MarysLibrary

Best Seller List - June 1963

This morning's New York Times printed the books that were on the best seller list forty-five years ago this week. I was surprised at the quality. O'Hara, du Maurier, Salinger, Grass, Baldwin, Steinbeck, Woodham-Smith. This year's list is not nearly so inspiring.

Fiction

1. The Shoes of the Fisherman by Morris West
2. Elizabeth Appleton by John O'Hara
3. The Glass-Blowers by Daphne du Maurier
4. Seven Days in May by Fletcher Knebel and Charles W Bailey II
5. Grandmother and the Priests by Taylor Caldwell
6. Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters, by J D Salinger
7. The Sand Pebbles by Richard McKenna
8. The Bedford Incident by Mark Rascovich
9. The Tin Drum by Gunter Grass
10. Stacy Tower by Robert H K Walter

Nonfiction

1. The Whole Truth and Nothing But by Hedda Hopper and James Brough
2. I Owe Russia $1200 by Bob Hope
3. The Fire Next Time by James Baldwin
4. Travels with Charley by John Steinbeck
5. Happiness Is a Warm Puppy by Charles M Schulz
6. Terrible Swift Sword by Bruce Catton
7. O Ye Jigs and Juleps! by Virginia Cary Hudson
8. The Day They Shook the Plum Tree by Arthur H Lewis
9. The Great Hunger by Cecil Woodham-Smith
10. The Ordeal of Power by Emmet John Hughes

Burning is too good for them

Yesterday's Times Online (London, that is, not New York) has an article that should start your week with either exhilarating agreement or infuriating disgust.

It's a "red mist" list by Rod Liddle, books that once seemed superb and are now found to be hollow. He takes aim particularly at A Dance to the Music of Time by Anthony Powell (pronounced "Pole," which seems especially to madden Liddle.)

I think Dance is remarkable, endlessly re-readable, and profound. Shows what I know.

The Rough Guide to Classic Novels

I've always loved books about books. One of the best of the recent arrivals is The Rough Guide to Classic Novels (2008) by Simon Mason which arrived today.

This book, unlike some others such as 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die (2006) by Peter Ackroyd and Peter Boxall, is not prescriptive. It doesn't suggest that these are the world's only classic novels or even that you should be reading classics rather than other sorts of books. It even puts in a good word for Mills and Boon and Harlequin.

Many of the books listed as classic herein are obvious - War and Peace (1865) by Leo Tolstoy, for example, is on everyone's list. But Mason adds at the end of each classic book he describes a section called "Where to Go Next." And he does not direct the reader of War and Peace to Anna Karenena (1877) as you might expect, although he does often send the reader on to another book by the same author - for the reader of Anna Karenina he recommends The Kreutzer Sonata (1889) for example.

But for the reader who loved War and Peace he suggests Before the Storm (1878) by Theodor Fontane, in which Napoleon's soldiers, retreating from Moscow, arrive in Berlin. For the lover of Memoirs of Hadrian (1951) by Marguerite Yourcenar he suggests I, Claudius (1934) by Robert Graves. If you liked The Good Soldier Svejk (1921-23) by Jaroslav Hasek, he sends you to Karel Capek's War With the Newts (1936.)

Mason is, as am I, very fond of the work of Eca de Quieros. He mentions The Mais (1888), The Relic (1887), and Cousin Basillio (1878), the last of which he recommends to the reader who liked Theodor Fontane's Effi Briest (1894), which I did, very much. Did you enjoy Thomas Love Peacock's Nightmare Abbey (1818)? Then you should read Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey (1817.) Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937) leads you on to Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man (1952.) If you liked A Month in the Country (1980) by J L Carr, you might also like The Collected Stories (1976) of William Trevor.

Jonathan Wild (1743) by Henry Fielding brings to mind Captain Singleton (1720) by Daniel Defoe. Oblomov (1859) by Ivan Goncharov suggests Eugene Onegin (1833) by Alexander Pushkin. The Red and the Black (1830) by Stendhal suggests Selected Short Stories by Guy de Maupassant.

There are many classics here that you have probably never heard of like That Bringas Woman (1884) and Fortunata and Jacinta (1887) by Benito Perez Galdos. I happen to have read the latter and loved it. I have a vague recollection of having read something about The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle (1994) and Norwegian Wood (1987) by Haruki Murakami. I know I have never heard of Weep Not, Child (1964) by Ngugi Wa Thiong'o or Broken April (1982) by Ismail Kadare, or The Provost (1822) or The Annals of the Parish (1821) although I've heard of the author of these novels, John Galt.

