by Wendy Lesser
For an author to forge an intimate connection with you, the book you hold in your hands (or, if hands someday become irrelevant to the process, in your eyes, in your ears, in your mind) need not resemble the actual object he originally put out into the world. And this is true even when he is alluding to that object. Chaucer sends Troilus and Criseyde out to us by saying, “Go, litel book, go, litel myn tragedye,” but the book in which I read those lines is not little at all: it is a big, fat edition containing all of Geoffrey Chaucer’s known works, complete with scholarly apparatus. This is not a problem. It is Chaucer’s own voice I hear in this verse, not the editor’s or the printer’s. Part of the reason we value Chaucer so much, part of the reason we still care about him more than six hundred years after he wrote, lies in the strength and particularity of that voice.
He himself was worried, though, about the process of transmission. He says as much in the stanza that immediately follows the “litel bok” passage:
And for ther is so gret diversite
In Englissh and in writyng of oure tonge,
So prey I God that non myswrite the,
Ne the mysmetre for defaute of tonge.
And red wherso thow be, or elles songe,
That thow be understonde, God I biseche!
There is much less diversity in English now, or at least in its spelling: we would all, these days, “pray … that none miswrite thee,” or express the hope that the book, “read wheresoever thou be, or else sung,… be understood.” But despite its orthographic disguise, the protective concern with which Chaucer addresses his little book is still completely understandable, especially if we consider that “books” then were actually manuscripts, each individually copied by a possibly unreliable scribe. The scribes for Troilus and Criseyde may even have been worse than average: at any rate, more variants exist for that text than for many of Chaucer’s others. According to the editor of my scholarly edition, even the most reliable manuscripts of Troilus “contain errors and omissions,” and in regard to other revisions or changes, there is “uncertainty whether they are due to Chaucer or a scribe.” So the poet was right to be worried. And yet we have received his transmission in its essence, just as generations of us were able to receive Dostoyevsky’s Demons even with its crucial chapter hacked out by the censors. It’s amazing how, against all odds, readers and writers still manage to conjoin.
* * *
One more tale about a physical book, and then I am done.
Recently I felt the need to reread Conrad’s Nostromo in order to verify that I had been correct in describing it as I had, as primarily grand rather than intimate. The copy of that novel sitting on my shelves was a tattered Signet paperback, with an unbelievable seventy-five-cent price printed on its crumpled front cover. Oh, well, I thought, age cannot wither nor custom stale—but I was wrong. Some books are just too old, or too cheaply made, to be worth reading. This one had such narrow margins that the lines of print disappeared into the gutter and I had to crack the spine to read each page. The printing was so shoddy that if I ran a finger across the type—a dry finger, mind you—the black letters slurred together into an illegible smear. I felt sorry for the younger self who had only been able to afford this version of Nostromo; I also admired her persistence in getting through it. I tried reading it for one or two chapters, and then I gave up.
I could and did download the novel from Gutenberg, but I knew that even if this temporarily solved my problem, it would not be a permanent fix. Nostromo is one of those formative, crucial works of literature I need to have on my actual bookshelves, in my actual library. A bodiless version stored in a digital library will never, for me, be a sufficient replacement. Before I could throw away that crummy paperback, I had to get a solid copy to fill its hole on the shelf. So I once again resorted to online ordering, and with masses of inexpensive used editions to choose from, I bought a Modern Library hardcover, complete with original book jacket and transparent plastic jacket cover, which was rated by its seller as being in “Very Good” condition. It arrived so quickly that I didn’t even have time to turn to the Gutenberg version; and since, as should now be obvious, I always prefer a real book if I have it, this is the one I reread.
