Books You'd Vote Off the Desert Island
So, we’re all familiar with the game where you try to come up with 10 books you’d take with you to a desert island where you’re doomed to spend the rest of your days – it’s a way of forcing definition of a (personal) canon by whatever criteria you can muster.
Well, here is a neat attempt to do the reverse: define which books should be thrown out of the canon – books you’d vote off the island.
His ten to toss:
White Noise by Don DeLillo
Absalom, Absalom by William Faulkner
One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez
The Road by Cormac McCarthy
The Rainbow by D. H. Lawrence
On the Road by Jack Kerouac
The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen
The USA Trilogy by John Dos Passos
Jacob’s Room by Virginia Woolf
A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens
It’s an interesting list. My reactions:
If I were making a list, I’d avoid throwing out books that are generally not considered the best work of a great author. Come out swinging against To the Lighthouse or Between the Acts or Mrs. Dalloway, not against Jacob’s Room; attack The Sound and the Fury or As I Lay Dying, not Absalom, Absalom. A Tale of Two Cities is a bit different; though nobody thinks it’s one of Dickens’ best (and it would just be stupid to attack Bleak House or David Copperfield), it’s part of the high school English curriculum canon, so perhaps it’s worth attacking. Or is it? Are we going to bash Silas Marner as well? Lord of the Flies? The Pearl? The Good Earth?
White Noise I enjoyed at the time; I wonder whether I would still enjoy it now that I am no longer an undergraduate, and I also wonder whether it simply hasn’t aged well, whether the particular academic fads that he’s satirizing are, since they are no longer current, no longer a successful basis for satire. The Road I haven’t read. But I’m not sure either of these have yet wormed their way into the canon – as opposed to the canon of books that some of your friends are likely to want you to read. The Corrections isn’t really canonical yet either, but it so plainly and obviously and desperately wants to be canonical that I suppose you have to slam the door hard if you want to keep it out.
Then there are two books that have already been voted off the island. Do you know anybody who reads either John Dos Passos or D. H. Lawrence? I don’t. In fact, they both strike me as authors who are ripe for rediscovery. Whether they are worth rediscovering, I don’t know, as I haven’t read any of either’s work (actually, I think I read a Lawrence short story for a class once, but I don’t remember it) – but let’s put any evaluation in proper context. These are authors who were once canonical but who have fallen deeply out of favor. Throwing them off the island means endorsing the status quo estimation of them, not overturning it.
(BTW, there was some talk around the water cooler of responding to Infinite Summer with “The Fall of the U.S.A.”, reading John Dos Passos’ opus this autumn and commenting on our progress on this site. I’m still up for that if others are.)
That leaves two books that are clearly canonical (they are among the key books by each author, are also key exemplars of their genres/periods, and have lots of fans) that he’s voting off: One Hundred Years of Solitude and On the Road. Since I haven’t read either, I can’t comment – but I suspect I’d wind up agreeing with him about both.
What would I add to the little list?
It’s not actually my general preference to play this game. Among other things, I haven’t read everything in the universe. The authors of the list above want to knock off White Noise and The Corrections. But what about the work of the Pintchik Oracle? Is it not equally or more worthy of banishment? I’ve never read The Recognitions. Maybe I’d hate it so much, I’d like all these other books much better by comparison!
As well, our judgments change over time. I read a book, and like it, but then reflect on it and it begins to curdle in memory, until eventually I’m embarrassed by my original enthusiasm. Another book I initially can’t get into, take three tries to get past page 50, then suddenly I’m hooked.
And I’ve made the rules tougher, by ruling out going after a minor book by a major author. And taking on a major author’s major book is daunting. For example, I would be inclined to vote off The Longest Journey by E.M. Forster, but nobody thinks it’s his best book, and I’m not sure anybody reads it. So, I could try to take a whack at A Passage to India – indeed, somebody should – but do I really think it’s a bad book? No – nor do I think people shouldn’t bother to read Forster anymore. I just think he’s due for a demotion.
Then there are the books where you just have to be the right age. Or the right sex. Take Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being – please! I loved this book when I was 19 – sex and deep thoughts! – but basically this is a book for intellectually-minded adolescents, not for grownups. So: should it be voted off the island? Not really; the book, and the author, are just a phase some boys go through, and going through it won’t do them any lasting harm, I don’t think.
Then there are the books that I still think are good, but not as good as people think they are. A Winter’s Tale by Mark Helprin is an example; so is The Adventures of Cavalier and Clay by Michael Chabon. I enjoyed both of these ooks, but both are trying way too hard, and because of that are ultimately not convincing. I remember individual bits of writing I liked, individual moments that worked really well, but I didn’t ultimately believe in them as works of art. Which is a pretty fundamental fail.
