Well look at that. There's a posh new layout to this place.
This change in appearance comes on one of those days that I deem my "time to update my life on the internet!" days. This also mean that I spiffed up my Facebook profile and will be putting up a few new pieces on Deviant Art. The art will probably be put around here too.
I should also note that this is more or less something to keep the darkness at bay; I got a call back from Oaks Park today and they asked me to come and work on Saturday. After doing the things that make me happy, I'm going to search the hell out of the mall and call Budget and do everything I possibly can to cancel working at Oaks. The place is the equivalent of a big rotting wooden sign that says "You Have Failed" in the middle of a parking lot in the middle of the desert. If I only have to work there for three weeks or less before something else comes along, I'll be happy. But I work hard to earn a BA just so that I could go right back to cleaning up puke on amusement park rides. The idea that it's the only thing out there for me is insulting.
Okay, on to the makeover. First of all, the quotation in the top is by E.E. Cummings, from a fake interview that he did with himself for an edition of The Enormous Room. The quotation is important to me because I agree with it; but I should explain what that means. I think that people who aren't artists are people who never try and see past their own nose, who never find ways of expressing themselves or the world around them, and who have no respect or real interest in those that do. These are not the people that I want to surround myself with. These are not the people who mean something. I think that everyone is capable of being "deep", as they say, but there are too many who seem to think that they don't have to, that they're above that or better than it, or they choose to be ignorant. This is not the way to live your life, people. Negation will become of you.
Second, you'll notice that the page has been flipped, and that I've taken off the Bookshelf as well as the Turntable boxes. I did this for a couple reasons; first, that I don't really have the time or interest to change either of those whenever I start listening to/reading something different, second, that the Shelfari application, despite being neat to look at, was a poor representation of the books on my shelf (not to mention that I couldn't ever get it to display them randomly, it was just the same alphabetical books), and third, I don't want this site to be defined by any sort of specific "tastes" that I have. I think that literature, music, film, television, et cetera are things that can be enjoyed to a great and somewhat consuming extent, but I've gotten so annoyed with the laundry-listing that people do of what they Listen To or Read or Watch or whatever that it stops seeming like a way to describe yourself and it starts to seem like bragging. Honestly, I think that Hipsters use their long lists of bands, movies, or books like bikers soup up their hogs. In the end I think it's a way to give yourself a boner and alienate people with your Superiority. If I'm going to do that, I can probably find better ways than by talking about the latest Fleet Foxes EP.
Finally, on my own personal writing: unless this blog becomes an overnight sensation (it won't), I can't see why anyone passing through the interwebs would be interested in my extended character outlines or what have you, so I think that for the time being I'll keep most development-style writing about whatever novel or story I'm working on off of here. Also, I should at least keep some of it a secret. If anything amazing does happen, I'll let you know.
So that's where we stand with Arts Deux at the time being. I'm going to hopefully dedicate more of this blog to book reviews, film reviews, and other ramblings that I think fit into what it's all about. And you'll be hearing from my personal life soon enough, I'm sure; I do have thirty or so jobs to apply to today.
To the Resumobile, Robin!
Wednesday, July 8, 2009
Monday, July 6, 2009
Are we to accept this ignorance as comedic? A look at the "greatest books ever"
So the word on the street (the street being Internet Meme Crescent) is that most people have only read about 6 of the following 100 books. Since one of my causes is making sure that the world learns how to read better, I ought to make sure that I qualify first, right? There's an X next to every book that I've read. Here goes.
