Jeepers, no idea if I have the years absolutely correct here. And I am no scholar on this. And, like George, i have major gaps in my reading. But this was fun to do.
1300-1350 Divine Comedy
1350-1400 Canterbury Tales
1400-1450
1450-1500 Morte D'Arthur
1500-1550 The Prince (Machiavelli)
1550-1600 Hamlet (Shakespeare)
1600-1650 Don Quixote
1650-1700 Paradise Lost (Milton)
1700-1750 Gulliver's Travels
1750-1800
1800-1850 Anything by Jane Austen
1850-1900 Thus Spoke Zarathustra (Nietzsche) OR Heart of Darkness (Conrad)
Nice selections, Mary! Some alternate nominations:
~700BC The Odyssey
1750-1800 Candide
1800-1850 Frankenstein, Oliver Twist, Dead Souls
1850-1900 Moby Dick, The Brothers Karamazov, Alice in Wonderland, Huckleberry Finn
1900-1950 The Call of the Wild, The Metamorphosis, Winnie the Pooh, The Grapes of Wrath, West with the Night, The Sheltering Sky
1950-2000 The Cat in the Hat, To Kill a Mockingbird, The Left Hand of Darkness, One Hundred Years of Solitude, The Confessions of Nat Turner, Slaughterhouse Five, Midnight's Children
Since they were born, my daughters listened to a Winnie the Pooh CD every night before they went to bed when we were at our lake house (they shared a room there). It was called "The Original Story of Winnie the Pooh" read by Long John Baldry. Recently (they're 22 and 21 now), they told me they still listen to the story... on Spotify. I can't blame them, it is a lovely, soothing narration.
all excellent choices! I'd have to add Beloved by Toni Morrison to your alternate list. (And once I add Beloved, well, there are a zillion more to add....)
Yes! And, looking back on my choices, I regret that none were written by women. I'd love to add Frankenstein, West with the Night (not a novel but great), To Kill a Mockingbird, The Left Hand of Darkness, The Handmaid's Tale, The Accidental Tourist -- once you get going it *is* hard to stop.
Yeah, I think multiple books gives a more complete picture of what was going on in literature at the time. E.g. The Brothers Karamazov, of course, but also Alice in Wonderland.
I remember being assigned to read Middlemarch in high school. I was very skeptical that this thick book would be meaningfulto me. I was so surprised and delighted how much I liked it. I’ve tried to read it again once every decade. It never disappoints.
We had Mr Casaubon himself (aka known as Mr Gibb, or Gibbs - it was a long time ago) as a teacher for Middlemarch, and despite this, I still love the book. Would put it above either of the Janes, although agree, too cruel a choice.
Don’t know how I could ever pick between Mrs D and To the Lighthouse (the latter maybe my favorite novel ever). That said, in terms of the shadow it casts, including on Woolf, I would probably put In Search of Lost Time in the top slot for 1900-1950.
yes, I basically flipped a coin between the two Woolf books! Ha! In Search of Lost Time hangs over my head, year after year, unread (but for the first volume). I hope to get through it before i die, but i cannot predict the future.
Yes agreed. Jane Austen brought so much that was new and fresh to the novel - free indirect style for one, but you have to also have the Brontë’s, not just Charlotte, but Emily and Anne as well. Withering Heights is a marvel of construction and was widely considered a disgusting and amoral book. She was probably a greater writer than Charlotte, but sadly we would never find out. The Tennant of Wildfowl Hall by Ann is also a fantastic read. Then there’s Wilkie Collins! So many great novels around that time.
My sister-in-law told me to read it when I was about....28? She couldn't believe I hadn't read it. (She didn't know I hadn't read ANYTHING back then.) It was my subway book, going to and from work (NYC). And now that I think about it, it pretty much changed my life.
Curious about how it changed my life? Suddenly, I understood that I was a person who loved to read, and that there were a billion great books out there just waiting for me. Also, after reading something so fabulous I realized that I wanted to write and that writing was something that I could do. Reading and writing--I could do these things. I know that sounds crazy, but i hadn't thought of my life in that way before--as being a person who reads and writes. My self-identity rejiggered itself. I decided to become a writer.
To have that book be the one to have that impact is so great. I wonder if it'd been a different book...there's a story right there. Yes, that's what made me curious! Many things about that book blow my mind, including that Tolstoy had understanding of the double standards for men and women back in the 1870s.
I love them both as well. But, in the stream of novels from Don Quixote to the Rachels (cusk and Kushner) it’s the novels that altered the stream that, I feel, we’re talking about here. For instance, for its tectonic effect on the 21st Century novel one could make the case that Knausgaard’s My Struggle is more plate shifting than, say, Rooney’s Normal People though both are beloved.
Scout’s cute. Dolores is tragic. Plus, the Nabokov is an ur text for post modernism which, arguably, eclipsed english literature in the back half of the 20th Century. No Nabokov no Pynchon, DeLillo, Foster-Wallace, Amis. Mockingbird, though a beloved work, never moved the cultural dial.
I can totally see that. I loved Moby Dick. Just read it again this past year. All of this is comparing apples to oranges. So many books fit the bill for the Questioner.
Great list. I'd add Tristram Shandy for 1750-1800 and, as much as I love Lincoln in the Bardo, I'd sub in Atonement, which still seems to me unsurpassed as a novel in this century. Also, Hamlet may be greater than any novel of its time (or before or since), but does a play qualify? If not, I wonder about one of the Pantagruel books by Rabelais. I remember laughing out loud at Rabelais back in college and marveling that anything so ribald and goofy could have been written so long ago.
Will try Rabelais. I felt similarly about Dead Souls by Nikolai Gogol. Was so surprised that something written so long ago and a different language than mine could be so funny. I did not realize that humor could cross so much distance.
The New York Times would put the Corrections in that spot. I'm not sure why. I'm having a hard time getting into it. Listening to it on Audible is shedding some light, but I'm still waiting to find it all meaningful.
I read it when it came out and ended up loving it. I kind of remember not wanting to love it, I think because of the Oprah thing. Hope you start to enjoy it soon!
Woolf, of course! But I wonder if from 1900 on, we should list the novels of each decade? With the increase in publishing many more vital novels to read.
It's striking me that maybe we aren't just looking for works that represent the 50 years, but that works that were change agents for the next periods. I think that that extra element is what helps separate the "also rans" from the chosen book.
Excellent list, mary! Heart of Darkness - the slowest reading best book ever! I love that book so much. But that's also the same year range as Moby-Dick! Argh.. impossible choice. And I must say, 2000-now, I agree! We might spar over 1900-1950.
Wow, 2 for 2 Lee. I read Heart of Darkness as part of the Norton Anthology of Short Fiction. I was surprised how great it was. (Suddenly made sense why it had inspired so many other works; Apocalypse Now, etc.
So many plays Mary, and some poems, and why - I do dare to ask - "Lincoln in the Bardo of course', as in what earns this Lincoln's name in the 24 year frame of novels published since 2000?
And why, or should I ask what justifies "Anything by Austen"?
I'm not seriously querulous but, rather and meaningfully, celebrating this curious romp through long stories, as told long past, up to and including long stories told of much more recent date and literary vintage.
Let's leave lie, for the moment, in this - I'll call it - literary poker game, the positing that 'Lincoln in the Bardo' might carry the day and the Victor Ludorum in the post 2000 time slot. I get your drift in nominating Fahrenheit 451 Mary but have two, just visiting my mind, "raise you Mary", counterbids:
1994's 'Birdsong' by Sebastian Faulks and 1955's 'The Quiet American' by Graham Greene. How do these two land with you?
P.S. To be clear as clarification can be: I don't ever gamble, save as such as the occasion we overnighted in Las Vegas. Ouch! Lost big: $1.25 cents down as we went to our room 🤣. Not that there's too much of the Funny Side about the addictive attraction that is gambling.
I loved The Quiet American. Have not read the Faulks. My list was thrown up there just for fun. I'm not stuck on any of my selections. And yes, I included poems and plays--well, I suppose I didn't really hear "novel" when George wrote "novel." I heard "stories/literature." (My bad.) I hope those who know more than me will put up some novels in place of where I went wrong. When you ask "what justifies anything by Austen"--well, if you have to ask, then what can I say? I'm an Austen fan! Don't take my list seriously, Rob. I'm just playing around, and honestly, I'm not terribly well read anyway.
Well Le Morte d'Arthur is technically a collection of stories, but I think the argument can be made that it's an early novel.
Divine Comedy, Canterbury Tales, Shakespeare--though not novels, I'd certainly keep those picks as well if we're compiling a list of essential "Great Reads" across human history . . . I'm complicating things by going farther back on my own list. Virgil, Homer, Ovid . . . Beowulf!
yeah, and the Rousseau doesn't count either. (I've been waiting for someone to call me on that one!) Well, I did my best! I'm guessing George wrote "novels" but maybe meant something close to "literature" or "stories." Whatever--we've got some fun lists in these threads. And I'll look up Pamela. Thanks!
Every time I read it I learn something about voice, or how a framing story can play with its tale—or at the very least I am reminded that humans have always enjoyed a well-placed fart joke.
I remember reading the Canterbury Tales my sophomore year of high school and twenty-five years later I can still recite the beginning of the prologue in middle English. We were not prepared for how funny and bawdy those stories would be. Your students are in for such a treat!!
Yes, the bawdiness (in Shakespeare, too) always catches them off-guard; one of my students was shocked by a footnote clarifying an anatomical pun in Hamlet. No doubt I was shocked, too, back in the day.
I'll use the Signet Classic edition; it has the original text and the Hieatt modern translation on facing pages. It's instructive, I think, to compare the two, even if fleetingly. To hear it makes the gap between then and now seem not so vast. I can recite a few lines of the General Prologue, but don't have the ear or the confidence to otherwise read Middle English aloud. Muddle English is more like it. :(
That's so cool. My high school English teacher--who taught us The Canterbury Tales--changed my life and made me want to be a writer. He's in my first published novel!
Should we instead offer up the Decameron instead of Canterbury, seeing as Chaucer kind of nicked his ideas from the Decameron? Just throwing that out there!
It's so hard to pick one, especially in the later (or more current) years. Should we offer up books that show good but one dimensional writing, like "Absolute Beginners", or throw out Raymond Carver? But then Raymond Carver learned from John Gardner. I mean from 1900 to 2000 (two time periods, I know) how many "great books" are there? No wonder you're offering EXTRA EXTRA credit, Mr. Saunders!
I’ve read and studied both at a graduate level, and for me it will always be Canterbury. I found more joy in reading it, it informed my writing more, and derivation doesn’t bother me (Shakespeare nicked entire plots but I still think his versions are more worth reading than the source material). But many will disagree, and that’s fine. How great to have so many passionate readers, eh?
April is, for sure, the cruellest month... so much of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales resonates and strikes multiple chords with each passing generation... I'll choose to point up his, posited by me, impact on Igor Stravinsky's 'Rite of Spring' or on T.S.Eliot's 'The Waste Land'. Question I;d pose: certainly a collection of framed and themed tales but a novel?
In the room Hornbrooks are known, maybe even prone, to come and go; ever inclining to talk of Michelangelo. Next wondering whether they do or don't dare descend the stair given, the revealing, characteristic bald spot in the middle of their hair.
Just riffing Lee, will delete if - utterly unintended - you read and feel i give offence.
I'm not just blocked-up but back-blocked-up with grand things to read but, notwithstanding common sense, i'm going to go hunt up My Own Private Waste Land... 3; 2; 1 🚀
Yes!! My 10th grade english teacher made us all write our own prologue’s for an original archetype (mine was The Bronie (male-presenting My Little Pony fans.))
I thought I hated “the classics” until we had the chance to engage with the work in fun and meaningful ways.
I love this question and tension involved in understanding what has come before and how it informs the art we create now. Imagination falls somewhere within that tension--that breaking of forms, but knowing the forms in order to know what to break, where to bend, what to build from. It's a labyrinth and a delight in many ways.
The one thing I would very strongly suggest is reading the marginalized writers as much as the 'canon' or expected names. Read Amelia Lanyer and Margaret Cavendish to know what women were writing about in the early modern age, along with the expected works. Read and seek out the work of writers who were writing outside of what 'made' the novel and what actually was circling around the novel and contributing to its form, ideas, structure. One of the best parts of life--at least in my humble opinion--is knowing how much there is to learn and read that will never, ever be finished. And how many women and marginalized writers were contributing and determinedly getting their art out in the world. We owe it to the legacy of their works being erased from public memory to put them back into the conversation of what makes literature what it is--a much more varied and rich history than mainstream critics have ever allowed. (Ok, end of my soapbox rant). :)
Beautifully put, Freya. I particularly like the phrase “put them back in the conversation” because I like to think of books as a magic way of joining a conversation begun hundreds of years ago. Reading is my way of listening to what’s been said before adding my voice. And the best conversationalists, the ones who really make a dinner party sparkle, listen to everyone, not just the loudest or most famous among them.
