For those of you who don’t read This Thing of Ours, you should! you should! The blog is subtitled: The reading community is small, despised by all, and ever threatened with extinction. New members always welcome!
A post today begins,
What do you get when 125 of today’s writers are asked to nominate their best books of all time? The answer is, something like the unwieldy 544-title list included in The Top Ten: Writers Pick Their Favorite Books, on sale now.
I took a stab at my Top Ten and came up with
ALL QUIET ON THE WESTERN FRONT = Erich Maria Remarque
REBECCA = Daphne DuMaurier
THE BIG SLEEP and/or THE LONG GOODBYE = Raymond Chandler
TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD = Harper Lee
SCARAMOUCHE = Rafael Sabatini
CATCH-22 = Joseph Heller
DARKNESS VISIBLE = William Styron
SIDDHARTHA = Hermann Hesse
THE BRIDGE OF SAN LUIS REY = Thornton Wilder
ETHAN FROME = Edith Wharton
… and then I had to stop because I ran out of slots. But what about PRIDE AND PREJUDICE or COUNT OF MONTE CRISTO? JANE EYRE? WUTHERING HEIGHTS? THE PRINCESS AND THE GOBLIN/THE PRINCESS AND CURDIE? BLACK BEAUTY? (the first “real” book I ever read, so dear to my heart.) some Wodehouse, some Ngaio Marsh, some Josephine Tey (DAUGHTER OF TIME would make the list.)
There’s a bit more to the comments I left there, but that’s enough for here and now.