How often will we reread "Anna Karenina" instead of chasing something a pundit or a publisher declares a "must read?" The older we get, the easier it becomes to tune out the trendy. The line blurs between the stubborn and the wise.
In refining a literary canon, we hope to pass on the tradition of being a picky reader. It is a project dear to us. So, before the holidays, we published a commentary with proposals for 40 "essential" works of fiction ("The 40 greatest books we all should read," Dec. 23).
The response was big — more than 200 online comments, besides a published counterpoint and letters. Delighted, we saw that many people care about literature.
As "unapologetic" teachers, we were encouraged by the paucity of comments that it was impossible, in a postmodern world, to say that a particular work is better than another. Nobody argued — lost in the nihilism diagnosed by Dostoyevsky — that "Clifford the Big Red Dog" is just as noteworthy as "Hamlet."
By inviting principled debate, we made it clear that our selections are not grounded in scientific certainty. We expected readers to make solid arguments for and against our proposals, and for the most part they did. It is the argumentative method, after all, that fosters democracy and the rule of law. It is also part of good education.
In that conversational spirit, we offer the following refinements. We accept a rule of including only one work per author. That takes off the list, sadly, "Crime and Punishment," "King Lear," the "Odyssey" and "War and Peace." The work left for each author involved is thus intended as an example, not a definitive assessment that this is indeed the best work for that great author. Those who like our selected "Song of Solomon," for example, should feel free (and validated) to seek out "Beloved," outside the list.
Offstage, we continue to debate the virtues of Milton's "Paradise Lost" and Stendhal's "The Red and the Black." Onstage, we delete Miller's "Tropic of Cancer." The reactions convinced us that this is a lesser work, notable for its taboo-breaking style, but shallow in characters and ideas. Arguments made for "The Age of Innocence" (Wharton), "Catch-22" (Heller), "Les Misérables" (Hugo), "Middlemarch" (Eliot) and "Things Fall Apart" (Achebe) impressed us. Add those five. For the 40th spot, we would like more time to ponder the arguments for Willa Cather, Vladimir Nabokov, Philip Roth and Virginia Woolf. (To please our friends in a book club, though, we simply settle on Cather.)
Some readers called for science fiction. Rule that out as a "genre" proposal inconsistent with the rest of the list. Note our continued agreement, however, that Le Carré surpasses the genre limitations of "spy fiction."
