Uncanny how parallel our reading paths were. I too read almost exclusively nonfiction until high school, naively thinking at the time that fiction was a waste of time and it was better to learn from nonfiction. Then in 11th grade a particular literature class and teacher had a big influence on me, and soon thereafter I discovered Clifton Fadiman's Lifetime Reading Plan. For a couple of decades I gorged on the classics (I'm 65 so quite a bit older than you) and read almost no contemporary literature until I saw that same NYT list from 2006 and began reading from that list as an intro to good quality contemporary lit. Weird to come across your video and someone who did the same things in about the same way. Today I read a good blend of things and I'm glad for the new NYT list. Thank you for this video. I'll be sure to check out some of your others.
Thanks for the kind words, Bruce. I've never heard of Fadiman's Lifetime Reading Plan, though I've periodically received 1000 Books to Read Before You Die, etc. from well-meaning family members. It's nice to find the blend of genres, periods, and styles that works! I hope you have a great weekend. Cheers, Jack
I never was enough of a reader to be shaped by such a list (or even notice one). You were already a strong reader when you came upon that list. I found new authors either in an anthology or a mention, probably in an introduction (which already indicates “classic” as opposed to contemporary category). You as a BookTuber are in a position to create your own list, and I might trust your 100 before the motley crew that developed the New York Times list. I’m still deficient on contemporary authors, but I’m short on pressing reasons to try improve myself.
Thanks for the kind words, David. I was very fortunate with the encouragement I received as a young reader and the time that I was able to spend reading as an adolescent and young adult. I've been thinking about putting together 10-15 books that I recommend from this century and seeing if my wife will do the same. Three that I would certainly include are: Dead Girls by Selva Almada, The Books of Jacob by Olga Tokarczuk, and Of Cattle and Men by Ana Paula Maia. Cheers, Jack
A Month in the Country is fantastic, a book that compresses so much truth, mystery, and beauty into so few words. That's a book that I can recommend to any reader.
This was such a joy. I loved hearing about your early reading. My own early reading was all over the place, and I could have probably benefited from a similar list. 😅
Thanks for the kind words, Marina. I think that lists can be a nice roadmap, particularly when starting out, but I also have learned to really love "discovering" works that surprise and delight me. Cheers, Jack
@@ramblingraconteur1616 I have similar ideas on list and even approach my own with a healthy dose of skepticism. Haha. Nothing like going down a rabbit hole and finding new books based solely on your interest and the books/author you are reading.
Thanks, Brian. You might enjoy Gass's story "The Pedersen Kid" or "In the Heart of the Heart of the Country" and his early novel Omensetter's Luck. I spent (but rarely misspent) a lot of time hunting down both Gass and Gaddis in my early twenties. Cheers, Jack
Reading Ulysses on an airplane sounds like having a root canal on an off-road safari. Although I remember spending a long flight reading Absalom, Absalom!, which has become my favorite Faulkner novel. Maybe modernism works best in transit. I remember being very influenced by that previous list as well. Although now that I've read more widely, I think it's an unforgivable oversight that Pynchon's Mason & Dixon was not included. That might be my vote for the greatest American novel.
I've long wanted to read Mason & Dixon, but I am sort of holding it off as the last Pynchon novel I read. I have one Faulkner novel, one from Raymond Chandler, and a few other writers that I really love. The tedious chaos of airline travel seems to match Joyce's outlook! I hope you're well, Jordan, it's great to hear from you. Cheers, Jack
I am really enjoying Kavalier & Clay, Josh. So far, I wholeheartedly recommend it. JR is brilliant and unlike anything else I've ever spent time digging into. It's worth the attention. Cheers, Jack
I may be able to later this year. One side of our office/library is the last redoubt of extraneous furniture and storage after a massive home renovation. I'm hoping that we have it cleared out sometime this fall so that I can use that space. Thanks for the kind words, as always. Cheers, Jack
@@ramblingraconteur1616 that’d be fantastic, if possible (I’ve always enjoyed your themed shelf tours/subsets of your collection by publisher/genre)! Home renovations are always stressful and time consuming, fingers crossed it goes smoothly. Thanks for the reply & I look forward to your next video!!
