Should you ignore these great novels?

A literary blog called The Second Pass has posted a list of ten books you shouldn't bother to read, regardless of their prestige. I agree with some and strongly disagree with others:

White Noise, by Don DeLillo: I can't read anything by DeLillo, no matter how primed I am by his glowing reviews. Accepted.

Absalom, Absalom, by William Faulkner. Faulkner was a Hollywood drinking buddy of my grandfather, and I liked a couple of his novels when forced to read them in college (Light in August and The Sound and the Fury), but I never sought out any of his novels, so I'll go with this dismissal.

One Hundred Years of Solitude, by Gabriel García Márquez. Nonsense. It took me a couple of tries to get into it, when I was young and dumb, but I've read it three or four times since then and found more every time. A writer who hasn't read it is a writer who doesn't know how how tough the competition really is.

The Road, by Cormac McCarthy. No argument. I went to some effort to demolish this awful book in a Tyee review, yet it still sold by the hundreds of thousands. That told me the real end of the world has already happened, and it's a lot worse than McCarthy's version.

The Rainbow, by D.H. Lawrence. Lawrence struck me as a boring idiot when I first encountered him as a college student, and I have since lived a long and happy Lawrence-free life.

On the Road, by Jack Kerouac. In grade 11 or 12 we nerds at Santa Monica High read Kerouac hot off the press, and thought he was pretty cool. We grew up. Kerouac and the Beat Generation did not. (But when I met Allen Ginsberg at a Columbia University event a couple of years later, I liked him a lot.)

The Corrections, by Jonathan Franzen. Bought this as a Christmas present for my wife, who was instantly bored. Checked it myself and found that her literary taste, as usual, was bang-on.

The USA Trilogy, by John Dos Passos. When I read this as a teenager, I thought it was awesomely avant-garde (and Norman Mailer swiped some of Dos Passos's gimmicks for Naked and the Dead). Revisiting it a couple of years later, I found it just another rotting blowdown in an old forest.

Jacob's Room, by Virginia Woolf. OK, I never got Virginia Woolf. And I told myself as an undergraduate, circa 1961, that I would read her and Henry James when I was mature enough. That time has not yet come.

A Tale of Two Cities, by Charles Dickens. This is one of those novels everyone knows so well, they think they've read it. I know I haven't, so I'll pass on this one. But Bleak House, over 150 years after its first publication, remains one of the great must-reads of English literature.

Writers need to distinguish between best-sellers, most of which are forgotten in a year, and classics, which (as Northrop Frye observed) are books that refuse to go away. With a good graphic memory, I can recall several covers of Time Magazine from the 1950s glorifying great writers now vanished, like James Gould Cozzens and Herman Wouk.

Some of the books I've dismissed here will probably refuse to go away, like Jacob's Room and A Tale of Two Cities. One of the first reviews of The Great Gatsby called it "a book for the season only," one of the dumber judgements of all time. Such books, in effect, judge us, and find us wanting. 

But writers, especially, should read both classics and books for the season only, and judge themselves by what they find. Sometimes we'll meet a writer who's humiliatingly good, but at least shows us how well a human being can write. 

More often we'll find more evidence that any idiot can publish a book, and other idiots will write glowing reviews of it. This should give us encouragement: We too are idiots, after all. 

Comments

[Dale Myers]

I simply cannot believe this assinine article. To call yourself a writer and agree that any of the ten books mentioned are not well worth reading refutes your premise. A hack manipulating words you may well be, but not a "writer." Leave that title to the "authors" whose great works you dismissed. Pity.

[Ranjan SenGupta]

Hi,

To say that you can avoid One Hundred Years of Solitude and still can claim yourself to be a serious pursuer of literature (at least that what it appeared from the list of the books) is like saying you really enjoy pop music but do not think much of 'The long and Winding Road" by The Beatles. Just because one finds it a little diffficult to get through the dense structure, one tends to label it unreadable. I, for one, found One Hundred Years of Solitude a little difficult to penetrate at the first go. But years later I tried it again and found it so gripping that I woke up nights to finish it. However, as an aspiring writer from India, I would like to differ from you in regarding this masterpiece as competetion. I would rather like to view this as an inspiration, and a milepost of the extent to which one can strech one's mind.

Ranjan SenGupta

[Walter P.]

This article is cool! I really enjoy your opinions on literature and your healthy disdain for authors who try too hard to be "avant garde" without the skill to back it up. So many people in academics are such blowhards but you aren't. Rock on!

[Johnny V]

I think your insights here are wonderful. To me, writing is similar to music. Not everyone is going to have the same taste. For example, while Bob Dylan is a gifted lyricist, I find most of his melodies tedious and boring at best. Blaspheme? No. That's just my particular taste.
Write on...