And then there are the authors who are just past their sell date. John Barth, for instance. When was the last time anyone suggested you should read The Sot-Weed Factor or Giles, Goat Boy? I haven’t read either of them, but I wasn’t terribly impressed by what little Barth I have read. But what’s the point – he’s not really in the canon anymore, is he?
This leaves me with three books that I genuinely think are not good but that are unquestionably canonical, and should be voted off the island:
Under the Volcano, by Malcolm Lowry. I had to spend three weeks marinated in this humorless, self-pitying rant as part of a survey of modern English fiction. We spent only a week on Ulysses. Why? As the professor said, “this is my favorite book.” It appears to be a lot of other people’s favorite books as well; it’s on Time’s list of the 100 best novels of the 20th century. Someone needs to save these people from themselves.
Frankenstein, by Mary Shelley. Yes, it’s historically significant. Yes, you can “study” it until the cows come home. The big intro lit crit class when I was an undergrad read only one primary text before diving into a dozen different literary theoretical approaches thereto, and the one text was Frankenstein. But it’s boring! Boring with boring on top! And it has no style! Read Dracula instead – now there’s a novel!
The Watchmen, by Alan Moore. I should probably put this in the same category as Kundera, and just say this is a phase some boys have to go through, and leave it at that. And I’ll admit, it holds your attention. When the movie came out recently, instead of going to see it, I re-read the graphic novel. And I was certainly able to read through it – it was a breeze. I wasn’t bored. But trash isn’t generally boring. And that’s the problem: this is trash dressed up as something more. And the sensibility behind the book is not actually one that you want anybody taking seriously.
Your own suggestions?
The contours of this game seem less than well-defined, but one book that I assume is still canonical that I was less than impressed with was To Kill A Mockingbird. Not a bad read, but the characters weren’t terribly realistic (especially St. Atticus), and thematically it seemed a bit too concerned with being Important.
— kenB · Jul 15, 06:46 PM · #
I hope to come up with a real list later, but in the meantime and FWIW, my impression is that Absalom, Absalom! is generally thought to be Faulkner’s best novel.
— Alan Jacobs · Jul 15, 06:49 PM · #
Under no cricumstances are you permitted to throw out “100 Years of Solitude”.
— MC · Jul 15, 06:49 PM · #
The Idiot, though that’s not considered to be Dostoevsky’s best.
Faust
Pride and Prejudice (though I’m distinctly aware this opinion will not be shared by many)
Can I throw in movies also? If I can, I vote all of Scorsese out.
— dth · Jul 15, 06:59 PM · #
I keep meaning to go back to If On a Winter’s Night a Traveler, which an English teacher pushed on me at age 16 and I never finished. I fear, though, that I will actually like it as much as I’m supposed to.
— Matt Frost · Jul 15, 07:04 PM · #
And for those of you who thought the comments to Alan’s curriculum post amounted to a lot of signaling, hold on to your hats…
— Matt Frost · Jul 15, 07:04 PM · #
Alan: it is? Well, scratch my objection then. I haven’t read Absalom, Absalom, so I don’t have a personal view, but I’ve met other people who’ve disparaged it. Maybe they just didn’t like Faulkner much in general. Anyway, my fail.
And Matt: you know I wrote this specifically to draw fire away from Alan.
— Noah Millman · Jul 15, 07:16 PM · #
Under the Volcano is humorless?!
The consul chapters include some of the funniest passages in 20th century English lit.
— Chris · Jul 15, 07:17 PM · #
Chris: really? Boy, it sure didn’t seem that way to me when we were reading it for class.
I’m actually looking forward to the abuse I’m going to get. Might force me to re-read some of these books to see if I still agree with myself.
— Noah Millman · Jul 15, 07:25 PM · #
Heart of Darkness. Painfully boring and unnecessarily difficult prose.
The Great Gatsby. Nice story, short easy read, but why the big fuss?
— tompain · Jul 15, 07:30 PM · #
Dear God, this list gave me a heart attack. Jacobs is right: Absalom is Faulkner’s greatest. Knocking it out of “the canon” is dumb. And getting rid of White Noise, On the Road (!!!), USA, One Hundred Years of Solitude, Jacob’s Room — are you shitting me? Someone thinks those are overrated? Corrections is such a new novel it’s only in some kind of hipster “canon.” Same for Kavalier.