The thought of creating this arbitrary list of checkpoints and groundwork to read other books and unlock other parts of the canon is *so* real. "Can't read X until I read Y and probably Z too for context, and maybe W to make sure I might like X"-- and so on. This strategy has dominated the last three years of my life-- and even when I try and shrug it off and just read what I want to, I wake up from a daze and realize my little mini tbr's are just don't the same thing. But even as you illustrate in this video-- it's not usually a waste of time. And yet it always feels like a diversion (to me at least). I wish I understood why this is so engrained in my decision-making making and that lists like the NYT (and even the one The Atlantic just put out for the Great American Novels a few months ago) "notable books" didn't drive so much of my reading. Side note-- I don't think any author saw more backlash on my side of Twitter from the list than Richard Powers. Everyone seemed to universally clown The Overstory as a "Pulitzer for stupid people". Never heard a word of negativity before this list and now all of a sudden he's like a Malcolm Gladwell-level pseudointellectual. No idea if that's just my niche or if I didn't get the memo that Powers is out.
The whole cottage industry surrounding critically acclaimed literature drives so many readers, particularly when we are trying to discover what should love, what we actually love, and "why" we find it speaks to us. I know that my own experience was shaped by the absence of adults around me whose tastes ran towards the classics or contemporary literary fiction. Without anyone to actually talk to about what I was reading, these types of lists acted as major roadmaps. My next step was finding lists of recommendations from the writers I loved and starting to read all of those titles. That gave me a greater sense of agency, and I feel much more free now as I make choices about what I want to spend time with. Above all, I am glad that I still enjoy diving into books! Regarding Richard Powers, I am honestly not sure where the backlash started. I really liked The Gold Bug Variations and Galatea. Do you have a favorite among his novels, Ryan? Cheers, Jack
@@ramblingraconteur1616 another great point about one of the understated benefits of these lists: I don’t come from a literature/English background and so much of the discussion/discourse about these books happens in spaces I’m not, and so when these show up it sort of vacates into public spaces. But yeah, sometimes that’s for the best. I’ve seen a lot of people passing around the Gass essay about literary awards and how the Pulitzer Prize for fiction is the most sure indicator of a mediocre novel. That obviously hits me as hyperbolic but when it comes from a guy like that it grabs your attention. When it circulates on Twitter, it comes off as a little phony- fair or not. But that’s getting into liking/disliking books for the right/wrong reasons. I have not read any Powers yet! I own The Overstory, Gold Bug and Orfeo but those were all just thrift finds I squirreled away. The backlash feels so universal it does honestly push it down my TBR but I am definitely intrigued by him in general.
Jack, I have a question and a comment. First , I did what you did only I found that there were so darn many of the books on that list that I not only didn't like, they either bored me silly or I just was not interested, so I stopped reading the list! However, I do have another question for you: Have you ever seen a Classics List? A true Greek, Roman, Mary Beards, Mary Renault, Homer, the guys in the 12 Caesars books. Those books on ancient history and the ones the 'classist" folks read? Those are the ones I can craving at the moment. Even Google hasn't helped me. Thoughts please!! I have my notebook and pen out (yep, I have read 90% of the Penguin books on the subject. THANK YOU SO MUCH !!!! Oh there is one person "Goldsworthy" who does history of a particular time period and mine is on its way. Really appreciate any ideas and suggestions. Lee
Hi, Lee, I definitely stopped trying to "complete" the 2006 list at a certain point, sometime around Rabbit at Rest and Helprin's Winter's Tale, though I opened up Kavalier & Clay this week and have been enjoying it so far. In terms of the Greek and Roman Classics, I can't recall coming across a list as you describe. About twenty years ago, I took a few courses in college, and each had a decent syllabus of required reading that provided me with next steps from the foundation I already had with Herodotus, Homer, and Oedipus Tyrannus. There were a few gems that pushed me deeper into the Classics: Aristophanes' Lysistrata and the histories of Livy. Even the assigned readings did not always take, as it was only recently that I really started to enjoy reading Virgil. I'm currently midway through The New Roman Empire by Anthony Kaldellis, which is a massive history of the Eastern Roman Empire/Byzantium, and it is very good, though I picked it up from the library as it's extremely expensive. Are you a fan of Mary Renault's novels? I found mass market editions and have been thinking about reading those. I love I, Claudius and Yourcenar's Memoirs of Hadrian. Cheers, Jack
On a sentence by sentence basis, Updike is one of the greatest talents in our recent national literature. But man some of his novels are just bad despite being stylistically so good. I wrestle with the question: Is Updikes recycling of themes (religion/adultery) for 50 years a demonstration of his lack of ingenuity or is it noble that he stays true to what he knows? I've read a dozen of his novels, poetry collections, non-fiction, etc. and it remains a love/hate relationship.
