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The Greatest Literature of All Time 
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Frequently Asked Questions Have you read every book on the list? Of course not. Nobody has. I've read about half of them. Then how can you know what the greatest books of all time are? As explained in the section on how the selections were made, in addition to my own reading I've used dozens (probably hundreds) of other sources as a guide. The result is an amalgam of personal experience and the consensus of other readers and critics. And I continue to get input from readers that leads me to revise the list. I'm sure there are more great books that aren't on the list and should be. If you know of any please tell me. And I'm sure there are many on the list that in the future will no longer be considered great—for a variety of reasons. Then they will come off the list if the list is still around. Are these the books you think everyone should read? Good heavens, no. There are many books not among the "greatest of all time" that I've enjoyed more, or learned more from, than some books that are on the list. The list is an overview, a guideline to help you find good literature. From these you can branch out into all kinds of authors and books that may or may not be on the list. You should also try literature that's entirely unknown to you from time to time. Or give a chance to a genre that you always thought was not your kind of thing. You could make wonderful discoveries—about books and about yourself. Nor do I think anyone must read these books. You should probably try many of these, but I see no benefit to struggling through something you don't understand or you hate. Many older books are considered great because of the effect they had in their own times or because they have influenced thinking that has in turn affected our times, but they may not be easy to appreciate directly today. Many modern so-called greats appeal to specific audiences, while leaving others cold. By all means, give each period or genre an honest try, but working at something to the point that you come to dread reading it doesn't help. Part of the "honest try", by the way, might also include finding out more about the literature, the authors and the period. Reading the commentaries on this site, I hope, may be an aid. Check out some critical or biographical works on the writers or some histories of the period. Watch a movie taking place in the place or time. Read the introductions to the classics—some are deadly dull but the best intros can put the works in perspectives that make them interesting. Most importantly though, sample widely. Learning to enjoy poetry, ancient classics, nineteenth-century Russian novels and so on is similar to someone weaned on pop music learning to enjoy jazz or classical music. Most of us do not grow up with a natural appreciation of these forms but the more we are exposed to them and the more we learn about them, the more we "get" them—and some us become rabid fans. What's your favourite book of all time? No question about it. Middlemarch by George Eliot. Eliot is not my favourite writer, although she's probably in my top ten. But I find Middlemarch endlessly interesting. It's got that widescreen presentation of a community, or entire society, so typical of 19th-century novels. It has wonderful characters who strike some chord in me. It's intellectually provocative and enlightened. I could go on and on without telling you anything that could not be said equally of a dozen other great books: Les Misérables, David Copperfield, Pride and Prejudice, War and Peace, Huckleberry Finn, Tom Jones, Vanity Fair, The Mayor of Casterbridge.... But, for some reason I cannot quite put into words, Middlemarch says it all for me. If you're really asking what I think is the "greatest" book of all time, I'd have to say War and Peace. I can't say it's my favourite though as I've read it only once (and consider that an achievement since it is over 2,100 pages of tight text). But the summer I took to read it, I seemed to live inside the book. I recognized it was amazing on every level. The best writer of all time was likely Shakespeare, and Hamlet is arguably his best work, but it is difficult to rank a playwright and poet among prose writers. I mean what's your favourite modern book? This is tougher. Maybe The Grapes of Wrath
by John Steinbeck. Maybe I tend to like Russian and British literature of the 19th century for their intensely involving, panoramic views of the world, and American novels of the 1920s and 1930s for their energy and directness. I also like short stories by Canadian writers Morley Callaghan, Hugh Garner, Alice Munroe and Mavis Gallant, and by Americans John O'Hara, Hemingway again and Dorothy Parker. No, I mean your favourite book of the last forty years. Ouch. It's tough to be told the books one has read as modern literature are now considered old stuff. In choosing from the last four decades, I'd have to say something by John Irving — maybe The World According to Garp, maybe A Prayer for Owen Meany. There isn't one book by Irving that I adore all the way through, but I do like most of his writing and about ninety percent of Garp and Owen Meany. For a long time, even after reading Garp the first time, I didn't think much of Irving. But a friend explained why she liked his novels and I went back to him to find so much more that I had missed earlier. The key seems to be to read him not in the spirit of Hemingway and other finely honed American stylists, but rather as a modern version of Dickens or Thackeray or other rambling explorers of character in the midst of often irrational societies. I also enjoy Norman Mailer. His works range from dreadful to great,
