comments

1. Coop on July 26th, 2009 at 2:19 pm

   Cool. (And thank you.) My list is a lot shorter (and probably weirder):

   Jorge Luis Borges: Ficciones
   Lord Byron: Don Juan
   J.L. Carr: A Month in the Country
   Kim Chinquee: Oh Baby
   Samuel Taylor Coleridge: Christabel, Kubla Khan & The Pains of Sleep (1816)
   Guy Davenport: DaVinci’s Bicycle
   Emily Dickinson: any selection or collection
   Penelope Fitzgerald: The Blue Flower
   Alan Garner: The Stone Book Quartet
   Jack Gilbert: The Great Fires
   Thomas Hardy: Life’s Little Ironies
   Norman Lock: A History of the Imagination
   Herman Melville: Moby-Dick & “Bartleby”
   Paul Metcalf: Genoa
   Lorine Niedecker: The Granite Pail
   Ignacio Padilla: Shadow Without a Name
   Ezra Pound: Personae
   W.G. Sebald: The Rings of Saturn
   Leo Tolstoy: War & Peace
   W. B. Yeats: The Tower

2. Deron Bauman on July 26th, 2009 at 2:22 pm

   yes! you have reminded me of some I have forgotten.

3. Coop on July 26th, 2009 at 2:24 pm

   Who’d you forget?

4. Deron Bauman on July 26th, 2009 at 2:27 pm

   Ezra’s ABC of Reading and possibly Gilbert’s Great Fires.

   I know there will be others I have missed and that I will add, but these are the books there were instrumental to my development.

5. Lucy on July 26th, 2009 at 2:37 pm

   Have you read Coetzee?

6. Daryl Scroggins on July 26th, 2009 at 2:51 pm

   Oh this is a splendid list, Deron. And I am hugely honored that you would put me in it. It’s hard for me to get started on lists like this because the titles foam up on me and I suddenly find I’m making a book of titles! I like Coop”s list too and would surely put most of those in mine (with any left out being simply a matter of personal inclination and not a statement about worthiness). I’m sure my list would also include some Calvino, Walace Stevens, Rick Bass, Amy Hempel, Kafka, Annie Proulx, George Saunders, Dagoberto Gilb, Z.Z. Packer, Dan Chaon, Ralph Ellison, Juno Diaz, Russell Edson…hell, I wasn’t going to get started and there I went.

7. Deron Bauman on July 26th, 2009 at 3:09 pm

   Daryl, I will have to add Hempel, and I do have two Kafka. I think Stevens will have to go on there as well.

   Lucy, I haven’t read Coetzee but the paragraph Renner quoted made it clear that I should.

8. Lucy on July 26th, 2009 at 3:11 pm

   His work is magnificent. Read Disgrace.

9. Deron Bauman on July 26th, 2009 at 3:11 pm

   Thank you. I will.

10. Chris on July 26th, 2009 at 3:17 pm

    If you like The Things They Carried, [and I hope you do, I remember it being breath-takingly good], the rest of Tim O’Brien’s books vary in quality, but Going After Cacciato & In The Lake of the Woods are both thoroughly excellent.

    My real Q, though, is – how do you arrange your books?

    http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2009/jul/21/books-arrange-james-purnell

11. Cece on July 26th, 2009 at 3:24 pm

    No one mentions Thomas Pynchon anymore. He used to be de rigueur on lists of this type. He hid out too well, maybe.

12. Deron Bauman on July 26th, 2009 at 3:26 pm

    I forgot! I will add The Crying of Lot 49 and V.

    Chris, do you mean on my bookshelves?

13. Chris on July 26th, 2009 at 3:32 pm

    Aye – that article lists a few common ways – alphabetical, Dewey decimal, chronological. I’ve always fancied giving ‘by colour’ a go, but a method I’d never heard of before was mentioned – arranging your books so that authors you imagine would be friends are next to each other.

    I think that’s a bit mental, even for a booknut like me, but it’s kind of intriguing at the same time. It’s like a swimming pool of madness I don’t really want to dive into, but it’s hot out, and there’s no breeze, and the water looks perfectly cool.

    Sadly, most of my books are in my sister’s loft, as I have nowhere near enough room for them, but I have spent a long time building my dream library.

    It’s circular, many-storied, and it has a bed in it. Yes.

14. Phil Bebbington on July 26th, 2009 at 3:33 pm

    Well, lists of books I know I haven’t read scare the shit out of me – oddly though, there some here I have read. It was that long ago I can’t even remember when or what the book was about, but, I have read them!

    I even have first editions of two of those JD Salinger books, with dust jackets. Well, I think I did/do.

15. Deron Bauman on July 26th, 2009 at 3:54 pm

    sorry, Chris. I read your link initially in my email notification and missed your link. I look forward to taking a look.