Sot-Weed is marvellous and is canonical if only because of its clear impact on later histoical fiction (Mason and Dixon being trivially obvious but there’s others). When you toss aside Sot-Weed and Giles Goat Boy but you haven’t read them — huh? OK, I’m guessing what you’ve read is Chimera. Not really comparable. (It would be like judging Underworld by White Noise.) You want to tell people it’s safe to blow off Barth, then blow off something which sucks (Somebody the Sailor). Dracula is cute relative to Frankenstein for its invocation, also, of a fascination with organic, decaying matter — Dracula sleeps, you know, in earth and vegetation, not a coffin.
Again, The Recognitions? A good candidate for my favorite book, man! (But then so is USA). Blow off JR and Carpenter’s instead (but then he came back with Frolic…) And Kundera’s Lightness isn’t quite a “phase” book — there’s a kind of, let’s kick this idea along, thing which became much imitated, no? (By Kundera himself, badly, in Immortality.)
Watchmen — well, yeah. Get your noses out of the comix, boys, comb your hair, and go try to meet some girls.
The boom was a real movement which produced a lot, and One Hundred Years exemplifies it maybe better than anything else. You need that and some Borges. Similarly the great cluster of writers of the American ’30’s and ’40’s — look, USA is a presence in Faulkner, kill that and you might as well toss out your Thomas Wolfe too.
Whereas some of Tom Wolfe is overrated. Time to ditch Right Stuff from the canon. Not Bonfire, not just now, obviously!
OK, here’s a controversial one: ditch Crime and Punishment, man. You’ve got Underground and it’s so much more succinct. And all the Dumas can go, winning though the author is. And all the Philip Roth, ever. And Raymond Carver. And Vonnegut’s due to be pruned, but not so soon after his death, it’s not decent.
And toss Lord of the Flies. One of the funniest things I’ve read is the Nobel committee’s announcement awarding Golding the prize since in theory it’s supposed to be for the body of work and, look, the guy was a one-hit wonder. The only reason you need to read that book (granted an important one) is to make a clever snide allusion to it when you observe people Piggy-ing some poor bastard. Surely there’s another work that could stand in.
— Sanjay · Jul 15, 07:46 PM · #
I would just like to throw Harold Bloom off the island, desert or otherwise.
— Tickletext · Jul 15, 07:47 PM · #
I’m looking forward to Suderman blasting back on the Watchmen thing.
— Craig · Jul 15, 07:54 PM · #
“The Magic Mountain” is the worst book I’ve ever read all the way through (it was assigned for a course.) I recently decided to give late Mann another shot and threw “Doctor Faustus” in the trash after 40 pages. (And I’m interested in Schoenberg, who is the basis for the main character, so I was looking forward to it.) The weird thing is that “Buddenbrooks” is terrific. When he was young, Mann wrote good books about people (“Death in Venice”, too), but then he decided he was a Great German Writer and had to write about Ideas and Culture and Civilization and turned into a colossally empty-headed bore. I think the sufficiently pompous and Germanic still include his late works in the canon, but if he landed on my island, I’d swim out into the ocean and drown. It would be less painful.
— JimB · Jul 15, 08:02 PM · #
Hm.
The very first thing that popped into my mind when I read this post’s title was “A Passage to India.”
So I’m all for somebody taking a whack at it.
— Dave Roth · Jul 15, 08:03 PM · #
Sanjay: you got me right, all I’ve read of Barth is Chimera, didn’t like it. On your recommendation, Sot-Weed is on my list of ought to read someday – but I have to warn you, I couldn’t get into Mason & Dixon so if influence thereon is the main claim to keep it on the island, we’re starting off on the wrong foot. (And I’m not anti-Pynchon as such; there were chunks of Gravity’s Rainbow that I liked very much.)
Absalom has been on my ought-to-read along with much other Faulkner (I’ve read The Sound and the Fury and some of the novellas) but I’m not really a Faulkner guy.
Recognitions – tried to read both JR and Carpenters and couldn’t get into either! Seems to be a pattern here – I try to read the wrong books by a given author . . .
USA I am eager to read!
The Garcia Marquez I’ve read (Chronica and Love in the Time of Cholera) I haven’t liked as much as Borges’ or Cortazar’s short stories. Wasn’t blown away by Vargas Llosa (La Ciudad y Los Perros, Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter) either. Not even sure they’re really the same kind of thing as the Argentines. A friend who knows me and knows this literature very well tells me I should read Roa Bastos’ Yo, El Supremo.
Never read The Right Stuff but I’m not clear you need to read Bonfire of the Vanities – even if it is perennially topical. But whatever.
