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

Hopefully, by now, our list has upset you. In this section, you may find yourself outraged. Keep calm! First, you may find it useful to reread our mission statement. Remember, this is only Phase 1. In Phase 2 we will compile a list of your favorite 16 books of all time. Surely the Brother’s Karamazov and (we hope) Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita will appear on this list, which will come to combat our own.

The true list will emerge once our list and your reader-generated list face off in an NCAA-style tournament. Each match will be illustrated and the outcome will be determined by your voting. More than a few of you have wined to me in private about Ulysses, Lolita, and even Don DeLillo’s Underworld being kept from the list, and, while this is good, the only way you can change it is by leaving a comment.

Here are numbers 5-8. I hope they can quench your insatiable thirst for the sweet, sweet nectar of literature.

8. Paradise Lost, John Milton

Milton began to conceive Paradise Lost in his early teens. He spent decades conceptually honing and refining it so that it could stand as a neo-epic counter to the masterpieces of antiquity. He and it, by sparking the fire of Romanticism, came to change the entire conception of literature. His Devil conquered, and Adam’s own devilish reply to God (the epigraph of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein) characterized the defiance of the next century of literary achievement:

Did I request thee, Maker, from my clay
To mould me man? Did I solicit thee
From darkness to promote me?

William Blake says that Milton wrote “in fetters” of God and Angels and “at liberty” with the Devil and Hell because he “was a true poet, and of the Devil’s party without knowing it.” Shelley adds that Milton’s “bold neglect” of a direct moral is the most convincing proof of the “supremacy of his Genius.” A “true poet” of supreme genius, Milton might rightfully find himself in the #1 position of a well-formed list. Not ours. He’ll have to make do with #8. —J.F.

7. A Moveable Feast, Ernest Hemmingway

Hemmingway was a born story teller, sometimes rattling off tales all night at Ketchum, Idaho bars. He produced a massive collection of short stories and novels, but this, the story of himself and his literary counterparts in Paris, seems the one he was most destined to tell. A Moveable Feast is a rare glimpse into a literary scene that defined much of what we now call Modernism. To read Hemmingway’s opinion of Ezra Pound and Gertrude Stein, among others, is as close as most of us will ever get to these titans’ everyday lives. The book validates its place on the list by having some of the most fluid and enjoyable prose Hemmingway ever committed to paper. —J.D.

6. In Search of Lost Time, Marcel Proust

Marcel Proust’s 4,300 page In Search of Lost Time is widely regarded as the first modernist novel in any language. Though there is much debate about what this actually means, there are few who would question the scope of its genius. When he began work on it, he lined the walls of his room with cork, as he told Louis de Robert, in order “to yield to [his] demon, to [his] thought, to write on everything to the point of exhaustion.” His goal was to open up the form of the novel and clear in it a space for time, the unconscious, memory, and their decay:

“The places which we have known do not belong only to the world of space, where we locate them for convenience. They have been only a narrow slice among other adjacent impressions which made up our life of that time; the memory of a certain image is only the regret of a certain instant; and the houses, the roads and the avenues are fugitive, alas! like the years.”

There is little doubt that he succeeded. —J.F.

5. As I Lay Dying, William Faulkner

Faulkner’s portrait of the Bundrens’ quest to bury their matriarch is a masterpiece of both black comedy and family tragedy, of absurdity (see the river crossing) and of palpable emotional destruction. Each Bundren is troubled in his or her own way and, as each character is voiced in the fifty-nine monologues that function as chapters, we encounter their emotions, and, sometimes, insanity, as the story progresses. The prose is typical for Faulkner, favoring emotional complexity and gravity over easy comprehension. It also has what Harold Bloom calls “the finest opening section of any twentieth-century American novel.”

“Jewel and I come up from the field, following the path in single file. Although I am fifteen feet ahead of him, anyone watching from the cotton house can see Jewel’s frayed and broken straw hat a full head above my own.”

But even with one of the finest beginnings of the 20th century, As I Lay Dying is only the second highest ranked American novel on our list. —J.D.

Photo by Flickr user Kris Cohen used under the Creative Commons

As it was with Walt Whitman, so it is with Joe and me now. As a culture, we are often obsessed by the top, the end, the apocalypse. We can see this play out in small matters before our eyes—why else would this list be serialized? We’re just trying to draw out your death-drive as long as possible and, hopefully, spark more of your interest. But you should rest assured: numbers 9-12 are no less rewarding than numbers 1-4, and, as with the beginning of the list, they still invite (nay, demand) your criticism. As always, the success of our project and our shared, overall level of fun depends on your suggestions. The list goes on.

