Sylvain Tesson's six months in a cabin on shore of Lake Baikal - I take eighteen bottles: three per month.

Since I was promised a book about solitude in Bosco’s Malicroix and did not really get one, I thought I would mention a real one that I read last year, Sylvain Tesson’s In the Forests of Siberia (Dans les forêts de Sibérie, 2011).  The book exists in English under the embarrassing title The Consolations of the Forest, I assume to attract some of the readers of that recent bestseller about trees.  The German one?  Am I imagining that?  “Bestseller about trees” does not sound plausible.

Tesson is France’s most prestigious travel writer, and France has an audience that takes its travel writers, living and dead, seriously.  He has developed a special interest in Russia, visiting the country in many books.  By chance, earlier today Kaggsy wrote about another of his Russian books, Berezina (2015), in which he recreates Napoleon’s retreat from Moscow on a Soviet motorcycle.

In Forests, Tesson sits still for a while.  He spends February through July of 2010 in a cabin (the one to the upper left) on the shore of Lake Baikal, where he can be alone with himself, watch the weather and the lake, climb the nearby mountains, read, and drink.  There is a human being in another cabin a day’s walk to the north, and a couple of people a day’s walk to the south, and that’s it, at least until the lake thaws.  I was surprised how many visitors Tesson starts to get when the lake thaws. By then, though, the neighbors to the south have given Tesson a pair of dogs, and the nature of Tesson’s “solitude” has completely changed.  Forests kinda turns into a dog book.

Still, there is as much solitude, or more, than he wants.  Why is Tesson performing the experiment, other than to write this book?  In the first paragraph, he is shopping in Irkutsk.  “I had already filled six carts with pasta and Tabasco.”  He has trouble with the ketchup, because there are fifteen varieties.  “I choose ‘super hot tapas’ Heinz.  I take eighteen bottles: three per month” (p. 21).  This, he thinks, “fifteen kinds of ketchup,” is reason enough “to leave this world” for a while.

He says he told people in France that he was isolating himself “because I had fallen behind in my reading” (32), and I am including the contents of Tesson’s box of books, to which he gives a lot of thought.  “List of Ideal Reading Composed in Paris with Great Care in Anticipation of a Sojourn of Six Months in the Siberian Forest,” is the label up above.

When one is wary of the poverty of his internal life, it is necessary to carry some good books: one can always fill one’s own void.  The error would be to choose exclusively from difficult books, imagining that life in the woods maintains in you a very high spiritual temperature.  Time passes slowly when one has nothing but Hegel for a snowy afternoon.  (32, all translations are obviously mine)

Some philosophy, some crime novels, of course Robinson Crusoe, of course Walden, lots of American nature writing, remembering that the French for some reason do not produce their own nature writing, although Tesson’s book counts.  I am just assuming that people wandering by Wuthering Expectations are more curious about what Tesson reads than what he sees when the seasons change, although that is awfully interesting, or heaven forbid what he discovers about himself, which will not surprise many readers.  But as usual I prefer a writer’s irony to his sincerity.  Anyways, lists of books, everyone like those.

The most famous books I had not read but now have, 2018 edition, Cather and Wharton and Tintin

Ten years ago I assembled a little post about my 19th century Humiliations, the term, from a David Lodge novel I have not read, meaning the books it would be most shameful not to have read - if one were an English professor.  Which one is not.  It is just a game.  “Your bloody Hamlet” is the winner, I believe.  For non-professionals, it is in no way humiliating not to have read Hamlet.

Still, in a moment when I feel that I somehow know less than ever, it is nice to glance at that post.  I’ve read ‘em all, now.  Not bad.  Not so bad.

Based on a vague sense of prestige and imperfect memories of how often I see them mentioned in good literary writing, here are the Top Ten Humiliations I knocked off my list this year.  I had not, but now have, read:

The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge (1910), Rainer Maria Rilke
The Custom of the Country (1913), Edith Wharton
My Ántonia (1918), Willa Cather
Winesburg, Ohio (1919), Sherwood Anderson
R.U.R. (1921), Karel Čapek
Red Cavalry (1926), Isaac Babel
The Bridge of San Luis Rey (1927), Thornton Wilder
La nausée (Nausea, 1938), Jean-Paul Sartre
Cahier d’un retour au pays natal (Notebook of a Return to the Native Country, 1939), Aimé Césaire
Illuminations (1966, but really most from the 1930s), Walter Benjamin

Some are more famous.  Those last two are more on the prestige end.  I am probably overrating the status of the Čapek play, but c’mon, the word “robot,” right?  I am probably overrating the status of the Sartre novel at this moment.  It was still a super-high status art object when I was in college.

The only one of those I would put on my Top Ten Best of the Year list would be Red Cavalry.  For the little that is worth.

My perspective about prestige and fame is United Statesian, with some sense that the rest of the world exists.  From the French perspective, though, I could add some books that are much-read in France but have made much less impression here:

“L’attaque du moulin” (“The Attack on the Mill,” 1880), Émile Zola
La Gloire de mon père (The Glory of My Father, 1957), Marcel Pagnol
Le Lion (The Lion, 1958), Joseph Kessel

These are all books the French read when young.  School stuff, sometimes.  The charming Pagnol memoir is read in the U.S. by real Francophiles.  Kessel was a journalist and travel writer who also wrote fiction.  This particular novel, about an English girl whose best friend is a lion, was on the shelves of every bookstore, along with a less predictable selection of other Kessel books.  It was translated long ago, but seems to have vanished in English.  It seemed good to me.  Not a thriller as we use the word now, but tense and frightening.

Really, from the French perspective, the most famous books I read this year, the most universal books, were:

Tintin, volume 4 (Cigars of the Pharaoh, 1934) through volume 9 (The Crab with the Golden Claws, 1941), Hergé
Blake and Mortimer, the first six volumes, meaning The Secret of the Swordfish (1950-3), The Mystery of the Great Pyramid (1954-5), and The Yellow “M” (1956), Edgar P. Jacobs
Asterix, volume 1 (Asterix the Gaul, 1961) through volume 3 (Asterix and the Goths, 1963), René Goscinny and Albert Uderzo

The first two are Belgian.  All three are on the curious Le Monde “100 Books of the Century” list, alongside Camus and Proust and The Little Prince.

The Asterix volumes were the hardest to find at the library – meaning, always checked out – which is why I read so few.  I became fascinated by the Blake and Mortimer books because they are, in many ways, quite terrible.  Nuclear war as envisaged by an eight-year-old obsessed with model airplanes, just to kick things off.  Barely a woman in sight, even in the backgrounds, in any of these books.

It would not be true to say that everyone in France has read the first volume of Asterix and, say, Tintin’s The Blue Lotus.  But it must be pretty close.  I am not exactly sure what I learned about French culture reading these comics, but I certainly felt I had joined in.

So this was my continuing Education, 2018.

The Hundred Best Books as per Swinburne, Ruskin, and others - "jumping shrimps on a sandy shore express great satisfaction in their life"

In the fourth volume of Algernon Swinburne’s letters the alcoholic poet’s friends and family staged an intervention, saving his life at the cost of making his letters more dull.  I assumed that the final two volumes, with Swinburne living in the suburbs under the care of his friend Theodore Watts, writing more criticism than poetry, growing increasingly deaf and obsessing over babies – he really enjoys meeting babies – would lose the narrative thrust that made the earlier volumes often read like a good novel.  That is certainly the case with Volume 5.

Not that it is not good fun to see Swinburne tear into filthy Zola or execrable Byron (“I really know of nothing so execrable in literature as Byron’s plays,” letter 1308, Jan. 6, 1885, to William Rossetti, p. 93), or to watch him badger his publisher for “some few of Trollope’s numberless  novels” and the latest Gilbert and Sullivan play (“without the music,” 1426, June 21, 1887, p. 195).

Even better, I was led to an amusing document.  The Pall Mall Gazette published a list of the hundred best books by Sir John Lubbock and then asked writers, clergymen, librarians, and lunatics to comment on it.  The results were published as The Best Hundred Books By the Best Judges (1886).  “There is no more delightful pastime than to lecture other people on the choice of books” – no, no, not true.

