (more acute, in many ways, than her husband), his juniors, and the gallery of pimps and prostitutes, petty criminals, shopkeepers, bartenders, small tradesmen, and canal barge pilots who make up his world. There is no reveling in the grime of the underworld; most of the characters dream of better things and live a life of disappointment. Out of their lives, Simenon created some of the most enduring and compelling works of the twentieth century.

Mary Gaitskill's Top Ten

2007-03-22T08:06:00.000-07:00

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.

2007-03-20T14:56:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I asked you to talk about your Top Ten lists — why those ten books made such a lasting impression on you; what memories they kindled, what revelations they sparked. I promised to post Mary Gaitskill's essay from "The Top Ten" on the challenge of picking just ten books. But I'm going to wait until tomorrow to do that because I was so impressed by the piece I received from one bold reader, Lisa Guidarini (who operates the terrific litblog Bluestalking Reader).

Lisa writes:

Book 1: Light in August/William Faulkner
Faulkner's a writer very near my heart. He portrays the part of Mississippi I'm also native to, and despite the fact we weren't contemporary I can still see the Mississippi he wrote about. 'Light in August,' is one of the most huge-hearted portrayals of inter-racial relations in all of literature. Faulkner says crucial things about humanity in a way that's pointed, but also very funny. He's not on the soapbox, but you know what he's saying. It's a deeply moving and very important book.

Book 2: To the Lighthouse/Woolf
Up until about 1.5 years ago, I was a stay-at-home mom. I have three children who are very close in age, and as a result I had many pull-my-hair-out moments. Still do, actually, but I digress.
Around the time my older two were preschoolers, and my younger an infant, I realized my steady diet of PBS children's programming wasn't really keeping me awfully sharp. An online group was reading this particular Woolf book, and though I was a little frightened I thought I'd take the plunge. As soon as I read the first line I knew this was unlike anything I'd read before. The beauty inspired me, and Woolf is now one of my favorite writers.

Book 3: Anna K/Tolstoy
I love fallen woman novels, which may sound like a terrible aspersion to cast on my own sex, but ah well. I love novels in which women rally very hard against the constraints of society, and Anna K is one of these rebelious women. The book's gorgeously written, and whoever started the idea Tolstoy was inaccessible should be slapped. He's not at all. He just wrote really BIG books, which to my mind is an asset.

Book 4: Great Expectations/Dickens
I was an early convert to Dickens, starting to read him sometime around high school. GE was one of the first of his novels I read, and I re-read it regularly. It has everything, a gripping storyline, humor and pathos, and wonderful characters. And Estella fascinates me.

Book 5: Madame Bovary/Flaubert
Another "fallen woman" novel, this one just as brutal as Anna K. I'm not even sure how many times I've read this one, but it never fails to move me. Poor Emma Bovary! She married so young, and thought it would all be a big adventure. When that turned sour she turned to other men, with disastrous results. Flaubert's very sympathetic to Emma, turning the convention of the typical Frenchman and his mistress around to show women may actually have these feelings, too. Quelle horreur!

Book 6: Middlemarch/Eliot
Oh, Middlemarch, that huge, sprawling epic British novel. It's mostly about love and marriage, and a bit about politics. It's also about being heartsick, marrying the wrong person, and still managing to live with integrity. George Eliot was a giant intellect who could have stood her ground with anyone. I admire her so much.

Book 7: Ethan Frome/Wharton
This is perhaps one of the most perfectly crafted novellas ever written. Unrelentingly grim as it may seem, there are lights of hope within the story. The ending, yes, I know, but sometimes life just works out that way.

Book 8: Other Voices, Other Rooms/Capote
Sheer poetry, start to finish. This is a "weep at its beauty" novel.

Book 9: Pride and Prejudice/Austen
I came to an appreciation of Austen fairly late. I had a really bad experience with a HORRIBLE college class on Women in Literature that put me off all things Austen for over a decade. We were practically flogged over the head with 'Northanger Abbey,' and came to really despise the name Jane Austen as a result. But I eventually relented and tried again, and saw the true depth, wonderful satiric wit and real humanity of Jane Austen. I love all her novels, but P&P reigns supreme with me. Every word is sheer pleasure. I read it slowly to savor it.

