The NEA 100 Great Reads List, 5 posts down, recommends a bunch of books I would't. It also wastes space listing multiple titles by the same author.
So, I'm revising it.
(This is a highly subjective undertaking, as you can imagine.)
For my Rewrite Reads, I start with replacing the entries that duplicate authors. The authors are great, mostly, but why waste the places? I tried to choose one representative book and then match the others, sometimes very roughly, with a book with a similar theme.
Cut 4 of the 5 books by Charles Dickens.
I’d choose Christmas Carol as good, representative, and blessedly short.
Replace Great Expectations with Other Voices, Other Rooms by Truman Capote (right).
Both books are about young men coming of age in swampy places, where people lurk in dim rooms. But so different. I like Dickens’s stories, but his paid-by-the-word prose makes me want to scream, “Get on with it.”
Capote’s condensed prose hits the solar plexus.
Replace Bleak House with The Golden Bowl by Henry James, which Sister describes as a tale of “paranoia and sexual neurosis.”
Maybe not exactly Dickensian, but I had to squeeze James in here somewhere, even though I never got through anything of his longer than Turn of the Screw (terrifying!).
Sister, who loves 19th century novels, occasionally quotes one of his gorgeous sentences and I wilt with appreciation.
Replace A Tale Of Two Cities with The Periodic Table by Primo Levi.
Levi was an Italian Jewish chemist, better known for his writings about Auschwitz.
In this book, Levi matches qualities of Earth's elements with people and events in his life. His chapter on iron tells a tale of personal sacrifice in WWII Italy as good as Sydney Carton’s in the French Revolution. And it’s real.
Replace David Copperfield (one of my favorite books from childhood, and Dickens’s favorite child, he said) with the Dido Twite series, which starts with The Wolves of Willoughby Chase, for young adults, by Joan Aiken.
[Aiken got lucky: Edward Gorey illustrated the Yearling editions (left).]
Aiken’s Dido Twite is a scrappy/sad girl urchin who grows into self-awareness, along with her friend Simon, in the midst of the power struggles of 19th century England.
She probably crossed paths one London day with David Copperfield.
Replace 3 of the 4 titles by Jane Austen.
They’re all close enough to perfect as makes no difference.
More or less at random, I'll keep Pride and Prejudice as representative.
(*clears throat* I may be influenced by how sexy Colin Firth as Mr. Darcy looks in his wet shirt, right, sideburns and dopey look notwithstanding, in the PBS version—a totally gratuitous scene, and one which I approve entirely.)
Replace Emma with Excellent Women by Barbara Pym (1913—1980).
Pym, named by Philip Larkin as one of the most underrated authors of the 20th century, captures with a pen as wicked funny and insightful as Austen’s the restrictions of English women’s lives. Like Austen, to whom she is often compared, she published only six books. This is the best of them.
Replace Persuasion with “Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair by Pablo Neruda.
Stands to reason, right? If Austen had been a Latin American man, the smothered eroticism of “Persuasion” might have sounded something like Neruda’s lush poems.
Replace Sense and Sensibility with Persepolis, volumes I and II, by Marjane Satrapi.
Nothing on the surface connects these books, except the variation on the name “Marianne.” But Satrapi’s graphic-novelization of her coming of age in Iran during the Iranian revolution of 1979 and after, in the West, captures a young woman making her way in a restricted world, trying out different options, and I think she and Austen would have a lot to say to each other.
End of Empire
Double-up Tolstoy: put War and Peace as one entry with Anna Karenina.
Not a true parallel, but use the space saved for Waiting for the Barbarians, by white South African J. M. Coetzee—a tale of a man ensnared by his own power as a representative of an empire under attack, and the way this mutilates his ability to love.
Oooh—follow that with the complementary The Heart of the Matter by Graham Greene, for another imperialist in Africa (Sierra Leone), at the End of Empire--and another man trying to be good caught in the tangle of forces way beyond him.
