Anthony started all of this, prompting the Twitter crowd to define their personal canons. It is voyeuristic fun to take a peek inside people's heads, and their reading tastes certainly define the participants in unexpected ways. I put off the exercise for a few days, holding reservations about how authentic lists of these types might be when called upon to construct them for consumption by others rather than just one's own use. But today, I found myself on the world's dullest conference call, and decided to just start writing whatever came to my head until the end of the call. Not exactly the best approach for so weighty an endeavor, but I generally prefer spontaneity in all matters. So here we go, driven by the droning voice of a greedy attorney:
- The complete works of Proust, Woolf, Marias and Spark
- Flaubert, Madame Bovary
- Carroll, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland
- White, The Once and Future King
- Camus, The Stranger
- Morrison, The Song of Solomon
- Joyce, The Dead
- Melville, Bartleby the Scrivener
- Norris, The Octopus
- Sterne, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy
- Seuss, The Lorax
- Bolano, 2666
- Ford, The Good Soldier
- Dickens (Monica), Mariana
- Greene, The End of the Affair
- Williams, Patterson
- Mann, The Magic Mountain
- Yourcenar, Memoirs of Hadrian
- Perec, Life: A User's Manual
- Lispector, The Complete Stories
- Carson, Nox
- Shakespeare, The Tempest and A Midsummer Night's Dream
- Cather, My Antonia
- Frederic, The Damnation of Theron Ware
- Williams, Stoner
- James, The Ambassadors
- Duras, The Lover
- Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
- Muller, The Land of Green Plums
- Fowles, The Magus and The French Lieutenant's Woman
- Beavoir, The Mandarins
- Chopin, The Awakening
And then the call was over, and I stopped writing as I promised myself. I really like seeing how one thought led to another, the connections between some of these books. And I chose the image at the top of the post because I had not thought of Yourcenar's work this week as I read other lists, but then there it was. Always good to surprise yourself.