Book 10: The Blind Assassin/Atwood
I feel like a broken record. Every time I talk about Atwood I declare she's this century's answer to George Eliot. She is brilliant, truly brilliant. I've read TBA two or three times, and every time I find something new. It's so deep, and so complex, yet it can be read on a somewhat more superficial level, too, for the story. There's more there if you'd like to plumb the depths, but a good story if that's what you're looking for.

Why These Ten?

2007-03-19T12:08:00.000-07:00

One of the best responses to "The Top Ten" appeared on the website Chekhov's Mistress. It not only offered the writer's Top Ten list but also explained why he picked those ten and not others.

This is the same challenge I issued to Mary Gaitskill, who explored the complexity of my simple request in a brief essay for the book titled, "Only Ten?" I'll post her essay tomorrow and then some thoughts on my Top Ten.

The person I really want to hear from is you. How did you choose your ten? What were your criteria and considerations? What was the hardest part?

I'd also love to know the stories behind your picks. When did you first encounter them? What was it about them - above and beyond all the other works you've enjoyed and admired - that made such a strong impression?

The best lists are not just a series of titles. They are reflections of the listmaker's life and sensibility. As rewarding as they are to their readers, they are even more valuable to their creators, who learn about themselves through the books they love.

It only sounds like I'm asking you to write a doctoral thesis. I'd just like you to hit the comment button on this or any of my other posts and share some thoughts on your list.

Thanks

Forces of Evil

2007-03-17T12:27:00.000-07:00

My March 14th post on commercial fiction has prompted some interesting responses, including several comments on this blog (check them out).

The most frightening - and revealing - came from the blogger Sandra Ruttan, who champions the small-minded forces we're up against.

I imagine her wearing a green eyeshade, counting beans for Philistine International, as she writes (hey, she's multi-tasking!):

Now, let’s examine journalism. Journalism works the same way every other commercial product works. You produce a product which you sell. If you sell enough you stay in the game. If you don’t sell enough you fold.

Yes, Sandra, a newspaper is no different than a can of soda; public interest public schminterest, right? Newspapers have the same obligation to society as the folks who make Kleenex or Pepsi, right?

If journalists didn't have a sense of mission, Watergate never would have been uncovered. I bet much of the great work done by reporters probably hurt the bottom line but it served nobler purposes. It reflected higher ideals, a commitment to doing works that matters. How naive, right Sandra?

And, the sad truth is, too many newspaper publishers have adopted her perspective. They've realized that in the strictest sense foreign bureaus cost more revenue than they generate so they've shut them down. Same goes with book sections.

This approach may make sense in the short run. But as publishers pursue this logic, cutting here, slashing there, they may find that their efforts to please everybody don't please anybody. And, even if they sustain their mighty profit margins by producing passable content with much smaller staffs, what's the point? What creative person - and that's who we hope the biz attracts - wants to spend their lives doing that? What engaged person would want to read it?

Sandra then applies her logic to book reviews:

This is, in my opinion, why review space in many newspapers is decreasing. Reviewers fail to understand their role is not to be a cultural innovator. Their role is to reflect popular culture.

Critics as experts who point readers toward important works? Phooey. Who needs 'em. Right, Sandra? I know what I like. Just tell me it's good! I don't need critics to help me to expand my horizons. I want them to act as mirrors that reflect my good judgment back upon me.

Better yet, critics, save your words. Just run Amazon.com's rankings - and only the Top Ten, please. That will insure that I never read "unpopular" fiction.

Your Top Ten

2007-03-15T12:22:00.000-07:00

One of my goals in creating "The Top Ten" — besides getting FILTHY RICH — was to inspire readers to create their own top ten lists. I know from my own experience - and from the comments of many of the book's 125 contributors - that such listmaking opens a little window into our souls (or at least provokes a walk down memory lane).

My exquisite taste explains only part of the reason that my Top Ten differs yours; the rest involves the fact that different works to speak to us, well, differently; they strike chords that resonate more deeply in you than me. Identifying which books bang our gongs and why is more revealing than a year of therapy — at a fraction of the cost!