But I am not going to tell you about that (except to say that I was right the first time: the novel is grand rather than intimate). The point of my tale is what happened when I finished reading. I held the pleasant weight of the closed book for a moment in my hands, as if to bid its story a silent goodbye, and then I turned it over. On the back cover of that 1951 edition of Nostromo—older than I am by a year, and therefore deriving from some romantic, insufficiently imaginable past era—was an ad announcing that “The best of the world’s best books are now available in the inexpensive, compact, definitive editions of the Modern Library.” The phrase “Modern Library” was in a large, turquoise, semicursive typeface that must have seemed the height of modernity in 1951; and the same blue color appeared in the jacket’s upper-left corner, in the form of a small pointing hand, the kind of printer’s dingbat you might associate with nineteenth-century posters for magic shows or healing nostrums. Its index finger was aimed at the words: SEE INSIDE OF JACKET FOR COMPLETE LIST OF TITLES.
I am nothing if not obedient, so I removed the jacket from the book and carefully unwrapped the Plasti-Kleen Quik-Fold cover that was concealing its inner surface. A fragile, thin, parchment-colored sheet containing seven finely printed columns was revealed. The headline above this hidden treasure said, “Which of these 352 outstanding books do you want to read?” and the list itself ran from “Adams, Henry, The Education of Henry Adams” at the top of the first column to “Zweig, Stefan, Amok” at the bottom of the seventh. It was a wonderful list. It included “Marx, Karl, Capital and Other Writings” (this in 1951, at the height of the red-baiting McCarthy era) and “Veblen, Thorstein, The Theory of the Leisure Class.” Plato, Aristotle, Suetonius, and Thucydides were all here; so were Machiavelli, Kant, and Nietzsche. There were four novels by Henry James, as well as four by Conrad, four by Faulkner, three by Dickens, and three by D. H. Lawrence. The first six translated volumes of Marcel Proust appeared here, as well as numerous other translations from the French (Balzac, Montaigne, Voltaire, Zola), Russian (Dostoyevsky, Gogol, Tolstoy, Turgenev), Italian (Boccaccio, Dante), German (Freud, Goethe), Spanish (Cervantes), Norwegian (Knut Hamsun), and even Chinese (Confucius). There were plays as well: not just the complete Shakespeare, but also Molière, Ibsen, Eugene O’Neill, Oscar Wilde, and a number of dramatic anthologies. And there was poetry, ranging from Emily Dickinson and Robert Frost through Homer and Keats to Virgil, Wordsworth, and Yeats. Perhaps most surprisingly, these broad-minded editors had even included a few works from despised genres in their “outstanding” list: an anthology called Three Famous Murder Novels, for instance, and another called Great Tales of Terror and the Supernatural.
Of course, there were oddities. There always are, in such cases, not just because of personal tastes, but also because each period has its own preferences which mask the oddities for a time, making them seem logical and even predictable. In 1951, it made sense to include John Marquand, S. J. Perelman, and Ogden Nash on a list that would no doubt exclude them today. Erskine Caldwell, Daphne du Maurier, and Dorothy Parker were all represented—indeed, overrepresented, with two or three titles each—and though I consider myself a partisan of both Somerset Maugham and John Steinbeck, I would have to say there was a bit too much of them as well. Hemingway was there, but Fitzgerald was missing; Max Beerbohm made an appearance, whereas Ford Madox Ford did not. And strange, now-obscure historians and biographers (Francis Hackett, Emil Ludwig, Dmitri Merejkowski, Hendrik van Loon) were sprinkled here and there like so many nearly effaced tombstones.
But that is not only normal for a list of this kind; it is inevitable, if the list-makers are doing their job properly. It does no good simply to recommend the carefully plucked, time-approved choices of the past. Reading, if it is to stay alive, must be of its time as
well as out of it. New literature that is worth preserving is coming into being every day, and older works that were once ignored are constantly making their way back into print, but from our own fixed position in history, we can’t be expected to know for sure which are the ones that will endure.
Nothing worth saying, in such a situation, can be guaranteed to remain permanently true. No list, no opinion, however valid in its own time, will last forever. But that does not mean the attempt is not worth the paper it is written on (or whatever measure of value will arise when paper is no longer with us). To me, a list like the valiant, generous Modern Library one is intensely moving, even in its misjudgments. The point is to make a stab at it—at sharing the individual and collective wisdom, at assessing what matters and what does not—and then to abide with the consequences. In the never-ending conversation about what might count as good literature, there are many worse things than being wrong.
