Once, when I was a boy, flush with the first passionate love of reading, I made a rough calculation of the number of books I would be able to read in a biblical lifetime of four score years and ten. The sum I arrived at, around 5,000, left me dismayed. So few!
Later, as a very young man, I sat in the library of a community college in Cleveland, Tenn., slaking my thirst for narrative upon Joyce Carol Oates’ odd and potent novel Wonderland, and when I looked up, intoxicated, the volumes on the shelves around me seemed to breathe with secret powers.
Of course, the sensual satisfactions of youth, whatever their source — first kiss, first drink, first reading of a great novel — tend to moderate with the passage of time and repeated exposure.
So it came with a frisson of surprise that I found these two memories, expressive of my early devotion to the solitary vice — reading, of course; what did you think I meant? — called to mind by J. Peder Zane’s miscellany, The Top Ten.
What makes this reaction surprising is my extreme bias against listings and rankings of all kinds. The top 100 books of the 20th century, the top 100 movies, the 25 best books of the past 25 years, the top 100 rock songs of all time — all these have been done, and to what purpose?
The futile arbitrariness of such exercises seems to me self-evident. Yet my colleague Zane, book editor of the News & Observer in Raleigh, N.C., took it into his head to poll 125 contemporary authors on their selections for the top 10 greatest works of literature of all time, and what’s more, got them to reply.
Many of Zane’s correspondents share my scruples. Mary Gaitskill (Two Girls, Fat and Thin), asks, “Why only 10?” She notes obvious difficulties of choosing: You may have forgotten a book read long ago, or you may remember it so fondly that you overestimate its quality. And yet choose she does, with Joyce’s Ulysses first, Nabokov’s Lolita second.
Annie Proulx, of Brokeback Mountain fame, finds Zane’s project “difficult, pointless and wrong-headed.” She goes on to conclude, “Lists, unless grocery shopping lists, are truly reductio ad absurdum.” Then, unable to resist, provides her own list, beginning with Homer’s Odyssey and ending with the haiku of Matsuo Basho at No. 10.
I am quite surprised at how much the writers agreed upon. Madame Bovary, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Anna Karenina, something by Faulkner, Nabokov, Marquez, or Shakespeare makes many lists. Conversely, the Bible, foundation of modern culture, especially via the King James Version, appears less than I would have expected.
Points of divergence are of equal interest. Alice Hoffman includes Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451; Donald Harington gives 10th position to Some Other Place, The Right Place — by Donald Harington. Heidi Julavits includes Ask the Dust, by the interesting but minor novelist John Fante. Norman Mailer gives us John Dos Passos’ all-but-forgotten U.S.A. trilogy.
David Foster Wallace, of all people, includes books by C.S. Lewis, Stephen King, Robert Heinlein, Thomas Harris, Ed McBain and Tom Clancy. This eclectic and populist selection, by a writer of ostentatious learning, approaches the condescendingly perverse, and suggests Wallace does not play well with others.
Assigning points for each writer’s ranking, and toting them up, Zane emerges with a consensus Top 10. Zane also provides some additional top 10s — works of the 20th century, for example; or living writers, or American authors, or comic novels, fantasy, mysteries, and so on.
While the lists are momentarily diverting, and may contribute to conversation — and anything that gets people to think and talk about books nowadays is a downright public service — I found the real joy to lie in Zane’s brief descriptions, a longish paragraph each, of the 544 works nominated by his 125 authors.
Here, reading about books I’ve read, or meant to read, or had little interest in, or, in some cases, had never heard of, was a bracing and wholly pleasurable exercise. I spent an afternoon lolling on a couch, meaning with each passing moment to get up and do something productive, but instead remained where I was, gorging on all 544 descriptions like so many literary bon-bons.
Near the end of this luxuriant day, somewhere amid The Thin Man or On the Road or Kaputt, or perhaps To Kill a Mockingbird, I found myself seized with that pure love of books and reading I’ve rarely experienced in the years since I became a professional book reviewer.
Put in mind of halcyon afternoons, stretched out comfortably, immersed in the leisurely satisfactions of Vanity Fair, or The Brothers Karamazov, or The Professor of Desire, or The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket, all I wanted to do was read and read and read some more.
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AUTHORS’ TOP 10
J. Peder Zane polled 125 authors for their choices of the Top 10 books of all time. Assigning points for each writer’s ranking, and toting them up, he emerges with this consensus list.
1. Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy
2. Madame Bovary, Gustav Flaubert
3. War and Peace, Leo Tolstoy
4. Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov
5. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain
6. Hamlet, William Shakespeare
7. The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fizgerald
8. In Search of Lost Time, Marcel Proust
9. The stories of Anton Chekhov
10. Middlemarch, George Eliot