1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen (X)
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien (X)
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte (X)
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling - (X)
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee (X)
6 The Bible (X)
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte (X)
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwel (X)
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman (X)
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens (X)
11 Little Women - Louisa Mae Alcott (X)
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare (X)
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien (X)
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulk
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger (X)
19 The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger (X)
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald (X)
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams (X)
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck (X)
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll (X)
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame (X)
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis (X)
34 Emma - Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis (X)
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne (X)
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell (X)
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown (X)
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez (X)
44 A Prayer for Owen Meany - John Irving
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery (X)
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood (X)
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding (X)
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen (X)
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon (X)
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men- John Steinbeck (X)
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac (X)
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie (X)
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville (X)
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens (X)
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker (X)
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett (X)
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Inferno - Dante (X)
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens (X)
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert (X)
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White (X)
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (X)
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad (X)
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery (X)
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas (X)
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare (X)
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Ronald Dahl (X)
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo (X)
So, in the end, I have read 46 of the 100 books on the list. But really, is that a critique of me as a reader? Let's examine this list a little closer, and maybe we can get a better idea of exactly who the BBC is trying to position:
First of all, the list is not a reference to the BBC's Top 100 Reads, rather, it's an article from The Guardian, called "Books you Can't Live Without". However, this is not a list as compiled by critics (like the Modern Library's Top 100 Books, for example), but rather a popularity list, made from votes readers submitted. This illuminates more on what the actual list represents: the reading done by the average UK citizen. Thus the emphasis on British authors, especially Austen and Dickens (with about five books each, meaning that they represent 1/10 of the list) and little recognition for recognizable American authors (they mention F. Scott Fitzgerald and Harper Lee, but omit the likes of Mark Twain, William Faulkner or Ernest Hemingway). There's also a poor representation of relatively advanced writing: for example, Joyce's Ulysses is mentioned, but his other notable works–Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man or Dubliners, for example–are omitted, as well as other Modernist texts, such as Joyce's contemporary, Virginia Woolf, or other notable twentieth-century authors, such as Kurt Vonnegut or Zora Neale Hurston (also, I should point out the tiny number of non-white authors).
There's also a staggering number of what I'll call Grade School texts; works of classic literature that are typically read in secondary school (High School here in the States). That's just an assumption by myself, but at least 1/5 of the texts mentioned are likely to be required reading for many students before they graduate high school. Not only that, but works of Children's Literature are almost as prominent. And while I don't ever discredit the importance of Children's Literature, I don't exactly see why The Many Adventures of Winnie The Pooh is better than Hamlet. And speaking of Hamlet, I find it hard to believe that people have really read "The Complete Works of Shakespeare" as the list describes it, while still allowing Hamlet its own spot, there, at the bottom, below The Five People You Meet In Heaven.
Most of the list is, as I mentioned, British Literature. The lack of American authors is pitiful, and the attention paid to so few Russian, French and other international authors is equally unsound. Plus, no Germans. And there are enough books that I can credit gaining popularity due more to hype, controversy, and the Oprah Book Club than to their actual artistic merit.
What do these submissions–and omissions–tell us about the average reader? Well, at least the average reader of the Guardian, who lives in Britain. Let's look at the top 10 books that they picked, which are (apparently) the 10 greatest books you could possibly read. Look out, guys, I'm going to get snarky:
1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
This novel seems to fit most of what we're looking at with the rest of the list: British author, an acceptable piece of literature in its own right (if we were to look at any other top 100 lists, I doubt there would be an omission of this novel). But on the minus side, Pride and Prejudice is a relatively simple piece of literature. For its time it was groundbreaking, and though it serves as an excellent look into 18th century society, it is also a romantic comedy, and is not particularily well-written, being more revolutionary in what it is saying as opposed to how it says it. In many ways, Pride and Prejudice is the Wizard of Oz of books: everyone knows it, everyone gets it, everyone likes it, but does that make it truly great?
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
You know what, I hated Lord of the Rings. I didn't like The Hobbit that much either. Tolkein's overlong, plodding, and dull-save-for-some-battle-scenes saga is, perhaps, one of the best works of Fantasy Fiction. In my opinion, though, that's like saying that Independence Day is one of the best disaster movies ever. Yes, it's an anti-war book, but is it so hard to think of a hundred other anti-war books? Also, this series is responsible for practically creating the genre of Sword-and-Sorcery Fantasy, which I'm not sure is a great thing. The worst crime, perhaps, is that there is little in Tolkein's thirty thousand or so pages of walking across Middle Earth that opens up any insight into the human condition.