HOTM could replace Animal Farm, by George Orwell [another double-listed author], which is also about how easily naïve good intentions get warped by power.
Keep Orwell's 1984. Squeeze in the same entry “Why I Write”, a classic essay about politics, literature, and the limits of ego, by the same author:
Mix and Match
Keep Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte, of course, and add as a companion Wide Sargasso Sea (1966) by Jean Rhys.
“Wide” tells the story of Rochester’s first wife Antoinette/Bertha Mason--the madwoman Jane Eyre discovers in his attic—when he met her in the Caribbean (where the Welsh/white Creole Rhys was born).
Analysts of postcolonial literature point out that Rhys's Jamaican-born Antoinette represents the female sensuality and race issues (though she's white, there's a warm wildness to her) Rochester and his patriarchal colonial culture fear, which is why he locked her up.
You could also say it's just a damn good, well-written story that rings true.
Another entry that cries for a trim and a match:
The Bible. Do we really need to read all those books of lists? Let’s be more specific. A quick tour:
Genesis. Book of Isaiah. The Psalms. Song of Solomon. The Gospels. Book of Revelation.
Add as complementary The Bagavad Gita, the Hindu classic which is a surprisingly good read, and surprisingly familiar. Probably because like most Westerners I knew who Ghandi was before I knew who Krishna was.
Skip Some Shakespeare
Speaking of a trim, replace the “Complete Works” of Shakespeare with:
a comedy (I vote “Midsummer Night’s Dream,” because I saw a version of Peter Brook’s swinging-‘60s staging of it when I was a kid. Oh my. Double checking the date, I see that Patrick Stewart—Captain Picard of Star Trek--was in Brook’s RSC 1970 production);
a tragedy (“Hamlet”? “King Lear”?);
a history (“Richard III,” “Julius Caesar”);
and the sonnets.
All That Wanders Is Not Worthy
Save an entry, and put The Hobbit together with The Lord of the Rings by JRR Tolkien.
For a nice bit of compare and contrast, give the open place to Call of the Wild, by Jack London, for another astonishing journey.
Where Bilbo the hobbit takes a jolly romp "there and back again," Frodo in LOTR and Buck the dog in COTW find "you can't go home again" after their journey out into the wilds.
Replace the Harry Potter series by JK Rowling with A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’Engle.
I would have loved Harry Potter when I was ten, but as an adult I find it overly simplistic and predictable—and rather dead-ended. (What would it lead you to study or explore further, I wonder?)
“A Wrinkle,” however, opens up the universe of physics.
Replace The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe, by C. S. Lewis with Lucky Jim, by Kingsley Amis.
That is, replace sexist, humorless Oxbridge with sexist, hysterically funny Redbrick.
I'll forgive almost anything if it's extremely funny. And I am unanimous in that.
Different Fruits and Spices
Supplement Little Women by Louisa May Alcott with Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit by Jeanette Winterson (left, with a library card catalog*), or Rubyfruit Jungle by Rita Mae Brown.
Winterson (English) & Brown (American) both write funny, gritty coming of age stories about young women. Both protagonists come to realize they are lesbian, but that’s almost incidental. I mean, there’s always something a girl has to claim as her own, in defiance of her family and the world.
Replace that old chestnut Rebecca, by Daphne Du Maurier, with The Translator (1999), by Leila Aboulela.
Both are schlocky romantic fantasies about fairly passive, traditional women who move into worlds they don’t fully understand, where they long for the man of their dreams to see and accept them as themselves.
A big difference is that Aboulela’s heroine is a Sudanese Muslim woman working as an Arabic translator in Scotland, waiting for the Scottish professor of Islamic studies who loves her to wake up and get with the program: There is no God but God, and Muhammad is his prophet.
There’s no mystery in The Translator, as in Rebecca, but it’s a good swap as the intrigue of how to survive in Scotland is mysterious in its own way, such as, for instance, when the heroine has to figure out where to find green cardamom.