The original list is too ordinary to be of much interest.  Swinburne’s is also surprisingly standard, to the point that I have read all but ten of his choices and all but one of his top fifty.  Shakespeare, Aeschylus, “Selections from the Bible,” Homer, Sophocles, Aristophanes, and on like that.  No Euripides.  No Horace, since his childhood Latin instruction poisoned him against Horace.

Look, there’s Byron, but just “’Don Juan,’ cantos I-VII, XI-XVI, inclusive, and ‘Vision of Judgment.’”  I wonder what Swinburne has against Canto VIII.

Swinburne is a genuine expert on Elizabethan and Jacobean literature, so his list is packed with the plays and poetry of the period, but he is fair enough to novelists: Rabelais, Voltaire, Diderot, Balzac, Stendhal, Dumas; Defoe, Swift, Goldsmith, Fielding, Sterne, Scott, Austen, Dickens, Thackeray, Gaskell, Eliot, E. and C. Brontë; Wilhelm Meinhold – that one stumped me.  Childhood favorite, I’ll bet.

Conventional.  Perhaps Swinburne takes the exercise too seriously.  Or not seriously enough, as I see in the great find of the supplement, the annotated list of John Ruskin.  He does not submit his own list but rather mangles the original, and the Pall Mall just publishes it (larger, legible image here):

Ruskin is “[p]utting my pen lightly through the needless – and blottesquely through the rubbish and poison.”  The “Moralists,” theology, and Eastern epics are lightly excluded, while the historians and philosophers are hilariously blotted, as is Darwin – The Voyage of the ‘Beagle’! – and the journals of Captain Cook.  Why, why?  He murders every novelist except for Dickens and Scott,  A letter explains some but not all of his choices – “Gibbon’s is the worst English that was ever written by an educated Englishman” – and concludes with a call for someone to write an “intelligible” book about “the biography of a shrimp,” since he “was under the impression of having seen jumping shrimps on a sandy shore express great satisfaction in their life.”

Ruskin is the greatest.

I am sure there are other treasures in this pamphlet.  Wilkie Collins, William Morris, and Mary Elizabeth Braddon, contribute lists.  Surely nothing as good as Ruskin, though.

Sing of the needs / Of this our century; sing our ripe hope. - questions, scraps, oddities, and more books - an Italian hodgepodge

The title is ironically misappropriated from Leopardi’s Canto XXXII, “Palinode to the Marchese Gino Capponi,” in the J. G. Nichols version.  This final post on Italian literature will be un guazzabuglio.  More questions than answers.  I plan to, as the year goes on, drop in random Italian words that I have looked up on the internet, to add sapore and give l'impressione that I know some Italian, which I do not.

Would it be worthwhile to do something with opera?  Rossini, Verdi, Puccini, composers for the popular musical theater, were better known and are arguably greater artists than any of the writers I will be reading.  Yet their librettists are obscurities, even the one whose name I know, Arrigo Boito, author of librettos for several of Verdi’s late works.  If there a literary approach to the operas, which are, among other things, plays?  Do I know what I am doing?  Is it worth the effort?

A couple of writers are puzzling to me, too.  Gabriele D’Annunzio was for a time a giant, rich and famous and wild, author of a huge number of books in numerous styles and forms.  He was, at least in his later life, a fascist loon.  He and his followers, for example, seized a Croatian city in 1919 in order to do who knows what – the Italian Regency of Carnaro, with D’Annunzio as Il Duce.  “The charter designated ‘music’ to be one of the fundamental principles of the Fiume State,” (from previous link).  This sort of thing damages a writer’s reputation, it turns out, but the bad result for me is not that I have anything against reading the works of crazy people with bad ideas – oh no, quite the contrary – but rather that I have no idea which books are thought to be good (and are available in English, and are available to me).

Another fascist, the Futurist Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, presents a similar problem, but in his case I suspect a little more that his writings have become more interesting as intellectual history than as art.  Ford Madox Ford says I should read King Bombance and Mafarka the Futurist, which have better titles than D’Annunzio novels like The Flame of Life and The Triumph of Death.

Does anybody remember me mentioning the series of adventure novels about a Malaysian pirate by Emilio Salgari, “without whom there would be no Italian, French, Spanish, or Latin American Literature” says Carlos Fuentes.  An unlikely claim, but how could I not be curious?

A friendly reader has emailed to suggest I try Edmondo De Amici’s Cuore (1886), a hugely popular novel about a schoolboy; Ford Ford likes it, too.  Another De Amici novella available in English is titled Love and Gymnastics (1892).  Its library catalog classifications are “Women Gymnasts – Fiction” and “Love Stories,” so the title might be accurate.  This does not sound promising, but it has a foreword by Italo Calvino!

Also recommended by this thoughtful reader: more Sicilian fiction, including The Viceroys (1894) by Federico De Roberto, a Sicilian epic, and stories by Maria Messina, an adept of Giovanni Verga who specialized in tales about Sicilian women.  Verga, De Roberto, Messina, and then Giuseppe Lampedusa’s The Leopard (1958), which is set during the same period – that could be an interesting chain of books.  Cuore and The Viceroys seem to follow that gigantic Nievo novel.  There are lots of stories to tell with books.

There is no way I will read all of this, everything I have mentioned over the past few days, not this year and not ever, but I have a lot to play with.  Please feel free to give me more, more titles and writers and paths.  The ideal solution is that someone else reads Emilio Salgari and King Bombance and so on and writes them up for me.  Thanks in advance.

Finally, I have been clear enough, I hope, about what I am not reading, an important limit because as usual I want to invite you to join me on a book if something seems to fit into whatever path you are following, if you just moments ago were thinking “I have been meaning to read Love and Gymnastics!”  Let me know; we will find a time; it will all work out somehow.

Now every heart is glad, and far and wide / Rises once more the rumour / of work as it once did - when Italian literature acquired an Italy

I have switched to the J. G. Nichols translation of Leopardi.  The title is from Canto XXIV, “The Calm after the Storm.”  I have finally gotten to the point where there is a united Italy.  And Italian literature expands.

Giovanni Verga – I want to revisit and read more of his stories of hard times in Sicily, like those in Little Novels of Sicily (1883), and I also want to try at least one of his novels, either The House by the Medlar Tree (1881) or Mastro-don Gesualdo (1889) or both.

Luigi Pirandello was also from Sicily.  The major plays for which he is best known are from the 1920s and 1930s, too late for me – as  usual I want to choke off my reading somewhere around World War I – but The Late Mattia Pascal, a novel, is early, from 1904.  Somebody will have to tell me what else is especially good.  I like the sound of Shoot: The Notebooks of Serafino Gubbio, Cinematograph Operator (1915).  Pirandello is the first Nobelist I will mention in this post.

Grazia Deledda (she’s the second) is Sardinian.  I would likely enjoy her novels just for their unusual setting, but I assume they have more to offer than that.  After the Divorce (1902) and Elias Portulu (1903) are in my local library, which is encouraging.  Deledda is another reason my attention had turned to Italy.

Matilde Serao is associated with Rome and Naples – I’m back on the boot – where she was a journalist and novelist.  The fairly recent short story collection Unmarried Women looks most promising to me, but there are a large number of novels in English published a hundred years ago.  Ford Madox Ford, whose taste is eccentric but who seems to have read everything, recommends Conquest of Rome, Desire of Life, and In the Country of Jesus (see The March of Literature. p. 859).  Unlikely, but life is full of surprises.

I think of Italo Svevo as a 20th century writer because of Zeno’s Conscience (1923), but his first two novels, A Life (1892) and As a Man Grows Older (1898), are much earlier.  I have read the latter but remember nothing more than that I thought it was pretty good.  I would appreciate advice on the former.  Svevo at this point was not actually in Italy, since Trieste was part of Austria.  Another marginal region raising its voice.

Back to Tuscany, the old center of Italy, to remind anyone interested of the Pinocchio (1883) readalong at Simpler Pastimes scheduled for later this month.  Just 200 pages, including illustrations, written for tiny little children.  So easy to join in.

The poets are more of a problem.  20th century Italian poetry strikes me as very strong – Italian fiction, too – but the period before the war is either weaker or poorly represented in English.

