Wrong-headed lists

While tidying my study, I found, and started reading, a library book I’d forgotten I’d borrowed: The Top Ten: Writers pick their favorite books, edited by J. Peder Zane.

My favourite selection is Annie Proulx’s:

I find this list of ten books project to be difficult, pointless, and wrong-headed. Just so you’ll give it a rest, here is a list. One could, of course, quickly go on to put together list after list. Moreover, the lists could change from week to week as one’s tastes change and as one reads more widely. It has not escaped me that nearly every newspaper, book review publication, and magazine are currently gripped by list fever. Lists, unless grocery shoppping lists are truly a reduction ad absurdum.

1. The Odyssey by Homer
2. Wheat That Springeth Green by J.F. Powers
3. The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain
4. Ship of Fools by Katherine Anne Porter
5. The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov
6. King Lear by William Shakespeare
7. Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman
8. The stories of William Trevor
9. The Black Book by Orhan Pamuk
10. The haiku of Matsuo Basho

Regardless of what Annie Proulx thinks of this sort of list, I find it interesting to see what books writers think of as worthy. (Of Ms Proulx’s list, I’ve only read Tom Sawyer, plus the odd poem of Walt Whitman’s, and some of Basho’s haiku. That’s it.)

125 authors were surveyed for the book, and 544 works of literature were mentioned; the top ten, “in order according to the total number of points they received: a first-place pick is worth ten points, and a tenth-place pick is worth one point”:

1. Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
2. Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
3. War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
4. Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
5. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
6. Hamlet by William Shakespeare
7. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
8. In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust
9. The stories of Anton Chekhov
10. Middlemarch by George Eliot

See also The Guardian‘s review of the book.