I take this as an invitation to add a couple of Scandinavian authors to the list. Two Swedes who shared the Nobel Prize in 1974: Harry Martinsson and Eyvind Johnson. I think they are considered to be the first proletarian writers, i.e. not the first to write about the proletariat, but the first to actually come from the proletariat and write about their own experiences. There’s also the Norwegian Knut Hamsun (Nobel Prize 1920) who pioneered psychological literature which influenced writers from Kafka, Mann to Hemingway. And finally, Strindberg who was a precursor to expressionism and surrealism.
This is, as ever, wonderful, George, and comes as balm for the upset I felt having just read a piece in The Atlantic about how students are arriving at colleges with no experience reading books in their entirety. As a result, colleges are changing their expectations. The article mentions a Melville course at Columbia that doesn’t include Moby Dick because it’s too long.
I would be interested in people’s thoughts about this and specifically, anyone’s personal experience as a professor or a student.
I am always humbled by how many gaps there are in my reading, especially given how much time I have spent in my life so far (62 years) reading. One excuse is that I am an incredibly slow reader, and I like to reread the things I love most. I couldn’t count how many times I’ve read “To the Lighthouse,” “Middlemarch,” “Crime and Punishment,” “As I Lay Dying,” “Lincoln in the Bardo.” I very much identify with your saying that you read things that light you up. I do the same, over and over again.
If I had been told how much Moby Dick I had to read, at what pace, and informed of the date by which the book must be completed, my experience would have been completely altered, like listening to a symphony on 2x speed, in order to hear all the notes in the right order, but without the full weight of rest. Like being told you must eat an entire birthday cake in one sitting, even if you LOVE sugar. Something about the art form is the unique interaction of reader with text, the collaborative creation with the steering wheel placed completely in the readers hands—if you don’t feel in control when you are reading or that you are being pushed to experience something in a particular way that may or may not be yours, something is definitely lost. So, my sense of the dilemma is to allow a deep enough dive to get a sense of the enormity of what is there, enough knowledge to incur a humility of knowing how much you don’t know, to allow you to follow up when you feel the time is right.
At Univ of Kansas while I was there, we held a 24 hour "Reading Moby-Dick event." People would volunteer to stand by a podium in a public place and read for 30 or 60 minutes, many English profs, and others - and the book would be read aloud for 24 hours - cover to cover! So much fun!
Misread this at first glance Lee, in a way that left me gobsmacked with my ribald takeaway: "Reading My-Moby-Dick" conjuring up some form of storytelling from some erogenous zone or other.
I'm still struggling, somewhat, with continuing challenging vision... but what a hoot, mistaking a great novel for some passing moment of some promising (but unutterably undeliverable) presence in prose from the ancient mythical 'Isle of Pornographia' 🤣
Robin, I'm a college professor, and as you might imagine, my colleagues and I discuss this frequently, especially about a half-dozen of us who teach in a humanities general education sequence. We all agree that the majority of students simply will not, perhaps cannot, read as much as they used to. Our responses to that vary a bit. Some colleagues have moved toward shorter excerpts of texts. My own preference is to hold the line more, because I want to be sure I am not shortchanging that minority of students who really do want to read and are hungry for the real experience. I owe all of them an honest day's work, but those latter students are the ones I can really do something with and who will really benefit from what we have to offer them. I'm sure, though, that all of us, including me, assign somewhat less reading than we would have twenty years ago.
I tried to hold the line. I was wildly unpopular in certain classes, then in trouble with administration for not pleasing more crowds. It's a tough line to keep. I admire you for doing it.
Thank you, Susann. Fortunately, I have a good core group of colleagues and a generally supportive administration. I suspect we may be at different types of institutions. You do what you can to fight the good fight, yes?
Right ... So are you at an R1? In grad school, teaching classes was FUN, and none of my cohort realized that those generally anxious years (snagging a job at all was iffy) would be the halcyon ones. Students were usually motivated, read off-syllabus on their own, did weird and creative stuff, took risks ... The students I had later had different concerns, valid ones, and a couple of them went on to be famously successful, but it was overall a different pool. I never quite understood why the creative writers did not want to read much--or attend visiting writers' events ... They would go to hear each other read, however.
Oh, not by a long shot. I'm at a small Christian university (Houghton University) in western New York, a little over an hour from Buffalo. Plenty of challenges, as at just about every small school these days, but we are hanging in there. Have not yet abandoned a belief in the liberal arts. Mostly students from rural western NY and from PA (with a nice mix of international students because of historic missions connections), for the most part not ones who have enjoyed lots of advantages, decent number of first-generation students -- nice young men and women, not yet jaded. They're really quite pleasant to teach... but they haven't been trained to read a lot!
Peter, I’m so glad that you are holding the line. There have to be students - however few - who are showing up, as you say, “hungry for the real experience.” Thank you for still teaching to them.
Thank you for the rescuing work. I was one of those students, and I don’t know what would have happened to me without professors who gave so generously.
Yeah. That's hard. How do you compete with iPhones, social media, algorithms etc. Impossible. I wonder how much of our current political and cultural quagmires stem at least in part from the newer generations reading less and less. And then of course there's the question of what they are reading.
Having been a public high school teacher and librarian, I can attest to the fact that the curriculum has moved away from ‘full text’ to ‘snippets.’ This is due to standardized testing. What happens in the classroom imitates the standardized test with its short excerpts and then questions about those. Schools are judged by the test scores, so they work with that context. It’s surreal. Try to create high-scoring students by not reading books.
Yes! I saw this trend all too clearly in my final years as a middle school history teacher. Standardized testing is the educational pestilence that walks by night-and school days. As you so well articulate- it's insane!
Well put, Carolyn. But I thought that colleges were phasing out standardized testing (and good riddance to it). How, then, is it dictating what is being taught?
Yes, the testing tide was receding at the college level, although it is starting to flow back in again. For K-12 public schools this is the primary means of measuring student achievement and district administrators pretty much consider them the be-all and end-all of their district's success. This mainly falls on language arts and math teachers as those are the curricular areas tested-but history and science were also tested at the middle school level in California for a time. The day my students took the test in history it felt as if my worth as a teacher and a human being was on the line. If your school scored well it was time for celebration, and if not, it was a time of great sorrow and shame.
Isn’t this a party?! I’ve enjoyed reading through the lists and discussions. Many of my suggestions are already represented, so I’ll just zero in on my biggest struggle: the 20th Century.
I mean 1900-1950…just one? How can I choose? Proust, Wharton, Wodehouse, Chesterton, Fitzgerald, Narayan?! For me, At-Swim-Two-Birds by Flann O’Brien, 1939, would be the one I think you should not miss.
And 1950-2000 is impossible, but maybe don’t miss Slaughterhouse Five or The Crying of Lot 49 or Damage by Josephine Hart.
Thank you so much for answering my question, though I wish your answer were different. What you say echoes The Atlantic piece: the goal is simply to turn out students who can achieve high scores on standardized tests. I cried reading it, not so much because I worry for the collective intelligence of the next generation (and all the generations to come - if there are generations to come, given our barbarism) - but for the souls of those to come. It is indeed surreal - and heartbreaking.
Same has happened in the UK. My son's were avid readers until they went to high school (at 11) and soon hated English lessons. They were taught the same books and plays over and over and these would be the ones covered in their exams at 16.
Argh. I have not yet read that Atlantic article out of fear it would depress me. I retired from college teaching 3 years ago. It had become increasingly difficult to get students to read anything, especially those in creative writing courses. I taught Moby Dick. I will never forget one student who said it was not inspirational, just the same old stuff he'd heard before. "Where?" I asked him. "Where?" And that's the point anyway, to put it together in a novel that can move us as much as that one can. But if no one reads it, no one gets moved.
“Know ye, now, Bulkington? Glimpses do ye seem to see of that mortally intolerable truth; that all deep, earnest thinking is but the intrepid effort of the soul to keep the open independence of her sea; while the wildest winds of heaven and earth conspire to cast her on the treacherous, slavish shore?”
One (just one) dimension of this chapter that stuck with me was this: Melville apparently abandoned this character as he was writing the novel. Bulkington never appears again in the whole of Moby Dick. The chapter can be read almost as a eulogy of his own wild imagination, conceiving and then dispatching Bulkington because he realized 'Moby Dick', the novel, didn't need him (he followed George's advice here). It syncs with the book's deeply experimental tone and narrative drive, as if Melville, in this chapter, was both celebrating the life and untimely death of one of his creations, while at the same time giving permission to his soul "to keep the open independence of her sea."
I was fortunate to study Moby-Duck under two Melville experts. One Prof (James Barbour) at Univ of New Mexico had been a student at UCLA of Melville’s biographer - Leon Howard. The other was the foremost female expert on the art of Moby-Dick, Professor Elizabeth Schultz - two of the most engaging and compassionate professors I ever had.
Wasn't inspirational? Oh lord. Is that what we've come to, a whole generation who can't read a book unless it's inspirational? Remember when people used to read because they appreciated serious art?
Moby Dick is a series of stories, in a way, beginning with some very funny ones. I wonder if there's a way to use that, and the way the differences in those stories work together.
I have watched people on hiking trails check their phones every half hour or so. Our devices are changing our behavior, and maybe our brains. In Laos and Cambodia, I saw many working mothers entertain their babies and toddlers with their phones. What else can they do?
Or maybe we have always had flickering attention, and our devices simply take better advantage of that.
I took part in a vast procession of giant marionettes (the one I was helping puppeteer was about 30 foot tall, the biggest twice that) in Liverpool in 2018. The crowds were literally in the hundreds of thousands. In a few places, every single person watched whilst filming on their phones - I guess once the percentage of people filming reached a certain tipping point, everyone did the same.
Even more jarring than seeing people watch three-inch pictures rather than the 30-foot marionette actually walking past them, was the silence. Eerie.
It may be that we have always been susceptible to flickering attention, but the distractions and devices that are so ubiquitous now have caused that susceptibility to fulminate into a full blown attention deficit.
I'm a college professor but in an entirely different subject (Art) and it depresses me how poorly read my students are despite our program (being in high demand) having an extremely high GPA entry requirement. (4.0 plus) As all of us know, reading changes you, regardless of your discipline, and I find my extremely high GPA students only care if it's going to affect their grade.
I couldn't agree more. I told our administrators we might as well admit them based on their time in the 40 yard dash----then we would have REALLY FAST Animators . . .
All. The. Time. Even ten years ago. Even graduate students, alas. But one of the skills you learn as a grad student is to fake it, and the most powerful sentence you pick up as a PhD is "My reading of that text isn't fresh, so I'm going to think some more about your question and answer later"--when asked about something you utterly do not recognize.
I read the Atlantic article too. I wasn't much of a reader way-back-when I went to college, so I felt a bit ashamed of myself--I now read many books. But I can assure you not all kids are like that. Sorry, but please allow me to brag about my granddaughters. One of my granddaughters is a voracious reader. She asked her mom to buy her Anna Karenina a couple of years ago, (maybe when she was a sophomore) has read most of Stephen King (she likes horror and has already begun to write her own books) and last year when I was visiting, she was reading Otello. As for my other granddaughter, she's a freshman at Williams College and is expected to read one book each week for one of her classes. To what do I attribute this? Possibly the fact that their mother read them books when they were infants, took them to the library often, and made reading an important part of their lives.
My daughter is a creative writing student at Emerson. I am vicariously thrilled every time a purchase for a physical book comes through my credit card on the way to her apartment. They have been reading considerably fewer digital copies because they get those books and mark them up—annotating their histories in pencil and coffee stains. We are poorer, yes, but delighted.
I well know the feeling, Kathy! My youngest son - who was a literature major at Sarah Lawrence - reads constantly, and I, too, am thrilled by his book buying. I recently saw a doctor of mine who also sees my son and the first thing he said to me about my son: “He always has a book with him.” Wishing your daughter all the best with her writing.
Yes, reading is way, way down. Even when I lived in New York and was in a writing group many of the younger ones in their early twenties, when I asked what they read, said, Oh, I don't read; I do podcasts.
One would expect that a generation (or three) weaned on Cole's Notes, listicles, tweets and instant gratification would be more inclined to gravitate toward short fiction. Weirdly, this does not appear to be the case.
Well Robin seems to me you are drawing our attention to what is, let's say in support of the value of colourful metaphor, surely one of tectonic plate divides burgeoning threat upon our diverse, contemporary global cultures: it will, or more hopefully may not be a case of 'The War of the Worlds' envisaged by H G Wells, or 'Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus' but 'The Untold Battles Between Readers and Non-Readers' that ends our present, daily down-spiralling descent to Perdition... with not a hint of a bang but a whole lot of woeful whimpering.
We actually discussed that article in my college class this semester! The only class I really like, as it happens.
The consensus between myself and the other students was mostly one of disbelief. I'm in New York, filling in some credits at the local community college, before transferring to one of the four year SUNY colleges. So almost none of my peers had taken Honors or AP classes, and all of us, even the just-graduated, had read a complete book in highschool. Even the girl that graduated from HS in Texas.