Now, ditching Crime and Punishment is an interesting idea! Gotta think about that one. I haven’t read Demons or The Idiot, but of the three Doestoevsky books I have read (Notes from Underground, Crime and Punishment, and The Brothers Karamazov) I’d definitely part with Crime and Punishment vastly more readily than either of the others. But does it deserve to be booted off the island?
Can’t agree with you about Roth. I’d keep Goodbye, Columbus, Portnoy’s Complaint and American Pastoral at a minimum. And there’s a great deal I haven’t read yet. You want to ditch a yid? Ditch Elie Wiesel.
Never read any Dumas. Not sure he’s taken seriously, though, is he?
Absolutely agree about Carver. I thought we’d already thrown him off the island long ago, and I see no reason to invite him back.
Never read any Vonnegut, so have no opinion.
Lord of the Flies falls into the same category as To Kill a Mockingbird: these books are only read by high school students, so they don’t really count.
— Noah Millman · Jul 15, 08:23 PM · #
JimB: I think you need to be in the right frame of mind to get into The Magic Mountain. The head of our office is German, and he said it was his favorite book. He read it while doing his mandatory service in the German army, and something about the futility of that service connected him with the novel. In any event, Buddenbrooks and Joseph and his Brothers have long been on my ought-to-read list.
Anyone want to take a whack at The Tin Drum? Or Midnight’s Children?
— Noah Millman · Jul 15, 08:30 PM · #
Oh, and Sanjay: I see you defended most of the books on the original “Second Pass” kill list – but not The Rainbow. Should I infer the obvious? . . .
— Noah Millman · Jul 15, 08:36 PM · #
Others have covered this, already, but I will pile on: it may not be as popular nor as widely read as As I Lay Dying or The Sound and the Fury, but Absolom, Absolom is certainly regarded by Faulkner diehards as his best— certainly among his best.
I agree with “The Second Pass,” however, that Absolom, Absolom is quite overrated. Along with The Sound and the Fury, I would group Go Down, Moses and Light in August as Faulkner’s finest works. Even the somewhat lightweight The Reivers and the amazing/strange The Wild Palms are pleasures I would much sooner return to than the overwrought Absolom, Absolom.
— turnbuckle · Jul 15, 09:27 PM · #
Crap. Forgive my repeated misspelling of Absalom, Absalom! No doubt, it casts suspicion on everything I wrote.
— turnbuckle · Jul 15, 09:43 PM · #
@Matt
I specifically came her to mention If On a Winter’s Night a Traveler—-the literary abortion that was the first book I couldn’t read the entire way through.
@Sanjay
I hope you’re being sarcastic about Golding. The Inheritors is a pretty solid book and Rites of Passage is pretty well regarded too within his well known trilogy.
@tompain
So we’re going to knock of brilliant novels because they were dense? Maybe the readers who think that way should stick to movies?
Off the top of my head I’d go with:
Lolita
The Ginger Man
The Fountainhead
Stranger in a Strange Land
Anna Karenina
and any Calvino
— howcan · Jul 15, 10:15 PM · #
Signaling it be, but since we’re talking about a personal canon, I have to say that most of the these books never made it onto the island in the first place, with possible exceptions being Karamazov, Underground, Faust and Heart of Darkness.
If you only had ten books to read for the rest of your lonely life, what you’d be looking for are inexhaustibles. Which means that for the purposes of this list, what you’d throw away are books which at one point seemed rereadable forever, but which, for whatever reason, no longer are.
Here’s my list:
1. The Decline of the West
2. The Wheel of Time
3. Atlas Shrugged
4. The Hero with a Thousand Faces
5. Beyond Good and Evil
6. Catch 22
7. Godel, Escher, Bach
8. The New Testament
9. Huckleberry Finn
10. The Republic
— Kristoffer V. Sargent · Jul 15, 10:16 PM · #
One of my absolute least favorite misconceptions about “the canon”, or more particularly what’s taught in college, is that book’s presence in either are a simple matter of how “great” they are. People looooooove to kill Beloved because it’s the most taught book, but when doing so they usually make the leap into saying that the fact that it’s the most taught means people think it’s “best”. Quality is only one of many reasons to teach any novel, and far from the most important.
Beloved, incidentally, is only a qualified success. Whereas Sula is one of the five or six greatest American novels ever written, on a part with Huck Finn and only beneath Gatsby or Moby Dick.
