I asked an author once who his favorite writer was. He looked at me like I was nuts. This was the first time I realized how foolish it was to consider writers and books as if they were solid items that one could fix in a locked position. One might as well try to reach skyward and hold a cloud in place.
Yet across the pond The Guardian has been rolling out an exhausting ??? not exhaustive, it should be clarified ??? list of the Top 1000 Novels Everyone Must Read. That’s not a typo. They actually call out one thousand books, not just the pedestrian one hundred, apparently surrendering the 100-spot list to the VH1’s of the world.
Perhaps my sour opinion of such endeavors hails from my own experience in trying to finish a reading list. You might remember this one, back near the end of the last century. When it came out, I hungrily ticked off the fourteen tomes I had already read upon the list’s release. At the time, I was not yet halfway through college, and I practically memorized the list in my monomaniacal pursuit to complete it. Some books neatly corresponded to various course syllabi; many others did not. A few were out of print. I wandered bookstores and snapped up needed copies whether I could afford them or not. As a marketing ploy ???which it transparently was ??? the list worked perfectly on my deep-seated teenage and young adult fear of possessing a shamefully low literary IQ.
For years I made sure to keep at least one listed book on my nightstand even while simultaneously reading the half dozen or so other titles for my undergraduate and graduate classes. I finished university education, jumped into an underemployed existence in a lonely city, and made great headway with The List. (It merited capitalization by this point.)
I jumped around; I was not so foolish as to read The List in sequence. I pushed through sixty titles completed, then seventy, then eighty. I broke up my selections with other indisputably canonized authors and works, but I kept returning to The List. I was saving Ulysses, princely positioned in the top spot, for my capstone. I would not read Ulysses, I decided, until I read the other ninety-nine works of twentieth-century fiction that had been adjudged superior to all other novels save Mr. Joyce’s triumphant work. Naturally, that day never came. For a couple years now, I have been locked at eighty-nine.
In the interim, I found gainful employment and burgeoning social outlets. The List receded among my obsessions. I stopped purchasing books I could not afford, concentrating instead on the wonderful volumes already resting on my shelves waiting to be discovered. My consumer debt stopped accelerating. (Though I do confess to some guilt every time a bookstore shuts its doors). When friends and loved ones recommended new books, I gratefully accepted the suggestions and tried them out; I no longer had to offer polite and begrudging thanks for receiving books that weren’t on The List and thus, to my twisted logic, not yet worth my attention.
In short, reading became joyful again, communal, adventurous.
No longer did I view the remaining eleven books as the final works standing between me and some cosmically withheld knowledge, accessible only to those who read these certain books. No such knowledge existed, I eventually realized, and it was a nineteen-year-old’s lame folly to ever imagine that it did.
I don’t mean to be completely sour. I was grateful to have experienced most of the listed titles that I managed to complete. (The Good Soldier, fine. No comment about Parade’s End, though.) But without question, I was unfair to them.
The List ??? any list, no matter how short or long ??? essentially says, “Here, you must read this.” Which is an unfair request to make of any book. Reading is most beneficially performed with an open mind, wherein the reader thinks, “I might like this, I might not; let’s see.” To read with the preset, “I must finish this,” is a grave mistake. It’s like rapping a billy club against the novel’s knees and then ordering it to walk down the street.