I have truly loved a number of John Updike's short stories, and some of his criticism reveals an encompassing and constantly curious mind. I suspect that it's the pacing of his novels that frustrates my reading as much as the subject matter. A number that I have read seem to drift, and then when they coalesce it seems staged or contrived. In terms of his narrow subject matter, I think he genuinely believed in the themes that he wrote about and thought they mattered more than anything else he could discuss. Do you have a favorite among his novels? I am thinking of trying Marry Me. Cheers, Jack
@@ramblingraconteur1616 That's a great take-and I agree the pacing of his novels is strange at times. Rabbit Redux, for example seemed like a sequel going nowhere. I think one could read Rabbit Run and basically get the full picture of Updike the novelist with that one book-which is my favorite of his. My favorite work(s) of his are the Olinger Stories and his Facing Nature poetry collection.
@@thetributary8089 my hot take on Rabbit, Run and especially Rabbit Redux is that I found Ruth Leonard the most interesting character in the first book, and I wish Updike had found his way into writing more about her life and perspective rather than the oblique references from Rabbit’s perspective. There was an extraordinary humanity to her character.
Uncanny how parallel our reading paths were. I too read almost exclusively nonfiction until high school, naively thinking at the time that fiction was a waste of time and it was better to learn from nonfiction. Then in 11th grade a particular literature class and teacher had a big influence on me, and soon thereafter I discovered Clifton Fadiman's Lifetime Reading Plan. For a couple of decades I gorged on the classics (I'm 65 so quite a bit older than you) and read almost no contemporary literature until I saw that same NYT list from 2006 and began reading from that list as an intro to good quality contemporary lit. Weird to come across your video and someone who did the same things in about the same way. Today I read a good blend of things and I'm glad for the new NYT list. Thank you for this video. I'll be sure to check out some of your others.
Thanks for the kind words, Bruce. I've never heard of Fadiman's Lifetime Reading Plan, though I've periodically received 1000 Books to Read Before You Die, etc. from well-meaning family members. It's nice to find the blend of genres, periods, and styles that works! I hope you have a great weekend.
Cheers, Jack
I never was enough of a reader to be shaped by such a list (or even notice one). You were already a strong reader when you came upon that list. I found new authors either in an anthology or a mention, probably in an introduction (which already indicates “classic” as opposed to contemporary category). You as a BookTuber are in a position to create your own list, and I might trust your 100 before the motley crew that developed the New York Times list. I’m still deficient on contemporary authors, but I’m short on pressing reasons to try improve myself.
Thanks for the kind words, David. I was very fortunate with the encouragement I received as a young reader and the time that I was able to spend reading as an adolescent and young adult.
I've been thinking about putting together 10-15 books that I recommend from this century and seeing if my wife will do the same. Three that I would certainly include are: Dead Girls by Selva Almada, The Books of Jacob by Olga Tokarczuk, and Of Cattle and Men by Ana Paula Maia.
Cheers, Jack
Man, that NYRB collection is amazing. I recently read their editions of The Vet’s Daughter, My Death and A Month in the Country. All were fantastic.
A Month in the Country is fantastic, a book that compresses so much truth, mystery, and beauty into so few words. That's a book that I can recommend to any reader.
Really enjoyed your thoughts on the list and on particular books you mentioned! I'm looking forward to reading Gaddis for the first time next year
Gaddis crafted two magnificent books, and I hope you enjoy them!
Cheers, Jack
This was such a joy. I loved hearing about your early reading. My own early reading was all over the place, and I could have probably benefited from a similar list. 😅
Thanks for the kind words, Marina. I think that lists can be a nice roadmap, particularly when starting out, but I also have learned to really love "discovering" works that surprise and delight me.