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
Jane Eyre falls under a lot of the same categorials as Pride and Prejudice, though I'm happy to say that, at least, it's a better book. Virginia Woolf, in her introductory pages to A Room of One's Own, actually mentions that one is almost required to mention Austen and the Brontes, but this doesn't mean that they're necessarily great authors, just that they're the only women available. Jane Eyre is a good enough story as it is, and Charlotte is by far the most skilled of the Bronte sisters. Again this is a novel that must be remembered for its significance, but it is far from the best, even Bronte's later novel Villette is a better read.
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
First of all, don't put an entire series as one book. This happened with The Lord of the Rings as well, and I let it go as it was three pretty closely constructed books, but the entire Harry potter series? The list makes this error further down with The Chronicles of Narnia (despite how The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe has its own place). To be completely honest, I love the shit out of Harry Potter. But is it better than the next book on the list, To Kill a Mockingbird? No. Have more people read it? You bet. The series is the biggest thing to happen in literature in the past fifty years. But this isn't a list about what books are the most familiar, it is the books which are the best. And, though JK Rowling is a pretty good writer and she managed to make a series that was as good as the hype suggested it to be, I'm not sure that it deserves to be placed on the top shelf just yet.
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
Finally, something I can agree with! Well, at least I agree that it should be in the top 10. This is also the only American novel to rank this high (sad), and the only one that was written in the twentieth century AND isn't a fantasy story. Does that seem weird to anyone else? That there are no books about modern life this high up?
6 The Bible
Okay, look. The Bible is a great work of literature. But what does this exactly say? Most of the time when I see people list "The Bible" in their favorite books, it just seems like they're making a point of saying how Christian they are. I've read the Bible, but I wouldn't say that it's a favorite work of literature to me; I would just say that it's very essential reading for anyone who ever wants to find out what Western Society is talking about most of the time. If this was a list of Most Influential Books, then the Bible would be at #1. Also, I'm a little bugged that it's just "the Bible" and not something specific: King James Bible, New Testament, Old Testament, and so on. Also, look at the books that beat it.
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
I don't know what to say about this. Wuthering Heights is the most dull, insipid book that I've read and I will never understand why people love it so much. Do you get me? It's like the 19th century's precursor to Twilight; it's nothing but a book about people who love each other so passionately that they will ruin the lives of nearly everyone in England just so that they can die in the end and haunt their children.
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
Blah blah blah social commentary. Orwell did a damn good job of scaring the pants off of me, as well as most other people in the First World, when he came out with 1984. Orwell's novel is suspenseful and well-written, but I find it to be heavy-handed and, over fifty years later, pretty terribly dated. Like the Bible, I would place this close to the top of a Most Influential list, but I'm not sure that it's top 10 material.
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
I love these books. I love the characters. Philip Pullman is a better writer, to me, than Tolkein and Rowling. What bothers me most about this inclusion is that, besides the already obvious anger at snubbing dozens of other wonderful works of literature, they include His Dark Materials while at the same time no one thought of the literary masterpiece that serves, more or less, as Pullman's source material: John Milton's Paradise Lost. But hey, it's only the most influential and beautiful work of poetry in the English language, you don't have to read it.
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
This is the first of what appears to be hundreds of Dickens novels on the list. At least they chose the best one of the bunch. I'll go off on a tangent about this: I don't understand what's so great about Charles Dickens. When I was studying in England, I realized that almost everyone had read Dickens, while I was hardly ever introduced to his writing growing up in the States. In the same vein, the only way that British children seemed to be familiar with Mark Twain was to take a literature class that specialized in American Lit. That might be a misunderstanding on my part, of course. But maybe that's why I just can't get into Dickens: he wrote nothing, as far as I can tell, that has any remote interest to the American reader; whereas Twain practically invented the American Reader.