I've been thrilled to see more than 200 readers post their own top ten lists on my website and I ran into a computer whiz at a recent reading who said he'd be happy to tabulate the results of those lists. Stay tuned!

As we wait for those results, the folks at Amazon.com have released their own Top Ten list based on lists submitted by 71 folks:

To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee (15 votes)
Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë (9)
One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez (7; happy 80th birthday, Gabo!)
A Prayer for Owen Meany by John Irving (7)
The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald (6)
Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov (6)
The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand (6)
Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides (6)
The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger (6)
The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky (5)

Reviewing "Books People Actually Read"

2007-03-14T09:00:00.000-07:00

In conjunction with the NBCC Awards in New York last week, the organization hosted a panel on "genre fiction." Truth be told I was dismayed by much of the discussion which suggested that newspapers should devote more of their dwindling review space to "books people actually read."

Problem is, readers have little difficulty in finding the works of James Patterson and Danielle Steel , which manage to dominate the bestseller list without critical attention (on the other hand, maybe these authors wouldn't fare so well if reviewers consistently pointed out the limits of their efforts). What readers do need is assistance in locating the less popular "literary" works worth their attention.

At one point, an audience member raised the issue of poetry, which seemed very instructive. Thanks to the web, this is a Golden Age for poetry lovers. Great poems as well as reviews and discussions of new collections are only a click away. However, if you're not looking for poetry, if you don't search it out, these resources may as well not exist for you. That is the great power of newspapers and general circulation magazines: They put casual readers in touch with material that might interest them but which they would not seek out on their own. (In my case, I would never look for a Home & Garden story, but peruse my newspaper's fine Saturday section every week because it's right there in front of me.)

Interest in poetry has declined for many reasons but certainly one of them is its abandonment by most newspapers and magazines. My fear - no, make that prediction - is that literary fiction will be increasingly marginalized as general interest publications focus on "books people actually read."

Ironically, the effort to attract more readers will diminish interest in book pages. Of course there are many fine genre writers who deserve - and receive - critical attention. But one of the main reasons reviewers don't focus on their work is that there is only so much one can say about books that, like sitcoms, are formulaic and predictable. The best effrots of Michael Chabon, Lorrie Moore or Jonathan Lethem provoke far more interesting responses than the works of Patterson or Steel.

Focusing on the latter will force editors to run shorter pieces - how much can you really say - that revolve more heavily on the least interesting aspect of criticism: Thumbs up or thumbs down.

Even More Books!

2007-03-13T16:27:00.000-07:00

Although "The Top Ten's" 125 contributors named a total of 544 books, their picks didn't begin to exhaust our supply of great books. I learned this first hand when I realized that my picks 2-5 hadn't made any of the lists:

Absalom, Absalom! by William Faulkner
Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon
Hunger by Knut Hamsun
The Sound of the Mountain by Yasunari Kawabata
Nostromo by Joseph Conrad

A far broader indication of this vast universe of unselected genius is provided by the more than 200 readers who have posted their top ten lists on this website. They are brimming with worthwhile books awaiting discovery (and rediscovery). Today, Randy Overton reminds us of North by Frederick Busch and Nobody's Fool by Richard Russo; yesterday Kristen Marks spotlighted one of "Top Ten" contributor Lorrie Moore's great short story collections, "Birds of America" while Ling Wu celebrated these three gems: The Sound of Waves by Yukio Mishima, In the Lake of the Woods by Tim O'Brien and The Cement Garden by Ian McEwen.

I'm pretty sure O'Brien would be thrilled by that pick. I had the good fortune to share lunch with him last month, during which I asked him to inscribe a copy of The Things They Carried. My request evoked the same weary look that must cross Gregg Allman's face every time fan's demanded he play "Whipping Post." O'Brien said he appreciated the book's success but felt it overshadowed the rest of his work. Well, not according to Ling Wu!

Is David Foster Wallace Serious?