but I enjoy taking him on each time. Probably his first, The Naked and the If you want really recent, I very much like The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen. Also The Hippopotamus by Stephen Fry and Quincunx by Charles Palliser, although the latter is a throwback to the previous century. As everyone probably knows by now, I'm nuts for anything by sci-fi great Philip K. Dick. He's technically not the best writer and his reality-distorting works are erratic, to say the least. But they thrill me all to pieces. I just gobble them up. Sticking with science fiction, the first few books of the Riverworld series by Philip José Farmer are wonderful, in all applications of the word. What's your least favourite book? When people ask this, they usually mean "what book usually considered great is your least favourite?", since it would be pointless to discuss bad books no one has ever heard of. I've made clear elsewhere that I consider James Joyce's Ulysses, often cited
as the greatest book of the twentieth century, and Finnegans I don't like Faulkner's writing, at least in his big novels like The Sound and the Fury and Absalom, Absalom. I feel he makes the reader do all the work of trying to figure out what the heck he's talking about, rather than doing the writer's work of expressing himself. I don't mind novels considered "difficult" for implying layers of significance to unravel, but I do not appreciate difficulty in sorting out the grammar of each page-long sentence to figure out who's speaking, where we are and what is happening. A similar remark can be made about the prize-winning and widely acclaimed The English Patient by Michael Ondaatje. It certainly hasn't been acclaimed by many people outside literary and critical circles, as far as I've seen. While this novel was being hailed a masterpiece in the media, I kept meeting real folks who were, like myself, struggling to get past the first few pages. I don't think I've met anyone who understood what was going on in the book until they saw the movie (which was actually pretty good). And don't give me that malarkey about writers writing for themselves. Anyone can write any gibberish they like for their own entertainment, but when you publish (that is, make it public), you are doing so to communicate with others. Shakespeare, Dickens, Tolstoy—they wrote for their publics. There's no shame in that. Sure, you can also aim to satisfy your own creative or emotional needs within that goal. And there can be real dangers in catering to public whims rather than challenging readers. But these are issues within the framework of publishing to communicate with readers and should not be raised above that overall purpose. In the past century there has been an effort by critics and academics to separate and elevate "difficult" writing as a higher art form above mere popular writing. Which I reject. This is not to say a lot of popular writing isn't in fact trash. Some is good, some bad, some very bad and some great. But its potential greatness is not dependent on incomprehensibility. Sorry to go off on this tangent. It obviously irks me. Are there really so many modern books that should be ranked with the greatest on your list? I know what you mean. Is Get Shorty really in the same category as Hamlet? Is Douglas Adams really up there with Cervantes and Dickens? The short answer is, "I don't know." Nobody knows what modern works will stand the test of time. Shakespeare in his own age was a popular playwright but no one put him in the same class as the great ancient writers and no one expected that four hundred years later we would count him the greatest writer ever in the English language, possibly in any language. Still the predominance of relatively recent literature on the list may seem odd. By the latest tally, the eras break down as follows:
This pattern makes sense to an extent. The ancient classics are revered while the long Middle Ages are usually considered a period of decline and stagnation, after which a rebirth led to an accelerating increase of literacy, learning and the arts. Today, claims about the death of print to the contrary, far more people than ever can and do read. More books were published in the twentieth century than all the previous centuries combined and so it may be predicted that among the dross a higher number of great works would also have been produced. But are they better? Well, let's put it this way. They seem so to us who live in this period. Or, rather, they seem more relevant, more connected to our lives, than works from prior centuries. This is to be expected of any period. Also, consider the possibility that modern literature—in the novel form especially—may actually be better than that of the past. More sophisticated, more lively, more complex. Certainly more diverse than literature from any century before the twentieth that you could name. Read Hammett, Joyce, Borges, Adams, Remarque, Gorky, Le Guin—is there anything close to this multiplicity in styles, themes, philosophies or psychological treatments in any earlier period? A good argument could be made that we're living in the golden age of literature right now. Whether or not I accept this argument though, I fully anticipate as the years pass that recent titles will be dropped from this list as we turn our attention to new works of the next century (and then of the century after that, ad infinitum). Works from yet earlier centuries will also be reappraised over time—it's happened before, for example, when the ancient Greeks and Romans were rediscovered during the Renaissance. But I would guess that the older the work the more likely that its evaluation will remain stable. I wouldn't be surprised if the list fifty years from now is ninety percent identical for works up to the eighteenth century but with the nineteenth century reduced by about a quarter and the twentieth century by half. But this list right now is a current assessment of the greatest works of all time. Why don't you include great children's literature? Because the list is for adults. Usually people ask this question if they are plumping for adding a Doctor Seuss story or some other remembered favourite from their childhood. Some stories that may seem to have been written to entertain the young go on to become classics for all ages. The Alice in Wonderland books, for example, or Grimm's Fairy Tales. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe and Anne of Green Gables are twentieth-century examples, though we'll see how long into the twenty-first century they last. Tolkien's hobbit epics may be considered works for adolescent and adult readers alike. Sometimes adults enjoy reading certain books, like Seuss's Cat in the Hat, to kids and feel the books should therefore be considered as important as weightier adult fiction. But my criterion for the list has been whether the work is read by adults as adults for their own enjoyment and edification. Reading to entertain kids is not enough. Right away some reader is going to protest, "But I like to read Green Eggs and Ham for myself!" Yes, and I get a kick out of going back and looking through the Hardy Boys and the Enid Blyton adventure stories I devoured as a youth. But that's nostalgia—a delightful wallowing in a since-discarded naïve worldview. It may be fun and it may even be healthy to regress in this fashion now and then. But it's not reading as an adult. It's pretending to be a child. The children's books that eventually make it onto the adult list, like Lewis Carroll's works, usually offer a level that goes over the head of kids. Another factor to consider is the ongoing impact
the work has. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through
the Looking-Glass are embedded in our culture, almost as much as
such adult standards as Hamlet and the Bible. They are
continually referenced by serious writers, films and television. The
situations and expressions are part of our everyday conversation. An
adult has to have some familiarity with Alice to understand much
of what's being said and written around him. When As always, there are some tough judgment calls. I've included Winnie-the-Pooh as approaching this status, but I have to admit I wonder about my decision. I've kept out The Secret Garden, another one I've agonized over, consulting other sources as I have with all works. In the end, I've determined to my own satisfaction that this story has faded. It's got a fussy, old quality that isn't wearing well—at least not with new readers—laying its chin-up sentimentality too bare, with little of enduring interest. You can argue this (please do!), but my judgment so far is that it's not one for the ages. I don't. Many folks read a lot more. I've worked in fulltime professions that do not allow literary reading on the job. I've also wasted more of my free time than I like to admit watching TV. I have a family, a semi-active social life, and involvement in current social causes. Although I did read more as an adolescent, most of the books I devoured then were adventure tales, mysteries and sci-fi. Each year now I read thirty to forty books that are interesting enough that I jot down observations about them for myself. Mainly novels, some short story collections, a bit of poetry, a play or two. About half of those might be on the greatest-ever list. That's fifteen to twenty of the one thousand "greatest" books per year. Do the math and you'll see that it'll take a long lifetime to get through all the books on the list. (And by that time the list will have changed.) I also read an equal number of less serious fictional books each year. I've read every single one of the 150-something Perry Mason mysteries by Erle Stanley Gardner at least once and most of them two or three times—the writing may be hackneyed but I enjoy the plots as intricate puzzles. I go through many other detective procedurals, lots of science fiction, occasional espionage thrillers and the odd historical romance, most of which I enjoy but don't consider noteworthy. My non-fiction input is another ten to fifteen books a year, mainly in science and philosophy, with a little literary criticism, a bit of history and the odd juicy memoir. So I suppose my annual total is less than a hundred books of one kind or another. More than average, I imagine, but less than many voracious readers. I force myself to. With so many great books as yet unread, I'm often reluctant to "waste time" on books I already know, but invariably when I reread a book I find I get so much more out of it that I'm very glad I did. So I've made a rule of thumb: Every third book I read should be one that I've previously read. I don't always stick to this precisely, but I try to maintain on average the 2:1 ratio of new readings to repeat readings. Ideally one should reread books every ten years, I think. Good books take on different and deeper meanings in every decade of one's life. It may be one of the hallmarks of a great work. And ten years is just about the right interval I find for a memorable book to really settle in my mind and then appear fresh upon new reading. But no one has time for that amount of reading. One tries one's best to keep up with new writing while deepening one's appreciation of old friends. Yes to the first part. It is a superficial exercise. The reading is the important thing. The invention of best-of lists can be a trivial pursuit. No to the second part. Presenting a list is worthwhile in getting people to read books they might not otherwise consider. I know I've been led into some wonderful reading experiences by leads provided on other peoples' lists. And the discussion of literature that a list engenders is valuable and enjoyable. At least I have found it so. |
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© Copyright 2002-2006 Eric McMillan. All rights reserved.
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