16. Daryl Scroggins on July 26th, 2009 at 4:19 pm

    Oh yeah–sorry Deron–I see the Kafka in your list now.

    You know, one thing that always troubles me when I make lists like this (and it is great fun to do it) is all the books that had a powerful impact on me that somehow don’t “rate” as ones I would generally throw out there. I mean there are some great genre books and kids books and small books of poems, and so on, that I might not put in this kind of list but would put in an entirely private list. Does this make any sense? I mean, take Kurt Vonnegut Jr. for instance. I love the man–his life and his work–but even novels of his that I think are great seem great in ways that aren’t quite as grand as others. But if I were listing just authors, he would be in there. Also, what about writers who were sort of one hit wonders? There are sometimes writers who have written only one short story that really lives–but it really lives. Oh well–lots of questions here to play with I guess.

17. Chris on July 26th, 2009 at 4:24 pm

    Daryl: I came away from uni convinced that ‘the canon’ was just a long-term conspiracy perpetuated by academics to keep themselves in jobs. So I’d love to hear of any books that you don’t think are grand enough for a public list, but love all the same.

18. Deron Bauman on July 26th, 2009 at 4:25 pm

    I’m out for the evening. I look forward to continuing the conversation.

19. Cindy Scroggins on July 26th, 2009 at 4:43 pm

    This is fun. My list is very close to Deron’s, which isn’t a surprise–we’ve always been pretty much in sync when it comes to books. I would add

    Mary Hood – How Far She Went
    Mary Hood – And Venus is Blue
    Mark Richard – Charity
    Leon Rooke – A Bolt of White Cloth
    Leon Rooke – Fat Woman
    Leon Rooke – A Good Baby
    Jayne Anne Phillips – Black Tickets
    Milan Kundera – The Unbearable Lightness of Being
    Jamaica Kincaid – At the Bottom of the River
    Eugene Marten – In The Blind
    Joan Williams – Pariah and Other Stories

    There are others that aren’t rising in my mind just now, but I know they are there.

20. Cece on July 26th, 2009 at 6:40 pm

    Daryl, Donna Tartt’s “The Secret History” is like that. It is strange and defies in ways, as she does. She’s from Mississippi, but her “southern” book doesn’t work, at least for me. But “Secret” — set at a New England college, full of myth, and class distinction, prejudice, murder, surprising elements I won’t list here in case someone reads it later — I could not put down and cost me a good amount of sleep. That book got into me.

21. Daryl Scroggins on July 26th, 2009 at 7:37 pm

    Chris–I’m pretty much an academic, but that idea of The Canon has always bothered me too. It’s that old inside vs. outside standards thing, and I tend to see inclusiveness and an openness to difference as more in need of propping up than are great literary works. That is–until somebody says some dumbass thing about a work I consider to be a treasure. When that happens I get all puffed up. But I think there are many canons, and they are always changing–even as they are identified within a single mind.

    My comment about works I tend not to mention in a “formal” context is a gesture toward the issue of formal contexts more than to books. I mean, I love E.B. White’s Charlotte’s Web, but if I’m presenting a profile aimed at securing a job or admitance to some academic program, for instance, I might not mention that book. Also, I admire some books for technical features–while believing that the book as a whole is a failure. I love many science fiction books, but see most of them as almost necessarily tied to formula in a way that tends to make me admire them in a different way than I would those books that aren’t so tied. But here are two short lists of such books I admire or have enjoyed in a way that continues to make me thankful that I encountered them (first science fiction and then kid’s books):

    Orson Scott Card Ender’s Game
    Dan Simmons Hyperion (trilogy)
    S. M. Stirling Island in the Sea of Time (trilogy)
    Larry Niven & Jerry Pournelle Lucifer’s Hammer
    Stephen King Different Seasons (novellas)
    Ray Bradbury Something Wicked This Way Comes and
    The Martian Chronicles

    Jean Craighead George My Side of the Mountain
    Scott O’Dell Island of the Blue Dolphins
    Russell Hoban The Mouse and His Child
    Katherine Paterson The Bridge to Terabithia
    Robert C O’Brien Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of Nimh
    Maurice Sendak Where the Wild Things Are
    Donald Hall The Ox Cart Man
    Margaret Wise Brown (illustration by Clement Hurd) Goodnight Moon

22. Daryl Scroggins on July 26th, 2009 at 7:38 pm

    Cece–I haven’t read that book but have had a number of fine readers recommend it to me. I will surely read it now–thank you.

23. Sheila Ryan on July 26th, 2009 at 7:42 pm

    Daryl, I imagine your list and mine would be akin to one another’s with respect to being all over the place. It would be so damn fine if you taught a class based on what you hold near to your heart.

