Why I Read: The Serious Pleasure of Books (26 page)

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