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David Foster Wallace's Top Ten List
D.T. Max is receiving warm reviews for his biography of Top Ten contributor David Foster Wallace, Every Love Story is a Ghost Story.
New York Times book critic Michiko Kakutani avers: “What Mr. Max’s book does do — and does powerfully — is provide an emotionally detailed portrait of the artist as a young man: conflicted, self-conscious and deeply thoughtful, like so many of his characters a seeker after an understanding of his own place in the world and a Melvillian “isolato,” yearning for connection yet stymied by the whirring of his own brain and the discontinuities of an America reeling from information overload.”
If we could add one thing to Max’s work, it would be, of course, David’s delightfully provocative Top Ten List.
David Foster Wallace’s Top Ten List
1. The Screwtape Letters by C. S. Lewis (1942).
2. The Stand by Stephen King (1978).
3. Red Dragon by Thomas Harris (1981).
4. The Thin Red Line by James Jones (1962).
5. Fear of Flying by Erica Jong (1973).
6. The Silence of the Lambs by Thomas Harris (1988).
7. Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert A. Heinlein (1961).
8. Fuzz by Ed McBain (1968).
9. Alligator by Shelley Katz (1977).
10. The Sum of All Fears by Tom Clancy (1991).
New List
Claire Messud
1. Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen (1813).
2. In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust (1913–27).
3. The Portrait of a Lady by Henry James (1881).
4. Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert (1857).
5. Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy (1877).
6. The Possessed by Fyodor Dostoevsky (1872).
7. Confessions of Zeno by Italo Svevo (1923).
8. A House for Mr. Biswas by V. S. Naipaul (1961).
9. The Loser by Thomas Bernhard (1983).
10. Oscar and Lucinda by Peter Carey (1988).
Classic List
Arthur Phillips
1. The stories of Franz Kafka (1883–1924).
2. Life: A User’s Manual by Georges Perec (1978). See below).
3. The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann (1924).
4. Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov (1962).
5. Hamlet by William Shakespeare (1600).
6. In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust (1913–27).
7. War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy (1869).
8. The stories of Anton Chekhov (1860–1904).
9. The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas (1844).
10. The Odyssey by Homer (ninth century b.c.e.?).