Incidentally, including One Hundred Years of Solitude is the kind of move you do which is kind of just to be a punk. As I’m a big fan of being a bit of a punk, I’m not complaining; but I don’t think it’s credible to include it on the list. (But it’s all taste, isn’t it.)
Anyone want to take a whack at The Tin Drum? Or Midnight’s Children?
No.
— Freddie · Jul 15, 10:39 PM · #
Brideshead Revisited. Evelyn Waugh’s most famous novel and probably his worst.
That’s the book that came into my head straight away. But I’ll keep thinking about this, it’s a very interesting idea.
Shaun
— Shaun · Jul 15, 10:41 PM · #
And for those of you who thought the comments to Alan’s curriculum post amounted to a lot of signaling, hold on to your hats…
No offense, but this is a kind of non-falsifiable psychologizing meant to undermine opinion that drives me bonkers.
— Freddie · Jul 15, 10:46 PM · #
Actually, I know someone who is quite a fan of D.H. Lawrence, and he never mentioned The Rainbow, so I think that’s doubly damning.
(Is it just me or does Textile not produce anything for the citation tag here?)
— Justin · Jul 15, 10:56 PM · #
I don’t know that I can speak about my “personal canon”, but I’ll talk about some of the books I read in college.
The first kick would go to Theodore Dreiser — but I expect that would just speed him on his current way. Then, more controversially, Walt Whitman (except for possibly Leaves of Grass), and Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye (which I read twice, since it was the favorite book of one of my professors. I though it was merely okay).
Reaching further back, I’d kick the entire legend of Tristan and Iseult, from the medieval legends all the way up through Wagner’s opera.I’m sure after such big kicks, I’d be too exhausted to do anything but punt Edith Wharton and Don DeLillo a little ways down the beach.
— Ethan C. · Jul 15, 11:21 PM · #
Well, sure, I’m not going to stick my sorry neck out for Rainbow.
Sula one of the five best American novels? I can’t justify even putting it in the top 100. [Nor putting Gatsby or Moby Dick on top (this would be where I should insert an interesting story about my wife and Laurie Anderson but it’ll wait) of Faulkner, Dos Passos, Hemingway, Pynchon, Heller, Doctorow…no. Although for some reason the Fitz which always tears me up is Tender is the Night anyway: damn, that bitch really screwed him.] The reason for kicking things like Beloved is that if you’re really going to treat the canon as a kind of one-of-eash smorgasbord (which I wouldn’t), you’d kick Beloved in a heartbeat and replace it with Their Eyes Were Watching God, and if you got two you’d add Color Purple. And see, Noah, by the same token the Jews can stay the hell in: if I said I wanted to boot “a yid” the ghosts of Singer and Bellow would sneer at me (and then go back to just owning Dreiser) and I’d whimper an apology. I want to boot Roth, that over-rated under-sexed old fart.
I dropped out of high school and only went to college because I was enamored, in the way the young and stupid can be, of Absalom, and then later all of Faulkner. I applied to Harvard because Gavin Stevens and Quentin went there which is a stupid reason for a life decision that is in retrospect as good as any I’ve heard.
Really? No Vonnegut? I remember blowing up once in a lab, asking, look, Pynchon and Heller and others came along to toy with some of the same ideas and yet they were such damn better writers, what was the BFD with Vonnegut? And a much older woman explained, you need to get that he was the first on that ground, there was a time long past when a lot of us felt like he spoke for us. And I got it. That’s why he’s in the canon and should be: Cat’s Cradle and Slaughterhouse opened up doors. I just think a pruning is in order.
No, howcan, i’m not kidding about Golding. Read the incredibly funny award: the Nobel committee didn’t think the other shit was any good either. But if you don’t like If on a winter’s night then, shit, you haven’t even made it this far in the post.
Agreed Rushdie is hugely overrated. Grass isn’t though.
Oh, hey! Let’s boot Eco, though I love him. He never quite reattained the high of Rose and Pendulum (the latter, granted, being “include it just to demonstrate the form”). But we boot him as part of an obvious trade: Eco gets booted from the canon to “just good books,” while Dan Brown gets booted from popular culture straight into hell.
There is not enough Pushkin in the canon — Onegin? And are we agreed that Corrections, Kavalier, maybe some Messud, Auster and McEwan — that’s all “canon-in-waiting” at best? And that “Messud, Auster and McEwan” would be a damn good name for a law firm?
— Sanjay · Jul 16, 12:17 AM · #
Never mind voting him off the island; I am going to kill Sanjay and eat him if he does not send me my goddam coffee!
