Fig and crumbled goat’s cheese salad, followed by grilled vegetables with herbed oil, concluding with fresh fruit salad: an excellent and astonishingly healthy (for me) lunch in the restaurant of the Maritime Museum in Barcelona with my good friend Suzanne.
This was the first time that we had seen each other since the summer, and we had the usual lively conversation where the food (excellent though it was) came a distant second to the words with which we surrounded ourselves!
Out of all the things we talked about, the one which has stuck in my mind was related to a comment that Suzanne made as we bewailed the idiocy of so many people in the world who were simply behaving very badly. The perennial question of course, is what is to be done to make the situation better?
Suzanne’s suggestion was that some sort of international organization like The United Nations Organization should encourage people to come together and produce a list of “Ten books that everyone should read” and then actively encourage their dissemination and consumption.
My initial reaction was to say, “Thus starts World War III!” And I could imagine a Lincoln-like figure of authority coming up to Suzanne amid the rubble and wreckage of the World Book Armageddon and saying, “So, you’re the little lady who started this big war!”
The major religions would probably consider their texts a shoe-in as the most important, so the Christian Bible, The Quran, The Talmud, The Vedas, texts from Buddhism, Shintoism, Taoism and Sikhism – and you’ve almost used up the ten slots and you’ve left out religious texts from a significant number of other continents – to say nothing of other more fringe religions that would make a good case for the consideration of their ‘sacred’ texts.
What about considering texts of socio-political importance like Animal Farm and Utopia and The Prince and Leviathan and . . . too many other books to consider. Or texts about history, or art, or architecture, or music, or philosophy, or . . . so the list goes on.
I can imagine the discussion. And I can imagine more easily the discussion descending into rancour and outright violence. So, just to simplify somewhat the problems surrounding any choice, let’s try and limit things, so that the macro problems of some sort of ‘absolute’ text to go into the World UNO Ten Selected Books, can be considered from a more domestic perspective.
And that ‘perspective’ suggests another problem.
If I think about my personal choice of Ten Texts, then I would start from a background of English Literature and Literature in English. If I push myself further, then my choice might become a little more pan-European, but my selection will still be limited to fairly conventional Great Literature and Great Thinkers, who are overwhelmingly Western, white, and dead.
For the sake of attempting something that is within my range, instead of trying to cope with my upbringing, perspective, cultural background, ethnicity, class, etc. I will embrace what I have to work with and think about something that I can achieve and relate things directly to my read experience.
I will think about the problem of the Global nature suggested by Suzanne’s thought and suggestion, by seeing how something would work by using my experience in the limited area of English Literature, and choose ten books that might fit the bill.
I find that I am presented not with a range of opportunity, but with a disturbing number of questions about choice.
Should I be thinking of a History of English Literature approach that starts with something like Beowulf, takes in Chaucer and goes on to Shakespeare as writers providing the first three texts? But all three pose real problems: Beowulf is written in Early English; Chaucer writes in Middle English and Shakespeare writes in, well, Shakespearean English – none of which is easy to read if you are used to Modern English.
So, should the choice of Ten Books be not on a strict historical approach but something more like a populist approach, something which more easily invites a reader in, rather than something that demands a certain amount of knowledge and sensitivity to time and place to gain a full understanding of the text?
But, I feel that there might also be a “no pain, no gain” element inherent in the worth of a significant piece of literature (and I can feel the speech marks forming around many of the words that I have used in the sentence so far) so that if you don’t have to make an effort to understand or appreciate the quality of the writing and the thought behind it, then perhaps it is no more than entertainment, and is not something to be considered Great or even Worthwhile literature.
So, I will further limit myself to books that are unintimidating, works that can be understood by an educated reader. I know that ‘understood’ and ‘educated’ are words that demand some sort of definition, and perhaps the constant feeling that more explanation is necessary before a selection can be made is an indication of the difficulty of the whole project.
But, let me stick to my limits of books in English Literature; reasonably accessible; in some ways of universal significance.
So, my choice of Ten Texts That Everyone Should Read are:
1 Animal Farm by George Orwell
2 Songs of Innocence and Experience by William Blake
3 Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
4 Great Expectations by Charles Dickens
5 Emma by Jane Austen
6 Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll
7 Lord of the Flies by William Golding
8 A Modest Proposal by Jonathan Swift
9 Rain and other stories by Somerset Maugham
10 Stalky and Co by Rudyard Kipling
I’ve just typed them, and I am already having second and third and fourth thoughts, and I think that this is something that I will come back to!
But Suzanne’s comment has made me think, and, as these are only my first thoughts, perhaps it is only fair that I return to this concept another time!