2007-03-06T17:27:00.000-08:00

David Foster Wallace has one of the most … interesting “Top Ten” lists.

The Screwtape Letters - C.S. Lewis
2. The Stand - Stephen King
3. Red Dragon - Thomas Harris
4. The Thin Red Line - James Jones
5. Fear of Flying - Erica Jong
6. The Silence of the Lambs - Thomas Harris
7. Stranger in a Strange Land - Robert A. Heinlein
8. Fuzz - Ed McBain
9. Alligator - Shelley Katz
10. The Sum of All Fears - Tom Clancy

Inquiring minds want to know: Is he serious?

Beats me. To be honest, I don't know what Wallace was thinking — he doesn't phone, he doesn't write ... . But I do think there's a certain integrity to his list. If I had asked, "What are the Top Ten works of popular commercial fiction that most critics and serious authors sneer at" his list would be on target. Within their genres, each of his picks is a stand out.

Perhaps he's suggesting that even though we tend to define fiction, especially great fiction, in a specific way, it works, in fact, on different levels. Harris' "Red Dragon"and Clancy's "The Sum of All Fears" aren't trying to be "Hamlet"; Jong's "Fear of Flying" has different aims than "The Sound and the Fury" (except for the chief aim of engaging its readers). On their own terms, each of Wallace's picks is a great achievement.

I doubt Wallace thinks "Fuzz" is a better literary creation than "Moby Dick," but he might say it's more enjoyable. To take that a step further, the fact that the "Top Ten" contributors selected 544 different titles suggests that there are no right or wrong answers when it comes to great books, there are only the books that mean the most to each of us.

That’s a little bullcritty, I know. But hey, that's my business.

Wallace aficionado Jonathan Baskin offers this take:

I've read nearly every interview Wallace has ever done, and he is often asked for his influences, or books that are important to him. Here is one example of the kind of answer he usually gives, in response to Salon's Laura Miller's question about what books make him feel "human and unalone," which is how Wallace describes the affect of great fiction:

OK. Historically the stuff that's sort of rung my cherries: Socrates' funeral oration, the poetry of John Donne, the poetry of Richard Crashaw, every once in a while Shakespeare, although not all that often, Keats' shorter stuff, Schopenhauer, Descartes' "Meditations on First Philosophy" and "Discourse on Method, "Kant's "Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysic," although the translations are all terrible, William James' "Varieties of Religious Experience," Wittgenstein's "Tractatus," Joyce's "Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man," Hemingway -- particularly the ital stuff in "In Our Time," where you just go oomph!, Flannery O'Connor, Cormac McCarthy, Don DeLillo, A.S. Byatt, Cynthia Ozick -- the stories, especially one called "Levitations," about 25 percent of the time Pynchon. Donald Barthelme, especially a story called "The Balloon," which is the first story I ever read that made me want to be a writer, Tobias Wolff, Raymond Carver's best stuff -- the really famous stuff. Steinbeck when he's not beating his drum, 35 percent of Stephen Crane, "Moby-Dick," "The Great Gatsby."

Now, this is just one interview, but never have any of the novels he mentioned on his list appeared anywhere in the interviews I've read. Nor have I ever heard him praise any books even remotely like those books. He has also, I might add, written long, fawning essays about Dostoevsky and Kafka, and claimed to be a huge John Updike fan --somehow none of these authors made his cut.

Now, at first when I saw his list, and all the Thomas Harris and Tom Clancy books, I assumed he had just made a joke out of the list. Frankly, I was surprised he'd done it in the first place, so it didn't seem so outlandish that he'd have fun with it. I don't have the book in front of me right now because I'm at work, but I think it was somewhere around # 5 when I saw the Jong book, that I really got confused. Because Jong is not a crassly "popular" writer like Clancy or Harris, but he's also not really literary -- she's in that broad pseudo-literary realm populated by writers who want to be real writers, but simply aren't good enough...these are the kind of writers which only seem acceptable until you read their much more talented near-contemporaries, like David Foster Wallace. I knew when I saw Jong's book on there, though, that Wallace wouldn't have put it on in jest, because he doesn't have a cruel sense of humor, and it would have been cruel to put Erica Jong's book on in jest. Because Jong has aspirations of being a real writer (Thomas Harris, it might be argued, is precisely the author he wants to be), and Wallace would never put someone down in that way who was really trying.