— Tony Comstock · Jul 16, 12:59 AM · #
I suppose it’s a matter of taste, but I find Rushdie’s writing style immensely enjoyable when he gets on a roll, even though his novels as a whole often don’t hold together very well (and of course Midnight’s Children doesn’t seem quite so imaginatively new after reading Tin Drum).
I enjoyed Vonnegut as a young’un, but I’m not sure it holds up as Literature.
Pushkin loses so much in translation that I’m not sure it’s worth including him — if you can’t read the Russian, you’ll never quite understand his greatness. (Yes, that’s signalling — Slavic Studies degree-holder here!)
— kenb · Jul 16, 12:59 AM · #
Toni Morrison: I’ve read Beloved and Song of Solomon, liked the latter better but didn’t think it held up all the way through – problem with a lot of books. Agree that Their Eyes Were Watching God kicks just about anyone’s. But The Color Purple? Really? You’re serious? Ntozake Shange maybe, but Alice Walker?
Moby Dick is phenomenal. One of my very favorite books. No dice getting me to pick Faulkner, Hemmingway or Fitzgerald over Melville. But Heller? Heller? I’d throw Catch-22 off the island. Wouldn’t miss it.
Yids: If I have to lose one of Singer/Roth/Bellow, I probably lose Bellow, but that’s not a fair judgment because I’ve read the least Bellow (and the most Singer) so maybe if I’d read more I’d want to keep him more. Can’t I just get rid of Wiesel? I’ll throw in Andre Schwarz Bart! And then I keep Singer, Roth and Bellow. And if I throw in Mailer, Miller and Mamet, can I keep Appelfeld? And Primo Levy? And Babel? And Romain Gary? And Bruno Schulz? And Mordechai Richler? And . . . I’ll stop now. Sorry.
Could never get into Auster. Only McEwan I’ve read is Atonement, which I thought was OK. If we’re looking for “canon-in-waiting” folks I nominate Ishiguro for The Unconsoled. But that’s the other game; let’s stick to the game at hand.
I need to read Pushkin. It’s a hole. But there are even bigger holes than that. I talk a good game, but I’m really not terribly well-read.
— Noah Millman · Jul 16, 02:16 AM · #
I’ll send you TONS of information, air jordan shoes. Don’t you worry.
Try The Cement Garden, Noah. Like a lot of writers McEwan is a bad judge of the quality of his own work.
— Freddie · Jul 16, 02:25 AM · #
Noah, thanks for addressing the post at such length, and with such intelligence. And thanks to you and the other commenters here for a thread that is very much in keeping with the spirit of the list. If I could re-do the “canon” headline, I probably would. It’s caused some confusion — or maybe not confusion, just unnecessary distraction. The working title of the piece was just “don’t read this,” as an antidote to all the guides I mention in the intro. But obviously, we weren’t going to beat up on books or authors that serious readers already know to avoid or re-think (i.e., Ayn Rand). Also, I didn’t write about (or choose) all 10 books. It was a group effort, just to clarify phrasings like “his list.”
Sanjay, I love your first comment above. The idea of the list giving you a heart attack but then leading to spirited talk about books — that was the whole point. No one’s going to agree about all of this, obviously (and thankfully). So here’s some more talk, based on what everyone here has said:
I wouldn’t un-recommend any Dostoevsky, but I do agree that Underground is perfect in a way that Crime and Punishment isn’t. (But some scenes in C&P are just too great to lose.)
Tom Wolfe! can be!! PROBLEMATIC!!!, but I laughed enough during The Right Stuff that I’d fight for it. (The scenes about monkey astronauts come to mind, and there was even a gonzo, winding sentence that ends with an image of Joshua trees that is the best a sentence like that can be.) On Barth, I haven’t read the fatter ones, but I remember enjoying The Floating Opera and The End of the Road way back when. I know they’re not really indicative of what he went on to do, but…
I will never budge on White Noise: it’s not a good novel. Underworld has its flaws, certainly, but it has plenty of brilliance, too. That makes it a much better book than WN.
For the canon-in-waiting, I’d take Atonement. I’m glad I read it early — an adolescent thing to say, I know — and I loved it. I’d take it over Franzen and Chabon in a heartbeat. And lastly (for now), I agree that Roth is over-rated and (presumably) under-sexed. Still, Portnoy’s Complaint is great, and I thought The Counterlife, after the opening section, was impressive.
PS — The Textism-to-American Scene function has left me bewildered.
