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The top 10 books (plus 2) ever written
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Best-ever lists have a well deserved reputation as vanity projects of the “look what a smartie pants I am!” variety. However, they are also a good tool for keeping critics honest.
Critics can spend a great deal of time making of fun of what they don’t like, without ever having to declare what they do. This is quite different from artists, who expose their minds, their hearts – the very value of the lives – to ridicule whenever they create something.
So in the spirit of “letting the other guy in the duel have something to shoot at, too,” here is my top 10 (plus 2) list of the best books ever written.
Hamlet, William Shakespeare. No points for courage or originality on this one, but Hamlet is great, and he is the great model for characters in novels, and the artist as hero, with which we’re still living today.
Pnin, Vladimir Nabokov. The one true moral responsibility of art is to strengthen our imaginative sympathy for other people. Nabokov’s exploration of the deep humanity within the seemingly comic figure of Professor Timofrey Pnin is the most perfect example of this in English.
Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen. Elizabeth Bennett and Darcy’s ability to transcend their social circumstances, their personal failings, and then the confines of the novel they inhabit, achieving lives independent of the text, make Austen’s “sparkling” work one of the finest achievements in fiction.
Twelfth Night, William Shakespeare. The best of Shakespeare’s problem comedies. The happy reunion of Viola and her brother, and the multiple marriages at the close of the curtain, can’t quite make us forget the malignancy in Duke Orsino’s heart or Malvolio’s outrage at the mistreatment he suffers.
Vanity Fair, William Makepeace Thackeray. Thackeray’s subtitle for this work is “A Novel Without a Hero” and the ambiguity of his characterizations, the ironic moralizing of his near-constant authorial intrusions, and the emphasis on the artificiality of his methods, give this 19th-century warhorse a distinctly modern feel.
Ulysses, James Joyce. The most important novel of the 20th-century in English, Joyce’s book revolutionized fiction and delivers a high degree of pleasure for the demands it makes on the reader. That Joyce could also write the tremendously lucid short stories found in Dubliners only makes him more remarkable.
Dead Souls, Nikolai Gogol. No literary form is better suited to exploring the interior lives of its characters than the novel. Gogol crafts a masterpiece featuring characters who have none.
The Sun Also Rises, Ernest Hemingway. None of Hemingway’s novels equal the best of his short stories, but this is the one that comes closest. Jake and Bill’s fishing trip in the mountains offer Jake, and the reader, a brief vacation from the troubles of his life.
The Age of Innocence, Edith Wharton. Wharton may owe Henry James a finder’s fee for, well, her entire career … but this good novel achieves greatness in a final chapter that makes emotionally-repressed Northern Europeans everywhere cry their eyes out.
The Aubrey-Maturin Novels, Patrick O’Brian. Memorable characters in the persons of Jack Aubrey and Stephen Maturin; mastery of a sprawling 2,000 page narrative that is, by turns, sea-faring adventure, espionage thriller, tale of political intrigue, and novel of social manners; stuffed with historical, nautical, and scientific detail; and considering at least two great themes – how power corrupts and the problematic relations between men and women – Patrick O’Brian’s twenty-one novel series gives Trollope and Balzac a run for their money. A superb example of the pure pleasure reading can offer.
* Also see the Philly Lit Examiner's list of the 9 Worst Books Every Written.
* Also see the Philly Lit Examiner's column "Don't be afraid of Moby-Dick!".
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