(An aside--Rebecca is one of those books that is better as a movie, I think.
Alfred Hitchcock's 1940 film is better, anyway.
Not least because of Judith Anderson as creepy housekeeper Mrs. Danvers.
And I'm not just saying that because she played the Vulcan High Priestess--left--in Star Trek III, The Search for Spock.)
You've Got to Be Kidding
Most of the books I'm replacing are fine books; I just prefer others or am making space. Not so the following three.
Replace Gone With The Wind by Margaret Mitchell with Beloved by Toni Morrison.
Scarlett O’Hara is an astonishing character—a formidable survivor—the sort of woman who’d kill her baby to save it from slavery, just like the heroine of “Beloved” does. But I can’t believe anyone would recommend GWTW, with its vile, “We always fed our boys well and they were grateful/Mammy is so wonderful” [even if she has no name] apologies for slavery.
Another book I can’t believe made the list is The Da Vinci Code, by Dan Brown, which is so full of factual errors, I couldn’t stand it.
My father, on the other hand, had great fun pointing out all the Parisian geographical mistakes--“You can’t get there from there, it’s a one-way street’—that can be fun because you get to feel so superior and in-the-know.
Replace with a historical religious mystery that is erudite and still a ripping good read, The Name of the Rose, by Umberto Eco.
Maybe this is just plain old mean of me, but let's put Hannah Arendt's Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil in the ring with Mitch Albom's The Five People You Meet In Heaven.
It would be ugly, but it would be brief.
OK to All These
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
22 The Great Gatsby - F. Scott Fitzgerald
25 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
More to come.
* I chose the Winterson photo, which isn't the best of her, because of the card catalog.
I worked in an art college library from 1989 to 2001. The director refused for reasons of her own to put the catalog on line. Toward the end of my time there, students would walk in the library and ask how to look up books. When I'd point them to the card catalog, they'd say, "What's that?"
So, I'm revising it.
(This is a highly subjective undertaking, as you can imagine.)
For my Rewrite Reads, I start with replacing the entries that duplicate authors. The authors are great, mostly, but why waste the places? I tried to choose one representative book and then match the others, sometimes very roughly, with a book with a similar theme.
Cut 4 of the 5 books by Charles Dickens.
I’d choose Christmas Carol as good, representative, and blessedly short.
Replace Great Expectations with Other Voices, Other Rooms by Truman Capote (right).Both books are about young men coming of age in swampy places, where people lurk in dim rooms. But so different. I like Dickens’s stories, but his paid-by-the-word prose makes me want to scream, “Get on with it.”
Capote’s condensed prose hits the solar plexus.
Replace Bleak House with The Golden Bowl by Henry James, which Sister describes as a tale of “paranoia and sexual neurosis.”
Maybe not exactly Dickensian, but I had to squeeze James in here somewhere, even though I never got through anything of his longer than Turn of the Screw (terrifying!).
Sister, who loves 19th century novels, occasionally quotes one of his gorgeous sentences and I wilt with appreciation.
Replace A Tale Of Two Cities with The Periodic Table by Primo Levi.
Levi was an Italian Jewish chemist, better known for his writings about Auschwitz.
In this book, Levi matches qualities of Earth's elements with people and events in his life. His chapter on iron tells a tale of personal sacrifice in WWII Italy as good as Sydney Carton’s in the French Revolution. And it’s real.
Replace David Copperfield (one of my favorite books from childhood, and Dickens’s favorite child, he said) with the Dido Twite series, which starts with The Wolves of Willoughby Chase, for young adults, by Joan Aiken.[Aiken got lucky: Edward Gorey illustrated the Yearling editions (left).]
Aiken’s Dido Twite is a scrappy/sad girl urchin who grows into self-awareness, along with her friend Simon, in the midst of the power struggles of 19th century England.
She probably crossed paths one London day with David Copperfield.