Cheers, Jack
@@ramblingraconteur1616 I have similar ideas on list and even approach my own with a healthy dose of skepticism. Haha. Nothing like going down a rabbit hole and finding new books based solely on your interest and the books/author you are reading.
I conflated Gaddis and Gass as well though I’ve never read either. Great discussion Jack.
Thanks, Brian. You might enjoy Gass's story "The Pedersen Kid" or "In the Heart of the Heart of the Country" and his early novel Omensetter's Luck. I spent (but rarely misspent) a lot of time hunting down both Gass and Gaddis in my early twenties.
Cheers, Jack
Reading Ulysses on an airplane sounds like having a root canal on an off-road safari.
Although I remember spending a long flight reading Absalom, Absalom!, which has become my favorite Faulkner novel. Maybe modernism works best in transit.
I remember being very influenced by that previous list as well. Although now that I've read more widely, I think it's an unforgivable oversight that Pynchon's Mason & Dixon was not included. That might be my vote for the greatest American novel.
I've long wanted to read Mason & Dixon, but I am sort of holding it off as the last Pynchon novel I read. I have one Faulkner novel, one from Raymond Chandler, and a few other writers that I really love. The tedious chaos of airline travel seems to match Joyce's outlook! I hope you're well, Jordan, it's great to hear from you.
Cheers, Jack
Great library behind you. Plenty to keep you busy there. Best wishes.
Thank you!
My wife wants me to read Chabon too. Keep pushing it back. Starting JR next month.
"Cavelier and Klay" is long but well worth the read.
I am really enjoying Kavalier & Clay, Josh. So far, I wholeheartedly recommend it. JR is brilliant and unlike anything else I've ever spent time digging into. It's worth the attention.
Cheers, Jack
Another great video, thanks for sharing! I was wondering, do you have any plans to film a collection video for your Library of America editions?
I may be able to later this year. One side of our office/library is the last redoubt of extraneous furniture and storage after a massive home renovation. I'm hoping that we have it cleared out sometime this fall so that I can use that space.
Thanks for the kind words, as always.
Cheers, Jack
@@ramblingraconteur1616 that’d be fantastic, if possible (I’ve always enjoyed your themed shelf tours/subsets of your collection by publisher/genre)! Home renovations are always stressful and time consuming, fingers crossed it goes smoothly. Thanks for the reply & I look forward to your next video!!
@@NZAnimeManga Something to look forward to then.
The thought of creating this arbitrary list of checkpoints and groundwork to read other books and unlock other parts of the canon is *so* real. "Can't read X until I read Y and probably Z too for context, and maybe W to make sure I might like X"-- and so on. This strategy has dominated the last three years of my life-- and even when I try and shrug it off and just read what I want to, I wake up from a daze and realize my little mini tbr's are just don't the same thing. But even as you illustrate in this video-- it's not usually a waste of time. And yet it always feels like a diversion (to me at least). I wish I understood why this is so engrained in my decision-making making and that lists like the NYT (and even the one The Atlantic just put out for the Great American Novels a few months ago) "notable books" didn't drive so much of my reading.
Side note-- I don't think any author saw more backlash on my side of Twitter from the list than Richard Powers. Everyone seemed to universally clown The Overstory as a "Pulitzer for stupid people". Never heard a word of negativity before this list and now all of a sudden he's like a Malcolm Gladwell-level pseudointellectual. No idea if that's just my niche or if I didn't get the memo that Powers is out.
The whole cottage industry surrounding critically acclaimed literature drives so many readers, particularly when we are trying to discover what should love, what we actually love, and "why" we find it speaks to us. I know that my own experience was shaped by the absence of adults around me whose tastes ran towards the classics or contemporary literary fiction. Without anyone to actually talk to about what I was reading, these types of lists acted as major roadmaps. My next step was finding lists of recommendations from the writers I loved and starting to read all of those titles. That gave me a greater sense of agency, and I feel much more free now as I make choices about what I want to spend time with. Above all, I am glad that I still enjoy diving into books!
Regarding Richard Powers, I am honestly not sure where the backlash started. I really liked The Gold Bug Variations and Galatea. Do you have a favorite among his novels, Ryan?
Cheers, Jack
@@ramblingraconteur1616 another great point about one of the understated benefits of these lists: I don’t come from a literature/English background and so much of the discussion/discourse about these books happens in spaces I’m not, and so when these show up it sort of vacates into public spaces.
