Chekhov's Mistress

Your Top Ten Works of Fiction

by Bud Parr

The Top Ten out of what we in the blogosphere would just call a meme. He posed the question of 125 writers, What are The Top Ten works of fiction? That’s pretty open ended and potentially includes plays, poems and short stories as well as novels. Too overwhelming for me, so I limited my list to novels and short stories of the modern era. I’ve read all of Zane’s top ten list except Middlemarch (and I haven’t yet finished In Search of Lost Time), so it’s no wonder that my list, even without much crossover, vaguely resembles what you might expect from a top ten list.



Naturally the difficulty is limiting yourself to just ten: I quite reluctantly left Ralph Ellison and Chekhov off my list, and how could I not include Beckett and Fitzgerald, both of whom I credit with initially making me the fanatic for literature that I am?



I resolved these issues by choosing books where my enjoyment factor was highest. To wit, I think Stendhal’s The Red and Black is a better book than The Charterhouse of Parma, yet The Charterhouse reads like a fairy tale and I could read it again and again. Likewise with Taras Bulba. I’ve read all of Gogol’s work and Taras Bulba is a trifle compared to Dead Souls, Diary of Madman and many of his stories, but Taras Bulba appeals to my inner desire to think about the nature of love, honor and family as well as having some of the best action scenes I’ve ever read.



Dreamtigers, of all Borges’s work, is the one I return to the most, which is how that unexpected (of his) work makes my list, but the pieces in Dreamtigers also capture beautifully his essence, despite missing The Aleph and so many other works Borges is known for. Joyce’s Portrait is again a secondary work and even though I do indeed read (or listen) to Ulysses every year around Bloomsday, it’s The Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man that I am most enjoyably enamored with. Besides, it makes me want to be a Catholic (and Irish too) just so I could have so much great material.



Moby Dick makes my list as a proxy for Shakespeare (and the King James Bible). Don Quixote, the most recent read for me on this list, is infinitely and deceptively fascinating, while Blugakov’s Master and Margarita pushed out Kafka and Flann O’Brien in the outrageous category.



I think that Swann’s Way stands on it’s own as a great work of fiction, so I have no qualms with ranking that up there despite only reading two volumes of Proust’s six volume masterpiece. I suppose if anything, Selimovic’s Death and the Dervish is one that wouldn’t make any top ten lists and other people might have a choice for a book that plumbs the psychological depths of morality so subtly.



Lastly, The Recognitions was surprisingly not mentioned once in Zane’s entire list. I owe my reading of that book to the litbloggers of the “Gaddis Drinking Club” and despite it’s apparent difficulty, I eat it like a good lunch. The Recognitions is now what I judge all other novels by.



If my list reflects any diversity at all it’s geographic ( US -2, France -2, Russia – 2, Bosnia, Argentina, Ireland, Spain). I love Flannery O’Connor, Anne Carson and Virginia Woolf, what little I’ve read, but those weren’t the authors that, like the above, so readily came to mind when thinking of this list. With the exception of Don Quixote, my list is also fairly narrow in time. Had I broadened my list I would have to include Dante, but I feel that my reading of The Divine Comedy (which I’ve read three times) is somehow incomplete, and I dare not say like I have with some, that it’s just fun to read about Ugolino eating the back of Ruggieri’s head.



So what does your list look like? Comment or post at MetaxuCafé

posted February 09, 2007

comments

Hi,

My name is Peder Zane and I am editor of “The Top Ten.” I’m writing to say THANKS. Your response is exactly what I was hoping for when I put the book together. Yes, I wanted to let readers learn about the faves of their favorite writers, to be introduced to new books and reintroduced to some old friends. But I also wanted to spur readers to build their own Top Ten lists.

And not just jot down 10 titles but really think about what those picks say - what memories they recall, what aspects of personality or taste they reveal; here are the books I love, and here’s why. You’ve done that marvelously.

- peder

ps - about 100 readers (so far) have posted their Top Ten lists at my website, www.toptenbooks.net

    – J. Peder Zane (02/10  at  10:23 AM)


I posted mine here:

http://madinkbeard.com/blog/archives/top-10-works-of-fiction

    – derik (02/10  at  11:29 AM)


I’m cooking up my list over at my site right now - fun project -

    – Matthew Tiffany (02/12  at  12:16 PM)


Still thinking but this is a weirdly stressful question, too. Maybe you know the David Lodge version of this: English professors play a game of chicken: what’s the greatest work of literature that you’ve never read. People volunteer Pride & Prejudice, Tom Jones, etc. Drunk (everyone’s drunk) and emboldened, the young man offers “Hamlet.”

Everyone laughs.

He doesn’t get tenure.

    – Anne Fernald (02/12  at  10:12 PM)


1. Brothers Karamazov- Dostoevsky

2. Riddley Walker- Russell Hoban

3. Mysteries- Knut Hamsun

4. War & Peace- Tolstoy

5. Eyeless in Gaza- Aldous Huxley

6. The Clay-Machine Gun- Victor Pelevin

7. Glass Bead Game- Hermann Hesse

8. The Leopard- de Lampedusa

9. Crime & Punishment- Dostoevsky

10. Celine- Journey to the End of the Night

11. Glastonbury Romance- Cowper Powys

Sorry about the eleven titles. All a bit off the cuff and not in any particular order.

    – Andrew K (03/22  at  09:41 AM)


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