Adepressing and dangerous document has recently come into my possession. Calling itself 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die (£20.00, Cassell Illustrated), the briefest glance at this list is guaranteed to leave any self-styled literatus feeling profoundly inadequate. Perusing the inventory drew to attention how narrow reading habits can inevitably become: of the books cited, I had read barely a tenth. Worse still, the existence of at least half had passed me by entirely, and many of the featured authors were completely unfamiliar to me; any pretensions to eruditeness were swiftly shattered. But however stung my pride, initial crushing gloom swiftly gave way to a spirit of rebellion. Why must I read this particular collection of books, I fumed. On whose authority are these claims to canonicity based? It may have only been intended as a bit of fun, but examining the list had led me, in a manner strangely reminiscent of Carrie Bradshaw, to ask a vital question of myself, “If the time I have available for reading is ultimately limited by my lifespan, what books should I most profitably be reading?”
For hard-line purists like literary critic Harold Bloom, the only books worth reading are those that form an indispensable part of the Western Canon (defined and listed in his book of the same title). Bloom’s stance is compelling in its simplicity. His criteria for inclusion in the Canon are stringent, summarised best in his pronouncement, “Unless it demands rereading, the work does not qualify.” For Bloom, it is the exclusivity of the Canon that makes it a valuable institution. To include books with lesser literary value would be to dilute the Canon, rendering its function as guide to the books worth preserving obsolete.
Bloom’s voice is authoritative, yet his defence of the Western Canon provides a rather sterile and unsatisfactory answer to the question, “What should I read?” A lifetime spent reading and rereading those texts most venerated in the Western tradition would doubtless be instructive, but choosing to read only those texts prescribed by an academic authority is really no choice at all. One should also keep in mind the view of Terry Eagleton, who, in his book Literary Theory, argues, “Many films and works of philosophy are considerably more valuable than much that is included in the literary ‘canon’.” The most vital criticism of Bloom’s position however, is that he seems to leave no room for experimentation–the simple joy of picking up an unknown book (with all of the risks and delights inherent) is to be denied the reader. The work can only be read once sufficient time has passed and it has entered the hallowed province of the Canon; ‘contemporary’ writing is only to be appreciated retrospectively, and is certainly not to be lauded while new to the shelves. This strategy inevitably means that the reader will always approach a work with inherited opinions about its greatness, for only the truly ‘great’ books can be considered by Bloom’s ideal reader. A reading life without the occasional trashy novel seems a poor and unfulfilling prospect. After all, is not much of the joy that comes from reading Carry on, Jeeves the guilty pleasure that one should be reading Finnegans Wake instead?
A retreat to Bloom’s position, however, seems more attractive when one is confronted with the growing mountain of new books available for consumption. These days, it seems that pretty much anyone can get a book published. The shelves of every high-street bookstore teem with autobiographical offerings from the latest soon-to-be-forgotten celebrities. It is easy to dismiss such publications, and perhaps best to: who, when all is said and done, is going to remember the name of any Big Brother contestant in 50 years’ time, let alone want to read their outdated life story? But these are only the worst excesses of a publishing industry increasingly geared around profit and the quick sell. Almost every book published in 2006 is destined to be forgotten; condemned to the scrapheap of cultural artefacts that will doubtless serve as outmoded reminders of the post-modern age. From an environmental perspective, the vast majority of books published today are not worth the paper they are printed on. Most of them, the argument goes, would be more useful to us if they were to remain as trees. In 2005, over 200,000 new titles were published in the United Kingdom alone, placing us top of this particular global league table. The British consumer is confronted with choice as never before, but for readers attempting to be discerning the situation can quickly become overwhelming.
Literary prizes can provide readers with a useful starting point, but their limitations soon become apparent. For an author, winning a literary prize is no guarantee of longevity: the Nobel Prize for Literature has been awarded to one hundred and three individuals since its inauguration in 1901, yet many of the names on the list will fail to ring any bells for even the most well-read of individuals. Given the relentless production of contemporary fiction, it is hardly surprising that the life-span of all but the most fortunate of books is now mercifully short. How then, to predict which books will survive the cull and achieve some form of posterity?
Critical success appears to be a double-edged sword, confirming only that your book conforms to the popular literary standards of the time. In actual fact, the texts most likely to achieve the status of a masterpiece are those so ground-breaking that they are liable to be critically reviled at first. In Bloom’s words, they exhibit “a mode of originality that either cannot be assimilated, or that so assimilates us that we cease to see it as strange.” The free indirect style of Modernist writers like Joyce and Woolf, so experimental in its day, has now become a common trope of popular fiction. As readers, we tend to resist stylistic innovation in favour of those narrative techniques with which we are most comfortable. New narrative forms do not necessarily make for relaxing reading, it is true, but perhaps it is to books like Martin Amis’ Time’s Arrow (a novel in which events are narrated in reverse chronological order) that we should turn if we are to pinpoint those works destined to survive into the next century.
The English literary canon is an ever-growing mountain of books. At its peak are our very oldest texts - so few of these survive that they are useful as much as historical artefacts as works capable of inspiring great aesthetic pleasure. As one descends the slope, the mountain gets wider: in other words, each passing century produces more and more books that survive and are read to this present day. Despite this decidedly bottom-heavy catalogue, it is nigh-on impossible to predict which contemporary works will take their place on the lower slopes of this textual mountain. There is, however, one sure-fire way for an otherwise unremarkable book to prolong its life-span: become a GCSE or A-Level set text. Witness Louis de Bernieres’ Captain Corelli’s Mandolin, a novel of little merit still selling well, and that continues to be inflicted on thousands of unfortunate A Level students. For many others like me, the scars inflicted by Captain Corelli will still be visible when we are in our dotage. To my mind, this is the cruellest, yet perhaps the most effective method of stretching out one’s literary mortality.
Although I have suggested a number of factors that might influence a book’s chance of survival, this approach assumes that only those works with the potential for future adulation deserve to be read. Limiting one’s reading to the perusal of a ‘canon-in-waiting’ seems almost as stultifying as the restrictions imposed by Bloom’s advocacy of the Western canon. Adhering solely to any reading list, be it prescribed by an academic institution or by popular opinion, is the quickest route to narrowing your reading horizons. Until anyone convinces this reader otherwise, the works of the remarkable and decidedly unliterary P. G. Wodehouse are going to occupy their rightful and prominent place at the very centre of the bookcase.