Entertainment - Friday, December 12, 2008 13:57 - 12 Comments

The 16 Greatest Books of All Time [1-4]

It seems my negligence and insipidity has rolled into one fat ball of anticipation that can only disappoint. Nevertheless, here it is—the top of this side of the list of the sixteen greatest books of all time. You refresh your memory here: Honorable Mentions, 13-16, 9-12, 5-8.

These four selections span three centuries of human thought, four nations, four movements—satire, American romanticism, realism, and modernism—and, in each, we can see the biting, soul-dropping honesty achieved for only a few scattered moments in our actual lives and rarely (almost never) sustained throughout a substantial piece of writing. It is, thankfully, totally subjective.

After all, objectivity, in its pure sense, is as unoriginal as it is unattainable. Sadly, there are fewer and fewer of us with the necessary imagination to form an engaging, honest lie. I’ve barely read a sliver of what can be called “everything,” and even with the few things I have, my memory is not so strong. It all decays and blurs and we forget the things that made us love a book when we were reading it, that made us say the week after we finished it that it was not just good, but our favorite, and, then the thousand other temptations that pushed it from our mind.

So I’ve come to admire anyone still capable of a strong and justifiable opinion, or even an intuitively justified opinion, or really anyone who’s taken up the book and read it. Not to mention anyone who sees in the following selections the best four books of all time. Continue…