Frontispiece from 'Jerusalem The Emanation of The Giant Albion' (1804-1820) by William Blake.
And man do I feel like a snob, a poser, someone Salinger would bludgeon with a tire iron if he could. But there you have it. And the more I think about the list, the more I go “oh, wait, no that’s not right.” but then I felt like the first instinct should serve.
In order to lessen the self-disgust I feel at my own pretension, I’ve included commentary (because pontificating on classics is so much less pretentious….)
The list in no particular order (and I’ll amend the meme to include 10 texts—some shorter than a “book”) with prodigious links:
John Milton: Paradise Lost (though Lycidas was my first Miltonic poetic love, Paradise Lost freaked me out and gave me my first Ph.D. dissertation topic. The first of many.)
Virgil: The Aeneid (I spent every day one summer working with my Latin tutor to translate this one. The text still astounds me in its subversive brilliance.)
John Keat’s Ode on a Grecian Urn (I love this poem for the simple reason that I was assigned Keats by my graduate advisor just after Grace was born and, while Sara went off to work, I read my assignments aloud to Grace. And Keats made her giggle. She’d sit up, smile, listen, and giggle. If you shut off the words and just listen to the music of Keats, you’ll know why. I often find myself mumbling the opening: “Thous still unravish’d bridge of quietness / Thou foster-child of Silence and slow time” –perhaps my favorite spondee in the English language. Ruth giggled mostly to The Doors “Riders on the Storm.” One will write lyrics the other the melody.)
T.S. Eliot: The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock. (Like many, this was the first poem I ever memorized. I have a love-hate (mostly hate) relationship with Eliot but this one still rings in my head and the closing stanza stills moves me, partly because of the echo of the sirens used in Homer and Virgil.)
Henry Fielding: Tom Jones (I love Fielding, love his parody of Richardson, love his public life, love the novel. In many ways a forerunner for the next few texts.)
Here begins the “Big Ass Books” section, or the “Postmodern Enclyclopedic Novel” section
Willaim Gaddis: The Recognitions (The guy wrote five novels, two which won National Book Awards. He also garnered a MacArthur Genius Grant, and a slew of other awards. I’d never heard of him when I picked up The Recognitions, but have never forgotten this novel or any of the Gaddis subsequently read.)
Don Dellilo: Underworld (On a series of flights and connections lasting 30+ hours between Montana and Singapore where I was stuck in the middle row in the back for 18 hours, the only thing I remember was starting and finishing this novel and being so engrossed I don’t recall much else. For someone who spent much of his time in older works, this pulled me back into contemporary fiction).
David Foster Wallace: Infinite Jest (this one deserves a long, thoughtful post of its own, but for a shorter take, see here)
William Blake: Jerusalem The Emanation of the Giant Albion (This too produced a Ph.D. dissertation prospectus. A brilliant professor of mine commented on it with this: “reading Jerusalem is like your second shot of heroin. You realize two things immediately: one, it’s so indescribable and weird that you’re hooked and two, you realize you’ve flushed your life away.” This one never got done either.)
Stuart Dybek: The Coast of Chicago (“Chopin in Winter” blew my mind the first time I read it. So did the stories “Blight” and “Pet Milk.” I single this book out but any Dybek would fit. I re-read them regularly. I love “Lunch at the Loyola Arms” from his recent collection.)
that’s ten, but because it’s my blog damnit, a few more:
David Means: Assorted Fire Events
A few works of theory:
Slavoj Zizek: Plague of Fantasies (can’t read this blog without seeing this pop up everywhere)
Victor Burgin: In/Different Spaces
Sigmund Freud: Interpretation of Dreams (its status as a cultural landmark means we all think we know what this one says without reading it. I thank the professor who forced me to read it.)
Peter Stallybrass and Allon White: Politics and Poetics of Transgression (This was one that I was asked to cover during the written exam portion of my master’s, in a question relating to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and have loved the work ever since.)
So, you live in Montana – How could you not have “This House of Sky” by Ivan Doig or “A River Runs Through It” by Norman McClean on your list? I would add a collection of Robert Frost poems, “The Great Divorce” by C.S. Lewis, “Trinity” by Leon Uris, “Travels With Charlie” by Steinbeck, all 20 of Patrick O’Brien’s “Aubrey/Maturin” series tomes, “Citizen Soldier” by Stephen Ambrose, “Lonesome Dove” by Larry McMurtry and “Sometimes a Great Notion” by Ken Kesey. Not very scholarly….but, lots of fun!
Kelly, why no Doig…maybe I need to reread but there’s an emotional distance or something I can’t get through with his works. I remember getting a copy of Jim Harrison’s “Legends of the Fall” collection while traveling once and staying up all night reading it and being just floored (alas, the movie killed ever referencing that again). But Doig doesn’t do that for me, or at least he hasn’t in the past.