The great figure is Giosuè Carducci (Nobel #3), but even in Italian he seems to have lost some of his status, as if squeezed between the great 20th century poets and Leopardi.  The 1994 Selected Poems shows off Carducci well.  It includes his long ode Hymn to Satan (1865), which is not what the title suggests.  One of Carducci’s major collections, The Barbarian Odes (1877-89), is also available in English, but it is one of the worst translations I have ever come across.

A number of poets began publishing during or just after the war.  I hope to read Dino Campana, who wrote just one wild visionary book, Orphic Songs (1914), then, sadly, spent the rest of his life in mental hospitals.  I have my eye on Umberto Saba, too.  Move the cutoff just a bit later and lots of interesting writers pop up.

Look how efficient I was today.  Tomorrow I will end with the hard cases.  If you have advice on Gabrielle D’Annunzio or Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, let’s save it for a day – I do want it.  Then I will browse through some books I won’t read and take a glance at the 20th century.

Five days for all of this.  In my defense, it is an exciting literature.  Even in the 19th century, exciting.

one man unworthy of his cowardly age - Alfieri, Goldoni, and Foscolo - 700 words and I can only cover three writers

What is Italian literature?  I ignored the question; it is an important one for this literature.  These judgments are always retrospective: Italian literature is what people interested in the subject treat as Italian literature.  But I am not only working with a conventional contemporary idea, but a central question going back to Dante, at the least.  What is the Italian language?  What is Italy?

Yesterday I glanced at some of the highlights of almost three hundred years of arguing about these questions, the extraordinary run from Dante Alighieri to the visionary poet Tommaso Campanella, who gets us into the 17th century.  Something happens to the literature then; the life sputters out of it.  My glib explanation is the Counter-Reformation.  But around 1609, Claudio Monteverdi perfected and popularized the form of musical theater we for some reason call opera, and if anything the cultural prestige of Italian music only increased.  There was no obvious lack of, to use a dubious metaphor, cultural energy in northern Italian kingdoms and cities.

I don’t know what happened to Italian literature.  Spanish literature caught the same flu about fifty years later and took two hundred years to recover.

My next Italian landmark is the Venetian comic playwright Carlo Goldoni in the mid-18th century, author of The Servant of Two Masters (1743) and dozens of other comedies.  I read a couple over the weekend, including the recent adaptation by Richard Bean, One Man, Two Guvnors (2011) that was such a big hit in London.  That is one funny play.  I’ll write about these soon.

Then there is the proto-Romantic Count Vittorio Alfieri, founder of Italian tragedy, possibly the only Italian tragedian of consequence.  He is a giant in Italian but not in English, and I can guess why – first, English barely has room for its own tragedies, and second, Alfieri’s almost singular dramatic theme was the overthrow of tyrants, which may have more juice in Italy and France than in England or the United States.

I’ve read his best known  play, Saul (1782), about the overthrow of a tyrant, and am now reading his posthumous (1806) Autobiography, about the triumph of a tyrant.  I have gotten to some good stuff, but not to the good stuff, e.g.:

… claiming to be a democrat because he never struck his servants with anything but his open hand, yet stretching out his valet with a bronze candlestick because the valet pulled his hair slightly while combing it…  and then sleeping – or claiming to sleep – with his bedroom door always open so that the valet might come in and, in revenge, murder him in his sleep.  (Ford Madox Ford on p. 655 of The March of Literature, first ellipses mine, second his)

A big personality.  It might make similar sense to read a couple more autobiographies contemporary with Alfieri, the Memoirs of Mozart’s librettist Lorenzo da Ponte or more temptingly the massive Story of My Life of Giacomo Casanova, but I doubt that will happen.

Finally, the 19th century.  I plan to revisit to major figures from Italian Romanticism.  One is Ugo Foscolo, a genuine revolutionary and  fine poet although with a lyrical gift that has perhaps defeated his translators.  I remember many years ago running across a website with some lovely versions of Foscolo’s Graces (1803-1822) but I cannot find it now.  Foscolo also wrote The Last Letters of Jacopo Ortis (1802), a novella that is a conceptual politicized Italianization of The Sorrows of Young Werther.  I hope to revisit it and see if it is as clever as I remember.  Or impassioned, or propagandistic, or whatever it is.

And then there is Giacomo Taldegardo Francesco di Sales Saverio Pietro Leopardi.  The title quotation is again from Leopardi, from the same poem I used yesterday (p. 39), and is a description of Alfieri.

                                           He was the first to go
down into the ring alone, and no one followed,
for idleness and brutal silence now own us most of all.

The idea that Leopardi can be described as idle or silent is hilarious.  But look how long I have gone on.  I will start with Leopardi tomorrow.  I gotta pick up the pace.  At this rate – well, pretty soon I’ll get to books I haven’t read.  My ignorance should constrain the babble.

The strength and valor of Italianness - early modern Italian literature, a reading list

In 2015, I am concentrating on Italian literature.  Unlike some other reading projects I have pursued here – Yiddish, Scottish, and Austrian, and to some arguable extent Portuguese and Scandinavian – there is a substantial and, why deny it, superior early modern literature available in English that I have already explored and do not plan to reread right now.

I decided to make a list of the Italian books I think of as the best, or most instructive, from the 14th, 15th, and 16th centuries, when Italian literature was the glory of Europe, the literature that writers in other languages imitated.  I have made a vague resolution to make more lists.  I love lists.

1.  Dante Alighieri, Inferno (c. 1320).  I have read this book several times in several translations, but the entire Divine Comedy only once.  Inferno is so rich, in characters, imagination, and ideas.

2.  Francesco Petrarca, Canzoniere (complete by Petrarch’s death in 1374), a selection, not necessarily a long one.  Many of Europe’s greatest poets will spend the next three hundred years modifying Petrarch.  It is hard to imagine what English, French, or Spanish poetry would have been like in his absence.  Perhaps this is a bad thing, but it is what happened.

3.  Giovanni Boccaccio, The Decameron (c. 1353 – 14th century dating is an aggravation).  My Musa and Bondanella translation has a page describing possible abridgments, but I say read it all.  A hundred little stories, plus that extraordinary prologue about the Black Plague.

4.  Ludivico Ariosto, Orlando Furioso (1532 for the final version).  A crazy fantasy epic in eight-line stanzas, “a poem that refuses to begin and refuses to end” as Italo Calvino wrote*, but despite its length who would want less of it?

5.  Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince (c. 1532).  A great piece of satire, the foundation of political science, and more.  The Norton Critical Edition put together by Robert M. Adams is the greatest critical edition I have ever come across.  Stated so baldly, that sounds like a silly thing about which to have an opinion.

6.  Niccolò Machiavelli, The Mandrake (1524).  A play, a comedy, not the sort of thing associated with Machiavelli now, but a little masterpiece.

7.  Gaspara Stampa, Poems (complete by 1554).  The greatest woman poet in Italian, perhaps; a Petrarchan; in her best poems as good as Petrarch.

8.  Michelangelo Buonnaroti, Poems (complete by 1564), a selection.  In a handful of poems, another rival of Petrarch (and Stampa); in bulk, rough and repetitive, although he does have the advantage of original subject matter, since who else could write a credible poem about painting the Sistine Chapel?  The ideal translation of Michelangelo’s poems would be an anthology by many different translators.

9.  Giorgio Vasari, Lives of the Painters (1568), some reasonable selection of the best parts, which by chance or design would include the most famous artists.  I believe Penguin Classics publishes a good one.

10.  Benvenuto Cellini, Autobiography (1558-63).  A crazy genius tells his crazy adventures.  Astounding, funny, ridiculous, irritating.  I’m not sure why this book is not more commonly encountered on book blogs.  I understand that for many readers, poetry is akin to poison, and half of this list is poetry.  That I get.  But Cellini’s book is so much fun.

It is by chance that this list has ten entries.  The next set of books I would list (Castiglione, Tasso, more Dante, etc.) are more – not more advanced – more work, or are helped by more context.  I have not read all that many more Italian books from the Renaissance than I am listing – another dozen – which makes this list absurd.  But that’s all right.

As usual, I plan to invite those interested to read along with me, but, honestly anyone who has not read the above should read the above, which I am not planning to read, and not, with a couple of exceptions, what I do plan to read, lists of which are forthcoming.