The idea that teens are performing at the sort of level needed to land in elite institutions rather than a regional community college, without reading a book, and on a level where it's being asserted as an epidemic, seems to strain credulity.
Not that I don't think the problem exists, but I really struggle with the assertion that seemed implicit in the article: students don't know how to read books, but this does not otherwise impact academic achievement, or make it so they can't be accepted to Columbia. That not-reading-books is a problem that can exist in isolation.
My feeling is that the article is catastrophizing the problem of regional education guidelines: are there places in the US where reading a full and complete book is not a requirement? Almost certainly. Is it the norm? All the signs I can see point to no. And again, the Atlantic positioned this not just as a problem of our incredibly unbalanced public education system (which is absolutely a huge problem!), but that they were Ivy League students.
Who are disproportionately likely to have attended a private school, and one of the big selling points is academic rigeur beyond the results of standardized tests. My sister attended private school only a couple years ago, and I recall her reading about a book a month?
For me as a college student, there definitely *are* challenges when it comes to how you read books in college, but they're admittedly far less eye-catching.
1) Extremely limited ability to complete one book before starting the next.
It makes it incredibly jarring and difficult to usefully retain the words, especially with fiction that might benefit from a close read, when I'm required to work through multiple books simultaneously, typically in chunks of 50 pages or so.
Switching between Rubyfruit Jungle, Wizard of Earth Sea, the Odyssey, and Frankenstein in order to complete simultaneous reading assignments, mostly just guaranteed that I didn't enjoy or really remember any of them.
And this is an issue that I find to be pretty unique to college, as in highschool I only ever had one Literature class at a time. Even when taking Honors, I was never in a situation of reading chapters 11-15 of Book B, 1-6 of Book A and finishing Book C all in the same night.
2) I'm an English Major. So I have a ton of required lit classes for my major. And thus a sometimes hysteria-inducing amount of reading every night.
I have never had less than two lit classes in a semester. Right now even my two non Literature classes have turned out to be Lit class in all but name, based on the amount of reading.
This can result in 250+ pages of reading, in four different novels, plus questions to answer in the textbook, assigned Monday and completed by Wednesday.
So depending on your major, the sheer *amount* of reading outpaces the expectations of even advanced highschool classes pretty much exponentially.
I think I bought around 25 different books for this semester. I'm only taking 13 credits. So I'm clearing more than a novel a *week* most of the time, by comparison to my sister at her exclusive high school.
3) Assignments -- and thus the manner in which you're expected to retain, engage with, and synthesize readings from the text -- are also much different.
As an example from highschool: we read Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, spent a few classes having discussions about "honorable men", who was honorable, who was not, were these categories open to interpretation, what was Caesar's tragic flaw, etc. Then our assignment was a paper that argued some point about how Shakespeare employed virtue and honor in that play.
ALL of my Lit Classes have completely open topics for our papers.
"Choose a text and argue for your view of how it pertains to the material of this class."
"For this assignment, write a paper about our chosen genre of literature that makes a different point than the one you made for Paper #1."
One of my classes focuses more on in-class open book analysis writing assignments, which *do* have a valid prompt, although we're only given it at the start of the cass, then have the class period to complete a few decent paragraphs of reflection on that prompt.
(It's probably obvious which I prefer.)
4.) In short, when the assignment has no bounds, it requires a much higher level comprehension of the text... and the way we read these books is not really conducive towards that for me.
If I'm being asked to create not just an argument and support for that argument, but the entire theme and subject matter constellation I'm going to be working within, I really want to be able to take notes on what I'm reading, and read these books in a way that is productive to understanding and performing that kind of self-directed interrogation of the material.
I want the luxury of reading through the text to discover what I believe about it, and build a few pages of quotes for textual support that I feel creates the shape of something meaningful.
But I do not have that luxury, which is really frustrating, when that's the whole reason I want to be an English Major. Instead, my approach has thus-far been to read the texts as per the class assignments, and then find two outside sources I can put in conversation with each other, in a way that pertains to my initial feelings about the text. And then citing them whenever I reference outside ideas.
5.) Although, my biggest problem is probably that due to these factors, the discussions in most of my classes don't really feel ... relevant or important. They don't move me towards a more nuanced understanding of the material, nor do they help me refine the approach or ideas I might use in an essay, or give me inspiration I might explore, or just make me feel like I'm learning something through the experience.
Most of my Lit classes sort of just feel like an hour long compilation of our different Goodreads reviews on the chapters we read. "I liked..." "I didn't like..."
It's all very... "there's no wrong interpretations in literature!" which I don't love, as it feels like a way to avoid teaching how to get there, and the difference between "no interpretation is wrong" and "all interpretations are equally valid / meaningful". And those are very different statements.
But I'm trying to stay positive and finish my degree. My father swears my upper division classes will be better once I transfer, my mother says "yes, but the reading lists get even longer".
Maybe I should just switch back to Creative Writing...
A., I'm a big Zadie Smith fan too: her writing is full of vitality, humor, and a patient, compassionate appraisal of the messy beauty of the world we live in. Her essays (if not, I guess, the podcast you mention) show an agile mind at play in any number of fields; the ones I found the most resonant were about film and painting.
Like a lot of writers, I started writing because I love reading (I write fiction now) and love theater (I initially tried writing for the stage), and I wanted to emulate the writers that gave me so much pleasure.
One story began as an oblique response to an elegant sentence in a James Baldwin novel; another was inspired by To the Lighthouse, where Woolf immerses us in the intense dramas of family life, only to contrast it with the soulless depredations of war and of time itself.
So A., I hope, whatever approach you take, that you read as you write, not prior to doing so; and (even if you're scheduled to read Dubliners this week and The Good Soldier the next), if a book by Percival Everett or Jenny Offill or catches your eye, read it, too!
Serendipity is a gift, a call from the subconscious.
George, one reason I signed up for Story Club is that its embrace of literature--your embrace--is a reflection of joy, of an eagerness to explore--not, or not primarily, a project rooted in a sense of pedagogical duty or obligation. (And I write this as someone who happily spends his working days teaching high school English, and whose graduate degrees are in English literature, not creative writing.)
Joining SC, however belatedly, has reawakened my desire to write, so thank you very much for that.
There is no 'belatedly' in or about Story Club Peter. You're being here now - more than where you've come from or wherever you may be going - is the deal. Great to be reading the thoughts you cared to share and air.
I love serendipity. One of my favourite aspects of life in general.
I even take pleasure in moments like putting a load of paper in the printer, and it turning out to be exactly the right number of pages for the document I'm printing.
An example that's so ridiculously insignificant, it's almost not worth mentioning; but, as a writer, sometimes taking pleasure in the small things is needed to keep going.
I think it’s essential to know the tradition in which you are writing. I don’t believe that even a musician can create in isolation. Great musicians go to see live music, insatiably, and writers should read as if books were food and there is never enough. Not every thing is delicious, but you gotta eat.
I have a PhD in comparative literature. You have to know at least 3 traditions in their native languages, one of them from start (the ancestral language, where I studied, even a classical language) to contemporary. I did that before I knew I wanted to write fiction.
Why not find syllabi online, what professors at universities are requiring? It’s not hard to get people’s syllabi. That might be a good way to search.
Because I specialized in Russian, I like George Saunders' Swim in a Pond . . . and Nabokov’s Lectures on Literature, though both are eccentric (of course), because hearing opinions on literature is also important. That’s why I like this story club.
I studied the novel, and my thesis starts the novel as we know it—that is with developed and true to life characters, dialogue, a plot, recognizable or at least believable settings—in the seventeenth century in France, eighteenth in England and a bit later in Russia, early nineteenth with a novel written in verse, Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin. But long narratives have been with us since before they were written down, no matter what you call them. I don’t know from 1300, but
1600-1650 Don Quixote, Spanish. This is an episodic novel, so not as sophisticated in plot as novels would get, also a self-conscious one, though, which makes it delightful.
1650-1700: La Princess de Cleves, a dramatic novel, written by a woman, Mme de Lafayette, that broke the tradition of unplotted, idealized long narratives (romances), like Madelene de Scudery’s Le Grand Cyrus.
1700-1750: Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa, which was 1747 or 48, epistolary, with strong character development and a drawn out but dramatic plot. Because it is several volumes, it’s not much read. But it’s a masterpiece. So is Tom Jones, 1749, but I like this better. This is English. And I'd call it emblematic because of its influence and the way it reflects the times, particularly the state of women.
1750-1800: there were a lot of novels during this time period, especially in England and France. Out of excitement about what happened in 1825, though, I can’t think about this time period now.
1800-1850: Alexander Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin, a novel in verse, well plotted with well developed characters, a stellar use of language, untranslatable, Russian. It set the stage for all of Russian literature. 1825-1832. It's worth learning that whole difficult language just to read Pushkin's digression on feet.
These are all emblematic. After 1850 the field gets so crowded, I’m inclined just to mention my favorites. But I do think Dostoevsky and Tolstoy (Tolstoevsky) are emblematic of the second half of the nineteenth-century.
1850-1900: A tie, maybe many ties. This period marks the heyday of the modern novel. My personal favorites are Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Brothers Karamazov and Tolstoy’s War and Peace, though there are many other novels I love from this time period.
1900-1950: Again, there are many. My personal favorite is James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. But that leaves out a whole population of writers, including Faulkner, whose The Sound and the Fury is a masterpiece. I don’t know which I’d call reflective of the time or definitive.
1950-2000: Catch 22. Or One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.
2000-Now: This is my weak spot. I’m eager to see what other people say.
Your program sounded familiar, so I looked you up. We did in fact get our degrees in the same place. I, too, wrote a dissertation about the form of the novel. Too bad our time there did not overlap.
Haha! That's the way with graduate study. Sounds fascinating. My dissertation director was in Russian, Joan Grossman, as she taught a three-quarter course in influences on the Russian novel. (Berkeley had the quarter system then.) But because I was also doing French and English, I needed other readers who advised me as I wrote it. Robert Alter was one. He was in comparative literature, and he'd started his career with a book on Fielding. My case study in English was Clarissa, but he was invaluable for structuring the dissertation as well as the eighteenth-century context. French too. I vaguely remember my French advisor, a man named Eustis, I think, and he kept saying, of the draft, "I liked it the first time I read it!" My graduate advisor, also on my committee, was Robert Hughes. He was also in Russian, but he team taught a course with Alter on self-conscious literature, in which we read Diderot, Bely, Tristram Shandy, I think, Don Quixote. Coursework was minimal, but I took a seminar with a Scandinavian expert whose name I can't remember. That introduced me to Karen Blixen. And probably the best experience I had was a seminar in oral literature with a medievalist in French--oh, his name is escaping me. He was from Philadelphia, Duggan, maybe? Joe Duggan? Does that ring a bell? I took my exams in the office of a German professor who was in the comparative literature department, but I can't remember his name.
Don't apologize for going on too long. I enjoy the interactions I've encountered on this substack. It is filling a need for intellectual conversation about fiction. And it's good to meet you.
By the way, I have another vague memory of my TA from first year English holding up a copy of Tender is the Night and saying, "This is shit. Pure shit." He was opinionated. But sadly for me I have not yet read it. I do like Jackson Browne's song of the same title, though!
This is a really great and rich response, but I would just question whether it's really "essential to know the tradition in which you are writing"?
As you've illustrated, one of the joys of the novel is its constant reinvention and I think it's therefore perfectly possible for someone to write a great novel based on their experiences and interaction with wider culture without being remotely well-read (especially in terms of history). Such authors may be the exception rather than the norm, but I'm sure they're out there.
Unfortunately, not doing a lot of reading isn't really something which authors tend to boast about in interviews, so it's tricky to give concrete examples, but the music equivalent would be punk: “This is a chord. This is another. This is a third. Now form a band.”
I can partly see your point; though at the same time, I struggle to think of any significant artist - however experimental - who simply ignored everything that had gone before in their art-form.
At the same time, I'm not sure how I would identify such a person . . .
All the same, whilst I know there's a theory that '10,000 hours of practice' is required to master something, I can't imagine someone getting a guitar and simply sitting with it by themselves for that long and becoming a great guitarist.
Though even as I write this, I'm thinking punk was needed . . .
. . . but also that punk was absolutely a reaction to and rejection of what had gone before . . .
I think it might be the difference between a good story and a story that resonates with the culture, between a song and a sound and music that moves from, say, Bach and "Light my Fire," which happens when Ray Manzarak writes that riff--or the whole tradition of Delta blues and the way some Englishman plays his guitar.
Good comparison. The best thing a serious writer can do is write. Every day. Reading is crucial, too, but the writing, the actual practice of it, is The Golden Ticket.
I stumbled across George’s A Swim in a Pond in the Rain and Logan airport in Boston. It was stacked on the tables at the front of the bookstore. I was so delighted that such a different kind of book was being widely offered. And I ate the whole thing up. Soon after I bought 50 stories by Chekhov and gobbled that up too. When my father was alive, he talked about taking a course in Russian literature at Columbia University. His favorite book of all time was Dead Souls, and that has become my favorite as well.. My mother helped him get through his required reading list for the course at the time, and her favorite book from the list was Oblomov by Goncharov. Mom said: “Oblomov doesn’t get out of bed until more than halfway through the book. That alone makes it worth reading. “
"It's worth learning that whole difficult language just to read Pushkin's digression on feet."