Let's take a moment and look at the original list, the BBC's "The Big Read". Here are the top 10 books from that reader poll:
1. The Lord of the Rings, JRR Tolkien
2. Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen
3. His Dark Materials, Philip Pullman
4. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams
5. Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, JK Rowling
6. To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee
7. Winnie the Pooh, AA Milne
8. Nineteen Eighty-Four, George Orwell
9. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, CS Lewis
10. Jane Eyre, Charlotte Brontë
Oh god damn it. Is this really all that people aspire to read? At least they only named one of the Harry Potter books (don't worry, there are at least five more on the rest of the list). I'll count His Dark Materials as a single volume, since it works best if read that way anyway. Why do people love The Lord of the Rings so much? If these lists are proper reflections of the population of the United Kingdom, I'd say that everyone in the UK is fifteen and simply listed the only books they have ever read.
In order to make this fair, here's another Top 10 list, this one compiled by the apropriate Best 100 Novels website. Once again, I've X'ed the ones I know.
TIME Magazine created a list of the 100 best novels of the 20th century. I like this list for a few reasons: first of all, it's a narrowed-down selection, which means that it's a bit more fair (the earliest published novel is 1923, which can more or less be called the kickoff for what would define 20th century literature). Second, it was compiled by only two people, editors at TIME itself, meaning that they know what they're talking about, and the novels didn't just arrive on the list by overwhelming vote. Finally, the list is alphabetical and not done in a best to worst sort of way. This makes the books even in their heft on the list, which makes sense: after all, can you really compare science fiction, modernism, and fantasy in the same way?
The last list that I'll mention is the Modern Library's 100 Best Novels. This one's a little skewed, after all, the only eligible books are ones that have been published by the Modern Library, which means that it's sort of the Critereon Collection of books. Still, it was compiled by a board of literary experts, and is pretty formidable. You should go check it out, if only to see how many scientologists contributed to the Reader's List (that's the one on the right, with all the Ayn Rand and L. Ron Hubbard).
So what is it that makes the best novels of all time? Obviously, polling people won't produce the right answer. On the other hand, simply relying on the Literati to produce the answer alienates most people who read for the sake of reading. Of course, in the end, the "Best Novel Ever" doesn't exist, at least not objectively. What would make me happy would be something like TIME's list, more of a survey of great literature, but divided by era, genre, etc. What people fail to realize all too often is that literature is as complex and interesting as music. What the Guardian's list clearly shows, to me, is the general ignorance of this fact, the ignorance that leads people to believe that something like The Hitchiker's Guide to the Galaxy is more worthwhile than Dante's Inferno, Joyce's Ulysses, or dozens of other books that were ignored for the sake of a book-club populist grouping of literature that is choked by novels that, in twenty years, will lose any sort of relevance.
The solution? Easy. Let people know that they can and should read better books. They also can and should see better movies, while we're on the subject. People go about their lives ignoring some of the best artistic experiences that they could have for the sake of something that is "easier" or "more accessible", when the truth is....it isn't. You can go to MacDonalds and get a Big Mac meal for the same price that you could probably make a healthier, more delicious sandwich at home, you just have to be willing to put in the effort. The tragedy is that, the more attention that gets paid to mediocre talent, the less and less gets paid to the better, rarer works of literature. And true, reading something like Joyce or Woolf isn't easy, but I promise you that its worth it. And the more people read better things, the more their vocabulary and their world view expands and blooms. Reading great literature is, to me, not a requirement (like Summer reading), but is essential. I only wish that I could share that idea with more people, and that I could open up that understanding. I'm not going to give you my Top 100 novels, but I could always try...for now, though, I have too much left to read before I can feel happy with my understanding of it all. No matter how many great books you've read, there will always be more.