The post’s title is from “To Angelo Mai on His Finding the Manuscript of Cicero’s De re publica,” the third poem of Giacomo Leopardi’s Canti, lines 24 and 25 of Jonathan Galassi’s 2010 translation.  Leopardi is one of the exceptions.

*  “The Structure of Orlando Furioso” in The Uses of Literature (1980), tr. Patrick Creagh, p. 162.

The 100 Greatest Adventure Books of All Time - read these books, please

This post is about 105 books.  It is about a list.  How we all love lists.  This one is among my very favorites.  It is the list of The 100 Greatest Adventure Books of All Time as assembled by National Geographic (five extra books were tacked on as lagniappe).

The list is apparently the result of a poll, with scores based on “the book's pure literary merit; its ‘adrenaline factor,’ or the level of excitement they felt reading it; and its impact on our history and culture.”  My experience is that the scoring system worked – ever book I have read from the list, several of which have been featured here at Wuthering Expectations, have defensible is rarely first-rate literary value, and there are specific passages or even moments in which the level of excitement is as high as I am likely to find in literature.

As I mentioned with Nansen’s Farthest North (#11), a great deal of the matter in any book of exploration is inevitably tedious.  The chronicle of any expedition across an icesheet, desert, or ocean is filled with many changeless days.  The great challenge is simply endurance; the reader is privileged to share the slog.

In others the excitement lies in discovery, as with Charles Darwin’s The Voyage of the Beagle (1839, #23) or Incidents of Travel in Yucatan (1843, #60), in which the author, “the father of American archaeology,” discovers the lost cities of the Mayans.

Many of the books on the list are about disasters, including the winner, if that is the right word, Apsley Cherry-Garrard’s The Worst Journey in the World (1922), an account by a survivor of the Scott Antarctic expedition, and a good pick to win a poll of the 100 Greatest Titles of All Time.  Owen Chase’s Shipwreck of the Whaleship Essex (1821, #61) is not a great piece of literature, however important it is as a source for Moby-Dick, yet the scene early on when the whale turns on the whaling ship, rams it, and then comes back to finish the job, is thrilling and unimprovable. 

Or think of the desert plane crash in Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s Wind, Sand & Stars (1940, #3).  The excitement is unvitiated by the evidence that Saint-Exupéry will survive the crash – that crash, at least – the evidence of the book itself, I mean.  There is inevitably some survivor’s bias.  These are the books of people who made went out and made it back in, this time.

Then there’s a book like Murray’s Adventures in the Wilderness (1869, #87), where the excitement comes from chasing a trout or shooting a rapids.  Not exactly getting staved in by a whale.  But the list has a great deal of variety, with settings in caves and outer space as well as both poles and every major mountain range and desert, times ranging from Marco Polo (#10) in 1298 to the present.

There is maybe too much mountain climbing for my tastes, although when I line up the mountaineering books a miniature history of human ambition, or folly, is outlined.  I suspect the mountaineering  books would by themselves make a fine course of reading.

I have an ulterior motive in writing a post about this list, which is that I wish more people would read the books on it – any of them – and then tell me about them.  I have read only 24 of the 105 books, and since I read only about two or three travel books of any sort per year, I will likely never finish them all.  I’ve covered disproportionately more of the books about the American West than the poles, about sailing rather than mountain climbing, and about the 19th century rather than the 20th, so, although I recommend for one reason or another all of the 24 I have tried, I would appreciate hearing about the oddballs I have not tried – Osa Johnson’s I Married Adventure (1940, #95), about life with a wildlife photographer (“She tells their story in straight-on American gee-whiz style”) or Tracks (1980, #70) by Robyn Davidson, who travels “alone across 1,700 miles (2,735 km) of Australian outback on wild camels that she herself had trained.”  How can those not be good books?

Read The Book of Disquiet - before you DIE!

Yesterday, after putting up my invitation to read The Book of Disquiet along with whatever group of sharp characters plans to join in with me, I discovered that the novel-like non-novel has been included in the last couple of editions of the 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die.  So I used this as a marketing hook in my Twitter promotional effort, under the untested assumption that some readers out there somewhere are neurotically working off of (surely not through) this list.

I think this was my favorite joke (de-Twittered just a bit):

Imagine the poor reader, trapped in his deathbed, who has read all 1,001 books except #PessoaDisquiet.  He feebly turns the pages of the Richard Zenith translation, but his eyesight and concentration are insufficient for the difficult concepts and miniscule type of Pessoa’s text.  His strength wanes; the book slips from his fingers; he feels the icy shadow of Death approach, knowing that he ends his life unloved, and badly read.  Just one book short of being well-read, actually.

Do not be that reader.

Perhaps others are not so amused by the title of that book as I am.  The official position of Wuthering Expectations is that there is no book that a generalized “you” must read before “you” die.  Specific “you”s will want to consult a religious authority within “your” faith for some important exceptions.  Fernando Pessoa’s The Book of Disquiet will not be among them.  I can come up with a long list of shoulds, but no musts, and even the shoulds need to be preceded by ifs.  E.g.:  If you are at all interested in literature, you should get to know some of Shakespeare’s plays.

 Not that I am knocking the Must Read book as such.  It is a list among many lists, but a pretty good one.  The accompanying website has a nifty gadget to search the list by date, language, nationality, and so on.  I find sixteen books in Portuguese, the oldest being The Lusiads, The Crime of Father Amaro, The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas, and Dom Casmurro, outstanding choices.  Then a standard cluster of Portuguese and Brazilian Modernists:  Amado, Lispector, Guimăres Rosa, Saramago, and Lobo Antunes (plus Pessoa).  And then two novels by Paulo Coelho, about whom I will admit suspicion but plead ignorance.  I doubt that the typical purchaser of Before You Die is quite so fond of avant garde fragmentation and alienation and extremely long paragraphs as this list of authors would suggest, but this is a great list for me.

The Must… Die list also includes a number of oddities I never see anywhere else, which I wish someone else would read and tell me about.  Who is up for Emilio Salgari’s The Tigers of Mompracem (1900), the second of an eleven-volume series about the adventures of a Malaysian pirate?  See left, and do not miss this amazing page of Salgari’s Italian book covers, provided by his current English-language publisher.  I would also like to hear, from a reliable book blogger, something about Ivan Vazov’s 1888 Under the Yoke, the classic Bulgarian epic.

Why did I write this?  Oh yes, to encourage morbid neurotics who read in order to make checkmarks in spreadsheets to read The Book of Disquiet with me.  To encourage other people, too.

Books That Should Be Read More Than They Are, and Books That Should Not

When I write about a book over on the obscure end of the spectrum, I try to place it in one of two categories.  The first is:  Should Be Read More Than It Is, or Books for Everyone.  For example:

John Galt, The Entail, a Scottish family saga, tragic and comic.
Robert Louis Stevenson, The Beach at Falesá, thoughtful adventure in the South Seas.
Honoré de Balzac, Eugénie Grandet, love and greed, greed and love.
Sholem Aleichem, Tevye the Dairyman, so funny, so sad.
Victor Hugo, his poems, not at all forbidding, huge in spirit.
Theodor Storm, Immensee, a short delicate reverie about an old love affair.
Gérard de Nerval, Sylvie, a short delicate reverie about an old love affair.
Prosper Merimeé, Carmen, a short delicate reverie about an old love affair, while waiting to be hanged.
Herman Melville, Clarel, a jolly vacation lark.

One of these does not belong, but I’m not sure which one.  I’ll fix that later.  My guess is that many people would enjoy, even love, these books, far more than their reputation would suggest.  They are not particularly difficult, or weird.  Some of them, like Storm, are beloved in their own literature, not remotely obscure.  English-language readers should catch up.

Am I wrong that people like short delicate reveries etc?

The second category:  Should Not Be Read More Than It Is, or Not for Everyone, Oh No No No.  Such as:

Gérard de Nerval, Les Chimeras or Aurélia, esoteric poems and a descent into madness.
Bysshe Vanolis, The City of Dreadful Night, visionary pessimism.
George MacDonald, Lilith, a desperately peculiar dream novel.
S. Anski, The Destruction of Galicia, low-intensity genocide at firsthand.
Thomas Carlyle, Sartor Resartus, Kantian idealism in a handy pre- postmodern semi-novelistic form.
Roberto Bolaño, Nazi Literature in the Americas – Bolaño is surely clear enough with that title: Stay Away!

