In the Company of Books
On writing a book called 1,000 Books to Read Before You Die, with reflections on how we read, and why.
When you’ve spent fourteen years writing a book, your editor is not the only person who wants to know why it took so long. But imagine being tasked with culling from a library’s collection one thousand volumes to represent a lifetime’s reading. Where would you start? What principles would govern your selection? How would you explain the reasons for your choices? That thought experiment will give you some idea of why it took me so long to deliver 1,000 Books to Read Before You Die.
Any exercise in curation provokes questions of discernment, epistemology, and even philosophy that can easily lead to befuddlement, and in the case of books, since they are carriers of such varied knowledge in themselves, it can be paralyzing. A book about a thousand books could take so many different shapes. It could be a canon of classics; it could be a history of human thought and a tour of its significant disciplines; it might be a record of popular delights (or even delusions). But the crux of the difficulty was a less complicated truth: Readers read in so many different ways, any one standard of measure is inadequate. No matter their pedigree, inveterate readers read the way they eat — for pleasure as well as nourishment, indulgence as much as education, and sometimes for transcendence, too. Hot dogs one day, haute cuisine the next.
Keeping such diversity of appetite in mind, and hoping to have something to satisfy every kind of reading yen, I wanted to make 1,000 Books to Read Before You Die expansive in its tastes, encompassing revered classics and commercial favorites, flights of escapist entertainment and enlightening works of erudition.
There had to be room for novels of imaginative reach and histories with intellectual grasp. And since the project in its title invoked a lifetime, there had to be room for books for children and adolescents. What criteria could I apply to accommodate such a menagerie, to give plausibility to the idea that Where the Wild Things Are belongs in the same collection as In Search of Lost Time, that Aeneas and Sherlock Holmes could be companions, that a persuasive collection could begin, in chronological terms, with The Epic of Gilgamesh, inscribed on Babylonian tablets more than four thousand years ago, and end with Ellen Ullman’s personal history of technology, Life in Code, published in 2017?
Once people know you are writing a book called 1,000 Books to Read Before You Die, you can never enjoy a dinner party in quite the way you did before.
I came upon the clue I needed in a passage written by the critic Edmund Wilson, describing “the miscellaneous learning of the bookstore, unorganized by any larger purpose, the undisciplined undirected curiosity of the indolent lover of reading.” There, I knew instinctively, was a workable conceit: What if I had a bookstore that could hold only 1,000 volumes, and I wanted to ensure it held not only books for all time but also books for the moment, books to be savored or devoured in a night? A shop where any reading inclination — be it for thrillers or theology, or theological thrillers — might find reward. In the end, I was back in my favorite haunt, a browser’s version of paradise.
That end, of course, was only the beginning. I still had to wrangle with myriad knotty concerns. I spent months — was it years? — arranging and rearranging lists of several thousand titles. What classics were compelling enough to earn a spot? Which kids’ books so timeless they made the grade? What currents of thought retained their currency? Which life stories were larger than their protagonist’s life span? Not least, what authors did I love so much that they might be ushered in without their credentials being subject to too much scrutiny?
My answers to all of the above questions almost surely will not be yours. Even where we agree, my description of a book might not highlight the things that have made you love it. But one lesson of bookstore learning is that questions are always the important part of any inquiry, that the impulse to explore is more rewarding than the need to define with certainty. I’ll go further and assert that, as far as reading is concerned, the conviction that books provide answers rather than questions — that they are perfected products rather than agents of discovery for author as well as reader — is a dangerous output of academic education. The insight encoded in the greatest books is seldom expressed directly, but is revealed obliquely in the stance that, for example, Henry James takes to the unfolding of our large and small hesitations (in which so much of life is suspended, always), or Virginia Woolf traces through the hearts and minds of people who are networked in their sentiments, or Elena Ferrante takes toward the structures of gender and class that are embodied not in political ideas but in the people on the street where we live, whether they know it or not: shoemakers, grocers, lovers, friends. A text is never static, for every sentence wends its way into the ear and mind of one reader differently than it is welcomed, or invites itself, into the ear and mind of another. Just as a musician brings a score to life, so a reader animates an author’s pages; as Emerson said, “‘Tis the good reader that makes the good book.” And true readers talk and listen to one another, recommend and contend, make lists in the service of their search for another volume; it’s all part of the dance of serendipity and conversation that sweeps up all true book lovers time and again.