I LOVE that thought!
I have for a while contemplated dedicating some time to learning Spanish well enough to read Don Quixote in the original . . . Perhaps this thread should be the nudge I need . . .
"Great musicians go to see live music, insatiably, and writers should read as if books were food and there is never enough. Not every thing is delicious, but you gotta eat."
In response, I got so much heartfelt advice and terrific perspective from you all—THANK YOU!
And one thing George and others said was in effect, "you'll know when it's ready." And you were exactly right! I just didn't think it could ever take this long—the first complete draft took 6 months to write—and the editing took 4 years.
The weirdest thing was in this final stretch this last week, I could feel that I was starting to separate from the book—that it really was trying to get birthed! And a few days ago I had a dream I was VERY pregnant. At 65, that's uncomfortable.
I can't tell you how much I learned in the process over this last year of editing so yes, it was all worth it. This book really had so much more to teach me than I ever imagined.
I emailed the manuscript to my agent 30 minutes ago and I am relieved. I'm also ready for the postpartum hangover and glad to report I do have other smaller projects in the wings.
That's fantastic. I relate. I often write a very fast first draft. And then comes the editing and revising. Congrats to you. It feels incredible to finish a book.
1950-2000 I just want to make a plug for Beloved by Toni Morrison. I think it changed the course of American Literature. I would also venture the Morrison's work changed the course of literature beyond the U.S. too
"Jane Eyre" (1847) needs to be added to the list, please. Not only is it an early example of a bildungsroman (coming of age novel), but it also features a female protagonist who triumphs despite the odds. Jane is no high society beauty, yet through her own determination, she creates a happy life for herself and others. As a female author, Charlotte Bronte nails female interiority. No "male gaze" here, which is personhood described all on the surface, and can often feel dehumanizing to the reader.
The novel seems to mix genres: romance, gothic, mystery with some magical realism woven in. It’s an early template of the orphan novel and the boarding school novel - hello Harry Potter!
As an added bonus, the illustrious Juliet Stevenson narrates the Audible version. Plus, there’s a dog! In other words, the book is perfect.
PS: I've always wanted to use the word bildungsroman!
Good for you! The beginning is a bit of a slog, in my opinion. One thing for us to keep in mind, as we read these older novels, is that they are more like "rough drafts" than "highly polished stone." Bronte certainly didn't have a word processor, Scrivener or Grammarly software, and probably didn't even have an editor.
Does anyone know the first novel that is likely to have gone through something resembling today's editing process? Certainly not "Ulysses"! 🤣
Btw, I once tried Scrivener, thinking it would be the perfect way to "move walls around" in my budding novel, with visions of jumping back and forth between my iPad (portable) and laptop, but there was so much device incomparability that I eventually gave up, resorting to old fashioned technology of legal pad and Bic gel pen. Plus, and this is tedious, but I found Scrivener's thick blinking cursor to be a total distraction, so I'd often write text in Word and then cut and paste it in to Scrivener, which spawned a whole host of other weird problems. Hopefully they've fixed these issues.
George, if you're reading this, I'd love a post on pros/cons of writing technology.
About 15 years ago I decided to finally read The Great Gatsby. My husband had as many gaps in his reading as I did, so I read it aloud to him whenever we were in the car and he was driving. And then we couldn’t stop. Pride and Prejudice. Cannery Row. The Sound and the Fury. Moby Dick! We didn’t make it all the way through Dante and Proust but we got a thrilling taste. After a few years my voice was getting tired and we switched to audiobooks. But for me there is no reading as delicious as reading aloud.
Wow! Cool story! I read one of my early draft novels out loud to my ex many years ago and it was a helpful experience. My folks and I listened to Thomas Mann's Magic Mountain together over a period of a few months. That was fun.
So smart! I recommend this step in the writing process—reading drafts aloud to another person—to all writers! I definitely do it myself, especially when I’m feeling stuck.
Two quick comments before my jet lag kicks in again...
1 - Nothing could be further from the truth than this comment:
"Music, on the other hand, almost works better freed from any hierarchy, that maybe it gets more interesting the more it strays."
I am a professional musician and I don't know one peer who would, in any way, agree with this. In order to stray you must have something to stray from, and that usually involves straying from what has come before, but only after having digested it. I realize this is not the forum for discussion music so I will stop here...
2 - I wonder what everyone here feels about Harold Bloom's take on literature. As I recall, he look at all (great?) literature as having been the result of a conversation with/response to what has come before. I believe "misreading" is also a part of his theory. In any event, I think he believes that nothing of value can be produced in the present without at least a nod to the past.
I wonder if anyone here has any thoughts about this...
(The jet lag experienced when traveling from NYC to Australia is nothing less than fierce.
I wrote a note about abloom somewhere in this thread. They just aren’t many readers in the world like him. For mere mortals having the kind of breadth and depth he had is not possible.
That comment about music left me scratching my head, too. I can't think of any art, or any human endeavor really, that doesn't require a grasp, or at least a working knowledge, of what came before. And as for Bloom, I agree there, too, and think he & James Wood can point toward suggestions as to what & how to read.
It's not a novel, but I'll vote for the King James Bible, written in 1611, as a book that should be on any serious writer's list. (Not any bible -- specifically the King James version.)
I can't even choose a favorite novel from the 1960's: The Master and Margarita, One Hundred Years of Solitude, and Slaughterhouse-Five are all top five favorites. What a marvel the last 200 years have been for the novel! How lucky I am to be alive when I am, reading all that I can!
I didn't choose my favorites! I chose books that I thought would be good for a list of books to read for the questioner. Like, a well-rounded list. Not sure I succeeded, but if I'd chosen my faves, the list would have been different.
I have such a hard time turning off my subjectivity. My favorites are the best and the best are my favorites! I was trying to think of this exercise as "time capsule for future civilization/aliens" but I'm really not qualified to choose one novel from each period that "contains the essential seed of what novels were," mostly because I haven't read enough from most of those periods pre-1700's.
I want to know what would have been on Mary's favorites list. Or maybe an easier (harder?) question--what ten novels would you put in your time capsule, for someone to look back and understand, this is what Mary loved?
This is going to be a hard one for me to answer. But I will work on this one, Manami, and get back to you on it. The main problem with choosing 10 is that I am a different person than I was when I read the books I've read. For instance, I LOVED Love in the Time of Cholera--but I haven't read it in 20 years. Is it still in my top ten? I don't know! But i like this idea--for someone to understand what mary loved. Okay, let me ponder.
Because of my own background, I had read very little of the classics by the time I was in my early 30s. I've had the compulsion to write since my late teens, but my lack of formal and informal education on the topic made me feel unqualified. There's a lot of books out there, and a lot of how-to books as well. What can be an overwhelming amount. After I read Stephen King's On Writing, the fire really started going.
I enrolled in a university at 33 to major in English (Creative Writing) and Philosophy. That's not possible for everybody, and it was barely possible for me. In the end, I am very grateful for the experience. If nothing else, it gave me confidence and direction. One thing I learned about there being so many books out there, is that you can't read them all. I am acquainted with quite a few of the classics now, but I also have the confidence to just read whatever the hell I want to read. The embarrassment of saying "No, I haven't read that one" is gone (mostly).
To hear that a writer of George Saunders caliber has "embarrassing" gaps in his own reading helps me to shed the imposter syndrome just a little more. I also thought maybe I was the only one who could cite an influence and not be able to tell you everything about it. There are some stories that have influenced me in a big way, and I can't remember either who wrote it, or what it's called. To remedy that I have started keeping lists, but some are lost to me forever.
Jeepers, no idea if I have the years absolutely correct here. And I am no scholar on this. And, like George, i have major gaps in my reading. But this was fun to do.
1300-1350 Divine Comedy
1350-1400 Canterbury Tales
1400-1450
1450-1500 Morte D'Arthur
1500-1550 The Prince (Machiavelli)
1550-1600 Hamlet (Shakespeare)
1600-1650 Don Quixote
1650-1700 Paradise Lost (Milton)
1700-1750 Gulliver's Travels
1750-1800
1800-1850 Anything by Jane Austen
1850-1900 Thus Spoke Zarathustra (Nietzsche) OR Heart of Darkness (Conrad)
1900-1950 Mrs. Dalloway (Woolf)
1950-2000 Fahrenheit 451
2000-now Lincoln in the Bardo of course
Nice selections, Mary! Some alternate nominations:
~700BC The Odyssey
1750-1800 Candide
1800-1850 Frankenstein, Oliver Twist, Dead Souls
1850-1900 Moby Dick, The Brothers Karamazov, Alice in Wonderland, Huckleberry Finn
1900-1950 The Call of the Wild, The Metamorphosis, Winnie the Pooh, The Grapes of Wrath, West with the Night, The Sheltering Sky
1950-2000 The Cat in the Hat, To Kill a Mockingbird, The Left Hand of Darkness, One Hundred Years of Solitude, The Confessions of Nat Turner, Slaughterhouse Five, Midnight's Children
2000- Cloud Atlas
I echo Winnie the Pooh. I listened to it with my kids on CD with British actors doing the reading. Mind blowingly funny. I highly recommend this: https://www.amazon.com/Winnie-Pooh-2-CDs-Milne/dp/184032001X/ref=asc_df_184032001X/?tag=hyprod-20&linkCode=df0&hvadid=692875362841&hvpos=&hvnetw=g&hvrand=15488361049602591028&hvpone=&hvptwo=&hvqmt=&hvdev=c&hvdvcmdl=&hvlocint=&hvlocphy=9194385&hvtargid=pla-2281435179818&psc=1&mcid=81fc007e3b19369696f33de75f5b5e8c&hvocijid=15488361049602591028-184032001X-&hvexpln=73
The definitive reading is by Alan Bennett, who is a national treasure here in the UK, and whose delivery of Milne's text is pitch-perfect
Since they were born, my daughters listened to a Winnie the Pooh CD every night before they went to bed when we were at our lake house (they shared a room there). It was called "The Original Story of Winnie the Pooh" read by Long John Baldry. Recently (they're 22 and 21 now), they told me they still listen to the story... on Spotify. I can't blame them, it is a lovely, soothing narration.
Fantastic! Thanks for this audio recommendation. “Once upon a time, a very long time ago now, about last Friday…” excellent delivery.
“….Winnie-the-Pooh lived in a forest all by himself under the name of Sanders [sic].”
God bless you for including Winnie the Pooh.
all excellent choices! I'd have to add Beloved by Toni Morrison to your alternate list. (And once I add Beloved, well, there are a zillion more to add....)
Yes! And, looking back on my choices, I regret that none were written by women. I'd love to add Frankenstein, West with the Night (not a novel but great), To Kill a Mockingbird, The Left Hand of Darkness, The Handmaid's Tale, The Accidental Tourist -- once you get going it *is* hard to stop.
Why the 'were' David? Surely plenty of time to review and revise your selections?
Fair enough. I edited my list a bit.
Left Hand of Darkness is a good one.
Don't worry Mary, I had it on my list.
What if we included multiple books for each time period? This is to be helpful, right?
Yeah, I think multiple books gives a more complete picture of what was going on in literature at the time. E.g. The Brothers Karamazov, of course, but also Alice in Wonderland.
yes to The Grapes of Wrath and Candide although I would put Madame Bovary in the 1850 slot.
More great choices! George was right about how hard this is. Interesting though--not a single female novelist on this list.
I suggested Carson McCullers, the heart is a lonely hunter, but I don‘t find my post😅
My list has many female novelists.
I've got Austen and Woolf on my list.
Yeah, I noticed that too shortly after I posted. I made some edits.
Yes, I love that you thought of Homer. And Sophokles ist missing: Antigone
Homer is way earlier in time from what George asked of us, so that's why he's not on my list as well.
Candide, one of my favourites. Great to see that here.
No Austen! No Eliot!
This was meant as an addendum to Mary's list, which includes Austen. As far as Eliot goes, I have no defense.
It is truly cruel that Jane Austen’s works and Jane Eyre are in the same chunk. Dear reader, I could not choose.
Not to mention Middlemarch
I loved Middlemarch so much. Sigh. Any lists are going to leave way too much out.
I remember being assigned to read Middlemarch in high school. I was very skeptical that this thick book would be meaningfulto me. I was so surprised and delighted how much I liked it. I’ve tried to read it again once every decade. It never disappoints.
We had Mr Casaubon himself (aka known as Mr Gibb, or Gibbs - it was a long time ago) as a teacher for Middlemarch, and despite this, I still love the book. Would put it above either of the Janes, although agree, too cruel a choice.
have you seen the book My Life in Middlemarch by Rebecca Mead?
hahahahaha! Yeah, some of these choices were brutal.