But yeah, sometimes that’s for the best. I’ve seen a lot of people passing around the Gass essay about literary awards and how the Pulitzer Prize for fiction is the most sure indicator of a mediocre novel. That obviously hits me as hyperbolic but when it comes from a guy like that it grabs your attention. When it circulates on Twitter, it comes off as a little phony- fair or not. But that’s getting into liking/disliking books for the right/wrong reasons.
I have not read any Powers yet! I own The Overstory, Gold Bug and Orfeo but those were all just thrift finds I squirreled away. The backlash feels so universal it does honestly push it down my TBR but I am definitely intrigued by him in general.
Great ramble, Jack.
Thanks, James!
I love this discussion
Thanks for the kind words!
Jack, I have a question and a comment. First , I did what you did only I found that there were so darn many of the books on that list that I not only didn't like, they either bored me silly or I just was not interested, so I stopped reading the list!
However, I do have another question for you: Have you ever seen a Classics List? A true Greek, Roman, Mary Beards, Mary Renault, Homer, the guys in the 12 Caesars books. Those books on ancient history and the ones the 'classist" folks read? Those are the ones I can craving at the moment. Even Google hasn't helped me. Thoughts please!! I have my notebook and pen out (yep, I have read 90% of the Penguin books on the subject. THANK YOU SO MUCH !!!! Oh there is one person "Goldsworthy" who does history of a particular time period and mine is on its way. Really appreciate any ideas and suggestions. Lee
Hi, Lee, I definitely stopped trying to "complete" the 2006 list at a certain point, sometime around Rabbit at Rest and Helprin's Winter's Tale, though I opened up Kavalier & Clay this week and have been enjoying it so far.
In terms of the Greek and Roman Classics, I can't recall coming across a list as you describe. About twenty years ago, I took a few courses in college, and each had a decent syllabus of required reading that provided me with next steps from the foundation I already had with Herodotus, Homer, and Oedipus Tyrannus. There were a few gems that pushed me deeper into the Classics: Aristophanes' Lysistrata and the histories of Livy. Even the assigned readings did not always take, as it was only recently that I really started to enjoy reading Virgil.
I'm currently midway through The New Roman Empire by Anthony Kaldellis, which is a massive history of the Eastern Roman Empire/Byzantium, and it is very good, though I picked it up from the library as it's extremely expensive.
Are you a fan of Mary Renault's novels? I found mass market editions and have been thinking about reading those. I love I, Claudius and Yourcenar's Memoirs of Hadrian.
Cheers, Jack
On a sentence by sentence basis, Updike is one of the greatest talents in our recent national literature. But man some of his novels are just bad despite being stylistically so good. I wrestle with the question: Is Updikes recycling of themes (religion/adultery) for 50 years a demonstration of his lack of ingenuity or is it noble that he stays true to what he knows? I've read a dozen of his novels, poetry collections, non-fiction, etc. and it remains a love/hate relationship.
I have truly loved a number of John Updike's short stories, and some of his criticism reveals an encompassing and constantly curious mind. I suspect that it's the pacing of his novels that frustrates my reading as much as the subject matter. A number that I have read seem to drift, and then when they coalesce it seems staged or contrived. In terms of his narrow subject matter, I think he genuinely believed in the themes that he wrote about and thought they mattered more than anything else he could discuss.
Do you have a favorite among his novels? I am thinking of trying Marry Me.
Cheers, Jack
@@ramblingraconteur1616 That's a great take-and I agree the pacing of his novels is strange at times. Rabbit Redux, for example seemed like a sequel going nowhere. I think one could read Rabbit Run and basically get the full picture of Updike the novelist with that one book-which is my favorite of his. My favorite work(s) of his are the Olinger Stories and his Facing Nature poetry collection.
@@thetributary8089 my hot take on Rabbit, Run and especially Rabbit Redux is that I found Ruth Leonard the most interesting character in the first book, and I wish Updike had found his way into writing more about her life and perspective rather than the oblique references from Rabbit’s perspective. There was an extraordinary humanity to her character.
@@ramblingraconteur1616 you’re exactly right!
too long a lead in, quit out of it