Calling on my literary friends list

[velvetpage]

I have a lot of very literary people on my friends list, so surely we can manage this amongst us.

I want to rewrite that meme I posted this morning.  Not edit it, but completely rewrite it.  I don't want to go with bestsellers, or any other arbitrary appeal to authority when it comes to what books should be on it and what should be left off.  I also don't want to include a certain laundry list of the "best" books by certain authors, while leaving out books by other, equally good authors.  I'd like to, for example, ask people to give themselves one point for each book they've read by Jane Austen or Charles Dickens or Mark Twain.  I'd like to develop a sub-list for young adult literature.  In the interests of brevity, I'm limiting this to novels, which means many well-read people will not see themselves in it.  That's a cultural bias I'll acknowledge and address some other time.

So, if you were to make a list like that, what books or authors would you keep from the old list, and what ones would you add?

I'll start.

Under the authors category, I'd let people give themselves points for any book written by the following authors that were left out of the first list:
Madeleine L'Engle
Arthur C. Clarke
Carl Sagan
Mark Twain
Margaret Lawrence
Michael Ontdaatje
Robertson Davies

Your thoughts?

Comments

[pvenables.livejournal.com]

The first question I'd ask is: is this a list of must-read books or are you attempting to identify a literary canon? The two are, naturally enough, not equivalent sets.

I come to this question myself when I think what books would I have my children read. What books, I wonder, changed the way I viewed things or simply enriched my life. Those are the books that I would put on such a list.

For my money, not everything that I've read that is literature has had that effect on my and aren't necessarily well-remembered by me. As such, it becomes a very personal list of likes and dislikes, personal preference and bias.

My problem with assembling a list of the greatest literary works of all time and noting which ones I've read reduces to my holding out my brain-penis for subsequent measure against everyone else's comparison-- and the point gets lost on me as to why bother.

But I've given a lot of thought lately to compiling the list of books I'd put in front of different people for different reasons. Most specifically pulling together a reading list of books I'd most want to read and have read by my kids as they grow is of value to me.

And there are my thoughts. :)

[velvetpage.livejournal.com]

Since I'm not sure I believe in the concept of a list of must-read books, for the very reasons you state, I suppose I'm suggesting a literary canon of sorts - one where a person with a good selection from it might consider themselves to have sampled a fair number of the literary offerings most likely to have an impact on their lives.

I just realized that I'm attempting to do exactly that which I decried about the first list. I'm attempting to set up an authority others could appeal to in deciding on their reading material.

[pvenables.livejournal.com]

Perhaps the right idea is to provide a guided roadmap of quality literature that can help people choose how to expose themselves to the broadest array or to specialize within a given area?

[velvetpage.livejournal.com]

I like that better. It fits in better with my teaching style overall.