The Greatest Books of All Time, As Voted by 125 Famous Authors. “Reading is the nourishment that lets you do interesting work,” Jennifer Egan once said.
This intersection of reading and writing is both a necessary bi-directional life skill for us mere mortals and a secret of iconic writers’ success, as bespoken by their personal libraries. The Top Ten: Writers Pick Their Favorite Books asks 125 of modernity’s greatest British and American writers — including Norman Mailer, Ann Patchett, Jonathan Franzen, Claire Messud, and Joyce Carol Oates — “to provide a list, ranked, in order, of what [they] consider the ten greatest works of fiction of all time– novels, story collections, plays, or poems.”
Of the 544 separate titles selected, each is assigned a reverse-order point value based on the number position at which it appears on any list — so, a book that tops a list at number one receives 10 points, and a book that graces the bottom, at number ten, receives 1 point. In introducing the lists, David Orr offers a litmus test for greatness: What Makes a Classic? Lessons from the Chinese Book of Changes. By Maria Popova What an ancient Chinese divination manual reveals about the design and anthropology of great literature.
What makes a classic? First, the work must focus on matters of great importance, identifying fundamental human problems and providing some sort of guidance for dealing with them. Second, it must address these fundamental issues in ‘beautiful, moving, and memorable ways,’ with ‘stimulating and inviting images.’ Third, it must be complex, nuanced, comprehensive, and profound, requiring careful and repeated study in order to yield its deepest secrets and greatest wisdom. This definition comes from historian Richard J. And yet [the I Ching] seems so different from other ‘classics’ that instantly come to mind, whether literary works such as the Odyssey, the Republic, the Divine Comedy, and The Pilgrim’s Progress or sacred scriptures like the Jewish and Christian Bibles, the Qur’an, the Hindu vVedas and the Buddhist sutras. Animated Anatomy of Shakespearean Slurs. The 10 best historical novels.
The 10 best first lines in fiction. In Which He Hated New York With A Passion. The archeologists, 1968 The Stupidity of All Mankind by GIORGIO DE CHIRICO In 1935 the Italian painter Giorgio de Chirico spent over a year in New York.
It was his first trip to America. I was disgusted by the low level, material and moral, to which painting in Paris had sunk. I embarked one August morning, at Genoa, on the liner Roma. South Ferry Finally, after nine days of pitching and tossing and the deafening noise made by the young Yankees, we arrived in New York; the sea was soapy and warm, the light that of a greenhouse or aquarium, the temperature equal to that of a Turkish bath, and I was dead tired. A damp heat, a tropical, mineshaft heat, hung over the oily water in the harbour. After the interminable formalities of passports, visas, interrogations, customs and even a medical examination, I succeeded in leaving the floating boiler. It was strange how in the city of New York I felt I had died and been born again on another planet.
Julien levy Life rushed by. Autumn came. People Who Became Nouns: The Music Video. By Maria Popova Boycott, Maverick, Guillotine, Shrapnel, Cardigan, Sandwich, Silhouette, Zeppelin, Leotard, Lamborghini.
Finding your name in the dictionary as a noun is a sure-fire litmus test for having made a impact on culture and history. Just look at OED-approved fine folks like Charles Boycott, Samuel Maverick, Joseph-Ignace Guillotine, Henry Shrapnel, and Lord Cardigan. But there are unsuspected downsides to being reduced to a noun — just ask suffragette and women’s rights pioneer Amelia Bloomer, now equated with a baggy pair of women’s underpants. Now, thanks to NPR‘s Robert Krulwich and Adam Cole, there’s a delightful music video about them.
Semi-relatedly, this reminded me of a lovely illustrated children’s book called If You Were a Noun. Donating = Loving Bringing you (ad-free) Brain Pickings takes hundreds of hours each month. You can also become a one-time patron with a single donation in any amount: Brain Pickings has a free weekly newsletter. Share on Tumblr.