Just trying to stick with things I’ve written about,* but I could add many example to both lists.  I could create more categories, too, like Famous Books That Are Perhaps Read Too Much, where I would include Wuthering Heights, Moby-Dick, The Brothers Karamazov, and so on, weird books that do not seem to have properly signaled their weirdness.

Most people do not want too much weirdness, do they?  Some readers, of course, jaded, ravaged by ennui, only alive out on the edgy edge of edginess, scoff at the exquisite domestic beauties of Theodor Storm or Victor Hugo (poems about his grandchildren! How bourgeois!) and demand the dangerous, the esoteric, the stark raving mad.  The City of Dreadful Night is just where they want to spend their time.  A descent into Hell, whether with Dante or Herman Melville, is their idea of good fun.  These readers are right - it is fun!

When I write about books, I try to communicate this difference.  I have no idea if I succeed.  I am in no way arguing here about the merit of the books in the two categories.  Both lists above contain books of extraordinary artistic value.  They all have their aesthetic purpose; they all succeed, or at least fail in fascinating ways.  Both groups include innovations, human insights, great writing.  I’d hate to have not read them, and hope to revisit every one.  But universalism has its own value.  I hope I make that clear.

All of this is just a throat-clearing preface to the rest of the week, which I will spend with a novelist who is much read and anything but obscure.  The book at issue, though, belongs in that second group.  Does it ever!  Not for Everyone, and then some!

Welcome, if that’s the right word, to Salammbô week.  There will be some interesting challenges.

* I could put in links, but that little search box in the upper left works well enough, I hope.

The Wuthering Expectations Lifetime Reading Plan

Wuthering Expectations will be on Christmas vacation for a while.  All of next week, and then a little more.  Before I forget, Merry Christmas!

A vacation shoulld allow me to salt away some reading for the long winter, to store some books for future blogging.  I’m not sure it ever works that way.  Last Christmas, and on the plane to and from Morocco, I checked off some solid Humiliations – The Mayor of Casterbridge, a handful of Ibsen plays, The Saga of the Volsungs – and revisited The Warden.  I never wrote about any of them.  So why did I bother?  No, no - thank goodness – I’m not always reading for the dang blog.

I recently started in on Les Misérables, not, with its ludicrous bulk, the most bloggable of books, although please see how C. B. James wisely breaks it into pieces, which is presumably also how one reads it, a word or line at a time, not all at once.  I’m less than a tenth of the way in, and there’s this scene – no, never mind.  Into the freezer.  It’ll still be good when I thaw it out in May.

Joseph Epstein, in “Joseph Epstein’s Lifetime Reading Plan” (from Once around the Block, 1987), advises a worried student to “have some time-tested and officially great book going at all times – Gibbon, perhaps, or Cervantes – alongside which you can read less thumpingly significant books.”  Victor Hugo will fill that slot for the next four or six or eight months, unless I put it aside at some point, which would be wise, if unlikely.  It’s amazing how the Big Books fall into place over time.  Read one or two or three a year, and eventually one feels almost educated, or would, if it were not for all of the other books one has learned about along the way.

Here is Epstein's actual advice to the anxious young reader, nervous about the holes in his education: “to read no junky books, to haunt used-book stores, and to let one book lead him to another… there is no systematic way to go about it, no list, key to the kingdom of the educated.”  The reader will have to decide for herself what “junky” means.  I would add, whatever one is reading, try to read it well.

I read more systematically than Epstein.  I have my lists, list after list, and sometimes follow them.  The Scottish Reading Challenge was meant, in part, to free me from the lists – you decide what I’m reading – although it began with three lists!  Try this, try that.  Read widely, even when reading narrowly.

I’m reading a book right now that was suggested to me a day or two ago by someone about to launch her own Lifetime Reading Plan.  Best of luck!  The book, by the way, is Dear Darkness (2008) by youthful poet Kevin Young, and is sprinkled with poems about food – “Ode to Pork,” “Ode to Grits,” “Ode to Boudin”:

You are the chewing gum
of God. You are the reason
I know that skin
is only that, holds
more than it meets.

Is that “meat” pun excellent or execrable?  A thing I like about this guy is he, like Joseph Epstein, is not afraid to go for the joke.  Private to Lifetime Reader: why did you single out two poets who teach at Emory?

I am not reading Kevin Young to be well read, or to check him off of a list.  Nor – what else am I reading – Willa Cather’s The Troll Garden (more fiction about artists) or John Crowley’s The Translator (fiction about Why Translation Matters).  Hugo, yes, and Dickens’ puzzling Christmas Stories, yes, although they are fascinating in their oddity.  Main entries or supplements to my ongoing Lifetime Reading Plan.  Epstein again:

There is also a danger: once begun, there is no end.  I myself would rather be well-read than dead, but I have a strong hunch about which will come first.

Pirates and fairies, Mr. Toad and Sherlock Holmes

I've been having good fun reading through Robert Louis Stevenson.  Major fictional works include:

New Arabian Nights (1882) - short stories, including some interconnected adventure stories which get cleverer as they go along.
Treasure Island (1883) - I saw six copies of this book, four in French, in a tiny bookstore in Morocco.
The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886)
Kidnapped (1886)
The Black Arrow (1888) - is this good? Penguin Classics has it in print.
The Master of Ballantrae (1889)
Catriona (1893) - sequel to Kidnapped
South Sea Tales (1893) - more stories
Weir of Hermiston (1896) - sadly, unfinished - it promised to be excellent.

Stevenson was also an accomplished essayist and travel writer.  About his poetry, I know little.  I wonder if I read The Child's Garden of Verse when I was a tot?

George MacDonald wrote mostly Christian fiction, I guess, but it's his fairy stories, for adults and children, that have survived (update: now I'm pretty sure that's not true):

Phantastes (1858) - I just read this.  It is plenty weird.
At the Back of the North Wind (1871)
The Princess and the Goblin (1872) - this and the last one are children's books.
Lilith (1895)

Bysshe Vanolis, dig that name, is known for one poem, a sort of dark fantasy about London, The City of Dreadful Night (1874).  I just read it - it's The Victorian Waste Land. I had no idea, he said in amazement.

One author I do not like including is Arthur Conan Doyle.  Does anyone really need encouragement to read Doyle?  Nevertheless, here he is.  Six Sherlock Holmes books make the 1914 cutoff, as does one Professor Challenger novel (The Lost World, 1912) and The Exploits of Brigadier Gerard (1896 and on).  I'm most curious about that last one, actually.

For a brief period, there existed a genre of sentimentally Scotch novels known as the "kailyard school." MacDonald wrote some, as did J. M. Barrie and various non-entities.  No one wants to read them now, surely.  They were demolished by a hack writer named George Douglas Brown in The House with the Green Shutters (1901). The author's description of his novel: "brutal and bloody."

Speaking of J. M. Barrie, why were so many of the children's classics of the period written by Scots?  The play Peter Pan is from 1904; the novel Peter and Wendy from 1911.  Kenneth Grahame's The Wind in the Willows was published 1908.  Andrew Lang's Blue Fairy Book is from 1889.

I've never read Margaret Oliphant, a hack writer (87 novels!) who outdid herself sometimes.  Rohan Maitzen has written positively about Miss Marjoribanks (1866) and Hester (1883).  Salem Chapel (1863), the supernatural A Beleaguered City (1880), and the 1899 Autobiography sound interesting, too.

I'm probaby missing a dozen worthwhile travel and nature writers.  John Muir was a Scot.  Anyone want to try My Summer in the Sierra (1911) or Our National Parks (1901) or his dog story, Stickeen (1909)?

What should you read?  I have no idea.  I mean, Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, if you've never read it, I know that.  This is where I'm going to be spending my time, whether or not anyone else wants to play along, reading lots of Stevenson and MacDonald, and so forth.  I think I'll write about Vanolis next week. So even if no one else wants to read them now, you might read about these books in the coming months.  At some point - August, I predict - I'll be heartily sick of Scottish literature and drift on to something else.

All right.  Let's read.

The Golden Age of Scottish fiction - Scott, Galt, Hogg, and Ferrier, plus Carlyle

Robert Crawford, in Scotland’s Books: A History of Scottish Literature, calls Walter Scott “the single most influential writer there has ever been in the global history of the novel” (p. 396).  This statement is precisely written - it is exactly right.  If only Scott were better!  Well, I can attest that he's good enough.