— John Williams · Jul 16, 04:05 AM · #
Ah Sanjay, I see now—-you’re clearly enamored with books that deign to be complex, sophisticated prose for the bourgeoisie. On the other hand, considering one has to be pretty simple to not be amazed at how tiresome and illogical Calvino’s metaphors were in his charmingly delightful set of vignettes and meta-discussion in On a winters night, maybe that’s an unfair characterization. And anyway, Calvino already did the ‘thinking’ for his readers by claiming any criticism of his meta discussion was just the pedestrian masses having brilliance fly over their heads, so an expletive insult serves your purpose.
In any event, your criticism of Golding’s award seems misplaced. You can say he wasn’t particularly diverse in your opinion or that he wasn’t incredibly provocative?!?, but that hardly has anything to do with his raw output and is probably more reflective of your political biases (maybe Humean themes aren’t appealing) or (as with everything in this thread) your literary biases with respect to an author’s formula. Hesse/Marquez/Asturias/Gordimer can be argued as being as single minded thematically as Golding and there’s an argument to be made for others as well. The claim that the nobel committee thought he had one good book is puzzling (and pretty lightweight) though: http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1983/press.html
Maybe you should stick with a criticism a Calvino fan would make—no book that can be a bestseller is intelligent enough to earn plaudits from the literary community.
— howcan · Jul 16, 04:12 AM · #
“No offense, but this is a kind of non-falsifiable psychologizing meant to undermine opinion that drives me bonkers.”
Me, I thought the guy was just heckling us as a bunch of show-offs.
And Justin – the style sheet is missing the tags to italicize citations. Thank you for caring about the difference between <cite> and <strong>. It makes it all worthwhile, man.
— Matt Frost · Jul 16, 04:17 AM · #
Noah,
Good stuff. Allowing for the gaps in my own reading (huge, terrifying gaps), I think we can dispose of Rushdie. I’ve also nominated Germinal at my blog and think it’s no loss to abandon The Old Man and the Sea and For Whom the Bell Tolls when there’s so much better Hemingway around, yet these two are, I suspect, the most-popular of his novels.
http://www.spectator.co.uk/alexmassie/5187401/books-overboard-what-would-you-throw-away.thtml
— Alex Massie · Jul 16, 10:13 AM · #
Oh, I’d also be interested in a Dos Passos Project…
— Alex Massie · Jul 16, 10:38 AM · #
Now, c’mon, howcan. If you want to diss Calvino on those grounds, how will Borges survive? And it ain’t all postmodern linguistically twisted navel-gazing, you know: Hemingway, Bellow, Steinbeck, Doctorow ….
John, think of White Noise in the context of that Vonnegut bit. DeLillo (and Auster) really redid Vonnegut’s bit, but perfectly, literarily. I don’t think it’s comparable to Underworld of course, it’s almost like DeLillo is two different (good) authors (and a third, not so good one, who did Ratner and Falling Man), much like the guy who wrote Lot 49 and Vineland can’t really be compared with the guy who wrote Rainbow and Against the Day (and who looks to be puttin’ out another Vineland/49-type book in about a month, by the way).
Ishiguro in waiting, OK — but for The Unconsoled? Really?
Auster is a god. Acutally NY Trilogy probably is old enough and has cast a broad enough swathe to be headed straight to the canon. It can be polished off well in an evening, too, Noah — although I don’t know why i’m wasting the advice on a guy who ranks Roth over Bellow (? Really? REALLY?) I just don’t think Wiesel is in most people’s constellations, by the way — I had to strain a bit to remember something of his I’d read.
Oh, hey: toss Sontag out of the literary canon (though she remains a great essayist). Death Kit — c’mon. Also please please please let’s bury Alan Moorehead. I remember reading his awe at how Livingston’s simple morally primitive Indian proters exerted themselves to get his body out of Africa — or his nose-in-the-air defense of Gordon — and thinking, this guy’s time has passed. And that was before 9/11.
I’m done. No fiction for me for a while anyway: I’m buried in Billingsley’s Probability and Measure — deservedly in a canon, but not this one, and it’s slow going — and afterwards I’ve got a pile of nonfiction including a copy of May’s Thinking in Time gifted to me by a retiring colonel: upon a skim it too looks to be as good as anything written in the English language, but it’s yet another canon and I’m stuck in those kinds of things for a while since books like that are the ones in my suitcase.
Gimme a break, Tony. It’s travel in bad settings for quite some while more. I’ve been drinking Maxwell House from percolators for months.
— Sanjay · Jul 16, 01:10 PM · #
Rushdie maybe you can throw out. Midnight’s Children, you can’t. I like the stories in Cloven Viscount and enjoyed The Baron in the Trees but not enough to read the followups.
