Reading Copy Book Blog

In my traipsing around the web for blog fodder today, I came across the book The Top Ten: Writers Pick Their Favorite Books by J. Peder Zane.

It’s been out for a couple of years, but this is my first time happening upon it. Basically, J. Peder Zane set out to accomplish the (no small) task of compiling a book of lists, from leading authors, of their favourite, top-10-of-all-time books (fiction).

Time Magazine did a piece on the book, and the opening paragraph by Lev Grossman made me laugh:

“Let’s not mince words: literary lists are basically an obscenity. Literature is the realm of the ineffable and the unquantifiable; lists are the realm of menus and laundry and rotisserie baseball. There’s something unseemly and promiscuous about all those letters and numbers jumbled together. Take it from me, a critic who has committed this particular sin many times over.”

It was funny to me, because I agree with him (rating something in terms of absolute superiority or ranking should be reserved for black and white subjects like math, not soft-edged, subjective ones like art and literature), but am a staunch, avid lover of the literary list phenomenon nonetheless. Always a sucker for the Top 10 format (who doesn’t love a good list?) and the meta-appeal of authors writing about their favorite books, I delved further into the book.

The sell:

“What if you asked 125 top writers to pick their favorite books? Which titles would come out on top?

You’ll find the answer in “The Top Ten: Writers Pick Their Favorite Books.” Edited by J. Peder Zane and published by W.W. Norton, “The Top Ten” is the ultimate guide to the world’s greatest books. As writers such as Norman Mailer, Annie Proulx, Stephen King, Jonathan Franzen, Claire Messud, Margaret Drabble, Michael Chabon and Peter Carey name the 10 books that have meant the most to them, you’ll be reminded of books you have always loved and introduced to works awaiting your discovery.”

But would there be anyone in there I cared about? Well, there are 125 contributed lists in the book, including lists by:

Peter Carey
Michael Chabon
Douglas Coupland
Elizabeth Hay
Ha Jin
Stephen King
Wally Lamb
David Mitchell
Ann Patchett
Tom Perrotta
Annie Proulx

…and those are just a handful of the names I was excited to see.

I’ll include two of the actual lists here. First, Tom Perrotta’s (of his list, I have only read The Great Gatsby…lord, please let me live to 150 so I can read everything I want to, or at least get a proper start):

1. Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes
2. Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
3. Père Goriot by Honoré de Balzac
4. Howard’s End by E. M. Forster
5. The Good Soldier by Ford Madox Ford
6. My Ántonia by Willa Cather
7. Sister Carrie by Theodore Dreiser
8. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
9. Rabbit Angstrom by John Updike
10. Where I’m Calling From by Raymond Carver

and then, curiously, the list submitted by the late David Foster Wallace. Far be it from me to presume to know the first thing about who Foster Wallace was, but some of the list surprised me and made me wonder whether he was having a go.

1. The Screwtape Letters - C.S. Lewis
2. The Stand - Stephen King
3. Red Dragon - Thomas Harris
4. The Thin Red Line - James Jones
5. Fear of Flying - Erica Jong
6. The Silence of the Lambs - Thomas Harris
7. Stranger in a Strange Land - Robert A. Heinlein
8. Fuzz - Ed McBain
9. Alligator - Shelley Katz
10. The Sum of All Fears - Tom Clancy

Interesting stuff. I do agree with Lev Grossman’s, sentiments, as does Annie Proulx, who was quoted as finding Zane’s lists attempts “difficult, pointless and wrong-headed. Lists, unless grocery shopping lists, are truly reductio ad absurdum.”

But the thing is, whether the lists are perfect, whether they are complete, whether they are in any way an accurate representation - or the far more likely scenario in which every contributor went “Drat! I should have skipped __________ and included ___________!”, it’s still a cool and unique chance to know a little bit about the writing some of our favourite writers read and love. I’d definitely like to check it out.

This entry was posted on Friday, June 5th, 2009 at 12:35 pm and is filed under AbeBooks, books, lists. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.