Here are the Walter Scott books that are or were recently in print from either Penguin Classics or Oxford World’s Classics. I have read six of them:

Waverley (1814) - the novel read 'round the world.
Guy Mannering (1815)
The Antiquary (1816) - "its longwindedness is unbelievable"*
The Tale of Old Mortality (1816)
Rob Roy (1817)
The Heart of Midlothian (1818)
The Bride of Lammermoor (1818)
Ivanhoe (1819)
Kenilworth (1821)
Redgauntlet (1824)
Chronicles of the Canongate (1827)

There are many, many, many more, plus poems.

The Scottish Challenge is another chance for me to recommend the grossly underrated John Galt. Please try, among his half dozen best novels, one of these two:

The Provost (1822) – narrow but sharp, brilliantly so.
The Entail (1822) – Aside from Austen, the best English novel between Tristram Shandy and The Pickwick Papers.

James Hogg was known, once upon a time, primarily as a naïve poet, but only his one fine novel is now read.  The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1824) is a sinister tale of Calvinism gone wrong, and, like Scott’s and Galt’s best books, a brilliant experiment with the form of the novel, an expansion of what the novel could do.

Quite a period for the Scottish novel! Numerous other authors, inspired by Scott, worked the Scottish vein at this time.  One I haven’t read who sounds quite good is Susan Ferrier, whose 1818 Marriage sounds like a feminist anti-Scott, or a Highland Jane Austen.

I’m going to slide Thomas Carlyle, England's greatest crank, in here, although he’s of the next generation.  Carlyle’s best books - and his best books are something else - are, I assert:

Sartor Resartus (1833, more or less) – Sterne’s only English disciple.
The French Revolution (1837) – a terrible introduction to the subject, but a great introduction to Carlyle.
On Heroes, Hero-Worship and the Heroic in History (1841) – lectures on Great Men, featuring some of Carlyle’s best ideas, and some of his worst.
Past and Present (1843) – The Condition of England is not good. A revelatory book, a fundamental Victorian text.
And I'm curious about the gossipy Reminiscences (1881).

Robert Crawford would like me to stuff in Lord Byron as well, which doesn’t seem right. Still, I’m game if you are.

What should you read? Here’s how I would rank the above novels (just the novels, so only one Carlyle book), the ones I have read (so not Ferrier or half of the Scott), by artistic quality:

1. The Entail, Galt
2. The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner, Hogg
3. The Provost, Galt
4. Sartor Resartus, Carlyle
5. The Tale of Old Mortality and The Heart of Midlothian, Scott
6. Redgauntlet, Scott – although this is best read as a sequel to Waverley
7. Waverley, Scott
8. More Galt
9. More Scott

But the most important novel is unquestionably Waverley.  This is a matter of literary history, not something that is evident in the book itself, which is not uncommon for a "first X novel."  I haven't read a Scott novel that did not require an extra measure of patience.  Read one and we can talk about that.

* Ford Madox Ford, The March of Literature (1938), p. 711.

Ha! Where ye gaun, ye crowlan ferlie! - Scotch literature from Burns and before

My Scottish reading lists are not meant to include every Scottish writer who ever lived, or every book by the writers I have mentioned, but only those books that I think someone might actually want to read.  My judgment on that subject could be quite wrong.  Corrections very welcome.  Scotland’s Books: A History of Scottish Literature (2009, Oxford University Press) by Robert Crawford has been most helpful.

I have read exactly one pre-18th century Scottish writer, the great early modern poet William Dunbar (c. 1460- c. 1513).  His “Lament for the Makaris” is a landmark poem.  The one with the flying machine is a hoot.  Dunbar's language is like Chaucer's, but Scottish, so rather more challenging.

Thomas Urquhart's translation of the first two books of Gargantua and Pantagruel (1653) is most tempting.  The excerpts I have seen are just wild.

The Scottish ballad tradition is rich, but I don’t know much about it.  Pick out an anthology for me.

I count three major 18th century novelists and poets.  Tobias Smollett was, with Samuel Richardson and Henry Fielding, one of the first important English novelists.  Smollett was a disciple of Fielding, and of Cervantes.  He is great fun.  The three most famous novels are:

Roderick Random (1748) – a true Spanish-style picaresque, with some classic naval scenes.
Peregrine Pickle (1751) – this one is by far the longest.
Humphrey Clinker (1771) – the cleverest epistolary novel of its age.  See bibliographing for samples.

James Boswell should not have been a major writer, but, somehow, he wrote one of the best books in the English language, and left behind a lengthy journal that is itself a delight.  Some highlights:

The London Journal , published 1950, but covering 1762-63.  Twelve additional volumes follow.  The best title is Boswell in Search of a Wife, 1766-1769.
A Journal of a Tour of the Hebrides (1785).  Read Samuel Johnson’s A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland first, then Boswell's rather different account of the same trip.  They’re typically published together now.
The Life of Johnson (1791). A monument, a masterpiece. Enormously long.

The quintessential Scotch author is Robert Burns. You want a nice, thick Selected Poems, like the Penguin Classics edition. Don’t skimp. Much of his best work was composed in a shocking six months of unmatched creativity in 1786.  This post's title is from "To a Louse: On Seeing One on a Lady's Bonnet at Church."

There were plenty of other Scottish poets – anyone up for Allan Ramsay? – but no one close to Burns in quality. One, James Macpherson aka Ossian, I refuse to read. You can tell me about him, if you like.

David Hume and Adam Smith and other Scottish Enlightenment figures seem like fair game, although I’m not sure how literary they are.  Enjoy the "Digression on Silver"!

If I were more serious about the 18th century, I would have already read the long poem The Seasons (1726+) by James Thomson, and the novels The Man of Feeling (1771) by Henry Mackenzie and The Female Quixote (1752) by Charlotte Lennox. Meh. Well, you can change my mind.

A couple of great travel books.  Mungo Park’s Travels in the Interior Districts of Africa (1799) is a classic of Scotch persistence, a high-spirited solo journey through present-day Senegal and Mali.  He ends the trip with nothing but rags and his enormous hat, stuffed with his notes.  I have actually crossed paths with Park’s disastrous second expedition.

Alexander Mackenzie and his companions were the first men to cross the breadth of the North American continent.  His canoe trip into and across the Rockies (as well as an earlier trip to the Arctic sea) is described in Journal of the Voyage to the Pacific (1801).  These explorers were all a little nuts.

What should you read?  Burns, if you haven’t.  And Humphrey Clinker, certainly.  But I want to really plug Boswell.  The bulky Life of Johnson is a challenge all its own, so set that aside for a moment.  Instead, I want to advocate for Boswell’s journals.  The first volume, The London Journal, is one of the great books of the century, really.  Boswell is such a rich character, vain, weak-willed, ambitious, self-pitying, and foolish, but somehow so amazingly alive.  I’ve read all twelve volumes of the journal, and would love to read them again.  The account of the Scottish trip with Dr. Johnson is another fine way to get to know Boswell at his best without committing to the entire Life of Johnson.  Having said that, yes, Life of Johnson, absolutely!

The Best Books of the Year - 2009

Now I have moved to a subject about which I know nothing, just what I have gleaned from other readers.  I read more contemporary books than I perhaps let on - this year about one in five were from the last ten years.  But a fair number of those are mysteries, none of which belong with the Best Books of 200X, and much of the rest is non-fiction.  Native American history, criticism of Yiddish literature, and popularized science, for example.

So I can't make a 2009 list (an actual 2009 list - see below), but that shouldn't stop other people.  Best of lists are an essential part of the transmission of books.  Imagine the poor book that finds itself on no lists at all!  Most books fall into that category, pretty quickly, listed only on the list of the unlisted, which is imaginary.  Bye bye, books.

I sometimes wonder how the really dedicated readers of the new go about their business.  I mean critics, professionals.  Here we see Tom Hull, a jazz critic I like a lot, discuss his method in obsessive detail.  He has heard 699 of the jazz records released in 2009, plus another 300 or so non-jazz albums.  This is considerable.  He is a music processor, continually evaluating, triaging, culling.  His Top 10 list has some weight behind it, although when Hull reviews the lists of other critics, he is always amazed by the number of albums he has never heard.  For practicing music critics, I think his statistics are typical.  A mere fan, I hear about 100 records a year, plus who knows how many stray songs.  My Top 10 list is filled with great records, absolutely, but the base is pretty limited.