— Freddie · Jul 16, 02:03 PM · #
I think the biases against Vonnegut are another, complicated issue entirely, and one that would take a lot more thinking than I’m capable of at this particular moment. Whatever Vonnegut’s limitations, I’m not sure that Pynchon, DeLillo, et al. “improved” on him. (And I’m more familiar with DeLillo’s work than Pynchon’s.) This is where I would normally try to address differences of purpose, readers aimed at, etc. Instead I’ll just say that Vonnegut can be genuinely funny, and I have a really, really hard time figuring out what people find funny in DeLillo. DeLillo is a more conspicuously literary writer than Vonnegut, but I’m not convinced that makes him a better one. When I think of who will be read a hundred years from now, I like Kurt’s chances against Don.
— John Williams · Jul 16, 02:03 PM · #
I think everyone is making this far more complicated than it needs to be. My list of 10 books to vote off the island would follow these two criteria:
a) books I’ve actually read
b) that most of the population loves or that are considered great literary works (the type that would often be assigned in college lit classes, for example)
— Amanda · Jul 16, 02:52 PM · #
Arriving late but I’d throw Virginia Woolf off the island (with “Jacob’s Room” & some essays retained for historic interest). She also has my vote for most overrated & damaging canonical 20th C figure: a pernicious influence & she used up breathing room that could have nourished much better writers & stylists. Don’t care for her pawky formal innovations, her condescenscion towards her characters or the monotonous flow of her lyric prose.
— mw · Jul 16, 03:25 PM · #
Vote off the island “A Catcher in the Rye” and “Zen or the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.” Both of them vaunt narcissism as if it were the secret to life. What stupidity. Also vote off the island “Lolita.” Since when do pedophiliac urges become great literature? I used to teach “Silas Marner” and “The Lord of the Flies.” Both are excellent. If I were to vote off the island any Dickens book, it would be “Hard Times,” not “A Tale of Two Cities.” “Hard Times” is beyond formulaic. I wasn’t too fond of “The Old Curiosity Shop” either. Little Nell took a century to die.
— Aunt Laura · Jul 16, 03:40 PM · #
Two thoughts only:
1) It’s outrageous to consider One Hundred Years of Solitude in this discussion.
2) Vonnegut can go. Especially Breakfast of Champions.
— right · Jul 16, 06:23 PM · #
One more: goodbye, Old Man and the F’ing Sea.
— right · Jul 16, 06:26 PM · #
May I suggest the one and only Pride & Prejudice and Zombies?
muahahahahahahahaha
I actually enjoyed If On A Winters Night A Traveler. An literary abortion to some, but each story within the story is so well written that when Calvino rips you back to the main storyline, you can’t help but feel whiplash. It’s silly at times, erotic at times, and a bit visceral. I had no idea it was canonical, however.
Who would I kick out? I’d echo Vonnegut, and add:
The Awakening by Kate Chopin
Handmaid’s Tale by Atwood
Clearly I’m against feminist literature. While we’re on the topic, did anyone completely create a storyline out of existence for a novel they hadn’t read fully, for a report or project? I totally did that with Hard Times. I still have no clue what it’s about, but I can recount the remaining story using all the characters from Chapter 1.
— Geoff · Jul 16, 07:54 PM · #
Dos Passos is one of my favorite authors, although i actually don’t think the USA Trilogy counts as his best work. Manhattan Transfer is his best and well worth your time. I’m not a big John Barth fan either but absolutely loved The Adventures of Somebody the Sailor.
I would definitely vote Chabon off the island, if he’s on it, and would nominate The Golden Bowl as a good candidate to be kicked off (Portrait of a Lady on the other hand is as impervious as Shakespeare).
— Giles · Jul 16, 10:02 PM · #
1. Catcher in the Rye
2. Lady Chatterley’s Lover
3. The Handmaid’s Tale (it will give the women on the island advance warning as to how I intend to structure our new society. Seriously, though, I have no idea how some critics found this book even remotely insightful let alone harrowing or possibly prophetic).
— Tim · Jul 17, 02:44 PM · #
Loved Under the Volcano, so had to add my 2 cents in for the defense. I thought the descriptions of actual events and settings were engrossing, as well as the interior monologues (espically regarding drunkenness).
For more, I suggest this website as proof of its greatness:
http://www.iloveunderthevolcano.com/
— agorabum · Jul 17, 06:58 PM · #
You don’t need to decide which books to throw off the island. President Obama has hired someone to make those decisions for you.
— The Reticulator · Jul 20, 02:54 AM · #