1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen (X)
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien (X)
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte (X)
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling - (X)
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee (X)
6 The Bible (X)
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte (X)
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwel (X)
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman (X)
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens (X)
11 Little Women - Louisa Mae Alcott (X)
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare (X)
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien (X)
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulk
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger (X)
19 The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger (X)
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald (X)
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams (X)
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck (X)
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll (X)
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame (X)
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis (X)
34 Emma - Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis (X)
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne (X)
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell (X)
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown (X)
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez (X)
44 A Prayer for Owen Meany - John Irving
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery (X)
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood (X)
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding (X)
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen (X)
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon (X)
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men- John Steinbeck (X)
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac (X)
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie (X)
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville (X)
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens (X)
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker (X)
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett (X)
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Inferno - Dante (X)
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens (X)
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert (X)
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White (X)
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (X)
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad (X)
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery (X)
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas (X)
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare (X)
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Ronald Dahl (X)
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo (X)
So, in the end, I have read 46 of the 100 books on the list. But really, is that a critique of me as a reader? Let's examine this list a little closer, and maybe we can get a better idea of exactly who the BBC is trying to position:
First of all, the list is not a reference to the BBC's Top 100 Reads, rather, it's an article from The Guardian, called "Books you Can't Live Without". However, this is not a list as compiled by critics (like the Modern Library's Top 100 Books, for example), but rather a popularity list, made from votes readers submitted. This illuminates more on what the actual list represents: the reading done by the average UK citizen. Thus the emphasis on British authors, especially Austen and Dickens (with about five books each, meaning that they represent 1/10 of the list) and little recognition for recognizable American authors (they mention F. Scott Fitzgerald and Harper Lee, but omit the likes of Mark Twain, William Faulkner or Ernest Hemingway). There's also a poor representation of relatively advanced writing: for example, Joyce's Ulysses is mentioned, but his other notable works–Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man or Dubliners, for example–are omitted, as well as other Modernist texts, such as Joyce's contemporary, Virginia Woolf, or other notable twentieth-century authors, such as Kurt Vonnegut or Zora Neale Hurston (also, I should point out the tiny number of non-white authors).
There's also a staggering number of what I'll call Grade School texts; works of classic literature that are typically read in secondary school (High School here in the States). That's just an assumption by myself, but at least 1/5 of the texts mentioned are likely to be required reading for many students before they graduate high school. Not only that, but works of Children's Literature are almost as prominent. And while I don't ever discredit the importance of Children's Literature, I don't exactly see why The Many Adventures of Winnie The Pooh is better than Hamlet. And speaking of Hamlet, I find it hard to believe that people have really read "The Complete Works of Shakespeare" as the list describes it, while still allowing Hamlet its own spot, there, at the bottom, below The Five People You Meet In Heaven.
Most of the list is, as I mentioned, British Literature. The lack of American authors is pitiful, and the attention paid to so few Russian, French and other international authors is equally unsound. Plus, no Germans. And there are enough books that I can credit gaining popularity due more to hype, controversy, and the Oprah Book Club than to their actual artistic merit.
What do these submissions–and omissions–tell us about the average reader? Well, at least the average reader of the Guardian, who lives in Britain. Let's look at the top 10 books that they picked, which are (apparently) the 10 greatest books you could possibly read. Look out, guys, I'm going to get snarky:
1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
This novel seems to fit most of what we're looking at with the rest of the list: British author, an acceptable piece of literature in its own right (if we were to look at any other top 100 lists, I doubt there would be an omission of this novel). But on the minus side, Pride and Prejudice is a relatively simple piece of literature. For its time it was groundbreaking, and though it serves as an excellent look into 18th century society, it is also a romantic comedy, and is not particularily well-written, being more revolutionary in what it is saying as opposed to how it says it. In many ways, Pride and Prejudice is the Wizard of Oz of books: everyone knows it, everyone gets it, everyone likes it, but does that make it truly great?
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
You know what, I hated Lord of the Rings. I didn't like The Hobbit that much either. Tolkein's overlong, plodding, and dull-save-for-some-battle-scenes saga is, perhaps, one of the best works of Fantasy Fiction. In my opinion, though, that's like saying that Independence Day is one of the best disaster movies ever. Yes, it's an anti-war book, but is it so hard to think of a hundred other anti-war books? Also, this series is responsible for practically creating the genre of Sword-and-Sorcery Fantasy, which I'm not sure is a great thing. The worst crime, perhaps, is that there is little in Tolkein's thirty thousand or so pages of walking across Middle Earth that opens up any insight into the human condition.