So how do book reviewers do their work?  When they make their Best of the Year list, what is the denominator?  Eva at A Striped Armchair reads about 500400 books athis year.  Are the pros all like her?  I'll bet not.  They miss a lot, and I question how well they read a lot of what they read (I question how well I read, too).  A really great book is complex, right?  Ah, they're all doing what they can.  Le's have some lists:

Tales from the Reading Room's Best of 2009.  I have read one of these, the Georg Büchner.

The Little Professor.  Congratulations on cracking 7,000 books in the personal library!

The Incurable Logophile.  The only one I've read is Vanity Fair.  Pathetic.

A highly focused year-end from Dan Green.

A best of the decade, category: English language fiction, from D. G. Myers.

My list is coming tomorrow.  If I missed your list, please link in the comments.  One might notice that no one here, except possibly Prof. Myers, has any interest in coverage, like the professional critics.  These lists are personal, idiosyncratic, and no less valuable for that.  Emily of Evening All Afternoon, in a comment here, said that these are the lists she finds truly valuable.  I think the critics' lists are essential, too, a mechanism that keeps books alive.  But if I want to read a recent book, I'm looking at one of those lists I linked, or at your list.

Update: Jenny at Shelf Love. Lots of goodies. Her posts earlier in the year about The Story in the Stone are very much worth a look.

mel u at The Reading Life with a Best of, Part I. I've actually read 7 of the 10 novels. And the Japanese, etc. best of is still to come.

The world's best novels, 1899 edition

I've been enjoying, a bit too much for my own good, the amazing 1899 London Daily Telegraph list of the "100 Best Novels in the World," brought to my attention by the Rose City Reader. The world, you don't say!

The top authors by number of books:

Walter Scott, 7
Charles Dickens, 5
Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 4
Captain Frederick Marryat, 4

And with 3 novels each:
W. H. Ainsworth
James Fennimore Cooper
Alexandre Dumas
Victor Hugo
Charles Kinglsey
Charles Reade
William Thackeray

Ten of the Best Novels in the World are in a language other than English: the six Dumas and Hugo novels, plus Père Goriot and Eugène Sue's The Wandering Jew in French; Anna Karenina in Russian; the recent international bestseller Quo Vadis in Polish. This is pathetic. In fairness, the editors and so on responsible for this list had no idea such a book as Dead Souls existed. The English-speaking world was about to get schooled in Russian literature. What excuse they had for the absence of Don Quixote, Candide, The Betrothed, and The Sorrows of Young Werther is beyond me. Ditto for Robinson Crusoe, Gulliver's Travels, and so many more.

The three Thackeray novels omit Vanity Fair. The single George Eliot novel is Scenes of Clerical Life. None of the five Dickens novels are Bleak House or Great Expectations or David Copperfield. Henry James, Herman Melville, Gustave Flaubert, Stendhal, Mark Twain, Thomas Hardy, Zola - all are absent. Instead, we find Elsie Venner by Oliver Wendell Holmes and Valentine Vox by Henry Cockton and The Deemster by Hall Caine and Soapy Sponge's Sporting Tour by R. S. Surtees.

I want to mock these obscurities. But a few minutes with Google Books reveals a horrible truth: these absurdly overrated books were good. Not great. But try a page 90 test at one of the links above. They're OK. The Surtees actually looks quite a bit better than OK. I'm sure there are a few truly hideous duds on that list (Sue's The Wandering Jew is my bet), but mostly these are good books. The bad books take care of themselves. Canon-formation is all about sorting through the good books. Almost none of them are going to make it. Curdles the blood, it does.

A useful point to note: not so long ago, Braddon's Lady Audley's Secret and Wood's Easy Lynne would have been in the "forgotten" pile. But they have been revived by scholars and teachers for various reasons. Maybe they will fade away again, replaced by something else. Or maybe not. But they remind me of part of the value of these lists. Books die, books are resurrected. Some intrepid visitor to the Rose City Reader may try out one of these puzzlers and find something no one knew was there.

Enough on this topic, for now, for a long time. Back to books I've actually read.

Chingiz Aitmatov, Kyrgyzstan's greatest writer, and an epic twenty times longer than Homer

So yesterday I made a list of the most famous 19th century books that I have not read. I did not list any Asian books, because to my knowledge the 19th was not such a hot century for Asian literature. I mean that relatively - but I have a pretty good idea that my Asian Humiliations reside elsewhere:

Japanese: Lady Murasaki, The Tale of Genji
Chinese: Cao Xueqin, The Story of the Stone
Sanskrit: Kalidasa, The Messenger of Sakantala
Persian: Attar, The Conference of the Birds

And much, much else. I'm still learning the lay of the land here. For example, to leap across the centuries, I came across this upcoming seminar / adult ed class at the Newberry Library in Chicago (scroll down a bit at the link, past the Musil and Proust):

"Chingiz Aitmatov: Lion of Central Asia

In June 2008 Kyrgyzstan lost arguably its greatest writer. We will discuss the novel of Chingiz Aitmatov, The Day Lasts More Than a Hundred Years, considering both its literary merit and its cultural context. The Kyrgyz epic, Manas, will also be sampled as part of the ancient background of modern Kyrgyz literature. We will discuss themes from the novel and the epic, fragments from Aitmatov's other works, as well as current Kyrgyz culture.

D. Stanley Moore, a former teacher at Rich Township High School and Prairie State College, has taught in Russia, China, the Czech Republic, and as a Fulbright scholar in Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan."

Six classes, $155. This has to be money well-spent - I predict an extremely high return on investment. Chingiz Aitmatov? The Kyrgyz epic? I poked around a bit and found this extremely useful piece, with sample translations, by a University of Washington Ph.D. student. Manas, we are told, dates from no-one-knows-when, and in its longest version extends to half a million lines, making it two and a half times longer than the Mahabharata, which, you may remember, is being published in a thirty-plus volume edition by the Clay Sanskrit Library. It's also twenty times longer than Homer's two books combined. I don't understand how this is even physically possible.

I've outgrown, I hope, the completeness neurosis, the idea that once I've read a certain list of books, I'm done. There is no completeness, there is no list. It's all wonderfully endless. Or sufficiently endless. There is a "done", I'm afraid. "Done" is a whole 'nother thing.

I'm so Humiliated

Prof. Novel Reading has been playing the Humiliation game, in which she confesses to the most glaring omissions in her lifetime reading. For Rohan, this game has some meaning. As a specialist in the Victorian novel, she admits that there is some professional sense in which she should have read Martin Chuzzlewit and Pendennis and any of 29 unread Trollope novels. To the Amateur Reader, none of those are famous enough to count as Humiliations (although Martin Chuzzlewit is pretty great).

Rohan humbly omits two things. First, that as part of her training, she has a pretty good idea of what's in those books, and if she doesn't she knows where to find out. For some scholarly purposes, a book that's been read is not much more valuable than one that hasn't been. Shockingly anti-literary of me, but there are interesting things in the world besides the purely literary, and some of those things are usefully studied by literature professors.

Second, as with all well-trained literature PhDs, there was a concentrated period of intense reading, broad and deep, covering the entire history of whichever literature they've picked. This is aside from the later specialization, the dissertation and whatnot. Those first couple of years of graduate school provide a base for the entire career. This is one reason (of many) that there is minimal prof-bashing at Wuthering Expectations. Lit profs know their business.

I've done a lot of the reading that the lit profs have done, but on a surface level. Few secondary sources, for example, and then mostly literary history that helps me see the field. No theory; no linguistics. Everything non-English in translation, of course. My breadth ain't bad; my depth could use some work.

Since I've set up shop as a bit of an amateur specialist, though, my position is a little bit closer to the profs, except that where they argue from authority, I argue from enthusiam. My rhetorical trick here, as in many aspects of life, is to write with confidence, whether or not I know what I'm talking about.

