It’s the middle of the week, so let’s have some fun (lots of folks need it right about now). Over at Touchstone magazine’s Mere Comments blog (which if you don’t read it, you should), contributor Anthony Esolen compiles a Top Ten list–of the “Bad Books Everybody Reads.” By that, he means the books (specifically novels) that you had to read in high school or college because they are supposed to be “great literature,” or that you talked yourself into reading because of their literary reputation, but which in fact you realize to be glorified bird cage lining. Esolen’s list is:
10. Mary Shelley, Frankenstein. Not for the moral, which is actually more conservative than her husband Percy might have preferred, but for the clunky and confused writing.
9. James Joyce, Ulysses. Yes, I know, it’s a work of genius. Doesn’t he say so on every other page?
8. James Heller, Catch-22. Cute and clever. Yossarian naked up a tree. Now I understand Vietnam.
7. Voltaire, Candide. French stylishness be damned. Ecrasez l’infame!
6. Theodore Dreiser, Sister Carrie. All the length and ponderousness of a Russian novel; all the theological and intellectual depth of a Russian tart.
5. Kurt Vonnegut, Breakfast of Champions. I loved this book — when I was thirteen. So it goes.
4. Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale. What happens when you smoke that scurf on the tundra instead of eating it.
3. J. D. Salinger, Catcher in the Rye. I met a lot of preppies at Princeton. Never saw a single one of them in a field of rye. I must have been in the wrong place at the wrong time.
2. Marx and Engels, The Communist Manifesto. I’ve had to re-read it in the last few weeks. It makes up for bad economics, bad history, and bad anthropology with prudishness and sheer nastiness. [This doesn't really fit with the others, but that's Esolen's choice. If you start opening it up to non-fiction works, it makes the job considerably harder. On the other hand, he may have been including this because it's bad fiction.--DSF]
1. Kahlil Gibran, The Prophet. If you see yourself at the top of a mountain, know that it was meant to be, and that it was not meant to be.
Of these, I’ve read Catch-22, Candide, Breakfast of Champions, Catcher in the Rye, and The Communist Manifesto, all when I was a teenager. Of them, the only one I’ve read in adulthood was Catch-22, which I enjoyed for the humor, not the message. I’d agree with him about the others I’ve read. But here’s what my own Top Ten would look like:
10. Richard Adams, Watership Down. 400 pages of talking rabbits. If I want talking animals, I’ll take Animal Farm.
9. Ken Kesey, Sometimes a Great Notion. I really liked One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, and couldn’t wait to get into what was supposed to be Kesey’s magnum opus. Of doorstops, perhaps; of fiction, hardly.
8. Ernest Hemingway, The Old Man and the Sea. Sorry, I just don’t sea it.
7. Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49. There were a lot of really strange novels written in the 60s. This one is supposed to be one of the best. For me, the only the only thing that comes to mind is to ask what the heck he’s talking about.
6. Somerset Maugham, Of Human Bondage. Maybe if I re-read it now, I’d feel differently. Back then, I found the Victorian style excruciating.
5. D).H. Lawrence, Sons and Lovers. Ditto on the style. As for the story or characters–who cares?
4. F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby. Pretentious, obvious, dated. What’s not to hate?
3. F. Scott Fitzgerald, Tender Is the Night. Have I mentioned that I don’t like Fitzgerald?
2. Anything by Ayn Rand. I’ve only read parts of The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged, and was astounded that she ever found a publisher for such unreadable, buffoonish drivel. Believe it or not, at the site of the Modern Library, readers choose these as the two greatest novels ever. I figure that saying what I do about them here should get me a traffic spike, for sure.
1. James Joyce, Finnegan’s Wake. I’m sorry, but any novel that you can’t read without spending twelve times longer on the annotations than on the text is no longer a novel. It’s an exercise in solipsism.
So what say you, folks? What are the “great” novels on which you wish you’d never wasted precious hours of your life?
(By the way, I should mention that I read Beowulf for the first time this summer, simply because I’ve been wanting to read some of the literature [the Icelandic saga Story of the Volsungs, the Finnish saga The Kalevala, the German Nibelungunlied] that lies behind Tolkien’s Middle Earth saga. I loved it. So you can take my judgments for what they’re worth.
Posted by David Fischler 
Posted by David Fischler 