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
Jane Eyre falls under a lot of the same categorials as Pride and Prejudice, though I'm happy to say that, at least, it's a better book. Virginia Woolf, in her introductory pages to A Room of One's Own, actually mentions that one is almost required to mention Austen and the Brontes, but this doesn't mean that they're necessarily great authors, just that they're the only women available. Jane Eyre is a good enough story as it is, and Charlotte is by far the most skilled of the Bronte sisters. Again this is a novel that must be remembered for its significance, but it is far from the best, even Bronte's later novel Villette is a better read.
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
First of all, don't put an entire series as one book. This happened with The Lord of the Rings as well, and I let it go as it was three pretty closely constructed books, but the entire Harry potter series? The list makes this error further down with The Chronicles of Narnia (despite how The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe has its own place). To be completely honest, I love the shit out of Harry Potter. But is it better than the next book on the list, To Kill a Mockingbird? No. Have more people read it? You bet. The series is the biggest thing to happen in literature in the past fifty years. But this isn't a list about what books are the most familiar, it is the books which are the best. And, though JK Rowling is a pretty good writer and she managed to make a series that was as good as the hype suggested it to be, I'm not sure that it deserves to be placed on the top shelf just yet.
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
Finally, something I can agree with! Well, at least I agree that it should be in the top 10. This is also the only American novel to rank this high (sad), and the only one that was written in the twentieth century AND isn't a fantasy story. Does that seem weird to anyone else? That there are no books about modern life this high up?
6 The Bible
Okay, look. The Bible is a great work of literature. But what does this exactly say? Most of the time when I see people list "The Bible" in their favorite books, it just seems like they're making a point of saying how Christian they are. I've read the Bible, but I wouldn't say that it's a favorite work of literature to me; I would just say that it's very essential reading for anyone who ever wants to find out what Western Society is talking about most of the time. If this was a list of Most Influential Books, then the Bible would be at #1. Also, I'm a little bugged that it's just "the Bible" and not something specific: King James Bible, New Testament, Old Testament, and so on. Also, look at the books that beat it.
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
I don't know what to say about this. Wuthering Heights is the most dull, insipid book that I've read and I will never understand why people love it so much. Do you get me? It's like the 19th century's precursor to Twilight; it's nothing but a book about people who love each other so passionately that they will ruin the lives of nearly everyone in England just so that they can die in the end and haunt their children.
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
Blah blah blah social commentary. Orwell did a damn good job of scaring the pants off of me, as well as most other people in the First World, when he came out with 1984. Orwell's novel is suspenseful and well-written, but I find it to be heavy-handed and, over fifty years later, pretty terribly dated. Like the Bible, I would place this close to the top of a Most Influential list, but I'm not sure that it's top 10 material.
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
I love these books. I love the characters. Philip Pullman is a better writer, to me, than Tolkein and Rowling. What bothers me most about this inclusion is that, besides the already obvious anger at snubbing dozens of other wonderful works of literature, they include His Dark Materials while at the same time no one thought of the literary masterpiece that serves, more or less, as Pullman's source material: John Milton's Paradise Lost. But hey, it's only the most influential and beautiful work of poetry in the English language, you don't have to read it.
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
This is the first of what appears to be hundreds of Dickens novels on the list. At least they chose the best one of the bunch. I'll go off on a tangent about this: I don't understand what's so great about Charles Dickens. When I was studying in England, I realized that almost everyone had read Dickens, while I was hardly ever introduced to his writing growing up in the States. In the same vein, the only way that British children seemed to be familiar with Mark Twain was to take a literature class that specialized in American Lit. That might be a misunderstanding on my part, of course. But maybe that's why I just can't get into Dickens: he wrote nothing, as far as I can tell, that has any remote interest to the American reader; whereas Twain practically invented the American Reader.