Once people know you are writing a book called 1,000 Books to Read Before You Die, you can never enjoy a dinner party in quite the way you did before. No matter how many books you’ve managed to consider, and no matter how many pages you’ve written, every conversation with a fellow reader is almost sure to provide new titles to seek out, or, more worryingly, to expose an egregious omission or a gap in your knowledge — to say nothing of revealing the privileges and prejudices, however unwitting, underlying your points of reference.
Although my choice of books has been informed across the years by the generosity of other readers in the guise of teachers, friends, work colleagues, literary collaborators, correspondents, customers, and acquaintances, it is in the end mine, and as such personal and sometimes peculiar. At its core is an informed itinerary through literary culture, from Homer and Sappho to George Eliot and Emily Dickinson; from The Arabian Nights, The Canterbury Tales, and The Decameron to Shakespeare, Montaigne, and Cervantes; from Austen to Dickens to Gabriel García Márquez and Toni Morrison; from Ralph Waldo Emerson to James Baldwin, Walt Whitman to Claudia Rankine; from Aeschylus to Zadie Smith, Zola to Ali Smith. It’s not a survey course in literature, although one could easily chart one through its entries, just as one could also map a journey in ideas from Plato to Darwin to Simone de Beauvoir, or in religious thinking from Saint Augustine to Simone Weil, in diaries from Samuel Pepys to Sarah Manguso, or in history from the Trojan War to Vietnam.
A good book is the opposite of a selfie.
Whatever route through my thousand you set out on, you’ll find tempting distractions in every direction. You’ll come upon books about insects, fish, and race horses; perspectives on revolutions political and scientific; profound thoughts on food as well as philosophy. There are comic stylists (Nora Ephron, Machado de Asis, P. G. Wodehouse) and comics artists (Alison Bechdel, Art Spiegelman, Jillian Tamaki). Stories are told without regard to length (Lady Murasaki’s The Tale of Genji, Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables) and with great precision (Yasunari Kawabata’s Palm-of-the-Hand Stories, the Selected Stories of Alice Munro). Lives are recollected with a biographer’s attention (Jean Strouse’s Alice James, David McCullough’s Truman) or a memoirist’s élan (Gertrude Stein’s The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, Mary Karr’s The Liars’ Club, Richard Rodriguez’s Hunger of Memory). Especially intriguing are works often tagged as historical oddities that should be monuments: The Book of the City of Ladies by Christine de Pizan and Corinne, or Italy by Madame de Staël come to mind. More than a few of my selections may strike you as arguable, and some may provoke you to exclaim, “Are you kidding me?” Although I hope you’ll be inspired to track your own reading against the works I’ve written about, I know for certain that you’ll be making a list of all the books you love that I’ve left out.
For years a thousand books felt like far too many to get my head around, but now it seems too few by several multiples. So let me say what already should be obvious: 1,000 Books to Read Before You Die is neither comprehensive nor authoritative, even if a good number of the titles assembled here would be on most lists of essential reading. It is meant to be an invitation to a conversation — even a merry argument — about the books and authors that are missing as well as the books and authors included, because the question of what to read next is the best prelude to even more important ones, like who to be, and how to live. Such faith in reading’s power, and the learning and imagination it nourishes, is something I’ve been lucky enough to take for granted as both fact and freedom; it’s something I fear may be forgotten in the great amnesia of our in-the-moment newsfeeds and algorithmically defined identities, which hide from our view the complexity of feelings and ideas that books demand we quietly, and determinedly, engage.
To get lost in a book, be it story or study, is inherently to acknowledge the voice of another, to broaden one’s perspective beyond the confines of one’s own understanding. A good book is the opposite of a selfie; the right book at the right time can expand our lives in the way love does, making us more thoughtful, more generous, more brave, more alert to the world’s wonders and more pained by its inequities, more wise, more kind.