There were a few other entries like Jong as well, which really gave me pause, and the more I thought about it, the less I understood what point Wallace could be trying to get across. It's almost like he went to a rack in a bookstore and poked randomly at ten books, or farmed the job out to a 13 year-old who liked to read (my list might have looked something like Wallace's when I was about 12). Yes, the books he chose may be great achievements on their own terms, but why would Wallace use those kinds of terms? He is clearly aware of other, better terms, and his writing is steered by them. I simply do not buy he enjoys "Red Dragon" as much as he enjoys "Hamlet," or "Brothers K," or "Gravity's Rainbow."

Lorrie Moore's List

2007-03-05T14:05:00.000-08:00

It's fun to be the book editor! The morning mail brought fresh copies of Lorrie Moore's first novel, "Anagrams," and one of her superb story collections, "Self-Help." Vintage Books has slapped new covers of these gems, which will be available March 13. As we read Lorrie, let's take a peek at "The Top Ten" books she'd bring to a desert island.

Lorrie Moore
1. Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
2. Dubliners by James Joyce
3. The Iliad by Homer
4. The Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio
5. Troilus and Criseyde by Geoffrey Chaucer
6. Romeo and Juliet by William Shakespeare
7. Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë
8. Washington Square by Henry James
9. Middlemarch by George Eliot
10. Open Secrets by Alice Munro

Katharine Weber's Top Ten

2007-03-04T09:37:00.000-08:00

Space constraints meant I could only ask 125 writers to contribute to "The Top Ten" - leaving me to wonder about the picks of many authors I admire.

Now I have one less writer to puzzle about. Katharine Weber - whose novels include "Objects in the Mirror," "The Little Women," "The Music Lesson," and most recently, a reimagining of the 1911 shirtwaist factory fire that killed 146, most female workers, "Triangle" - has posted her list on my website:

From Katharine Weber submitted 03/03/2007

Edwin Mullhouse by Steven Milhauser
Ulysses by James Joyce
Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
The Comforters by Muriel Spark
A Severed Head by Iris Murdoch
The Eighth Day by Thornton Wilder
Lucy Carmichael by Margaret Kennedy
The Painted Veil by W. Somerset Maugham
The Custom of the Country by Edith Wharton
Portnoy's Complaint by Philip Roth

The 125 writers listed 544 separate works on their lists - an average of four unique titles per list. Weber is above average, including six unselected works - the Milhauser, Spark, Murdoch, Wilder, Maugham and, Kennedy (she's news to me, but not for long).

Reading Across the Ages

2007-03-03T11:00:00.000-08:00

Most "Top Ten" contributors ranked their ten favorite books. Richard Powers, who won a National Book Award this year for his novel "The Echo Maker," took a different approach, naming his top pick at various stages of life.

Richard Powers
Age 5: Harold and the Purple Crayon by Crockett Johnson
Age 10: The Bible; The Odyssey by Homer (dead heat)
Age 15: The Lord of the Rings by J. R. R. Tolkien
Age 20: Ulysses by James Joyce
Age 25: Moby-Dick by Herman Melville
Age 30: The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann
Age 35: In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust
Age 40: Great Expectations by Charles Dickens
Age 45: My Ántonia by Willa Cather
Age 50: Something wholly unforeseen, that will change all these others, again

The youthful blogger at Isabel Archer tries his approach:

Age 5: L. Frank Baum, The Wizard of Oz

Age 10: Michael Ende, The Neverending Story, Anne Frank: Diary of a Young Girl

Age 12: William Sleator, House of Stairs

Age 17: Barbara Brandon, The Passion of Ayn Rand

Age 20: The Sound and the Fury, The Aeneid, Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil

Age 25: Pride and Prejudice, Adam Thorpe, Ulverton

Age 30: ?????

What are your greatest hits through the ages?

