The Huffington Post recently ran this little slideshow article listing "13 books nobody's read but they say they have." Featuring William Faulkner's As I Lay Dying. But they add insult to injury, saying
Actually, let's just put all of Faulkner's oeuvre in there. Not even Oprah could make him cool.
I suspect that Sean has something to say on this subject.
For the record, here are the other books:
- The Canterbury Tales, by Geoffrey Chaucer
- Democracy in America, by Alexis de Tocqueville
- Ulysses, by James Joyce
- A Christmas Carol, by Charles Dickens
- The Satanic Verses, by Salman Rushdie
- Moby Dick, by Herman Melville
- A Brief History of Time, by Stephen Hawking
- Infinite Jest, by David Foster Wallace
- The Name of the Rose, by Umberto Eco
- In Search of Lost Time, by Marcel Proust
- Don Quixote, by Miguel de Cervantes
- War and Peace, by Leo Tolstoy
How many have YOU read? And, maybe more importantly, who the heck goes to cocktail parties and discusses literature anymore anyway?
d'Tocqueville was so freakin boring I put the book down before I finished his discription of the United States and why it was so interesting for the fact that it "mirrors itself". What a bunch of poppycock. ::grumbles about high-browed Frenchmen...::
ReplyDeleteThere are two books on this list I am loathe to say I have not read. Canterbury Tales was scratched off our high school syllabus after Mom read how much crude descriptions it contained, especially concerning the nun. I have not tried to pick it up on my own. In my defense, I do know which translations I prefer of both Dante's Inferno and Beowulf. Moby Dick... there is no excuse on that one...
The rest that I have not read of this list don't really signify to me, because they've never been on my list, nor have I made any pretense of having read them.
Two. Shut up.
ReplyDeleteYeah... Christmas Carol and Don Quixote... :P
ReplyDeleteStarted War and Peace when I was pregnant with my son, though... haven't gotten very far.
ReplyDeleteHah, I'm even worse: one. Moby Dick.
ReplyDeleteWow... that's just sad. :(
ReplyDeleteHow was Moby Dick, anyway?
Without a doubt Moby Dick is the best piece of prose I have ever read.
ReplyDeleteI won't don the controversial mantle of Analyzer of Literature, but I think intellectual opinion is that Moby Dick is amongst the celestial furniture sitting in the room of Greatest Novels.
It has truly awe- and fear-inspiring scenes. It contains vast knowledge not only of whales and whaling but also literature, history, and philosophy. And it says volumes about gender. The digressions, typically readers' least favorite parts, are amazing for their erudition as well as their rhetoric and relation to the narrator and the narrative. Plus, it's just flat out awesome that Ishmail tattoos whale data on his arm during his shipwrecked isolation. The prose is nothing but aesthetic.
So, yeah, Moby Dick was great.
Well said, Dom. Moby Dick rules. I only wish I had been able to read it in one of Dr. Norberg's classes!
ReplyDeleteWhile I think people would get more out of Faulkner than they might assume, this is obviously a tiny, tiny selection of notable books. There are many, many good books out there, available for our consumption--some of which might even be dismissed by the literary establishment and excluded from the canon.
I also wouldn't be surprised if some of the contributors to this blog have favorite books that are too lofty for even this list!
Sean, I read "The Name of the Rose" in high school. This was prompted by the movie version starring Sean Connery as an intelligent, yet jaded ex-inquisitor Franciscan caught between a 14th century debate on his order's poverty.
ReplyDeleteI did not enjoy the book very much, aside from Ecco's framing some passages in a biblical style (i.e., something from "Song of Songs") or more medieval apocalypticism.
Mike