Ambrose I can’t stomach. His great men theory of history doesn’t interest me. What can I say, it’s odd, cause Milton is also in that camp quite often. Also, Ambrose’s slavish devotion to Thomas Jefferson strikes me as odd. Nothing against Jefferson of course, I just like stories told from the bottom of history–labor stories, etc.
Maclean: yeh, he’s right there. I do love that book. It grabs me by the proverbial throat and tightens.
I’ll have to revisit the topic with only Montanans, since we have so many. My short list would start (in no order): Richard Hugo, James Welch, Ivan Doig, Norman Maclean, Mary Clearman Blew, Rick Bass, David James Duncan, Kevin Canty, D’arcy McNickle, likely Kittredge and McGuane…..let’s see…maybe Brautigan (if he counts). But perhaps I’m reaching now.
Yes, the difference between favorite and influential is key. In my case, as much as I try to distance myself from, say the Bible and Norman Mailer, I find myself stuck with the ideas in them, almost reflexively.
I guess because your list contains many books that I feel I OUGHT to have read and that you’ve not only read but incorporated into your mental furniture . . . well, it makes me feel slightly . . . simple. (I read those all in English, but struggled with Nietzsche’s German a bit out of duty and masochism, very un-Nietzchean values, but also out of a desire to get the feel for his German — which is often oddly French in its concision.
eh, you can’t quote more Blake than I’ve read and I’m the one who devoted years of his life to the man’s works… you’re not fooling me with your modesty.
Man, now I feel like a hick. I’m going to have to dust off that copy of the Aeniad, I guess, and give it another go. Subversive isn’t a quality that I associate with Virgil, but that’s the great thing about classics — they always surprise you. Have you read the Georgics? Herzog keeps recommending them, but I haven’t, ahem, gotten around to them yet, either.
One thing that struck me was that I’d read most of mine by my early twenties — I made my acquaintance with only one or maybe two of them after I was 25 or so. Is that true for you as well? I wonder if it’s because I was more impressionable, or more open, or maybe just that I read more instead of destroying my attention span on twitter?
I was having my doubts about the authenticity of your list until I saw the Zizek title.
Anyway, a great and inspiring list — I’m going to follow up on some of your titles certainly (but geeze, do you like anything under 1200 pages?? I guess Milton clocks in, but those are long-ass poems, so they’re kind of like 1200 page novels.)
hick? yeh, because Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Tolstoy, and Seneca put you right up there in the brain-dead-mouth-breather category….plus, you’re likely reading them in the original language while (outside of Virgil) I’m stuck in remedial English.
And you called for the ten most influential not my ten faves and having to work at a piece leaves an impression (protestant work ethic and all). This is more a map of my neuroses than my likes I suspect.
on Aeneid/subversion (and why it’s relevant if disregarded in today’s political climate): True, Aeneas loses everything for the empire but Virgil is very curious on whether that’s a good thing. Granted, it was a commissioned piece by Augustus, etc. Still: the warriors in the poem are all psychopaths, war is utterly pointless–it’s just that “these” wars, however insane and pointless, are “favored” by the gods because these Romans are favored by the gods. That’s Virgil hitting the empire without end line but he does with some irony.
for instance: when Aeneas slaughters his fallen foe (name slips my mind right now) in the parallel to Achilles wrath in Homer (killing Hector), Aeneas is aware of the futility of it, unlike Achilles who is just an unrepentent psychopath (it’s only Odysseus in Homer–my unsubstantiated opinion–that shows any kind of self-relflexivity. Odysseus is the first real dude to have it both ways.)
on the Georgics: only a bit. I did suffer years of Latin so you kind of touch on everything. I can see why Herzog would recommend them….all his themes are present in some form (man’s struggle against a hostile natural world, the futility of labor and the necessity of labor at the same time). If I recall, my prof. in that class was all about the context in Roman society between epicurianism and stoicism (which one or maybe more of the Georgics tackles) and the political context of the Georgics (the collapse of the 2nd triumvirate with Mark Antony’s death at Actium and the subsequent death of the Roman Republic as Octavian becomes Augustus). So I was taught Virgil as a kind of marginal character always on the side of the Republic, like Shakespeare after him, writing things that pleased the royalty but also subverted it.
to your point about time of life. I read all these in my 30s, mostly in grad school. Except Eliot whom I read early in life. Heck, I finally just read DFW’s IJ this past year.
The big books back in college were Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, David James Duncan’s The River Why, Barry Lopez’s Arctic Dreams, Kerouac’s Dharma Bums and On the Road, Gary Synder’s poetry and essays. They should all have made the list but I don’t return to them as often.
Paradise Lost I can pick up and read and be amazed (as with the classics).