At long last, The Second Pass blog now features a comments function. (For now, you have to be on the blog page to see it and use it, as opposed to the homepage.) So this post is the place to express any opinions you might have about the feature that went up on the Backlist today. I’ve gotten a few direct responses already. One reader who “slogged through” D. H. Lawrence’s The Rainbow in college wrote: “I had banished it from my mind, and now…it comes horribly horribly back.” Another defended William Faulkner, writing that “Absalom, Absalom isn’t purple, it’s deep purple, and, like the band, transcends its own absurdity. But it’s a lot better than ‘Smoke on the Water.’”
So, thoughts? Is White Noise your favorite novel and you think we’re crazy? Did you find On the Road as disappointing a guide to living as we did? And most importantly, what acclaimed books would you add to the list?
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I agree with the list with one exception. I recently completed the USA Trilogy and loved it. I am a convert. I am one of those pressing copies of Dos Passos’ masterpiece into friends’, acquaintances’, and strangers’ hands with an almost desperate desire for people to read it. It is fabulous.
While the more experimental “Camera Eye” and “Newsreel” sections are not a complete success, I thought they did add to the novel. However, they can easily be skipped if you find them annoying, too coy, or have some other problem. The text, though, the text is fabulous. Rather than showing the limitations of the novel form, Dos Passos demonstrated how much could be achieved.
For my full thoughts, you can always check out next week’s edition of my blog. But I think Dos Passos created a brilliant portrait of America.
As someone who’s always seen book lists as publisher propaganda, I say right on…nonetheless, while i wholeheartedly agree with your assessment of each book that I’ve actually read in this list and enjoy your very convincing reviewing style, I don’t believe that book lists are just for those works that are the most entertaining to you or me. Books can be significant and affect readers for many reasons, other than great writing. If we are to limit book lists to the most enlightened and inspired of all time, that a person could read at any stage of their life and enjoy, there would be only a few mentioned for each century. (e.g., Dickens only had one first-half of David Copperfield in him.) Some authors have something to say, but don’t have the inspiration to reach all of us whatever age or life stage we may be experiencing; therefore it would be best to read those works while at the right age and under the right circumstances to get the most out of them before we throw them off of the bus.
You start by making this piece about lists, but then urge your readers to resist the “ardent fans” who insist we read these works. You’re not really saying anything about current lists or even canons, you’re simply saying ‘these books have lots of fans and here are the reason’s I’m not a fan and you shouldn’t be one either’. Moreoever, you do so by creating your own negative list of ‘do not read’ books.
Wasn’t this all really just an excercise in telling your readers your unfavourable opinion of some well know books?
White Noise is overrated - if you had to pick one DeLillo book to read, it should be Great Jones Street. If that’s not available, Libra is next. Reading White Noise is akin to being lectured by your great-uncle, who came back from the war damaged, about the relation between world peace and the squirrels who live across the street.
I read On The Road when I was 18 and loved it. Read it again at 25 and was mostly bored. I re-read for a third time last year and I enjoyed it more than I did 8 years previously, but I don’t think it’s canon-worthy. Kerouac has to answer for a generation of pot-heads and free verse poetry enthusiasts who think writing is just typing.
No one will read The Corrections 10 years from now. I have scientific proof to back me up.
Another one for the list: The Catcher in the Rye. It’s the best book you’ve ever read when you’re 15, but when you read again after the age of maturity, Holden comes off as whiny, insipid and boring. The best thing Salinger ever did to cement his literary reputation was to retreat to his log cabin in the woods and grow facial hair.
“The Road” isn’t a book lacking description, or characters, or dialogue, as you sort of said. Keep in mind, it isn’t a beginning. It’s an ending. It’s a deconstruction.
So I say you underrate “The Road”. Given the narrative’s setting, there’s a symbolism to the style. The descriptions are bare, yes, much like the landscape traversed by the father and son: stark, dead, non-descript. But the prose mirrors the once beautiful world in ruins. In the midst of all the bleakness, there come, albeit, few and far-between, startling scenes like the house with the cellar, and breathtaking sights: the beach after all the woods, the ship. But, the ship, like everything else in the book, even the writing, is sinking.
Are you just trolling here? Your take on several of these books is dead wrong, especially concerning The Road and One Hundred Years of Solitude. Books don’t have to appeal to everyone or be the author’s ‘finest’ (whatever that is) to be great.
So, let’s hear your ten best books and why you think that way about them next.
I’ll take a quick shot at explaining my love of 100 Years of Solitude. It creates a bewildering repeating family history. It reminds me of epic poetry and ballads, shreds of history and romance retold until the edges blur. I know that it bugs the hell out of people who are bugged by the fantastic. Eh, so they should skip it. Lots of us embrace fantastic elements in fiction when they achieve mood and meaning more effectively than realistic depiction. It is fiction after all; ceci n’est pas une pipe.
Dude, why don’t you just put The Sound and The Fury on there instead? I mean, you wanna talk about pure dreck? It’s literary equivalent of playing someone with a disability to win the Oscar. Throw in “the race card” and you’ve got a classic work of American fiction. Puh-lease.
