I have been contemplating writing about Israel and Gaza but I am resisting the temptation. I could let off steam at both sides in the conflict but it wouldn’t help. Maybe I will give in to the temptation but for now I will take up what is certainly a much less pressing issue, but one that bothers me nonetheless: lists of “must-read” classics on popular online platforms.
This one on Media is better than many but it still contains biases and omissions. To its credit, it includes Anna Karenina as well as War and Peace. The prevailing view of those who have read both, including myself, is that, although the latter is staggering in its scope and characterisation, it is marred by its long discursive passages and its interpretation of the historical period is flawed, and that Anna Karenina is the better book. With regard to Dostoevsky, I am glad that it includes The Brothers Karamazov, as well as Crime and Punishment (which always seems to be a tick box on these lists). But what about The Idiot? And what about all the other great Russian novels: Fathers and Sons, A Hero of our Time, Oblomov, The Master and Margarita, to name only a few?
When it comes to English literature, the list is patchy at best. Good that it includes Middlemarch, and that Wuthering Heights is listed alongside Jane Eyre (which is another regular box tick). Again, it seems to be automatic in these lists that Jane Austen is represented by Pride and prejudice. Superb as it is, Emma and Persuasion are at least on a par, if not better. There are no novels by Charles Dickens (yes, at his worst he is sentimental bosh, but The Pickwick Papers, Great Expectations and Bleak House merit consideration). The same for Thomas Hardy (personally I am not a fan either of Tess of the d'Urbervilles or Jude the Obscure, but I love The Mayor of Casterbridge).
Perhaps understandably, there’s a strong American bias in the selection. I would tend to agree that The Scarlet Letter, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Moby Dick and The Great Gatsby, should at least be seriously considered. But why is To Kill a Mockingbird always included in these lists without question. Yes, it’s a beautiful book in many ways, and manages to rise above sentimentality and triteness, but it would be one that I would push nearer to the edge of the table. If it merits consideration then so does Steinbeck’s East of Eden and Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms. As for The Catcher in the Rye, sorry but I think this is clumsily written, badly structured and, basically, grossly overrated. If you want to include something from the more popular end of the spectrum then Catch 22 should have been considered. And any serious review of American candidates should have included works by Henry James, even though I do find that his novels can be repetitive. Whether you consider Lolita to be American or Russian, either way it should be in the running.
It’s good that the list goes back as far as Homer, and that both the Iliad and the Odyssey are included, because there is really little to choose between them. However, when it comes to epic narrative poems from the Classical period to the Middle Ages, the Aeneid, the Song of Roland, Beowulf, the Song of the Nibelungs and others should have been considered.
On fantasy, The Lord of the Rings is always another box tick. It has many strengths, notably its imaginative scope. It also has weaknesses; the few female characters are cyphers, and it often lapses into triteness and pomposity. What about the Gormenghast trilogy, by Mervyn Peak, or His Dark Materials by Philip Pullman.
The gaps don’t stop there. There are no French works at all. Personally I haven’t read Rabelais or Stendhal, but, as well as Laclos’s one-off masterpiece, Les Liaisons Dangereuses, there are works by the Dumas father and son, Balzac, Hugo, Flaubert, Zola, Proust, Sartre, Camus and others that should have been considered. German authors are also missing; some German literature is quite dense but Effie Briest, the Castle, The Trial and The Tin Drum should not have been passed over.
When Conrad is represented in these lists, it is usually by Heart of Darkness, which was actually one of a collection of long short stories. Lord Jim or, best of all, Nostromo, are better candidates. However, the Polish author who wrote in English is missing entirely from this list.
And then there’s the Irish. Oscar Wilde was a great playwright, but The Picture of Dorian Grey is sentimental and trivial, in my view. Swift, Joyce, Beckett, and more modern Irish authors are missing.
One Hundred Years of Solitude is the only southern hemisphere book in the list. I can’t even begin to list the Chinese, Japanese, Indian, African and Latin American authors that should be considered, and even then I am not being comprehensive. I have put in my top pick as the image for this article.
All this serves to illustrate the biases that tend to creep into these exercises. The same is true, by the way, of movie lists. A more workable approach would be to break down the lists into subsets by language/ genre/ continent/ age etc.
