How great is it to receive a book in the mail unexpectedly? You're right, it's that great. No, BAFAB week isn't upon us yet (but here's a tease: I'll be doing a book giveaway contest this time around!), but I found a puffy package on my foyer floor today all the same. My former Wesleyan classmate Peder Zane sent me a copy of his new book, The Top Ten: Writers Pick Their Favorite Books. This is the kind of book that makes me want to send the kids off on extended playdates so I can get comfy and just slurp the entire thing down in one sitting.
Here's the deal: Peder contacted 125 of today's best-known and best-loved writers and asked them—or in some cases practically forced them, amid much wailing and gnashing of teeth, it seems—to come up with a list of their favorite ten books of all time. They're all here: Annie Proulx (favorite book: The Odyssey), Ann Patchett (Anna Karenina), Joyce Carol Oates (Crime and Punishment), Jonathan Franzen (The Brothers Karamazov), Jim Harrison (The Possessed), John Irving (Great Expectations), James Lee Burke (The Sound and the Fury), Lorrie Moore (Madame Bovary), Michael Cunningham (King Lear), Paul Auster (Don Quixote), and on and on and on. I feel as though I managed to wrangle an invitation to the coolest literary dinner party imaginable, and talk has turned to books.
The nerd in me appreciates the ranking system, which gives each #1 vote 10 points, each #2 vote 9 points, and so on, until we arrive at a list of the top 10 books according to all 125 of these writers:
1. Anna Karenina
2. Madame Bovary
3. War and Peace
4. Lolita
5. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
6. Hamlet
7. The Great Gatsby
8. In Search of Lost Time
9. The stories of Anton Chekhov
10. Middlemarch
Me, I've read all but War and Peace (which I suspect I never will read), Lolita (yes, yes, I promise to read it, you've all yelled at me enough about it already), and In Search of Lost Time (which I like to think I'll read someday, but don't hold your breath).
Then there are descriptions of all 544 books that appear on the 125 lists, plus a bunch of appealingly nerdy cross-lists, like Top Ten Works of the Twentieth Century and Top Ten Works by American Authors and so on. Really interesting.
Oh, and now Peder's got a blog! And you don't have to be a famous author, although there are plenty of those —even poor schlubs like me and you (well, most of you, anyhow) can play along. I'm already getting anxious; I don't know how I will ever come up with such a list. Books that were exquisitely written but not especially life-changing, or vice versa? Books that I loved as an adolescent but never read again? Oy, I'm getting a headache. One thing I know for sure: None of the books on the list above—with the possible exception of Huck Finn—would make my list. Nah, not even Huck Finn, come to think of it. How 'bout you? Can you do it?
So thanks, Peder. And kids? Get your own dinner. Mama's busy.