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.

4. Leaves of Grass, Walt Whitman—“an American, one of the roughs, a kosmos”

Take up a copy and turn to any page. I hope you will see in it the “Urge and urge and urge” of life, of the approach that is equal parts a connect and a disconnect. I think it’s for this reason that my good friend and now reluctant list-partner told me that “Song of Myself” would be the first thing he read to his child (if he ever had one). “Here’s what you need to know,” he’d say.

For a long time, I couldn’t like Whitman, and I know many who can’t, or don’t want to, or who would rather do “homocentric” readings that, in their very name, misattribute the center. (For more on this, or if you just want to be astonished, see this essay by Harold Bloom. I used to read those famous parts that they gave us in excerpts in high school like “Do I contradict myself? Very well I contradict myself; I am large… I contain multitudes” and feel more than a little nauseous. But Whitman’s philosophy is larger than any excerpt and usually poorly summarized. As Bloom writes, Whitman is an ostensibly easy poet who, on closer inspection, proves extremely difficult, but as you’ll see, always worthwhile.

3. The Metamorphosis, Franz Kafka

In the introduction to my edition, Jason Baker writes, “As if leading the reader up and down endless staircases of logic, Kafka focuses on multiple dualities at once, all of which crisscross in three dimensions.” It is this three-dimensionality—a sort of literary cubism—that marks the transition into modernism, that gives way to the Anglo-Saxons and, to some extent, the French. We see how the urge has shifted in the years since Whitman. It may be that The Trial and The Castle, the longer, truer Kafka, say more about that desire, unnamable and objectless, but the Metamorphosis is more solid, more engaging, and speaks of change and growth—stagnation and deformation—in a way my youth can’t overlook.

2. Gulliver’s Travels, Jonathan Swift

To all of you who haven’t picked it up since your parents read you an abridged picture book version: Gulliver’s Travels is an amazingly engaging, profoundly reflective read. In it, you’ll encounter all of your introjects, your friends, your family, the people you have already known and those you have yet to meet. You’ll learn how “the world has been misled by prostitute writers to ascribe the greatest exploits of war to cowards, the wisest counsel to fools, sincerity to flatters… truth to informers” and, eventually, you’ll be convinced, like the Houyhnhnms, that, instead of reason, humans are “only possessed of some quality fitted to increase [their] natural vices; as the reflection from a troubled stream returns the image of an ill-shapen body, not only larger, but more distorted.”

In the end, we can’t tell if it makes sense for us to be good simply to set ourselves apart from the foul species of humans that tread so heavily on our lives, or if—because we can’t escape what we are—it doesn’t. If you haven’t read it, read it—if you read it before and didn’t like it, read it again because you missed it; you were asleep or in school or whacking off or something. Gulliver’s sadness is my sadness. It makes me want to get a horse and start neighing—anything to keep from going crazy.

1. Madame Bovary, Gustave Flaubert

“Le mot juste”—the exact word.

As my Proust professor told me when she handed me my first copy (a beautiful Everyman’s Library edition translated by Francis Steegmuller): “This is it.” Flaubert’s prose is merciless, his story wrenching, his characters as detestable as they are accurate. Everywhere lies a sad, autumn beauty, and it begins with the precision of each word—le mot juste—which makes a literature where, as Flaubert described it, “the adventures are the sentences” and then, the paragraph, the chapter, the book. Flaubert joked (or maybe it was serious) that he dreamt of writing a book with no subject at all, just sentences. While reading, you get the feeling that the words are as pure as they are in a dictionary, untampered, uncorrupted, and then you notice that his perfectionism is no less relentless with his characters, as when Rodolpho writes adieu as two words in his final letter to Emma “which he thought in very excellent taste.” It makes us embarrassed to be the permeable human beings that we are.

His descriptions are no less vivid, and, one could say, perfectly tampered by action. See for yourself:

It was a beautiful summer morning. Silver plate sparkled in the jeweller’s windows, and the light falling obliquely on the cathedral made mirrors of the corners of the grey stones; a flock of birds fluttered in the grey sky round the trefoil bell-turrets; the square, resounding with cries, was fragrant with the flowers that bordered its pavement, roses, jasmines, pinks, narcissi, and tube-roses, unevenly spaced out between moist grasses, catmint, and chickweed for the birds; the fountains gurgled in the centre, and under large umbrellas, amidst melons, piled up in heaps, flower-women, bare-headed, were twisting
paper round bunches of violets.

The young man took one. It was the first time that he had bought flowers for a woman, and his breast, as he smelt them, swelled with pride, as if this homage that he meant for another had recoiled upon himself.

As far as that goes, Flaubert is as necessary to the art of writing as Plato to philosophy.

So there you have it. There it is. Or is it just the way I see it? Remember, submit what you’d have liked to see if this were your list. Some kind of illustrated competition between your reader generated list and this one might stop somewhere waiting for you in the days ahead.

Photo by Flickr user litlnemo used under the Creative Commons