Don’t know how I could ever pick between Mrs D and To the Lighthouse (the latter maybe my favorite novel ever). That said, in terms of the shadow it casts, including on Woolf, I would probably put In Search of Lost Time in the top slot for 1900-1950.
yes, I basically flipped a coin between the two Woolf books! Ha! In Search of Lost Time hangs over my head, year after year, unread (but for the first volume). I hope to get through it before i die, but i cannot predict the future.
Same here! I've read and loved Volume one, but the other volumes sit unread on my shelf. Some day...
Exactly!
Yes agreed. Jane Austen brought so much that was new and fresh to the novel - free indirect style for one, but you have to also have the Brontë’s, not just Charlotte, but Emily and Anne as well. Withering Heights is a marvel of construction and was widely considered a disgusting and amoral book. She was probably a greater writer than Charlotte, but sadly we would never find out. The Tennant of Wildfowl Hall by Ann is also a fantastic read. Then there’s Wilkie Collins! So many great novels around that time.
1850-1900 I’d have to go with Anna Karenina. What fun. What agony. We could play this game forever.
I'm so glad I read Anna Karenina in my thirties and not sooner. I wouldn't have understood it. It's my favorite.
My sister-in-law told me to read it when I was about....28? She couldn't believe I hadn't read it. (She didn't know I hadn't read ANYTHING back then.) It was my subway book, going to and from work (NYC). And now that I think about it, it pretty much changed my life.
Now I’m curious…
Curious about how it changed my life? Suddenly, I understood that I was a person who loved to read, and that there were a billion great books out there just waiting for me. Also, after reading something so fabulous I realized that I wanted to write and that writing was something that I could do. Reading and writing--I could do these things. I know that sounds crazy, but i hadn't thought of my life in that way before--as being a person who reads and writes. My self-identity rejiggered itself. I decided to become a writer.
To have that book be the one to have that impact is so great. I wonder if it'd been a different book...there's a story right there. Yes, that's what made me curious! Many things about that book blow my mind, including that Tolstoy had understanding of the double standards for men and women back in the 1870s.
I finally read that during Covid. Incredible.
One of my all time favorites! God, I love that book! Oh, I see I picked the Conrad. I agree with you--should be Anna.
Yes. My choice too.
1950-2000 I’d put my money on Lolita winning by TKO in the second round.
I think To Kill a Mockingbird would probably take out Lolita.
Oh I don't know... i love them both, but Lolita is fine fine literature.
I remember reading Lolita during my MFA and feeling as if I were writing with crayons in my own work.
Right?! Master stylist. I'm reading Andrew Field's 1986 biography on him now, VN. Really fascinating.
I love them both as well. But, in the stream of novels from Don Quixote to the Rachels (cusk and Kushner) it’s the novels that altered the stream that, I feel, we’re talking about here. For instance, for its tectonic effect on the 21st Century novel one could make the case that Knausgaard’s My Struggle is more plate shifting than, say, Rooney’s Normal People though both are beloved.
Scout’s cute. Dolores is tragic. Plus, the Nabokov is an ur text for post modernism which, arguably, eclipsed english literature in the back half of the 20th Century. No Nabokov no Pynchon, DeLillo, Foster-Wallace, Amis. Mockingbird, though a beloved work, never moved the cultural dial.
I want both.
👍👍
Yep
I suggest 1900-1950 McCullers, The heart is a lonely hunter
Agreed with Don Quixote and Paradise Lost. I think Moby Dick beats Heart of Darkness though.
I can totally see that. I loved Moby Dick. Just read it again this past year. All of this is comparing apples to oranges. So many books fit the bill for the Questioner.
Yes
Great list. I'd add Tristram Shandy for 1750-1800 and, as much as I love Lincoln in the Bardo, I'd sub in Atonement, which still seems to me unsurpassed as a novel in this century. Also, Hamlet may be greater than any novel of its time (or before or since), but does a play qualify? If not, I wonder about one of the Pantagruel books by Rabelais. I remember laughing out loud at Rabelais back in college and marveling that anything so ribald and goofy could have been written so long ago.
Well, this is George's substack, so I'm sticking with Lincoln in the Bardo. But i did love Antonement!
Will try Rabelais. I felt similarly about Dead Souls by Nikolai Gogol. Was so surprised that something written so long ago and a different language than mine could be so funny. I did not realize that humor could cross so much distance.
The New York Times would put the Corrections in that spot. I'm not sure why. I'm having a hard time getting into it. Listening to it on Audible is shedding some light, but I'm still waiting to find it all meaningful.
I read it when it came out and ended up loving it. I kind of remember not wanting to love it, I think because of the Oprah thing. Hope you start to enjoy it soon!
Woolf, of course! But I wonder if from 1900 on, we should list the novels of each decade? With the increase in publishing many more vital novels to read.
There are so many books that would work for a list like this. So yes, a novel per decade is a great idea.
WOW, Mary! It's great you tackled this and BRAVA!
It's striking me that maybe we aren't just looking for works that represent the 50 years, but that works that were change agents for the next periods. I think that that extra element is what helps separate the "also rans" from the chosen book.
Yes. "Change agents." Exactly.
Mrs. Dalloway was so good. My senior year high school English teacher had us read that plus the Hours.
The Hours is such a wonderful tribute to Woolf--elegant, assured, & deeply melancholic.
I love that!
Excellent list, mary! Heart of Darkness - the slowest reading best book ever! I love that book so much. But that's also the same year range as Moby-Dick! Argh.. impossible choice. And I must say, 2000-now, I agree! We might spar over 1900-1950.
Wow, 2 for 2 Lee. I read Heart of Darkness as part of the Norton Anthology of Short Fiction. I was surprised how great it was. (Suddenly made sense why it had inspired so many other works; Apocalypse Now, etc.
We came out very similar except I just skipped the whole 1400 - 1500 period and I started to rebel in my attempt to choose just 1 from 1800 onwards.
So many plays Mary, and some poems, and why - I do dare to ask - "Lincoln in the Bardo of course', as in what earns this Lincoln's name in the 24 year frame of novels published since 2000?
And why, or should I ask what justifies "Anything by Austen"?
I'm not seriously querulous but, rather and meaningfully, celebrating this curious romp through long stories, as told long past, up to and including long stories told of much more recent date and literary vintage.
Let's leave lie, for the moment, in this - I'll call it - literary poker game, the positing that 'Lincoln in the Bardo' might carry the day and the Victor Ludorum in the post 2000 time slot. I get your drift in nominating Fahrenheit 451 Mary but have two, just visiting my mind, "raise you Mary", counterbids:
1994's 'Birdsong' by Sebastian Faulks and 1955's 'The Quiet American' by Graham Greene. How do these two land with you?
P.S. To be clear as clarification can be: I don't ever gamble, save as such as the occasion we overnighted in Las Vegas. Ouch! Lost big: $1.25 cents down as we went to our room 🤣. Not that there's too much of the Funny Side about the addictive attraction that is gambling.
I loved The Quiet American. Have not read the Faulks. My list was thrown up there just for fun. I'm not stuck on any of my selections. And yes, I included poems and plays--well, I suppose I didn't really hear "novel" when George wrote "novel." I heard "stories/literature." (My bad.) I hope those who know more than me will put up some novels in place of where I went wrong. When you ask "what justifies anything by Austen"--well, if you have to ask, then what can I say? I'm an Austen fan! Don't take my list seriously, Rob. I'm just playing around, and honestly, I'm not terribly well read anyway.
Stick to your guns, Mary! Austen is perfectly justified. No explanation necessary. :)
I still remember my first read of Pride and Prejudice. I was BOWLED OVER. How could one book be so good???
Many on your list are not novels. Divine Comedy, Canterbury Tales, Morte d'Arthur, are poems. First novel in English was Pamela, 1740, Richardson.
Well Le Morte d'Arthur is technically a collection of stories, but I think the argument can be made that it's an early novel.
Divine Comedy, Canterbury Tales, Shakespeare--though not novels, I'd certainly keep those picks as well if we're compiling a list of essential "Great Reads" across human history . . . I'm complicating things by going farther back on my own list. Virgil, Homer, Ovid . . . Beowulf!
yeah, and the Rousseau doesn't count either. (I've been waiting for someone to call me on that one!) Well, I did my best! I'm guessing George wrote "novels" but maybe meant something close to "literature" or "stories." Whatever--we've got some fun lists in these threads. And I'll look up Pamela. Thanks!
I just deleted the Rousseau.....
Jean Jacques is in his room, door closed, weeping.
Hahahhahahaha!
But on this basis writers who want a good understanding of literature would not read Shakespeare or Dante and I just can't get behind that idea.
True but Pamela was sooooo tedious!!!
Tedious to us indeed, but a real game-changer for the novel going forward.
1350-1400 Canterbury Tales
Every time I read it I learn something about voice, or how a framing story can play with its tale—or at the very least I am reminded that humans have always enjoyed a well-placed fart joke.
I love it, too; this fall, I am going to try introducing The Wife of Bath to my high school students.
I remember reading the Canterbury Tales my sophomore year of high school and twenty-five years later I can still recite the beginning of the prologue in middle English. We were not prepared for how funny and bawdy those stories would be. Your students are in for such a treat!!
Yes, the bawdiness (in Shakespeare, too) always catches them off-guard; one of my students was shocked by a footnote clarifying an anatomical pun in Hamlet. No doubt I was shocked, too, back in the day.
Country matters, perchance?
The shock of that is still firmly lodged in my brain 30 years on!
That's the one!
I remember that as well. Oh the memorization.
what translation do you like to use (I'm assuming your students don't read it in middle english, but maybe i'm wrong)?
I'll use the Signet Classic edition; it has the original text and the Hieatt modern translation on facing pages. It's instructive, I think, to compare the two, even if fleetingly. To hear it makes the gap between then and now seem not so vast. I can recite a few lines of the General Prologue, but don't have the ear or the confidence to otherwise read Middle English aloud. Muddle English is more like it. :(
Great! Thank you! I'm guessing you make that book come alive for your students. Yay for teachers!!!
We had to read and listen to it in Middle English – our teacher didn't think a translation was necessary. She just strode around speaking it out loud
Ha!!
Chaucer is great. Great idea.
That's so cool. My high school English teacher--who taught us The Canterbury Tales--changed my life and made me want to be a writer. He's in my first published novel!
Should we instead offer up the Decameron instead of Canterbury, seeing as Chaucer kind of nicked his ideas from the Decameron? Just throwing that out there!
It's so hard to pick one, especially in the later (or more current) years. Should we offer up books that show good but one dimensional writing, like "Absolute Beginners", or throw out Raymond Carver? But then Raymond Carver learned from John Gardner. I mean from 1900 to 2000 (two time periods, I know) how many "great books" are there? No wonder you're offering EXTRA EXTRA credit, Mr. Saunders!
I’ve read and studied both at a graduate level, and for me it will always be Canterbury. I found more joy in reading it, it informed my writing more, and derivation doesn’t bother me (Shakespeare nicked entire plots but I still think his versions are more worth reading than the source material). But many will disagree, and that’s fine. How great to have so many passionate readers, eh?
As I understand it, of all of Shakespeare's plays, only The Tempest has no obvious predecessors.
I agree 100%, though - the Bard did it better!
Readers Unite!
You beat me to it, but my thoughts exactly -- much as Ilove Chaucer
April is, for sure, the cruellest month... so much of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales resonates and strikes multiple chords with each passing generation... I'll choose to point up his, posited by me, impact on Igor Stravinsky's 'Rite of Spring' or on T.S.Eliot's 'The Waste Land'. Question I;d pose: certainly a collection of framed and themed tales but a novel?
My memoir is aptly named My Own Private Waste Land. T.S. Eliot through it all.
In the room Hornbrooks are known, maybe even prone, to come and go; ever inclining to talk of Michelangelo. Next wondering whether they do or don't dare descend the stair given, the revealing, characteristic bald spot in the middle of their hair.
Just riffing Lee, will delete if - utterly unintended - you read and feel i give offence.
I'm not just blocked-up but back-blocked-up with grand things to read but, notwithstanding common sense, i'm going to go hunt up My Own Private Waste Land... 3; 2; 1 🚀
Oh I show my bald spot, with a flair!
Sozz Lee; Linked-In; Not Me 😂
Sozz Lee; Linked-In; Not Me 😂
A whoopsie of some, inadvertent, sort; posting the same Reply Thrice; neither intended or pukka!
Sorry, don’t understand much, but find it funny…
Yes!! My 10th grade english teacher made us all write our own prologue’s for an original archetype (mine was The Bronie (male-presenting My Little Pony fans.))
I thought I hated “the classics” until we had the chance to engage with the work in fun and meaningful ways.
Agreed!
Excellent choice Ellen! Bawdiness never seems to go out of style!
Ha! Yep. I remember. Sophomore year of high school. The memorization!
I love this question and tension involved in understanding what has come before and how it informs the art we create now. Imagination falls somewhere within that tension--that breaking of forms, but knowing the forms in order to know what to break, where to bend, what to build from. It's a labyrinth and a delight in many ways.