Congratulations Judy Budnitz

2007-03-02T12:01:00.000-08:00

Granta has just named "Top Ten" contributor Judy Budnitz as one of the 21 best writers under 35.

Here's Judy's List:

1. Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
2. Jesus' Son by Denis Johnson
3. All the King's Men by Robert Penn Warren
4. To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
5. Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
6. Red Cavalry Stories by Isaac Babel
7. House of Breath by William Goyen
8. Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates
9. Sixty Stories by Donald Barthelme
10. The Street of Crocodiles by Bruno Schulz

And here's David Orr's essay from "The Top Ten" on "reading" her picks.

If you’re putting together a list of “the greatest books,” you’ll want to do two things: (1) out of kindness, avoid anyone working on a novel; and (2) decide what the word “great” means. The first part is easy, but how about the second? A short list of possible definitions of “greatness” might look like this:

1. “Great” means “books that have been greatest for me.”
2. “Great” means “books that would be considered great by the most people over time.”
3. “Great” has nothing to do with you or me — or people at all. It involves transcendent concepts like God or the - Sublime.
4. “Great”? I like Tom Clancy.

As writers tend to be practical — at least, as regards writing — the list makers here generally have avoided adhering strictly to one approach. That’s to their credit and our benefit. We learn more about literature from intuitions than calculations, and the intuitions of good authors are especially valuable because, as the poet James Richardson puts it, writers are “how books read each other.”

So what can these lists tell us about how these writers read great books, and how those great books, in turn, read them? For a representative example, let’s consider the selections made by Judy Budnitz, a younger author known for fabular, dreamily deadpan short-stories.

The first thing to notice about Budnitz’s list is that it isn’t an effort to capture all the eternal works of the West. There’s no Homer, no Shakespeare, no Dante, no Chaucer — no roundup of Great Greats. But she also hasn’t ignored the giants; at least four of her choices — Nabokov, Tolstoy, Isaac Babel, and Bruno Schulz — are picks that would look reasonable in any collection of All Stars. This is a common approach, and it speaks to the loyalty most writers feel to their craft heritage (and in a book like this, to their desire to look erudite alongside their peers). It’s a hard pull to resist. Even David Foster Wallace’s idiosyncratic selection of top-selling authors (see #4 above) includes C. S. Lewis, who’s no less canonical for being wildly popular.

The best parts of Budnitz’s list, however, are personal. Some of these elements are obvious— as a short story writer, she favors short fiction (four of her ten selections); as an Atlanta native, she likes Southerners (three of ten); and as a contemporary writer, she prefers more recent work (only Tolstoy predates the twentieth century).

But Budnitz’s list also tells a less straightforward story about aesthetic and political affinities. Her more obscure picks are especially revealing in this regard. She’s the only author here, for instance, to choose a book by Donald Barthelme, whose ludic, funny, and intensely smart stories are likely formal touchstones for her own work. Her selection of Richard Yates (who’s enjoying a minor renaissance) and William Goyen (who remains largely unknown) tells us even more. Yates’s work bears little technical resemblance to Budnitz’s, but his attention to the ways in which dreams are diminished by neighborhood expectations would be attractive to Budnitz, whose stories, however oblique, are often social parables. Goyen, a Texan with a cascading, biblical prose style, would seem to be the odd man out here. Yet while Budnitz is more understated, more withholding, and decidedly more off-kilter, there is a soulfulness to her best writing — a willingness to relinquish control— that recalls the best of Goyen.

This is her most unusual pick, and it is likely the truest. And isn’t that what we want from a “greatest books” list, that it show, as Goethe said genius always must, “the love of truth”?

David Orr, the 2004 recipient of the Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing from the National Book Critics Circle, lives in New York City.

New Top Ten Lists

2007-03-01T10:37:00.000-08:00

"The Top Ten" offers 15 Super Top Ten Lists — including The Top Ten Mysteries and Thrillers, The Top Ten Works by Living Authors — drawn from all 125 author lists. A website has come up with two more, The Top Ten Works by Women Authors, The Top Ten Works in Translation.

Others?