A HUNDRED BOOKS TO READ FOR PLEASURE
This is not supposed to be a list of the hundred best books. Some of the very best books in the world (Paradise Lost, Remembrance of Things Past, The Oresteia, Don Quixote, to name just a few of the obvious ones) do not appear here at all. I don’t want us to get bogged down aiming for coverage. This is not a literary canon, and there will be no final exam—for any of us. No one is going to ask us on our deathbeds how many great books we’ve read, and at that point even we won’t care. Reading is not about progressing toward a finish line, any more than life is.
The idea is simply to offer you a list of books that have all brought me great pleasure in the course of my life. Because we are not the same person, your tastes will differ from mine, and these books will not all give you the same delight they gave me. I cannot predict which ones will fail you—you will just have to give them a try, and if you find yourself getting bored, quit that book and go on to the next. There is nothing shameful about giving up on a book in the middle: that is the exercise of taste.
And remember, there are always more where these came from. I limited myself to one title per author, which means that for every book named here, there could be three or eight or thirty by the same writer that you might enjoy just as much. Once you find an author whose work appeals to you, you can mine that lode until it’s exhausted. Or, if you prefer, you can save up all her remaining works for a rainy day. How you go about it is entirely up to you.
Choosing which book should represent each author was a difficult and unsettling process. I felt, for instance, that I practically had to list The Way We Live Now for Trollope, since it is clearly his finest novel—but does this mean you will fail to read Phineas Finn, or He Knew He Was Right, or any of the other terrific books he left us? Why did I pick Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment over The Idiot or Demons or The Brothers Karamazov, all of which I love just as much? Was I depriving you of the true D. H. Lawrence by giving you his best novel, Sons and Lovers, rather than his best nonfiction book, Studies in Classic American Literature? Did the brilliant intensity of Melville’s shorter fiction make up for the fact that it was usurping the place of his masterpiece, Moby-Dick? And how could any single work stand in for all the marvelously satisfying novels written by my dear Henry James?
Then there are the missing. William Empson and Randall Jarrell were here in an earlier version of this list. So was John le Carré. So was Stefan Zweig. I still regret their absence. I still wonder if you might have liked Milton’s God or The Third Book of Criticism or A Perfect Spy or The Post-Office Girl better than whatever finally went into those slots. And then there are my contemporaries and near-contemporaries, so many of whom are absent. It would have given me pleasure to recommend Michael Chabon’s The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, Kay Ryan’s The Best of It, Peter Carey’s My Life as a Fake, Julian Barnes’s Arthur & George, and Zadie Smith’s NW, among others; but I felt you would already know about those authors, whereas older books by now-dead writers were more in need of my championing. Having set my arbitrary limit of a hundred books (which is not so arbitrary, if you are a ten-digited human), I felt obliged to adhere to it. So excruciating excisions and hesitant substitutions continued to take place during the entire time I was writing this book. If I am through with them now, it is only because my time is up. Composing a list like this is one of those tasks that can be stopped but never finished, and now it is up to you to carry on, which is why I have left some white space at the end.
Ackerley, J. R., My Father and Myself
Ambler, Eric, A Coffin for Dimitrios
Austen, Jane, Persuasion
Baldwin, James, Notes of a Native Son
Balzac, Honoré, Cousin Bette
Bellow, Saul, Ravelstein
Bennett, Arnold, The Old Wives’ Tale
Bishop, Elizabeth, The Complete Poems
Bolaño, Roberto, Distant Star
Bowen, Elizabeth, The Heat of the Day
Carroll, Lewis, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
Cather, Willa, The Professor’s House
Chekhov, Anton, The Lady with the Dog and Other Stories
Coetzee, J. M., Disgrace
Collins, Wilkie, The Woman in White
Conrad, Joseph, Under Western Eyes
de Waal, Edmund, The Hare with Amber Eyes
Der Nister, The Family Mashber
Dickens, Charles, David Copperfield
Dickinson, Emily, Final Harvest
Dostoyevsky, Fyodor, Crime and Punishment
Dyer, Geoff, Out of Sheer Rage
Eisenberg, Deborah, Twilight of the Superheroes
Elkin, Stanley, Van Gogh’s Room at Arles
Ellison, Ralph, Invisible Man
Farrell, J. G., The Siege of Krishnapur
Faulkner, William, Absalom, Absalom!