The one thing I would very strongly suggest is reading the marginalized writers as much as the 'canon' or expected names. Read Amelia Lanyer and Margaret Cavendish to know what women were writing about in the early modern age, along with the expected works. Read and seek out the work of writers who were writing outside of what 'made' the novel and what actually was circling around the novel and contributing to its form, ideas, structure. One of the best parts of life--at least in my humble opinion--is knowing how much there is to learn and read that will never, ever be finished. And how many women and marginalized writers were contributing and determinedly getting their art out in the world. We owe it to the legacy of their works being erased from public memory to put them back into the conversation of what makes literature what it is--a much more varied and rich history than mainstream critics have ever allowed. (Ok, end of my soapbox rant). :)
Beautifully put, Freya. I particularly like the phrase “put them back in the conversation” because I like to think of books as a magic way of joining a conversation begun hundreds of years ago. Reading is my way of listening to what’s been said before adding my voice. And the best conversationalists, the ones who really make a dinner party sparkle, listen to everyone, not just the loudest or most famous among them.
Thank you for this, yes!
That was an excellent soap box rant.
Thanks Freya!
I take this as an invitation to add a couple of Scandinavian authors to the list. Two Swedes who shared the Nobel Prize in 1974: Harry Martinsson and Eyvind Johnson. I think they are considered to be the first proletarian writers, i.e. not the first to write about the proletariat, but the first to actually come from the proletariat and write about their own experiences. There’s also the Norwegian Knut Hamsun (Nobel Prize 1920) who pioneered psychological literature which influenced writers from Kafka, Mann to Hemingway. And finally, Strindberg who was a precursor to expressionism and surrealism.
Yes please!!!
This is, as ever, wonderful, George, and comes as balm for the upset I felt having just read a piece in The Atlantic about how students are arriving at colleges with no experience reading books in their entirety. As a result, colleges are changing their expectations. The article mentions a Melville course at Columbia that doesn’t include Moby Dick because it’s too long.
I would be interested in people’s thoughts about this and specifically, anyone’s personal experience as a professor or a student.
I am always humbled by how many gaps there are in my reading, especially given how much time I have spent in my life so far (62 years) reading. One excuse is that I am an incredibly slow reader, and I like to reread the things I love most. I couldn’t count how many times I’ve read “To the Lighthouse,” “Middlemarch,” “Crime and Punishment,” “As I Lay Dying,” “Lincoln in the Bardo.” I very much identify with your saying that you read things that light you up. I do the same, over and over again.
Thank you for this forum, George and everyone.
Warmly,
Robin
If I had been told how much Moby Dick I had to read, at what pace, and informed of the date by which the book must be completed, my experience would have been completely altered, like listening to a symphony on 2x speed, in order to hear all the notes in the right order, but without the full weight of rest. Like being told you must eat an entire birthday cake in one sitting, even if you LOVE sugar. Something about the art form is the unique interaction of reader with text, the collaborative creation with the steering wheel placed completely in the readers hands—if you don’t feel in control when you are reading or that you are being pushed to experience something in a particular way that may or may not be yours, something is definitely lost. So, my sense of the dilemma is to allow a deep enough dive to get a sense of the enormity of what is there, enough knowledge to incur a humility of knowing how much you don’t know, to allow you to follow up when you feel the time is right.
At Univ of Kansas while I was there, we held a 24 hour "Reading Moby-Dick event." People would volunteer to stand by a podium in a public place and read for 30 or 60 minutes, many English profs, and others - and the book would be read aloud for 24 hours - cover to cover! So much fun!
So fun! A damn good story read aloud.
What an idea!!
That sounds awesome!
Misread this at first glance Lee, in a way that left me gobsmacked with my ribald takeaway: "Reading My-Moby-Dick" conjuring up some form of storytelling from some erogenous zone or other.
I'm still struggling, somewhat, with continuing challenging vision... but what a hoot, mistaking a great novel for some passing moment of some promising (but unutterably undeliverable) presence in prose from the ancient mythical 'Isle of Pornographia' 🤣
I see tattoos. Would you like to come upstairs to see my ... Tattoos? I am a Meville fan and...
That is very cool 😎
Love this 💪💪
Robin, I'm a college professor, and as you might imagine, my colleagues and I discuss this frequently, especially about a half-dozen of us who teach in a humanities general education sequence. We all agree that the majority of students simply will not, perhaps cannot, read as much as they used to. Our responses to that vary a bit. Some colleagues have moved toward shorter excerpts of texts. My own preference is to hold the line more, because I want to be sure I am not shortchanging that minority of students who really do want to read and are hungry for the real experience. I owe all of them an honest day's work, but those latter students are the ones I can really do something with and who will really benefit from what we have to offer them. I'm sure, though, that all of us, including me, assign somewhat less reading than we would have twenty years ago.
I tried to hold the line. I was wildly unpopular in certain classes, then in trouble with administration for not pleasing more crowds. It's a tough line to keep. I admire you for doing it.
Thank you, Susann. Fortunately, I have a good core group of colleagues and a generally supportive administration. I suspect we may be at different types of institutions. You do what you can to fight the good fight, yes?
Right ... So are you at an R1? In grad school, teaching classes was FUN, and none of my cohort realized that those generally anxious years (snagging a job at all was iffy) would be the halcyon ones. Students were usually motivated, read off-syllabus on their own, did weird and creative stuff, took risks ... The students I had later had different concerns, valid ones, and a couple of them went on to be famously successful, but it was overall a different pool. I never quite understood why the creative writers did not want to read much--or attend visiting writers' events ... They would go to hear each other read, however.
Oh, not by a long shot. I'm at a small Christian university (Houghton University) in western New York, a little over an hour from Buffalo. Plenty of challenges, as at just about every small school these days, but we are hanging in there. Have not yet abandoned a belief in the liberal arts. Mostly students from rural western NY and from PA (with a nice mix of international students because of historic missions connections), for the most part not ones who have enjoyed lots of advantages, decent number of first-generation students -- nice young men and women, not yet jaded. They're really quite pleasant to teach... but they haven't been trained to read a lot!
That does sound pleasant ... and there is something to be said for getting to be the one who introduces them to the pleasures of the text.
Peter, I’m so glad that you are holding the line. There have to be students - however few - who are showing up, as you say, “hungry for the real experience.” Thank you for still teaching to them.
We do our best, Robin! Thanks for the kind words.
Thank you for the rescuing work. I was one of those students, and I don’t know what would have happened to me without professors who gave so generously.
Ditto
HOLD THE LINE
Yeah. That's hard. How do you compete with iPhones, social media, algorithms etc. Impossible. I wonder how much of our current political and cultural quagmires stem at least in part from the newer generations reading less and less. And then of course there's the question of what they are reading.
Having been a public high school teacher and librarian, I can attest to the fact that the curriculum has moved away from ‘full text’ to ‘snippets.’ This is due to standardized testing. What happens in the classroom imitates the standardized test with its short excerpts and then questions about those. Schools are judged by the test scores, so they work with that context. It’s surreal. Try to create high-scoring students by not reading books.
Yes! I saw this trend all too clearly in my final years as a middle school history teacher. Standardized testing is the educational pestilence that walks by night-and school days. As you so well articulate- it's insane!
It's such a shame that 'what matters' and 'what is easily measured' are rarely the same thing, and the latter often wins out.
Well put, Carolyn. But I thought that colleges were phasing out standardized testing (and good riddance to it). How, then, is it dictating what is being taught?
Yes, the testing tide was receding at the college level, although it is starting to flow back in again. For K-12 public schools this is the primary means of measuring student achievement and district administrators pretty much consider them the be-all and end-all of their district's success. This mainly falls on language arts and math teachers as those are the curricular areas tested-but history and science were also tested at the middle school level in California for a time. The day my students took the test in history it felt as if my worth as a teacher and a human being was on the line. If your school scored well it was time for celebration, and if not, it was a time of great sorrow and shame.
Too true!
Isn’t this a party?! I’ve enjoyed reading through the lists and discussions. Many of my suggestions are already represented, so I’ll just zero in on my biggest struggle: the 20th Century.
I mean 1900-1950…just one? How can I choose? Proust, Wharton, Wodehouse, Chesterton, Fitzgerald, Narayan?! For me, At-Swim-Two-Birds by Flann O’Brien, 1939, would be the one I think you should not miss.
And 1950-2000 is impossible, but maybe don’t miss Slaughterhouse Five or The Crying of Lot 49 or Damage by Josephine Hart.
Dear Victoria,
Thank you so much for answering my question, though I wish your answer were different. What you say echoes The Atlantic piece: the goal is simply to turn out students who can achieve high scores on standardized tests. I cried reading it, not so much because I worry for the collective intelligence of the next generation (and all the generations to come - if there are generations to come, given our barbarism) - but for the souls of those to come. It is indeed surreal - and heartbreaking.
Again, thank you for answering, Victoria.
Warmly,
Robin
I had an after schoolbook club for years, but that was only with ten students. Just trying to keep the fire burning in those who wanted it.
Same has happened in the UK. My son's were avid readers until they went to high school (at 11) and soon hated English lessons. They were taught the same books and plays over and over and these would be the ones covered in their exams at 16.
Argh. I have not yet read that Atlantic article out of fear it would depress me. I retired from college teaching 3 years ago. It had become increasingly difficult to get students to read anything, especially those in creative writing courses. I taught Moby Dick. I will never forget one student who said it was not inspirational, just the same old stuff he'd heard before. "Where?" I asked him. "Where?" And that's the point anyway, to put it together in a novel that can move us as much as that one can. But if no one reads it, no one gets moved.
Moby Dick was a game changer for me. My vote for best of 1850-1900.
I agree. When I first read it, someone advised me not to skip the boring parts. I kept waiting for the boring parts and never found them.
"The Lee Shore" is one of the greatest chapters in history.
“Know ye, now, Bulkington? Glimpses do ye seem to see of that mortally intolerable truth; that all deep, earnest thinking is but the intrepid effort of the soul to keep the open independence of her sea; while the wildest winds of heaven and earth conspire to cast her on the treacherous, slavish shore?”
One (just one) dimension of this chapter that stuck with me was this: Melville apparently abandoned this character as he was writing the novel. Bulkington never appears again in the whole of Moby Dick. The chapter can be read almost as a eulogy of his own wild imagination, conceiving and then dispatching Bulkington because he realized 'Moby Dick', the novel, didn't need him (he followed George's advice here). It syncs with the book's deeply experimental tone and narrative drive, as if Melville, in this chapter, was both celebrating the life and untimely death of one of his creations, while at the same time giving permission to his soul "to keep the open independence of her sea."
I was fortunate to study Moby-Duck under two Melville experts. One Prof (James Barbour) at Univ of New Mexico had been a student at UCLA of Melville’s biographer - Leon Howard. The other was the foremost female expert on the art of Moby-Dick, Professor Elizabeth Schultz - two of the most engaging and compassionate professors I ever had.
How wonderful!
Agreed
My favourite of all time as well. Lots of great seconds, though, much from the same hemi-decade!
Exactly, Roberta. You put it well, and it’s heartbreaking.
Wasn't inspirational? Oh lord. Is that what we've come to, a whole generation who can't read a book unless it's inspirational? Remember when people used to read because they appreciated serious art?
Moby Dick is a series of stories, in a way, beginning with some very funny ones. I wonder if there's a way to use that, and the way the differences in those stories work together.
I have watched people on hiking trails check their phones every half hour or so. Our devices are changing our behavior, and maybe our brains. In Laos and Cambodia, I saw many working mothers entertain their babies and toddlers with their phones. What else can they do?
Or maybe we have always had flickering attention, and our devices simply take better advantage of that.
I took part in a vast procession of giant marionettes (the one I was helping puppeteer was about 30 foot tall, the biggest twice that) in Liverpool in 2018. The crowds were literally in the hundreds of thousands. In a few places, every single person watched whilst filming on their phones - I guess once the percentage of people filming reached a certain tipping point, everyone did the same.
Even more jarring than seeing people watch three-inch pictures rather than the 30-foot marionette actually walking past them, was the silence. Eerie.
It may be that we have always been susceptible to flickering attention, but the distractions and devices that are so ubiquitous now have caused that susceptibility to fulminate into a full blown attention deficit.
Scarily, the devices and many of the things you can access using them are designed precisely to capture attention.
I'm a college professor but in an entirely different subject (Art) and it depresses me how poorly read my students are despite our program (being in high demand) having an extremely high GPA entry requirement. (4.0 plus) As all of us know, reading changes you, regardless of your discipline, and I find my extremely high GPA students only care if it's going to affect their grade.
Perhaps the GPA requirement is way off to the far side of "wrong metric".
I couldn't agree more. I told our administrators we might as well admit them based on their time in the 40 yard dash----then we would have REALLY FAST Animators . . .
Lol
That’s very funny.
John, that’s so sad.
All. The. Time. Even ten years ago. Even graduate students, alas. But one of the skills you learn as a grad student is to fake it, and the most powerful sentence you pick up as a PhD is "My reading of that text isn't fresh, so I'm going to think some more about your question and answer later"--when asked about something you utterly do not recognize.