This is a superb book for someone who reads broadly and deeply. Unlike most such books it frequently suggests books you may not know or have heard about. There are lots of treasures out there, many of them listed in here.

Book Club Companion

The Book Club Companion: A Comprehensive Guide to the Reading Group Experience by Diana Loevy (2006) is invaluable, not just for a book club looking to choose books that are likely to be popular with the group, but to any of us looking for information about books that will hit the spot with us.

Here are some fetures in Leovy's book:

• Rules for running a book club and hints about how to choose the books you will read, places you might meet, and how to solve problems like pets who intrude.
• A list of ten books beloved by many of us, including The Kite Runner, To Kill a Mockingbird, and Memoirs of a Geisha
• The twenty indispensable titles that book clubs have loved, including Bel Canto, The Girl With the Pearl Earring, The Red Tent, and The Sparrow.
• Lists of "The Ten Indispensable Titles" in various subject fields like Classics, Memoirs, Black Literature, and easy reading, which the author calls "respites."
• Lists of books in quirky categories like Angry, Often Desperate Housewives (Brick Lane, Mrs Dalloway, The First Wives Club), P G Wodehouse 101, The Essential Short Story Collection.
• Interviews with authors such as Isabel Allende and Alexander McCall Smith.
• Short but perceptive reviews of many of the books mentioned.
• Recipes to use for meetings with book themes.
• Much, much more.

I didn't "read" the book because it's not that kind of book - rather you leaf through and sample here and there. The copy I scanned has gone back to the library but I'm going to buy it, if only for the lists of US best-sellers for every year from 1920 to 1999.

NBCC Best Recommended List

"WHAT IF A BEST SELLERS LIST was made up of books people read rather than books they simply bought? What if it was a list of books you just had to read rather than books that were just good reads. And what if the people recommending those books weren't sales clerks and publicists but award-winning poets and readers?"

This is the start of a post over on Bluestalking Reader where Lisa introduces the National Book Critics Circle Monthly Best Recommended Book Lists. Go on over there and read her comments.

To start things off the NBCC has listed the best recommended books of 2007 as chosen by their members and finalists and winners of their prize. Here are the fiction and nonfiction lists:

Fiction

1. Junot Diaz, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (Riverhead)
2. Denis Johnson, Tree of Smoke (Farrar Straus & Giroux)
3. Michael Chabon, The Yiddish Policeman's Union (HarperCollins)
4. Philip Roth, Exit Ghost (Houghton Mifflin)
5. Per Petterson, Out Stealing Horses (Graywolf)

Nonfiction

1. Edwidge Danticat, Brother, I'm Dying (Knopf)
2. Alan Weisman, The World Without Us (St. Martin's)
3. Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine (Metropolitan Books)
4. David Michaelis, Schulz and Peanuts (HarperCollins)
5. Tim Weiner, Legacy of Ashes (Doubleday)

You can read the original announcement at Critical Mass, the NBCC blog. (You'll love the fox.)

100 Great American Novels You've (Probably) Never Read

I've recently acquired this newly published book by Karl Bridges, a librarian at the University of Vermont: 100 Great American Novels You've (Probably) Never Read. For those of us who have read our way through much of the canon this list brings us titles that are not new (all the books Bridges lists were published before 1997) but are new to us.

Some are lesser known novels by authors we already know, like Laurie Colwin and Don DeLillo. Others are books that were once quite popular but have been sort of forgotten, like The Rise of Silas Lapham by William Dean Howells. And many are books we have never heard of by authors we have never heard of.

I checked my database and found that I own four or five of these titles. The library has another 30 or more. I've mooched another 10 or 12 and Gutenberg has posted etexts of some others.

That's enough books for me to read one a week for the next year. With interlibrary loan I can acquire the rest of them as I need them and hope to finish reading all 100 by the end of 2009 if I read them at the rate of one a week, which isn't overly ambitious.

I feel a New Year's Resolution coming on.

Reading Life

Sven Birkerts has a new book out, Reading Life: Books for the Ages. If you liked Birkerts' Readings or The Gutenberg Elegies, if you like reading about the responses other people have had to books, you will love this.