Now, I agree on some of these, but One Hundred Years of Solitude? You like fun don’t you? and humor? fancy? Or do you just prefer to read books in which white authors lead the tour through the wine cellars of their uncorked feelings? “I’ll have the ‘76 Chateau Maudlin, sir, thank you.”
Two things I found interesting about this list - well three if you count its existence. One, a number of these books are in my started but never finished pile, White Noise jumps out at me in that category and it is not even that long of a book. The other thing is that I really enjoyed One Hundred Years of Solitude. However, I read it while taking a class on Sigmund Freud which treated his works as literary works rather than psychoanalytical works. I felt like I was reading Marquez’s work while it was being explained to me in parallel.
“A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens”
Thank you. I’ve read all of Dickens and never understood why this is one of his best known and loved works. I think you’ve explained the problems perfectly. What I love about Dickens is the sprawl and extraneous information. Do I really need to know the fully genealogy of the fruit vendor on the street corner around the bend from the protagonists adoptive home? Of course not. But does it make Dickens Dickens that he should write it so beautifully and well that I’m tricked into believing this moment might be the most important part of the book until it’s too late and said fruit vendor is never seen again? Absolutely.
Well I agree with all but two of your selections. And here is how I differ:
On the Road, Kerouac. While not his best work, this book set the scene perfectly. After studying Kerouac for a long time, I have come back to On the Road (an awesome version that has reverted back to the original scroll seems to breathe some of the life back into the journey.) and am surprised by the heart and honesty Kerouac revealed. The story is more than Jack and his buddy. It’s about Jack and himself, Jack and his Mama, Jack and his depression. While I like Dharma Bums and Desolation Angels better, On the Road is quite a read.
100 Years of Solitude, Marquez. I have to think your bored assessment has more to do with you than the writing in 100 Years. Yes it meanders, but that is the case with many a whimsical tale of enchantment, love, betrayal and excess. Some of the scenes in 100 Years are completely transportive, reading them once, I was never the same after reading this book. Blending “magical realism” and the mundane Marquez takes us to places unknown and dark. As you say, you come to a book with what you yourself are carrying, and if you missed 100 Years the first time, perhaps try again later. The rewards in this book are vast. Having started here, I have read almost all of Marquez’s books over time. And this one is still the masterpiece!
@jmacofearth
First: smart and ballsy article. It’s just what I like to see and have been doing for some time - unabashedly noting books which are more popular than good (with having to see one of my past favorites up there as well). However, regarding “On the Road” and the loss of identity where you say, “This galactic disturbance allowed neoliberalism to firmly take hold, such that now the only relevant distinctions between people are levels of disposable income and whether they wear Bluetooth earpieces.” That’s a lot for one little book, and for all it’s cleverness is just a bit too subjective and not a well connected thought. It just seems that among the rest of this confident article, this particular point was laughing at it’s own joke a little too hard and ignores the lack of truth in it.
Having read (or tried to read) all but 1 of these, I can say I agree! So nice to hear that I am not alone.
Thank you for including, “Absolom, Absolom,” and, “One Hundred Years of Solitude.” I could not agree more with you on them. Even though I have been accused of writing in Faulkner’s style (long-winded, but without his talent >g<), I have never been a fan of that style. And, it having come so highly-recommended by a friend of mine whose opinion I highly value, I wanted so much to enjoy, “One Hundred Years of Solitude,” but found myself, much as the reviewer here, checking my watch and wondering what the fuss was about … as well as wondering when I would ever reach the end of this book. Might it take me 100 years??? lol! Anyway, I am glad to see I am not the only one with those opinions.
I’m so glad everybody is taking you to task for including “On the Road” and “100 Years.” I’ve tried and tested both many times and still get a thrill. I loved “100 Years” so much that I included it in my 12 pounds of cargo on a 3-month bike trip in France. My companion and I read it to each other every night in camp and used the read ages as toilet paper. So Marquez and his delightful fancy are spread all the way across Gaul.
Not sure what to make of all this. Surely a lot of other books could go on this list, and most people would (subjectively) take a book or two off the list. I read “On the Road” while hopping freight trains across the country, and my friends proclaimed me a social retard when I admitted I didn’t get it and insisted that “Darma Bums” was a lot better. But by your standards, this makes me one of the cool people.
You always have the freedom to pick up and read any book you like, and to dump it after the first 10 pages (or even 10 words or less) if it isn’t working out. Everyone has to find their own way through the literary world, and who can say which path is right?
have to disagree, the marquez is great. perhaps give it another try, sometimes you need to be in the right mindspace, for example I got bored and put down “crime and punishment” the first couple times I tried it, but the third time I was ready for it, and there we are.
One Hundred Years of Solitude is one of my all-time favorite books, though I did have to keep a running list of all the characters and what pages they were introduced on.