Replace 3 of the 4 titles by Jane Austen.
They’re all close enough to perfect as makes no difference. More or less at random, I'll keep Pride and Prejudice as representative.
(*clears throat* I may be influenced by how sexy Colin Firth as Mr. Darcy looks in his wet shirt, right, sideburns and dopey look notwithstanding, in the PBS version—a totally gratuitous scene, and one which I approve entirely.)
Replace Emma with Excellent Women by Barbara Pym (1913—1980).
Pym, named by Philip Larkin as one of the most underrated authors of the 20th century, captures with a pen as wicked funny and insightful as Austen’s the restrictions of English women’s lives. Like Austen, to whom she is often compared, she published only six books. This is the best of them.
Replace Persuasion with “Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair by Pablo Neruda.
Stands to reason, right? If Austen had been a Latin American man, the smothered eroticism of “Persuasion” might have sounded something like Neruda’s lush poems.
Replace Sense and Sensibility with Persepolis, volumes I and II, by Marjane Satrapi.
Nothing on the surface connects these books, except the variation on the name “Marianne.” But Satrapi’s graphic-novelization of her coming of age in Iran during the Iranian revolution of 1979 and after, in the West, captures a young woman making her way in a restricted world, trying out different options, and I think she and Austen would have a lot to say to each other.
End of Empire
Double-up Tolstoy: put War and Peace as one entry with Anna Karenina.
Not a true parallel, but use the space saved for Waiting for the Barbarians, by white South African J. M. Coetzee—a tale of a man ensnared by his own power as a representative of an empire under attack, and the way this mutilates his ability to love.
Oooh—follow that with the complementary The Heart of the Matter by Graham Greene, for another imperialist in Africa (Sierra Leone), at the End of Empire--and another man trying to be good caught in the tangle of forces way beyond him.HOTM could replace Animal Farm, by George Orwell [another double-listed author], which is also about how easily naïve good intentions get warped by power.
Keep Orwell's 1984. Squeeze in the same entry “Why I Write”, a classic essay about politics, literature, and the limits of ego, by the same author:
"Looking back through the last page or two, I see that I have made it appear as though my motives in writing were wholly public-spirited. I don't want to leave that as the final impression. All writers are vain, selfish, and lazy, and at the very bottom of their motives there lies a mystery. Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand."
Mix and Match
Keep Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte, of course, and add as a companion Wide Sargasso Sea (1966) by Jean Rhys.“Wide” tells the story of Rochester’s first wife Antoinette/Bertha Mason--the madwoman Jane Eyre discovers in his attic—when he met her in the Caribbean (where the Welsh/white Creole Rhys was born).
Analysts of postcolonial literature point out that Rhys's Jamaican-born Antoinette represents the female sensuality and race issues (though she's white, there's a warm wildness to her) Rochester and his patriarchal colonial culture fear, which is why he locked her up.
You could also say it's just a damn good, well-written story that rings true.
Another entry that cries for a trim and a match:
The Bible. Do we really need to read all those books of lists? Let’s be more specific. A quick tour:
Genesis. Book of Isaiah. The Psalms. Song of Solomon. The Gospels. Book of Revelation.
Add as complementary The Bagavad Gita, the Hindu classic which is a surprisingly good read, and surprisingly familiar. Probably because like most Westerners I knew who Ghandi was before I knew who Krishna was.Skip Some Shakespeare
Speaking of a trim, replace the “Complete Works” of Shakespeare with:
a comedy (I vote “Midsummer Night’s Dream,” because I saw a version of Peter Brook’s swinging-‘60s staging of it when I was a kid. Oh my. Double checking the date, I see that Patrick Stewart—Captain Picard of Star Trek--was in Brook’s RSC 1970 production);
a tragedy (“Hamlet”? “King Lear”?);
a history (“Richard III,” “Julius Caesar”);
and the sonnets.
All That Wanders Is Not Worthy
Save an entry, and put The Hobbit together with The Lord of the Rings by JRR Tolkien.