After a smoothly written introduction, Birkerts talks about 11 books that were life-changing for him. He returned to these books in later years and as so many of us do when we re-read favorite novels, found the books had changed as he had matured, growing richer and more meaningful.

The books he talks about are:

• J D Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye
• Knut Hamsun's Pan
• D H Lawrence's Women in Love
• Gustave Flaubert's Madame Bovary
• Saul Bellow's Humboldt's Gift
• Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita
• Walker Percy's The Moviegoer
• Ford Madox Ford's The Good Soldier
• Henry James' The Ambassadors
• Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse
• Alice Munro's The Beggar Maid

I had never heard of Hamsun's book or Munro's. I've never read the books by Flaubert, Bellow, and Percy. And I was totally unimpressed with the Salinger, Lawrence, Nabokov, and Ford. The Henry James and Virginia Woolf works are, I believe, among the great novels of the last 150 years, but they didn't change my life in any way when I read them.

Nonetheless, I'm enjoying Birkerts' essays immensely. I can easily understand how they have brought enlightenment, enjoyment, excitement, and other life enhancing experiences to Birkerts and others.

This is another book about books that needs to be on your library shelves.

Nick Hornby

  For a while now I've been reading Polysyllabic Spree, a collection of Nick Hornby's columns from Believer magazine. I was picking it up, reading half a page, putting it down, picking it up again three days later, forgetting where I was, going back to the beginning. You know the drill.

Yesterday I picked it up, started again at page 1 and really read it. All the way through to the end. And then I picked up his second collection, Housekeeping vs the Dirt and continued reading his delightful reviews.

The idea of these columns is that Hornby will list every month the books he has bought and the books he has read. There is not always a tidy relationship. In the end, like the rest of us, he buys a lot more books than he reads. He buys books and discovers them to be unreadable and abandons them. He begins reading something he is lukewarm about and flips over it.

One of the latter books was Denis Lehane's Mystic River. In part because he's a novelist himself, Hornby immediately recognized that this "mystery" is a fine novel with a murder in the plot. He loves Michael Lewis' Moneyball and Liar's Poker. He zips through Salinger's entire oeuvre in a single month. He rediscovers Dickens.

Ultimately, Hornby is unapologetic about his book habit. He soothes himself -- and many of the rest of us -- with a quote from Gabriel Zaid's So Many Books: "the truly cultured are capable of owning thousands of unread books without losing their composure or their desire for more."

November Books - 16

Years ago on Masterpiece Theater PBS aired a program based on Vera Britain's remembrance of World War I called Testament of Youth. It was then that many of us in the US first discovered Brittain's emotional work.

The book wasn't written until 1933 when the world was beginning to deteriorate again and to move inexorably toward World War II, or as some would have it, the second part of the Great War.

Brittain and her fellow upper class Englishmen were, as Fussell pointed out in The Great War and Modern Memory, deeply disillusioned about the ability of governments to make sensible decisions and to achieve what they set out to do, and so they were pacifists even in the face of the growing menace of Hitler.

Those of us who tend to rant about appeasement and the shortsightedness of those who thought they could cope with Germany without another war need to read about the lives of people like Brittain. She was a nurse during the first war and her experiences were almost unimaginably grim.

Her book gives us a better idea of why so many people were so deeply pacifist in the face of what seems to us today as an obvious threat to freedom.

The Lion's Pride

As noted in my comment on my Veterans' Day post, the photo in that post is of the American Military Cemetery in Normandy, where two of Theodore Roosevelt's sons are buried. A very fine book on TR and family in war and peace is The Lion's Pride (1998) by Edward J. Renehan.

TR unsuccessfully lobbied President Wilson for permission to form a division and to lead it in France, as he did with the Rough Riders (First U.S. Volunteer Cavalry Regiment) during the Spanish-American War. The plan was unrealistic and, in any event, was likely doomed by the animosity between Roosevelt and Wilson caused by TR's ardent opposition to Wilson's neutrality policy before 1917. Nonetheless, TR took great pride in the military service of all four of his sons during WWI. In fact, TR's daughter Edith was the first of the family to arrive in France during WWI when she traveled there to serve as a nurse. Quentin, an aviator, was killed in action during WWI at the age of 20. Ted, Jr., died of a heart attack in France during World War II. This book sets out the remarkable story of a family's heroic service.