In today's New York Times, William Grimes writes about a new book, 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die. In short, he points out that any such list is flawed by the the compiler's biases, but it's irresistible to go through and see how you've done. Without putting my hands on the book, though, I gather that I would do very poorly; I've never heard of some of the authors he mentions (Maria Edgeworth, Henry WIlliamson, Barry Hines) and haven't read anything by the ones I have heard of (Thackeray, Nabokov, Don DeLillo). I'm not sure what I'd put on my list; as we discussed for our top books of 2008, some of our "bests" are not necessarily the best literature, but the books that stay lurking in our minds long after we're done reading them.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/23/books/23read.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=volumes+to+go+before+you+&st=nyt&oref=slogin
2 comments:
Great article, JNJ, and as always, another link to lots of things to read! I skimmed the list itself, and did agree with his assertion that's it's supposed to create talk of what the canon should be and shake it up a bit!
Noticed The Secret History, which we've discussed, and an old favorite, Mrs. 'Arris goes to Paris! Several John LeCarre too, (older ones) makes you wonder if the list were American, would it be full of Stephen King and Tom Clancy??
Bookmarked it to check out again later!
John got a book for Christmas "501 Must-Read Books." I think it too is British. It has been quite fun to look through it. We've put skads of post-its on it to show which books we need to read! We particularly enjoyed the children's fiction - everything from The Secret Garden to Emil and the Detectives to The Curious Incident (which I don't really think is a kids book!)
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