24. Chris on July 26th, 2009 at 8:30 pm

    Sheila, when I did my Masters, I was lucky enough to be in a class with my favourite prof and just one other student. And pretty much all we did for 12 weeks was talk about the books we loved but wouldn’t have been able to talk about in a more formalised academic setting. And I’m pretty sure the Prof enjoyed it just as much as we did. That really was the best of times.

    Daryl – there’s just been a mini-spat between Adam Roberts & John Scalzi about this year’s Hugo nominees, and as far as I could tell Robert’s position came down to an assertion that ambitious books that can be appreciated are better than books that are less ambitious but more enjoyable. Which is a boiled-down version of the inside vs outside thing, I think. “They enjoy, but we appreciate.”

    I think, though, that 20th century sci-fi is going to be regarded differently in the future. Maybe not for its technical merit [although I'd argue that one], but on the concrete effect it had on society. In a century of extraordinarily accelerating invention, a lot of the path we’ve followed was conjured by SF writers, dreaming possible futures.

    And I have insomnia again, dammit.

25. Daryl Scroggins on July 26th, 2009 at 9:17 pm

    Well said, Chris. It’s a particularly good point you make about “enjoy” weighed against “appreciate.” I have known many academics and students who seemed to have no history of actual joy taken in literature. I don’t think appreciation is worth a shit if you don’t have the joy of it–that thing that makes you look at the clock at 2 a.m., realize you have to go to work in six hours, but you say fuck it and keep reading.

    And what you say of SF writers reminds me of something that Descartes said a long time ago–that imagination opens the ground that science explores (my paraphrase). I also think that science fiction is often the first realm in which huge moral questions–particularly those related to the implications of technological changes we haven’t yet caught up with–are first broached in important ways.

26. Coop on July 26th, 2009 at 10:10 pm

    I’ll go ahead and go out on the limb that Daryl grew and say that Charlotte’s Web is one of the finest books of the 20th century. (And I generally hate books and movies with talking animals.) But EB White knew both how to write well and how to tell a story. Many SF writers, in my opinion, tell a good story and create sympathetic characters but, at best, write at the level of decent journalism. My Side of the Mountain and Bridge to Terabithia, which Daryl mentions, are also very fine, but not, perhaps, at the artistic level of Charlotte. Winnie-the-Pooh is also beautifully written. Alan Garner’s Stone Book Quartet, Owl Service and Red Shift are also ostensibly for “young readers” but are, for me, more artistically written and more challenging than all but the very finest books for adults. Even without the existence of Strandloper and Thursbitch, I’d rank Garner higher than almost anybody in the post-war period.

27. Brandon Hobson on July 26th, 2009 at 10:17 pm

    Great list, Deron!

28. Brandon Hobson on July 26th, 2009 at 10:19 pm

    i would maybe add Raymond Carver’s Where I’m Calling From

29. Deron Bauman on July 26th, 2009 at 11:22 pm

    Brandon, it’s on there.

    Cindy, fuck! I forgot Eugene. Waste goes on there tomorrow.

30. Daryl Scroggins on July 27th, 2009 at 8:52 am

    Sheila: I do get to teach the books I want to in most of my classes, and I work in lots of things that are not what more traditional approaches might call for. And here’s a funny story: My friend Rick, who retired from my school and department about 15 years ago, said he knew a man who taught American literature there who always had his students read Wind In the Willows just because he liked it.

    I often come up with arguments for why I need to present things I just want to present; I have lots of recorded works, for instance, that I simply like to hear. On the other side of this, I often avoid assigning works that I hold dear because I don’t want to hear another person say something like–”You know, that story ‘The Dead’ is just boring, and that story by whatshername, ‘A Good Man Is Hard To Find,’ would have been better if….”

    P.S. About my list of SF books in a comment above–it’s not all science fiction: Bradbury’s Something Wicked is a kind of fantasy/horror work, and King’s Different Seasons is mostly mainstream with only one piece being a sort of horror thing (“The Breathing Method”). The book contains four novellas, and I believe all of them were used in the making of feature length films, including “Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption,” and “The Body” (made into Stand By Me).

31. Cece on July 27th, 2009 at 9:05 am

    My husband and I are voracious readers and couldn’t figure out our reading- allergic son. We did everything to encourage him. He is an athlete so we went in that direction, but he was just bored out of his mind. “I just can’t take these talking cats. What’s up with that.” Read a Harry Potter or two to see what the commotion was about. He did what he had to do to make his (admittedly excellent) grades, but no more.

    Then came Ender’s!!!! The lightbulb had gone on. He still would rather do battle on the tennis court than pick up a book, but when he’s too tired for that, he will go for a good science fiction. That was never my thing or my husband’s. But my son’s choices have opened up a new territory for me.

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