I’m slightly ambivalent here. A lot of the choices on this list seem to suggest a James Wood-esque bias toward psychological realism (DeLillo, McCarthy, Lawrence, Faulkner, Marquez). Citing B.R Meyers to gripe with DeLillo was telling too, as his technique in A Reader’s Manifesto is basically adopted: 1) attack a load of books that don’t actually set out to use language in a spare, realistic manner for the fact that they don’t do so 2) quote the worst sentence out of context, and 3) don’t bother addressing in any way what other things they might be trying to do with an unrealistically flash prose style.
I hope you will reconsider your comments on Jack Kerouac. First, if you haven’t read On the Road since your teen years, I suggest you give it another try now that you are in your 30s. It really doesn’t mean what readers tend to think it means if they read it too young and don’t have the life experience necessary to interpret it (Very much like Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises). Second, The Dharma Bums is certainly the easiest read of the Kerouac canon — and is not without value — but literarily speaking Big Sur is arguably his most mature work, so you should read that too before disposing of the author as a whole.
So I would amend your argument to suggest that readers put off reading On the Road until they are a little older. And PLEASE don’t try to hop a freight train or hitch the backroads after you pick it up — if you do, you are seriously missing the point.
I love “One Hundred Years of Solitude”, but i kept a list of characters, as Suzanne said.
This list could be a lot longer, of course. I can absolutely see how someone would be bored by 100 Years of Solitude, although I very much enjoyed the novel. Ditto for ‘The Road,’ which I found to be absolutely amazing in its ability to create suspense in the complete and total absence of plot–and I mean that as high praise. But if you’re the type who is looking for every conversation and every paragraph to move the reader forward, then I can see how this would not be a book for you. On the other hand, I’m a fan of Hemingway, where patience with such static writing is inevitably rewarded.
And forget the static you’re getting about On the Road. It’s truly a horrible piece of writing. I understand that it was a book that once meant something to a lot of people, but I suspect they invested it with a meaning that was never really there to begin with. A glance at Kerouac’s other books is enough to demonstrate what a very poor writer he was in the end.
I wholeheartedly disagree with your critique of The Corrections. I’ll admit, I totally slogged through the first 50 or more pages but I felt rather rewarded for having done so, as I hit my stride soon thereafter and pretty much devoured the book while on vacation last winter. I agree that the Chip/Lithuania subplot was so far-fetched, it lost all impact of sociopolitical commentary but it did provide for some comic relief. I cannot attest to whether or not this book will withstand the test of time, as much of the subject matter and references are ‘au courant’ and will therefore become seemingly obscure or irrelevant as the years pass, but reading it at the age of 26 here in 2009, I loved it. So much so, that I wanted to keep reading. Which is saying a lot, considering the book already weights in at almost 550 pages. Family dysfunction is always relatable and these particular characters and situations were acutely comforting, in their banality as well as their experiences that occur outside of the mainstream.
I also loved 100 Years of Solitude.
The Day of the Locust, however, was a waste of time, money, trees, and ink. One of the worst books I’ve ever read in my entire life. My father is in complete concurrence.
There are a few suggestions I might make to you in your dismal critique of Kerouac’s “On the Road.” The fact that you claim you, “read it as a textbook on how to be cool.” shows your detachment from the art of literature. Why would anyone read a fictional book as textbook on how to be something as categorized as cool.
“Cool” is something mainstream America has forced down our throats. I get the impression that you read “On the Road” because you were trying to forge an image for yourself, and the book couldn’t deliver this to you so you dismissed it as sloppy, sexist, and sappy.
You also claim that Ginsberg and Kerouac were nerds trying to be cool. Who are you to make such a bold statement? They weren’t trying to be anything but themselves, original and uninfected by the idea of being lumped into some labeled category. They didn’t plan on becoming anything, they just did, just were, just lived.
Lastly, you make a claim that reading as an effective form of vision quest has been destroyed forever. I’de like you to realize something; if this is truly happening, it’s because people like you are attempting to tell people what to read, or what not to read and why, without letting them do what every person does everyday, which is experience it for themselves firsthand.
Lists like this only further the destruction of literature.
I don’t understand why Tess of the D’Ubervilles was not included in this list. That slobbering piece of misogynistic soap opera crap was foisted on me in university, and it still leaves a dull thud in my brain–or perhaps that was the sound of the book itself when I hurled it against the wall in fury. Stupid Tess, stupid book. If you are desperate to read Hardy, read Far From The Maddening Crowd, which was far more satisfactory in narrative.
I have a real hate-on for The Portrait of a Lady by Henry James. I couldn’t get past the first fifty pages. It’s like dry toast with sawdust jam. Absolutely nothing about it interests me, and reading about a young free spirited woman slowly be turned into a houseplant for hundreds of pages is a form of torture I wouldn’t inflict on anyone.
[...] so often, someone will leave a comment about the “Fired from the Canon” feature that ran last summer. The latest two give a [...]
awwwwwww come on, The Road is a quick read, lots of payback for little investment. For me it is packed with visual depths, Hemmingway’ish conversationals, reflections of my son. (We do the best we can, but what do we really give our children?) If you liked The Road, try Suttree.
100% in agreement with Greg Devine on Catcher in the Rye! Please, strike it from the canon!