Let's take a moment and look at the original list, the BBC's "The Big Read". Here are the top 10 books from that reader poll:
1. The Lord of the Rings, JRR Tolkien
2. Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen
3. His Dark Materials, Philip Pullman
4. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams
5. Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, JK Rowling
6. To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee
7. Winnie the Pooh, AA Milne
8. Nineteen Eighty-Four, George Orwell
9. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, CS Lewis
10. Jane Eyre, Charlotte Brontë
Oh god damn it. Is this really all that people aspire to read? At least they only named one of the Harry Potter books (don't worry, there are at least five more on the rest of the list). I'll count His Dark Materials as a single volume, since it works best if read that way anyway. Why do people love The Lord of the Rings so much? If these lists are proper reflections of the population of the United Kingdom, I'd say that everyone in the UK is fifteen and simply listed the only books they have ever read.
In order to make this fair, here's another Top 10 list, this one compiled by the apropriate Best 100 Novels website. Once again, I've X'ed the ones I know.
- 1984 by George Orwell (X)
- To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee (X)
- The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger (X)
- The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien (X)
- Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen (X)
- The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald (X)
- Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky
- Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
- Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
- The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky (X)
TIME Magazine created a list of the 100 best novels of the 20th century. I like this list for a few reasons: first of all, it's a narrowed-down selection, which means that it's a bit more fair (the earliest published novel is 1923, which can more or less be called the kickoff for what would define 20th century literature). Second, it was compiled by only two people, editors at TIME itself, meaning that they know what they're talking about, and the novels didn't just arrive on the list by overwhelming vote. Finally, the list is alphabetical and not done in a best to worst sort of way. This makes the books even in their heft on the list, which makes sense: after all, can you really compare science fiction, modernism, and fantasy in the same way?
The last list that I'll mention is the Modern Library's 100 Best Novels. This one's a little skewed, after all, the only eligible books are ones that have been published by the Modern Library, which means that it's sort of the Critereon Collection of books. Still, it was compiled by a board of literary experts, and is pretty formidable. You should go check it out, if only to see how many scientologists contributed to the Reader's List (that's the one on the right, with all the Ayn Rand and L. Ron Hubbard).
So what is it that makes the best novels of all time? Obviously, polling people won't produce the right answer. On the other hand, simply relying on the Literati to produce the answer alienates most people who read for the sake of reading. Of course, in the end, the "Best Novel Ever" doesn't exist, at least not objectively. What would make me happy would be something like TIME's list, more of a survey of great literature, but divided by era, genre, etc. What people fail to realize all too often is that literature is as complex and interesting as music. What the Guardian's list clearly shows, to me, is the general ignorance of this fact, the ignorance that leads people to believe that something like The Hitchiker's Guide to the Galaxy is more worthwhile than Dante's Inferno, Joyce's Ulysses, or dozens of other books that were ignored for the sake of a book-club populist grouping of literature that is choked by novels that, in twenty years, will lose any sort of relevance.
The solution? Easy. Let people know that they can and should read better books. They also can and should see better movies, while we're on the subject. People go about their lives ignoring some of the best artistic experiences that they could have for the sake of something that is "easier" or "more accessible", when the truth is....it isn't. You can go to MacDonalds and get a Big Mac meal for the same price that you could probably make a healthier, more delicious sandwich at home, you just have to be willing to put in the effort. The tragedy is that, the more attention that gets paid to mediocre talent, the less and less gets paid to the better, rarer works of literature. And true, reading something like Joyce or Woolf isn't easy, but I promise you that its worth it. And the more people read better things, the more their vocabulary and their world view expands and blooms. Reading great literature is, to me, not a requirement (like Summer reading), but is essential. I only wish that I could share that idea with more people, and that I could open up that understanding. I'm not going to give you my Top 100 novels, but I could always try...for now, though, I have too much left to read before I can feel happy with my understanding of it all. No matter how many great books you've read, there will always be more.
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