For a nice bit of compare and contrast, give the open place to Call of the Wild, by Jack London, for another astonishing journey.
Where Bilbo the hobbit takes a jolly romp "there and back again," Frodo in LOTR and Buck the dog in COTW find "you can't go home again" after their journey out into the wilds.
Replace the Harry Potter series by JK Rowling with A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’Engle.
I would have loved Harry Potter when I was ten, but as an adult I find it overly simplistic and predictable—and rather dead-ended. (What would it lead you to study or explore further, I wonder?)
“A Wrinkle,” however, opens up the universe of physics.
Replace The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe, by C. S. Lewis with Lucky Jim, by Kingsley Amis.
That is, replace sexist, humorless Oxbridge with sexist, hysterically funny Redbrick.
I'll forgive almost anything if it's extremely funny. And I am unanimous in that.
Different Fruits and Spices
Supplement Little Women by Louisa May Alcott with Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit by Jeanette Winterson (left, with a library card catalog*), or Rubyfruit Jungle by Rita Mae Brown. Winterson (English) & Brown (American) both write funny, gritty coming of age stories about young women. Both protagonists come to realize they are lesbian, but that’s almost incidental. I mean, there’s always something a girl has to claim as her own, in defiance of her family and the world.
Replace that old chestnut Rebecca, by Daphne Du Maurier, with The Translator (1999), by Leila Aboulela.
Both are schlocky romantic fantasies about fairly passive, traditional women who move into worlds they don’t fully understand, where they long for the man of their dreams to see and accept them as themselves.
A big difference is that Aboulela’s heroine is a Sudanese Muslim woman working as an Arabic translator in Scotland, waiting for the Scottish professor of Islamic studies who loves her to wake up and get with the program: There is no God but God, and Muhammad is his prophet.
There’s no mystery in The Translator, as in Rebecca, but it’s a good swap as the intrigue of how to survive in Scotland is mysterious in its own way, such as, for instance, when the heroine has to figure out where to find green cardamom.
(An aside--Rebecca is one of those books that is better as a movie, I think. Alfred Hitchcock's 1940 film is better, anyway.
Not least because of Judith Anderson as creepy housekeeper Mrs. Danvers.
And I'm not just saying that because she played the Vulcan High Priestess--left--in Star Trek III, The Search for Spock.)
You've Got to Be Kidding
Most of the books I'm replacing are fine books; I just prefer others or am making space. Not so the following three.
Replace Gone With The Wind by Margaret Mitchell with Beloved by Toni Morrison.
Scarlett O’Hara is an astonishing character—a formidable survivor—the sort of woman who’d kill her baby to save it from slavery, just like the heroine of “Beloved” does. But I can’t believe anyone would recommend GWTW, with its vile, “We always fed our boys well and they were grateful/Mammy is so wonderful” [even if she has no name] apologies for slavery.
Another book I can’t believe made the list is The Da Vinci Code, by Dan Brown, which is so full of factual errors, I couldn’t stand it.
My father, on the other hand, had great fun pointing out all the Parisian geographical mistakes--“You can’t get there from there, it’s a one-way street’—that can be fun because you get to feel so superior and in-the-know.
Replace with a historical religious mystery that is erudite and still a ripping good read, The Name of the Rose, by Umberto Eco.
Maybe this is just plain old mean of me, but let's put Hannah Arendt's Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil in the ring with Mitch Albom's The Five People You Meet In Heaven. It would be ugly, but it would be brief.
OK to All These
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
22 The Great Gatsby - F. Scott Fitzgerald
25 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
More to come.
* I chose the Winterson photo, which isn't the best of her, because of the card catalog.
I worked in an art college library from 1989 to 2001. The director refused for reasons of her own to put the catalog on line. Toward the end of my time there, students would walk in the library and ask how to look up books. When I'd point them to the card catalog, they'd say, "What's that?"