To help undercut any pretence to authority, here's my 19th century Humiliation list, the most famous books of the period that I have not read, by language or field:

English: Eliot, Middlemarch; Dickens, David Copperfield, Hard Times, A Tale of Two Cities; Hardy: Tess of the D'Urbervilles and many more; Stoker, Dracula; Stevenson, Treasure Island and Kidnapped. Almost no Christina Rossetti.

American: Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter; Crane, The Red Badge of Courage; James, I'll let The Portrait of a Lady stand in for a larger Henry James problem; Thoreau, Walden. Almost no Emily Dickinson.

French: Hugo, Les Miserables; Zola, Germinal and others; Baudelaire, The Flowers of Evil; Verlaine, Rimbaud, Mallarmé.

Russian: Dostoevsky, The Devils, The Idiot; Goncharov: Oblomov; Herzen: From the Far Shore. I know, these won't win the Humiliation game. I guess I've read the conventional Russian Top 10.

Norwegian and Swedish: Ibsen and Strindberg

German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Yiddish: Ha ha ha, these don't count, not their 19th century literatures. Not in the United States at least. None of these literatures have the prestige necessary to count as Humiliations. This is where the game breaks down. Goethe's Faust, Fontane's Effi Briest, Verga's Little Novels of Sicily, Sholem Aleichem's Tevye the Dairyman - they ought to be on everyone's "someday" list. But they're not. Still, for my own sake:

German: Keller, Green Henry.

Italian: Verga, The House by the Medlar Tree.

Spanish: Perez Galdos, Fortunata y Jacinta.

Portuguese: Machado de Assis, Dom Casmurro.

Yiddish: This one will be checked off the list pretty soon, actually. Keep reading, steer clear of too much junk, and any fool can beat this game.

A Senegalese reading list

Here is an annotated version of my Senegalese reading list. I want to save future Googlers the work I did. It's an English-language list. French readers can expand it by a factor of 50 or so.

Especially useful books - books that really helped me prepare for Senegal - have been marked with an asterisk. This is entirely independent of literary merit. If there's no comment, I haven't read it. If there's a comment, I have. No Senegalese movies or music here, despite the quality of both. Most of the novels are extremely short, often 100 pages or less.

Suggestions and corrections are still welcome. Thanks to those who helped out with the original list.

Books by Senegalese authors

Ousmane Sembène: The Black Docker (1956) - Angry first novel, set in Marseilles.

*God's Bits of Wood (1960) - An account of a 1948 railway workers' strike. An epic in 240 pages, and a masterpiece. I'm amazed at how much Sembène stuffs into the novel.

*Tribal Scars (1962) - Short stories, some in the village, some in Dakar.

*The Money Order (1966) - A villager receives a money order from his relative in France. Then his troubles begin. Worthy of Chekhov.

White Genesis (1966) - Something horrible happens in a village. Only the griot will speak the truth. Perplexing, but illuminates the role of the griot in Senegalese society.

*Xala (1973) - A bigshot is struck with an impotence curse on the night of his marriage to his third wife. The funniest Sembène I've read, easily.

Also by Sembène: The Last of the Empire (1981), Niiwam & Taaw (1987)

Cheikh Amadou Kane: The Ambiguous Adventure (1961) - A didactic novel on the conflicts between tradition and modernity. I don't pretend to understand it well.

Mariama Bâ: *So Long a Letter (1979) - A reasoned feminist argument for women's autonomy and against multiple wives. A masterpiece of rhetoric, if not of art, and the best-selling novel in West African history.

Also by Mariama Ba: Scarlet Song (1986)

Aminata Sow Fall: *The Beggars' Strike, Or, The Dregs of Society (1981) - The Dakar government wants to get rid of the beggars. The beggars go on strike. Consequences ensue. Ingenious. In Senegal, I actually saw a news report in which a government official said she wanted to crack down on the children who beg as part of their religious schooling. Strike! Strike!

Birago Diop: Tales of Amadou Koumba (1947/1958) - Fine adaptations of traditonal stories, often animal fables. Diop was also a distinguished poet.

Myriam Warner-Vieyra: As the Sorceror Said (1980) - Not actually about Senegal at all. Warner-Vieyra is Gaudeloupan now living in Senegal. This one is a good girl-pushed-to-the-edge story, about a Gaudaloupan girl in France.

Juletane (1982) - A different Guadaloupan girl in France marries a Senegalese man, and goes to Senegal with him. Things don't go well. Another sharp feminist novel, the crazed alternative to Mariama Ba's rationalism.

Ken Bugul: The Abandoned Baobab (1982)

Fatou Diome: The Belly of the Atlantic (2001)

Djibril Niane: Soundjata (1965)

Leopold Senghor: Poems - A Collected Poems has been published, but the 1964 Selected Poems is probably better suited for most of us. Also see the Penguin Book of Modern African Poetry.

Books about Senegal by non-Senegalese authors

Mungo Park: Travels in the Interior of Africa (1799) - An all-time great travel book. One young Scot attempts to be the first European to visit Timbuktu. He doesn't make it on this trip, lucky for him, emerging from the bush with nothing but rags and his enormous hat, stuffed with his notes. The first place to go for a look at pre-colonial West Africa.

Mark Hudson: *The Music in My Head (1998) - See here. A great book about Senegalese music, and about Dakar.

Reginald McKnight: *Moustapha's Eclipse (1988) - A short story collection of high quality. Three of the stories are inspired by McKnight's experiences in Senegal, the others are about American racial complications. I need to read more of his work.

Also by Reginald McKnight: I Get on the Bus (1990), He Sleeps (2002), and others.

Michael Palin: Sahara (2002) - Senegal is passed through. Well-observed and funny, with good photos.

Jean Baptiste Henri Savigny and Alexander Corréaud: Narrative of a Voyage to Senegal in 1816 (1817) - A great account of a famous shipwreck, with some incidental historical information about Senegal.

Peter Biddlecombe: French Lessons in Africa

Akihiro Yamamura: Senegal

Peter Matthiessen: African Silences

Ryszard Kapuscinski: The Shadow of the Sun

Susan Lowerre: Under the Neem (1990)

Katharine Kane: *Lonely Planet Guide to Senegal and The Gambia - The best written Lonely Planet guide I've used. Meine frau had lunch with the author, while I went out looking for a place to buy shampoo. For a city of 3 million people, Dakar is a small place.

A reading list for a trip to Senegal

With any luck, I will be visiting Senegal this summer, as a tourist.

I would like advice and recommendations for reading - novels, poems, non-fiction. Advice about anything, really. It all has to be in English. I have to start working on my French. I don't want to think about that. Ein, zwei, drei. No, no. Un, deux, trois. Quatre-vingt-un. Je voudrais le yassa de poulet.

Any help is much appreciated. Here's a start. Some I've read, some I ain't:

Books by Senegalese authors

Ousmane Sembène: The Black Docker, God's Bits of Wood, The Money Order, White Genesis, Xala, The Last of the Empire, Niiwam & Taaw
Cheik Kane: The Ambiguous Adventure
Mariama Bâ: So Long a Letter, Scarlet Song
Aminata Sow Fall: The Beggars' Strike
Birago Diop: Tales of Amadou Koumba
Ken Bugul: The Abandoned Baobab
Fatou Diome: The Belly of the Atlantic
Myriam Warner Vieyra: As the Sorceror Said, Juletane
Leopold Senghor: Poems

Books about Senegal by non-Senegalese authors

Mungo Park: Travels in the Interior of Africa
Mark Hudson: The Music in My Head
Reginald McKnight: I Get on the Bus, Moustapha's Eclipse, He Sleeps
Michael Palin: Sahara
Peter Biddlecombe: French Lessons in Africa
Akahiro Yamamura: Senegal
Jean Baptiste Henri Savigny and Alexander Corréaud: Narrative of a Voyage to Senegal in 1816
Peter Matthiessen: African Silences
Susan Lowerre: Under the Neem Tree

That one's a little short (but growing - many thanks).

A complaint directed at publishers, who are complicating my work. A recent book by Peter Godwin, When a Crocodile Meets the Sun: A Memoir of Africa, looks pretty interesting. It's entirely about Zimbabwe. Zimbabwe is not Africa. Anyone interested in reading African memoirs knows this. Sales will not suffer if you put the word "Zimbabwe" in the title.

I'll post this in some permanent spot and update as needed.