I read the Atlantic article too. I wasn't much of a reader way-back-when I went to college, so I felt a bit ashamed of myself--I now read many books. But I can assure you not all kids are like that. Sorry, but please allow me to brag about my granddaughters. One of my granddaughters is a voracious reader. She asked her mom to buy her Anna Karenina a couple of years ago, (maybe when she was a sophomore) has read most of Stephen King (she likes horror and has already begun to write her own books) and last year when I was visiting, she was reading Otello. As for my other granddaughter, she's a freshman at Williams College and is expected to read one book each week for one of her classes. To what do I attribute this? Possibly the fact that their mother read them books when they were infants, took them to the library often, and made reading an important part of their lives.
Brag away! It’s a joy to hear about your granddaughters! You’ve made my day!
My daughter is a creative writing student at Emerson. I am vicariously thrilled every time a purchase for a physical book comes through my credit card on the way to her apartment. They have been reading considerably fewer digital copies because they get those books and mark them up—annotating their histories in pencil and coffee stains. We are poorer, yes, but delighted.
I well know the feeling, Kathy! My youngest son - who was a literature major at Sarah Lawrence - reads constantly, and I, too, am thrilled by his book buying. I recently saw a doctor of mine who also sees my son and the first thing he said to me about my son: “He always has a book with him.” Wishing your daughter all the best with her writing.
Warmly,
Robin
Yes, reading is way, way down. Even when I lived in New York and was in a writing group many of the younger ones in their early twenties, when I asked what they read, said, Oh, I don't read; I do podcasts.
It would be funny were it not so not funny.
One would expect that a generation (or three) weaned on Cole's Notes, listicles, tweets and instant gratification would be more inclined to gravitate toward short fiction. Weirdly, this does not appear to be the case.
Well Robin seems to me you are drawing our attention to what is, let's say in support of the value of colourful metaphor, surely one of tectonic plate divides burgeoning threat upon our diverse, contemporary global cultures: it will, or more hopefully may not be a case of 'The War of the Worlds' envisaged by H G Wells, or 'Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus' but 'The Untold Battles Between Readers and Non-Readers' that ends our present, daily down-spiralling descent to Perdition... with not a hint of a bang but a whole lot of woeful whimpering.
Just rocked up to praise the Eliot spin off at the end there because really if they don't read they are hollow.
Well put, Rob. And frightening.
We actually discussed that article in my college class this semester! The only class I really like, as it happens.
The consensus between myself and the other students was mostly one of disbelief. I'm in New York, filling in some credits at the local community college, before transferring to one of the four year SUNY colleges. So almost none of my peers had taken Honors or AP classes, and all of us, even the just-graduated, had read a complete book in highschool. Even the girl that graduated from HS in Texas.
The idea that teens are performing at the sort of level needed to land in elite institutions rather than a regional community college, without reading a book, and on a level where it's being asserted as an epidemic, seems to strain credulity.
Not that I don't think the problem exists, but I really struggle with the assertion that seemed implicit in the article: students don't know how to read books, but this does not otherwise impact academic achievement, or make it so they can't be accepted to Columbia. That not-reading-books is a problem that can exist in isolation.
My feeling is that the article is catastrophizing the problem of regional education guidelines: are there places in the US where reading a full and complete book is not a requirement? Almost certainly. Is it the norm? All the signs I can see point to no. And again, the Atlantic positioned this not just as a problem of our incredibly unbalanced public education system (which is absolutely a huge problem!), but that they were Ivy League students.
Who are disproportionately likely to have attended a private school, and one of the big selling points is academic rigeur beyond the results of standardized tests. My sister attended private school only a couple years ago, and I recall her reading about a book a month?
For me as a college student, there definitely *are* challenges when it comes to how you read books in college, but they're admittedly far less eye-catching.
1) Extremely limited ability to complete one book before starting the next.
It makes it incredibly jarring and difficult to usefully retain the words, especially with fiction that might benefit from a close read, when I'm required to work through multiple books simultaneously, typically in chunks of 50 pages or so.
Switching between Rubyfruit Jungle, Wizard of Earth Sea, the Odyssey, and Frankenstein in order to complete simultaneous reading assignments, mostly just guaranteed that I didn't enjoy or really remember any of them.
And this is an issue that I find to be pretty unique to college, as in highschool I only ever had one Literature class at a time. Even when taking Honors, I was never in a situation of reading chapters 11-15 of Book B, 1-6 of Book A and finishing Book C all in the same night.
2) I'm an English Major. So I have a ton of required lit classes for my major. And thus a sometimes hysteria-inducing amount of reading every night.
I have never had less than two lit classes in a semester. Right now even my two non Literature classes have turned out to be Lit class in all but name, based on the amount of reading.
This can result in 250+ pages of reading, in four different novels, plus questions to answer in the textbook, assigned Monday and completed by Wednesday.
So depending on your major, the sheer *amount* of reading outpaces the expectations of even advanced highschool classes pretty much exponentially.
I think I bought around 25 different books for this semester. I'm only taking 13 credits. So I'm clearing more than a novel a *week* most of the time, by comparison to my sister at her exclusive high school.
3) Assignments -- and thus the manner in which you're expected to retain, engage with, and synthesize readings from the text -- are also much different.
As an example from highschool: we read Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, spent a few classes having discussions about "honorable men", who was honorable, who was not, were these categories open to interpretation, what was Caesar's tragic flaw, etc. Then our assignment was a paper that argued some point about how Shakespeare employed virtue and honor in that play.
ALL of my Lit Classes have completely open topics for our papers.
"Choose a text and argue for your view of how it pertains to the material of this class."
"For this assignment, write a paper about our chosen genre of literature that makes a different point than the one you made for Paper #1."
One of my classes focuses more on in-class open book analysis writing assignments, which *do* have a valid prompt, although we're only given it at the start of the cass, then have the class period to complete a few decent paragraphs of reflection on that prompt.
(It's probably obvious which I prefer.)
4.) In short, when the assignment has no bounds, it requires a much higher level comprehension of the text... and the way we read these books is not really conducive towards that for me.
If I'm being asked to create not just an argument and support for that argument, but the entire theme and subject matter constellation I'm going to be working within, I really want to be able to take notes on what I'm reading, and read these books in a way that is productive to understanding and performing that kind of self-directed interrogation of the material.
I want the luxury of reading through the text to discover what I believe about it, and build a few pages of quotes for textual support that I feel creates the shape of something meaningful.
But I do not have that luxury, which is really frustrating, when that's the whole reason I want to be an English Major. Instead, my approach has thus-far been to read the texts as per the class assignments, and then find two outside sources I can put in conversation with each other, in a way that pertains to my initial feelings about the text. And then citing them whenever I reference outside ideas.
5.) Although, my biggest problem is probably that due to these factors, the discussions in most of my classes don't really feel ... relevant or important. They don't move me towards a more nuanced understanding of the material, nor do they help me refine the approach or ideas I might use in an essay, or give me inspiration I might explore, or just make me feel like I'm learning something through the experience.
Most of my Lit classes sort of just feel like an hour long compilation of our different Goodreads reviews on the chapters we read. "I liked..." "I didn't like..."
It's all very... "there's no wrong interpretations in literature!" which I don't love, as it feels like a way to avoid teaching how to get there, and the difference between "no interpretation is wrong" and "all interpretations are equally valid / meaningful". And those are very different statements.
But I'm trying to stay positive and finish my degree. My father swears my upper division classes will be better once I transfer, my mother says "yes, but the reading lists get even longer".
Maybe I should just switch back to Creative Writing...
That’s very funny.
A., I'm a big Zadie Smith fan too: her writing is full of vitality, humor, and a patient, compassionate appraisal of the messy beauty of the world we live in. Her essays (if not, I guess, the podcast you mention) show an agile mind at play in any number of fields; the ones I found the most resonant were about film and painting.
Like a lot of writers, I started writing because I love reading (I write fiction now) and love theater (I initially tried writing for the stage), and I wanted to emulate the writers that gave me so much pleasure.
One story began as an oblique response to an elegant sentence in a James Baldwin novel; another was inspired by To the Lighthouse, where Woolf immerses us in the intense dramas of family life, only to contrast it with the soulless depredations of war and of time itself.
So A., I hope, whatever approach you take, that you read as you write, not prior to doing so; and (even if you're scheduled to read Dubliners this week and The Good Soldier the next), if a book by Percival Everett or Jenny Offill or catches your eye, read it, too!
Serendipity is a gift, a call from the subconscious.
George, one reason I signed up for Story Club is that its embrace of literature--your embrace--is a reflection of joy, of an eagerness to explore--not, or not primarily, a project rooted in a sense of pedagogical duty or obligation. (And I write this as someone who happily spends his working days teaching high school English, and whose graduate degrees are in English literature, not creative writing.)
Joining SC, however belatedly, has reawakened my desire to write, so thank you very much for that.
There is no 'belatedly' in or about Story Club Peter. You're being here now - more than where you've come from or wherever you may be going - is the deal. Great to be reading the thoughts you cared to share and air.
Thank you, Rob! Very kind of you.
Love Jenny Offill. Dept. of Speculation is a favorite.
I love serendipity. One of my favourite aspects of life in general.
I even take pleasure in moments like putting a load of paper in the printer, and it turning out to be exactly the right number of pages for the document I'm printing.
An example that's so ridiculously insignificant, it's almost not worth mentioning; but, as a writer, sometimes taking pleasure in the small things is needed to keep going.
Edward, I feel the same way when a series of green lights eases my morning commute!
That's great! Welcome back to writing ✍️
I think it’s essential to know the tradition in which you are writing. I don’t believe that even a musician can create in isolation. Great musicians go to see live music, insatiably, and writers should read as if books were food and there is never enough. Not every thing is delicious, but you gotta eat.
I have a PhD in comparative literature. You have to know at least 3 traditions in their native languages, one of them from start (the ancestral language, where I studied, even a classical language) to contemporary. I did that before I knew I wanted to write fiction.
Why not find syllabi online, what professors at universities are requiring? It’s not hard to get people’s syllabi. That might be a good way to search.
Because I specialized in Russian, I like George Saunders' Swim in a Pond . . . and Nabokov’s Lectures on Literature, though both are eccentric (of course), because hearing opinions on literature is also important. That’s why I like this story club.
I studied the novel, and my thesis starts the novel as we know it—that is with developed and true to life characters, dialogue, a plot, recognizable or at least believable settings—in the seventeenth century in France, eighteenth in England and a bit later in Russia, early nineteenth with a novel written in verse, Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin. But long narratives have been with us since before they were written down, no matter what you call them. I don’t know from 1300, but
1600-1650 Don Quixote, Spanish. This is an episodic novel, so not as sophisticated in plot as novels would get, also a self-conscious one, though, which makes it delightful.
1650-1700: La Princess de Cleves, a dramatic novel, written by a woman, Mme de Lafayette, that broke the tradition of unplotted, idealized long narratives (romances), like Madelene de Scudery’s Le Grand Cyrus.
1700-1750: Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa, which was 1747 or 48, epistolary, with strong character development and a drawn out but dramatic plot. Because it is several volumes, it’s not much read. But it’s a masterpiece. So is Tom Jones, 1749, but I like this better. This is English. And I'd call it emblematic because of its influence and the way it reflects the times, particularly the state of women.
1750-1800: there were a lot of novels during this time period, especially in England and France. Out of excitement about what happened in 1825, though, I can’t think about this time period now.
1800-1850: Alexander Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin, a novel in verse, well plotted with well developed characters, a stellar use of language, untranslatable, Russian. It set the stage for all of Russian literature. 1825-1832. It's worth learning that whole difficult language just to read Pushkin's digression on feet.
These are all emblematic. After 1850 the field gets so crowded, I’m inclined just to mention my favorites. But I do think Dostoevsky and Tolstoy (Tolstoevsky) are emblematic of the second half of the nineteenth-century.
1850-1900: A tie, maybe many ties. This period marks the heyday of the modern novel. My personal favorites are Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Brothers Karamazov and Tolstoy’s War and Peace, though there are many other novels I love from this time period.
1900-1950: Again, there are many. My personal favorite is James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. But that leaves out a whole population of writers, including Faulkner, whose The Sound and the Fury is a masterpiece. I don’t know which I’d call reflective of the time or definitive.
1950-2000: Catch 22. Or One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.
2000-Now: This is my weak spot. I’m eager to see what other people say.
I agree with so many of these ... also a Comp Lit PhD. I love your first paragraph.
Your program sounded familiar, so I looked you up. We did in fact get our degrees in the same place. I, too, wrote a dissertation about the form of the novel. Too bad our time there did not overlap.
No kidding! Small world. How did your dissertation approach the novel?
Also glad you're a Princesse de Clèves fan.