Allan Gurganus on Reading & Writing

2007-03-01T08:30:00.000-08:00

We had a terrific event with Allan Gurganus last night at the Regulator Bookshop in Durham, N.C.

After I spoke, Allan said he didn’t completely accept my assertion that all good writers are great readers. He said he knows many writers who don’t seem to read much and then quoted Lee Smith, who once observed of a colleague: I believe he’s written more books than he’s read.

Allan added: Reading is inhaling; writing is exhaling. Anyone who exhales without inhaling is just releasing pure carbon monoxide that is hardly worth your time and may very well kill you.

One of my aims with “The Top Ten” was to cast writers as readers - to reveal the idolatrous fan that resides in each of their breasts. Allan did not disappoint, reading with awe and elan from the works that made his Top Ten list. He began with “Robinson Crusoe,” which, he said, he discovered as a fifth grader. This led to trouble when he tried to hide Defoe’s massive novel behind his small math book. His teacher was not amused. Nor was the Principal when he took the phone from the hand of little Allan — who was supposed to be confessing his crime to his father — and heard: “At the tone, the time will be 1:15 p.m. and 20 seconds.”

Allan also read from “Speak, Memory,” “A Death in the Family,” “Emma” and “Middlemarch.” The crowd was mesmerized as he articulated the thickly textured opening of the second chapter of “Absalom, Absalom!” — get it now and read it aloud (Allan likened its cadences to the King James Bible).

Finally, he brought the house down when he read - in different voices - the interview between Lady Bracknell and Jack from Act I of “The Importance of Being Earnest”:

LADY BRACKNELL : [Pencil and note-book in hand.] I feel bound to tell you that you are not down on my list of eligible young men, although I have the same list as the dear Duchess of Bolton has. We work together, in fact. However, I am quite ready to enter your name, should your answers be what a really affectionate mother requires. Do you smoke?
JACK: Well, yes, I must admit I smoke.
LADY BRACKNELL: I am glad to hear it. A man should always have an occupation of some kind. There are far too many idle men in London as it is. How old are you?
JACK: Twenty-nine.
LADY BRACKNELL: A very good age to be married at. I have always been of opinion that a man who desires to get married should know either everything or nothing. Which do you know?
JACK: [After some hesitation.] I know nothing, Lady Bracknell.
LADY BRACKNELL: I am pleased to hear it. I do not approve of anything that tampers with natural ignorance. Ignorance is like a delicate exotic fruit; touch it and the bloom is gone. The whole theory of modern education is radically unsound. Fortunately in England, at any rate, education produces no effect whatsoever. If it did, it would prove a serious danger to the upper classes, and probably lead to acts of violence in Grosvenor Square. What is your income?
JACK: Between seven and eight thousand a year.
LADY BRACKNELL: [Makes a note in her book.] In land, or in investments?
JACK: In investments, chiefly.
LADY BRACKNELL: That is satisfactory. What between the duties expected of one during one's lifetime, and the duties exacted from one after one's death, land has ceased to be either a profit or a pleasure. It gives one position, and prevents one from keeping it up. That's all that can be said about land.

Top Ten Q&A

2007-02-28T08:44:00.000-08:00

Lisa Guidarini runs one of the most ambitious literary blogs - definitely worth a bookmark. Click on her name to read an interview with me about "The Top Ten." While you're there, check out her posting about some guy named Roth.

Reading Tonight with Allan Gurganus

2007-02-28T08:02:00.000-08:00

I'll be reading with Allan Gurganus tonight at 7 p.m. the Regulator Bookshop in Durham. An earlier reading with Clyde Edgerton and G.D. Gearino inspired some great conversation with the audience about the difference between a "great" book and a "favorite."

Here's Allan's Top Ten:

Allan Gurganus
1. Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe
2. The Stories of Anton Chekhov
3. Middlemarch by George Eliot
4. Speak Memory by Vladimir Nabokov
5. A Death in the Family by James Agee
6. Absalom Absalom! by William Faulkner
7. The Importance of Being Earnest by Oscar Wilde
8. Vile Bodies by Evelyn Waugh
9. Emma by Jane Austen
10. The Tin Drum by Gunter Grass