“Studying is the nourishment that permits you to do fascinating work,” Jennifer Egan as soon as stated. This intersection of studying and writing is each a essential bi-directional life talent for us mere mortals and a secret of iconic writers’ success, as bespoken by their private libraries. The High Ten: Writers Choose Their Favourite Books asks 125 of modernity’s best British and American writers — together with Norman Mailer, Ann Patchett, Jonathan Franzen, Claire Messud, and Joyce Carol Oates — “to supply a listing, ranked, so as, of what [they] take into account the ten best works of fiction of all time- novels, story collections, performs, or poems.”
Of the 544 separate titles chosen, every is assigned a reverse-order level worth based mostly on the quantity place at which it seems on any listing — so, a guide that tops a listing at primary receives 10 factors, and a guide that graces the underside, at quantity ten, receives 1 level.
In introducing the lists, David Orr presents a litmus take a look at for greatness:
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In the event you’re placing collectively a listing of ‘the best books,’ you’ll need to do two issues: (1) out of kindness, keep away from anybody engaged on a novel; and (2) resolve what the phrase ‘nice’ means. The primary half is straightforward, however how concerning the second? A brief listing of potential definitions of ‘greatness’ would possibly appear like this:
1. ‘Nice’ means ‘books which were best for me.’ 2. ‘Nice’ means ‘books that may be thought-about nice by the most individuals over time.’ 3. ‘Nice’ has nothing to do with you or me — or individuals in any respect. It entails transcendental ideas like God or the Chic. 4. ‘Nice’? I like Tom Clancy.
From David Foster Wallace (#1: The Screwtape Letters by C.S. Lewis) to Stephen King (#1: The Golden Argosy, a 1955 anthology of the very best brief tales within the English language), the gathering presents a uncommon glimpse of the constructing blocks of nice creators’ combinatorial creativity — as a result of, as Austin Kleon put it, “you’re a mashup of what you let into your life.”
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The guide concludes with an appendix of “literary quantity video games” summing up some patterns and developing a number of total rankings based mostly on the totality of the completely different authors’ picks. Amongst them (*with hyperlinks to free public area works the place obtainable):
TOP TEN WORKS OF THE 20TH CENTURY
- Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
- The Nice Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
- In Search of Misplaced Time by Marcel Proust
- Ulysses* by James Joyce
- Dubliners* by James Joyce
- One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
- The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner
- To The Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf
- The whole tales of Flannery O’Connor
- Pale Hearth by Vladimir Nabokov
TOP TEN WORKS OF THE nineteenth CENTURY
- Anna Karenina* by Leo Tolstoy
- Madame Bovary* by Gustave Flaubert
- Struggle and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
- The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
- The tales of Anton Chekhov
- Middlemarch* by George Eliot
- Moby-Dick by Herman Melville
- Nice Expectations* by Charles Dickens
- Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky
- Emma* by Jane Austen
TOP TEN AUTHORS BY NUMBER OF BOOKS SELECTED
- William Shakespeare — 11
- William Faulkner — 6
- Henry James — 6
- Jane Austen — 5
- Charles Dickens — 5
- Fyodor Dostoevsky — 5
- Ernest Hemingway — 5
- Franz Kafka — 5
- (tie) James Joyce, Thomas Mann, Vladimir Nabokov, Mark Twain, Virginia Woolf — 4
TOP TEN AUTHORS BY POINTS EARNED
- Leo Tolstoy — 327
- William Shakespeare — 293
- James Joyce — 194
- Vladimir Nabokov — 190
- Fyodor Dostoevsky — 177
- William Faulkner — 173
- Charles Dickens — 168
- Anton Chekhov — 165
- Gustave Flaubert — 163
- Jane Austen — 161
As a nonfiction loyalist, I’d love the same anthology of nonfiction favorites — then once more, well-known writers would possibly wave a realizing finger and level me to the advanced relationship between fact and fiction.
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