12. Harmonium, Wallace Stevens

Harmonium, Stevens’ first published collection, was not released until he was 44. Perhaps that is why the table of contents reads like a greatest hits collection.  Harmonium contains 85 poems and few are not wonderful, imaginative and challenging.  Stevens’ capacity to make the reader reassess their worldview with only a simple turn of phrase may be unparalleled.  I would love to weave a quotation in here and convince you how good this really is, but since most of the collection is free of copyright, I leave you to Stevens.

“Disillusionment of Ten O’Clock”

The houses are haunted
By white night-gowns.
None are green,
Or purple with green rings,
Or green with yellow rings,
Or yellow with blue rings.
None of them are strange,
With socks of lace
And beaded ceintures.
People are not going
To dream of baboons and periwinkles.
Only, here and there, an old sailor,
Drunk and asleep in his boots,
Catches tigers
In red weather.
—J.D.

11. The Sound and The Fury, William Faulkner

Benjy’s chapter, the first and most striking section of Faulkner’s masterpiece, abandons the traditional convention of chronological thought, and reduces experience to memory and image. It alone is enough to justify The Sound and The Fury’s position on the list.

Benjy himself is a tragic exaggeration of the human condition; he can neither possess nor lose anything because, for him, time is a kaleidoscope and the years turn and glitter within his shifting thoughts. In Benjy’s narration, a 30 year leap between a current and a past vision requires no segue, objects exist without names and characters fade in and out without even being announced. Needless to say, this has led some careless readers to deem the book incomprehensible, and give up. Surely, whether they realize it or not, they throw down the book in horror only because Benjy’s helplessness strikes too close to the core and the power of Faulkner’s images can be too much to bear.

Don’t worry, Faulkner fans, if #11 seems like a paltry showing. There may be more to come…  —J.F.

10. Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad

No list with our aim would be complete without a mention to writer Hunter Thompson once called “one of the best writers in this language” and “a crafty little polack.” Though many of Joseph Conrad’s novels are great candidates (Lord Jim, Nosstromo, The Secret Agent, et al.), Heart of Darkness is the one that stays with you the longest. Marlow experiences colonialism in the most violent way possible—through a series of unforgettable, jarring encounters—and Conrad’s un-dogmatic prose reflects Marlow’s struggle. The writing itself; Of Kurtz’s face in the novella’s climax:

“I saw on that ivory face the expression of somber pride, of ruthless power, of craven terror–of an intense and hopeless despair. Did he live his life again in every detail of desire, temptation, and surrender during that supreme moment of complete knowledge?”

All this from a man who didn’t speak English until his twenties. Word? —J.D.

9. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Hunter S. Thompson

Raoul Duke and Dr. Gonzo head to Sin City with a trunk full of “two bags of grass, seventy-five pellets of mescaline” and many, many more psychoactive substances. Things that come out of the trip: 224 of the most exciting pages ever written in English—I have a brick-throwing friend who professes that reading the book takes less time than watching the movie—and the most stark, terrifying and heart-breaking account of the death of the American dream. Cormac McCarthy calls it “a classic of our time” and who is going to argue with him. —J.D.

Photo by Flickr user 2fs used under the Creative Commons

Here is the tail end of what we believe are the greatest books of all time. We urge you to ridicule (or praise!) both our selections and our reasoning. We need your suggestions for the showdown to come—our list will be pitted against yours in what’s sure to be an epic, illustrated death match. Come back soon for the next section and a cash prize for anyone who can guess our top four.

16. The Elements of Style, William Strunk Jr.

I once had a teacher tell me that just owning this book will make you a better writer.  Hyperbole aside, this is far and away the best style guide I have ever encountered. It will drastically improve your writing and speech should you decide to read it. Yes, it is pretentiously written, but that’s part of the fun. In the book’s most entertaining section, you’ll learn that a phrase like “student body” is “needless and awkward, meaning no more than the simple word “students.” See, you’re a better writer already. –J.D.

15. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, James Joyce

It may not be as fully realized as Ulysses or as immediate as Dubliners, but I will always prefer the exuberance of Portrait. Reading the book is akin to being inside the mind of a nascent Joyce as he develops his style. Stephen Daedelus’s struggles with alienation are as resonant as they were when Joyce wrote the book. When we encounter Stephen “still unfallen, but about to fall” near the books climax, the delicacy of Joyce’s prose perfectly mirrors his protagonist’s character. The style, whatever its pretensions, is fully justified for the effect –J.D.

14. Nine Stories, J.D. Salinger

Maybe this place could have been filled by The Catcher in the Rye (by all means a great book) but, ultimately, the writing in Nine Stories is cleaner and more moving. It might be the best collection of short fiction by a single author to be written in the 20th century. Though, like Esmé—the title character from the book’s best story—I “prefer stories about squalor,” so I’ve got my natural biases. Many of the stories, like “A Perfect Day for Bananafish” are sad, even overwhelmingly so, but despite this the book, like Catcher in the Rye, is among the most fun and the most accessible literature that America has ever seen. –J.F.

13. Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy

Tolstoy is perhaps the most successful moralist in Western literature. His God and his morality are large enough to include the despondency of human experience. In fact, the stories of Anna Karenina and Konstantin Levin weave around that same philosophy. The characters scarcely touch, and the point of view can shift rather abruptly, yet, due to the finest, subtlest care, the novel is extremely cohesive. Still, it is not the spiritual scope—the unanswered prayers, disintegrated families, failed resolutions—that place it at the forefront of literature. It’s passages like this:

“The sun was already sinking into the trees when they went, with their tin boxes rattling, into the wooded ravine of Mashkin Upland. The grass was up to their waists in the middle of the hollow, soft, tender, and broad-bladed, spotted here and there among the trees with wild pansies.”

Sweet, cool simplicity. –J.F.

Photo: Flickr by niznoz used under the Creative Commons

Is one of these titles undoubtedly in your top 5? Think they’re all shit? Sound off in the comments.

Over the next few weeks, my friend and colleague Joe DiGrigoli and I will be posting a list of the top 16 books of all time—excluding, of course, the ones we have not read. It’s a tall order. One might say, “Impossible,” but Joe and I would never go so far. If you’re a serious reader, or even an informed one, you’ve probably already seen Modern Library’s list of the top 100 novels in the English language. It’s a good start. Like us, you may even have used their list as a guide to becoming an informed, well-rounded human being. Though it’s not the original, it would be a lie to say that Modern Library has neither influenced our reading nor affected our ideas.

So you might be—even should be saying—why another list? What can two college sophomores really say about the scope of human literary achievement that I haven’t already?

Touché. So allow us to explain.

First, we feel the list provides a certain degree of permeability. It will allow anyone concerned enough about the reviews to come to understand both the kind of literature that we hold in the highest regard and the books that we feel have had the most influence on us and the world over time.

As a second function, the list brings an element of the classic into a realm that is obsessed with the current, the modern, and the popular. Yes, Stephanie Meyer’s blockbuster Breaking Dawn sold several million copies this August, and teenager girls across the country swooned along with its vivid portrayal of vampire-on-human sex and rib-breaking birth scenes—but have you read Milton’s description of personified Sin, raped by Death, only to birth “Yelling monsters, [dogs]…hourly born, with sorrow infinite” that rip and gnaw inside her womb? I certainly hope so. It’s enough to curdle the blood.

Still, to take yet another page from Modern Library, our list is only the first phase. Once it’s up, we encourage all of our readers to make their own suggestions, to propose their own favorites, to proffer books that we have likely never heard of, let alone read. We’ll then create a democratically organized, reader-generated list that will be pitted—in deadly battle—against our own.

Any ranking is dubious, especially one of this scale. For instance, how can one possibly weigh a Kurt Vonnegut or a Don Dellilo novel of 250 pages, against the entirety of Homer, Ovid, Shakespeare, and Tolstoy? One simultaneously has to have tremendous gaps in his self-respect, an inflated ego, and a hungry mind. As Joe put it:

“I, like my beloved Augie March, am an American and go about things as I have taught myself, free-style. The point is that we are here to celebrate the qualifying bound volumes of our time—the time of the human race and written word—while simultaneously creating a roster that will do well in one-on-one match-ups. This to me seems like an excellent way to approach the much maligned art of list-making.”

Later in the day, the series will kick off with a list of honorable mentions—great books that didn’t quite make our cut.

Good luck. Happy reading.
-Literature Bloggers, Jake Fournier and Joe DiGrigoli