Haha! That's the way with graduate study. Sounds fascinating. My dissertation director was in Russian, Joan Grossman, as she taught a three-quarter course in influences on the Russian novel. (Berkeley had the quarter system then.) But because I was also doing French and English, I needed other readers who advised me as I wrote it. Robert Alter was one. He was in comparative literature, and he'd started his career with a book on Fielding. My case study in English was Clarissa, but he was invaluable for structuring the dissertation as well as the eighteenth-century context. French too. I vaguely remember my French advisor, a man named Eustis, I think, and he kept saying, of the draft, "I liked it the first time I read it!" My graduate advisor, also on my committee, was Robert Hughes. He was also in Russian, but he team taught a course with Alter on self-conscious literature, in which we read Diderot, Bely, Tristram Shandy, I think, Don Quixote. Coursework was minimal, but I took a seminar with a Scandinavian expert whose name I can't remember. That introduced me to Karen Blixen. And probably the best experience I had was a seminar in oral literature with a medievalist in French--oh, his name is escaping me. He was from Philadelphia, Duggan, maybe? Joe Duggan? Does that ring a bell? I took my exams in the office of a German professor who was in the comparative literature department, but I can't remember his name.
Don't apologize for going on too long. I enjoy the interactions I've encountered on this substack. It is filling a need for intellectual conversation about fiction. And it's good to meet you.
By the way, I have another vague memory of my TA from first year English holding up a copy of Tender is the Night and saying, "This is shit. Pure shit." He was opinionated. But sadly for me I have not yet read it. I do like Jackson Browne's song of the same title, though!
AND that is incredibly good feedback on a first draft!
This is a really great and rich response, but I would just question whether it's really "essential to know the tradition in which you are writing"?
As you've illustrated, one of the joys of the novel is its constant reinvention and I think it's therefore perfectly possible for someone to write a great novel based on their experiences and interaction with wider culture without being remotely well-read (especially in terms of history). Such authors may be the exception rather than the norm, but I'm sure they're out there.
Unfortunately, not doing a lot of reading isn't really something which authors tend to boast about in interviews, so it's tricky to give concrete examples, but the music equivalent would be punk: “This is a chord. This is another. This is a third. Now form a band.”
I can partly see your point; though at the same time, I struggle to think of any significant artist - however experimental - who simply ignored everything that had gone before in their art-form.
At the same time, I'm not sure how I would identify such a person . . .
All the same, whilst I know there's a theory that '10,000 hours of practice' is required to master something, I can't imagine someone getting a guitar and simply sitting with it by themselves for that long and becoming a great guitarist.
Though even as I write this, I'm thinking punk was needed . . .
. . . but also that punk was absolutely a reaction to and rejection of what had gone before . . .
Plus even punk has its antecedents.
True.
I think it might be the difference between a good story and a story that resonates with the culture, between a song and a sound and music that moves from, say, Bach and "Light my Fire," which happens when Ray Manzarak writes that riff--or the whole tradition of Delta blues and the way some Englishman plays his guitar.
Good comparison. The best thing a serious writer can do is write. Every day. Reading is crucial, too, but the writing, the actual practice of it, is The Golden Ticket.
I stumbled across George’s A Swim in a Pond in the Rain and Logan airport in Boston. It was stacked on the tables at the front of the bookstore. I was so delighted that such a different kind of book was being widely offered. And I ate the whole thing up. Soon after I bought 50 stories by Chekhov and gobbled that up too. When my father was alive, he talked about taking a course in Russian literature at Columbia University. His favorite book of all time was Dead Souls, and that has become my favorite as well.. My mother helped him get through his required reading list for the course at the time, and her favorite book from the list was Oblomov by Goncharov. Mom said: “Oblomov doesn’t get out of bed until more than halfway through the book. That alone makes it worth reading. “
Sorry for my typo, Chekhov! Using dictation app…
Ever read Notes of a Dead House?
Oh I'm so glad you mentioned Don Quixote. One of my favorites. And I would vote for The Sound and the Fury over Joyce.
"It's worth learning that whole difficult language just to read Pushkin's digression on feet."
I LOVE that thought!
I have for a while contemplated dedicating some time to learning Spanish well enough to read Don Quixote in the original . . . Perhaps this thread should be the nudge I need . . .
I don't believe than anything can be translated.
Russian grad student here too so agree
"Great musicians go to see live music, insatiably, and writers should read as if books were food and there is never enough. Not every thing is delicious, but you gotta eat."
Brilliant 💥💥
George, you have to stop being so much fun. I have reports to write! 😂
Me, too; I keep moving between this Substack and the open tab with the sophomore revisions I'm grading.
Ha!
Jane Smiley's '13 ways of looking at the novel' comes up with an interesting (representative?) list.
I dropped into comments to say exactly this Susy!
It was a thought-provoking book :)
Yes!
Agree - found it a little hard going in places but I was inspired to read older literature (which this post is reminding me to go back to :) )
This update doesn't belong here but I wasn't sure where else to put it. It's a BIG THANK YOU to @George and all of you here at Story Club!
I had written in a year ago with a question about editing a non-fiction book that didn't seem to be getting close to being finalized.
(https://georgesaunders.substack.com/p/office-hours-5a6?utm_source=publication-search.)
In response, I got so much heartfelt advice and terrific perspective from you all—THANK YOU!
And one thing George and others said was in effect, "you'll know when it's ready." And you were exactly right! I just didn't think it could ever take this long—the first complete draft took 6 months to write—and the editing took 4 years.
The weirdest thing was in this final stretch this last week, I could feel that I was starting to separate from the book—that it really was trying to get birthed! And a few days ago I had a dream I was VERY pregnant. At 65, that's uncomfortable.
I can't tell you how much I learned in the process over this last year of editing so yes, it was all worth it. This book really had so much more to teach me than I ever imagined.
I emailed the manuscript to my agent 30 minutes ago and I am relieved. I'm also ready for the postpartum hangover and glad to report I do have other smaller projects in the wings.
YAY for Story Club: THANK YOU VERY MUCH!
That's fantastic. I relate. I often write a very fast first draft. And then comes the editing and revising. Congrats to you. It feels incredible to finish a book.
1950-2000 I just want to make a plug for Beloved by Toni Morrison. I think it changed the course of American Literature. I would also venture the Morrison's work changed the course of literature beyond the U.S. too
Agreed!
I'm from the UK and it changed my life. So it got to at least one reader overseas.
I am too! So that makes two of us.
"Jane Eyre" (1847) needs to be added to the list, please. Not only is it an early example of a bildungsroman (coming of age novel), but it also features a female protagonist who triumphs despite the odds. Jane is no high society beauty, yet through her own determination, she creates a happy life for herself and others. As a female author, Charlotte Bronte nails female interiority. No "male gaze" here, which is personhood described all on the surface, and can often feel dehumanizing to the reader.
The novel seems to mix genres: romance, gothic, mystery with some magical realism woven in. It’s an early template of the orphan novel and the boarding school novel - hello Harry Potter!
As an added bonus, the illustrious Juliet Stevenson narrates the Audible version. Plus, there’s a dog! In other words, the book is perfect.
PS: I've always wanted to use the word bildungsroman!
I just bought JE again last night - an undergrad visiting for dinner made off with my last copy in 2019. So so so so good!
Good for you! The beginning is a bit of a slog, in my opinion. One thing for us to keep in mind, as we read these older novels, is that they are more like "rough drafts" than "highly polished stone." Bronte certainly didn't have a word processor, Scrivener or Grammarly software, and probably didn't even have an editor.
Does anyone know the first novel that is likely to have gone through something resembling today's editing process? Certainly not "Ulysses"! 🤣
Btw, I once tried Scrivener, thinking it would be the perfect way to "move walls around" in my budding novel, with visions of jumping back and forth between my iPad (portable) and laptop, but there was so much device incomparability that I eventually gave up, resorting to old fashioned technology of legal pad and Bic gel pen. Plus, and this is tedious, but I found Scrivener's thick blinking cursor to be a total distraction, so I'd often write text in Word and then cut and paste it in to Scrivener, which spawned a whole host of other weird problems. Hopefully they've fixed these issues.
George, if you're reading this, I'd love a post on pros/cons of writing technology.
About 15 years ago I decided to finally read The Great Gatsby. My husband had as many gaps in his reading as I did, so I read it aloud to him whenever we were in the car and he was driving. And then we couldn’t stop. Pride and Prejudice. Cannery Row. The Sound and the Fury. Moby Dick! We didn’t make it all the way through Dante and Proust but we got a thrilling taste. After a few years my voice was getting tired and we switched to audiobooks. But for me there is no reading as delicious as reading aloud.
Reading aloud is so much fun. Let's all take a road trip with Judith!
I’ve narrated two audiobooks that I wrote. The most recent one is The Film Director’s Intuition (it came out in May).
Hop aboard!
Agreed! An excellent plan!
Love this! My husband likes to read me Sherlock Holmes stories.
How wonderful. I love Sherlock Holmes!
That would be so exciting… as the plot thickens!
Wow! Cool story! I read one of my early draft novels out loud to my ex many years ago and it was a helpful experience. My folks and I listened to Thomas Mann's Magic Mountain together over a period of a few months. That was fun.
So smart! I recommend this step in the writing process—reading drafts aloud to another person—to all writers! I definitely do it myself, especially when I’m feeling stuck.
What a great idea. I like to read my drafts out loud to my dog. She loves a good story!
What a wonderful activity! I do so enjoy reading aloud to my grandchildren.
Two quick comments before my jet lag kicks in again...
1 - Nothing could be further from the truth than this comment:
"Music, on the other hand, almost works better freed from any hierarchy, that maybe it gets more interesting the more it strays."
I am a professional musician and I don't know one peer who would, in any way, agree with this. In order to stray you must have something to stray from, and that usually involves straying from what has come before, but only after having digested it. I realize this is not the forum for discussion music so I will stop here...
2 - I wonder what everyone here feels about Harold Bloom's take on literature. As I recall, he look at all (great?) literature as having been the result of a conversation with/response to what has come before. I believe "misreading" is also a part of his theory. In any event, I think he believes that nothing of value can be produced in the present without at least a nod to the past.
I wonder if anyone here has any thoughts about this...
(The jet lag experienced when traveling from NYC to Australia is nothing less than fierce.
I wrote a note about abloom somewhere in this thread. They just aren’t many readers in the world like him. For mere mortals having the kind of breadth and depth he had is not possible.
That comment about music left me scratching my head, too. I can't think of any art, or any human endeavor really, that doesn't require a grasp, or at least a working knowledge, of what came before. And as for Bloom, I agree there, too, and think he & James Wood can point toward suggestions as to what & how to read.
It's not a novel, but I'll vote for the King James Bible, written in 1611, as a book that should be on any serious writer's list. (Not any bible -- specifically the King James version.)
Beautiful language, astounding stories.
I can't even choose a favorite novel from the 1960's: The Master and Margarita, One Hundred Years of Solitude, and Slaughterhouse-Five are all top five favorites. What a marvel the last 200 years have been for the novel! How lucky I am to be alive when I am, reading all that I can!
I didn't choose my favorites! I chose books that I thought would be good for a list of books to read for the questioner. Like, a well-rounded list. Not sure I succeeded, but if I'd chosen my faves, the list would have been different.
I have such a hard time turning off my subjectivity. My favorites are the best and the best are my favorites! I was trying to think of this exercise as "time capsule for future civilization/aliens" but I'm really not qualified to choose one novel from each period that "contains the essential seed of what novels were," mostly because I haven't read enough from most of those periods pre-1700's.
I want to know what would have been on Mary's favorites list. Or maybe an easier (harder?) question--what ten novels would you put in your time capsule, for someone to look back and understand, this is what Mary loved?
This is going to be a hard one for me to answer. But I will work on this one, Manami, and get back to you on it. The main problem with choosing 10 is that I am a different person than I was when I read the books I've read. For instance, I LOVED Love in the Time of Cholera--but I haven't read it in 20 years. Is it still in my top ten? I don't know! But i like this idea--for someone to understand what mary loved. Okay, let me ponder.
Okay, I sent you a DM with a list of books!
Yes 🙌
Because of my own background, I had read very little of the classics by the time I was in my early 30s. I've had the compulsion to write since my late teens, but my lack of formal and informal education on the topic made me feel unqualified. There's a lot of books out there, and a lot of how-to books as well. What can be an overwhelming amount. After I read Stephen King's On Writing, the fire really started going.
I enrolled in a university at 33 to major in English (Creative Writing) and Philosophy. That's not possible for everybody, and it was barely possible for me. In the end, I am very grateful for the experience. If nothing else, it gave me confidence and direction. One thing I learned about there being so many books out there, is that you can't read them all. I am acquainted with quite a few of the classics now, but I also have the confidence to just read whatever the hell I want to read. The embarrassment of saying "No, I haven't read that one" is gone (mostly).
To hear that a writer of George Saunders caliber has "embarrassing" gaps in his own reading helps me to shed the imposter syndrome just a little more. I also thought maybe I was the only one who could cite an influence and not be able to tell you everything about it. There are some stories that have influenced me in a big way, and I can't remember either who wrote it, or what it's called. To remedy that I have started keeping lists, but some are lost to me forever.
On Writing is fantastic.