Fitzgerald, Penelope, The Beginning of Spring
Flaubert, Gustave, Sentimental Education
Fontane, Theodor, Effi Briest
Ford, Ford Madox, Parade’s End
Ford, Richard, The Bascombe Novels
Forster, E. M., A Passage to India
Gissing, George, New Grub Street
Glück, Louise, A Village Life
Gogol, Nikolai, Collected Tales
Goncharov, Ivan, Oblomov
Greene, Graham, The Quiet American
Grossman, Vasily, Life and Fate
Gunn, Thom, Collected Poems
Handke, Peter, A Sorrow Beyond Dreams
Hardwick, Elizabeth, The Simple Truth
Hardy, Thomas, Jude the Obscure
Hazzard, Shirley, The Transit of Venus
Heaney, Seamus, The Haw Lantern
Herzen, Alexander, My Past and Thoughts
Highsmith, Patricia, The Complete Ripley Novels
Hopkins, Gerard Manley, Poems
Howells, William Dean, A Hazard of New Fortunes
James, Henry, The Golden Bowl
Lahiri, Jhumpa, Unaccustomed Earth
Lampedusa, Giuseppe di, The Leopard
Lawrence, D. H., Sons and Lovers
Li, Yiyun, Gold Boy, Emerald Girl
London, Jack, Martin Eden
Lowell, Robert, Life Studies
Macdonald, Ross, The Blue Hammer
Mailer, Norman, The Armies of the Night
Malcolm, Janet, In the Freud Archives
Malouf, David, The Great World
Mankell, Henning, Sidetracked
Mann, Thomas, Buddenbrooks
Mantel, Hilary, Beyond Black
Marías, Javier, A Heart So White
Maxwell, William, So Long, See You Tomorrow
McEwan, Ian, The Innocent
Melville, Herman, Great Short Works
Michaels, Leonard, Collected Stories
Mistry, Rohinton, A Fine Balance
Munro, Alice, Friend of My Youth
Murakami, Haruki, Hard-boiled Wonderland and the End of the World
Norris, Frank, The Pit
O’Connor, Flannery, Wise Blood
Ondaatje, Michael, Running in the Family
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Orwell, George, The Road to Wigan Pier
Pinsky, Robert, Selected Poems
Platonov, Andrey, Soul and Other Stories
Price, Richard, Clockers
Roth, Joseph, The Radetzky March
Roth, Philip, I Married a Communist
Rushdie, Salman, The Moor’s Last Sigh
Queirós, Eça de, The Maias
Sebald, W. G., The Rings of Saturn
Serge, Victor, The Case of Comrade Tulayev
Stafford, Jean, The Mountain Lion
Stendhal, The Charterhouse of Parma
Svevo, Italo, Zeno’s Conscience
Theroux, Paul, The Family Arsenal
Tóibín, Colm, The Master
Tolstoy, Leo, War and Peace
Trevor, William, The Children of Dynmouth
Trollope, Anthony, The Way We Live Now
Turgenev, Ivan, Virgin Soil
Twain, Mark, Huckleberry Finn
Verne, Jules, The Mysterious Island
West, Rebecca, The Fountain Overflows
Wharton, Edith, The House of Mirth
Wolff, Tobias, In Pharaoh’s Army
Wright, Richard, Native Son
Zola, Émile, The Ladies’ Paradise
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This book would not have been possible without the intelligent and useful advice of Arthur Lubow, Katharine Michaels, Thomas Wong, Tim Clark, Anne Wagner, and, above all, Ileene Smith.
INDEX
The index that appeared in the print version of this title does not match the pages in your eBook. Please use the search function on your eReading device to search for terms of interest. For your reference, the terms that appear in the print index are listed below.