Nay, this doesn't refer to age. It refers to list items.
I have a new friend (a mathematician, incidentally, in spite of all efforts to cozy up with Harvard humanities people whose paths I cross every day in the library; instead I meet people through Erik, which means they're math people or, if they are not, married to math people or, in the case of said friend, both). My new friend likes lists. Norah's her name, and she reads a lot. This became obvious after the latest Facebook Conspiracy Against Writing My Dissertation: I was forwarded the BBC's list of the top 100 books of all times*, with instructions to mark all those books I read and then pass this altered list to all my Facebook friends. Being an obedient Facebooker, I checked off those Dickens, Shakespeares, and Austens I read as an undergrad, shook my head in disbelief over books that clearly ought not be counted literature, wondered why there was no single German author on the list (after all, ten Nobel prizes for literature went to German-speaking authors**, and that's just the 20th century!), then counted my 46 check marks, and sent the list to everyone I know (this entire process eating up loads of quality library time: which is why Facebook is evil. evil. evil.).
Norah responded with 42 check marks and the brilliant idea that, since the BBC list wasn't really reflecting our tastes, we should come up with our own reading list. She'd been asking me for book recommendations long before the Facebook thing, and now we agreed to each come up with a list of 30 books that, either because they are great or just different and interesting, we'd recommend to our friends. Since I made my list of 32 books, I keep remembering books that should have made the cut. Hence I'm declaring the list a work in progress. Here's the original list, mixing "classics" with entertaining books with cheesy stuff I read as a teenager:
Classics
1. Sebald: Austerlitz
2. Tolstoy: Anna Karenina
3. Mann, Thomas: Dr. Faustus
4. Fitzgerald: The Great Gatsby
5. Flaubert: Madame Bovary
6. Sebald: The Rings of Saturn
7. Sebald: The Emigrants
8. William, John: Stoner
9. Yates, Richard: Revolutionary Road
10. Faulkner: Absalom, Absalom!
11. Nabokov: Pnim
12. Chekhov: (short stories)
More recent/entertaining/popular (not necessarily in order of preference)***
13. Chatwin, Bruce: The Songlines
14. Swift, Graham: Waterland
15. Ishiguro: The Remains of the Day
16. Kaminer, Wladimir: Russian Disco
17. Kundera, Milan: The Book of Laughter and Forgetting
18. Eco, Umberto: The Name of the Rose
19. Calvino, Italo: Invisible Cities
20. Miller, Sue: A Good Mother
21. Munro, Alice: (short stories)
22. Winterson, Jeannette: Written on the Body
23. Roy, Arundhati: The God of Small Things
24. Hermann, Judith: Nothing but Ghosts
25. Franzen, Jonathan: The Corrections
26. Styron: Sophie's Choice (I suppose this actually counts as a classic. But I have issues with it, so Styron won't make my classics list.)
27. Schätzing, Frank: The Swarm
28. Shalev, Zeruya: Love Life
29. Wolf, Christa: Divided Heaven
Teenage favorites
30. Remarque, Erich Maria: All Quiet on the Western Front, A Time to Love and a Time to Die, Arc de Triomphe (yes, that's actually three books)
31. Hesse, Hermann: Narzissus and Goldmund (my very favorite book when I was 16; it's quite, well, cheesy)
32. Süskind, Patrick: The Perfume
Now, the list ignores poetry, essays, non-fiction, science fiction, mystery novels and a whole bunch of other genres. I don't care much for SF, and mysteries are a guilty pleasure I indulge in when sick (and therefore not capable of reading anything more serious****). I don't know enough poetry to include poets on the list. Non-fiction and essays deserve lists of their own (a future project). What about plays?
For now, however, this is the list. I'll keep fiddling with it. Cheers to good reads!
*I stand corrected. While the instructions that came with the Facebook gig gave the impression these are the 100 best books ever, the BBC website clearly states that these are the "nation's best-loved novel[s]," not more or less than that.
**Is it really ten? Two different websites say two different things. In any event, four Nobel prizes were given to Germans within ten years, and if this strikes you as fishy, here you can read why you might be right.
***This isn't saying that classics aren't popular or recent or entertaining. My distinctions are pretty random and probably reflect how I'd answer my dissertation advisor if she asked me for my favorite books: I'd name the first group. (Thinking of it, though, I'd tell her of several books in the second group as well.)
**** There's plenty of serious crime fiction, some of it quite philosophical (think Jan Costin Wagner) and literary. I'm actually quite fond of the genre, but need to dismiss it for professional reasons. :)
3 comments:
Feeling left out of the reading list fun, I checked out the BBC's top 100 list (it's actually a top 200 or top 21, depending on your attention span. I'm somewhat embarrassed to report that I have read only 38 of the top 100. (30 in 1-50, 8 in 51-100, 9 in 101-150, and 16 in 151-200. My boycott of Harry Potter and most Jane Austen hurt me the most, though I could make up for the deficit by reading more Stephen King and Terry Pratchett, who are also overrepresented on the list.
On the Facebook list, my score is a bit higher: 55 or 57, depending on whether you're required to have read the entire Bible or all of Shakespeare's works in order to count them. BTW, I think it's silly to list series of books and individual books in those series as separate items on the list, but that's Facebook users' fault.
It's actually twelve German-speaking Nobel laureates for literature since 1902.
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