Today, Carolina Journal’s Mitch Kokai discusses great books with J. Peder Zane, former books editor of The News & Observer and author of The Top Ten: Writers Pick Their Favorite Books. The interview aired on Carolina Journal Radio. (Go to http://carolinajournal.com/cjradio/ to find a station near you or to learn about the weekly CJ Radio podcast.)
Kokai: This is a very interesting topic, the top books of all time as prepared, described, compiled by authors themselves. And how did you get involved in this project?
Zane: Probably the inspiration for it came from the mega book sellers that we have, such as Barnes and Noble and also internet booksellers like Amazon.com, which in the last few years have made almost every book that’s ever been published available to us. The problem is, is that possibilities can lead to paralysis. Choice can lead to confusion. So, you walk into these bookstores, or you go online, and when anything is possible, it’s almost impossible to figure out where to start. So, what I wanted to do was to have people who know, tell me what I ought to be reading. And who better than the world’s greatest writers?
Kokai: And we found that as you put together a list of 125 different authors, that the top book on their list was Anna Karenina, the classic from Tolstoy. Did that surprise you at all?
Zane: In fact, the top ten list, that featured also Madame Bovary, Tolstoy’s War and Peace, Nabokov’s Lolita — if there is one message that they send to you, it is that your high school teachers knew what they were talking about. These truly are great books. But I think that what was just as interesting in the findings was that the 125 writers named 544 different books on their lists. That means that each list had about four unique books — four books that nobody else mentioned. And so, I think that while we use the idea of the top 10 as an organizing principle for the book, the real message of the book is not, “Here are the 10 books that you should read,” but that there are hundreds and hundreds of fabulous books out there awaiting your discovery.
Kokai: Now, one of the ways that you could have used this information is to just put together one long list of those 544 books and said, “Here’s what’s been most popular.” Instead, in your book, The Top Ten, you describe these books. And if it is one that a person doesn’t know, or read so long ago that he forgets, he learns a little bit more about it.
Zane: Well, a couple of the goals that I have with the book is, one, I hope that fans of Tom Wolfe and Stephen King and Michael Connelly and Annie Proulx and Anita Shreve and all the other writers that are in here can turn to this book, see what are the favorite books of their favorite writers. If you like Scott Turow, it might be interesting to know that he is a big fan of Faulkner. What I also hope, though, is that people don’t just look at the picks, but think about reading some of those books. And so, the synopses we have of all 544 books are meant as a brief introduction, so that you can say to yourself, “Where do I want to start in working through this list of these all-time greats?”
The third thing that I am hoping, which is just as important, is that readers will compile their own top 10 lists. Because I think that when you make a list of the books that matter to you, you are not just jotting down titles, you are learning something about yourself, about your sense, your sensibility, your taste. I think it will bring back memories of when you first encountered the books that mattered to you most. That’s what the writers told me, time and time again, not only that it was very difficult to limit themselves to just 10 books, but as they were assembling that list, it really made them ask themselves what matters to me and why, and why is a book great.
And a book is great not just because it is technically brilliant, but also because readers have an emotional connection to that book. And that’s why I would say there are no right or wrong answers when it comes to what’s a great book. A great book is a book that matters to you. I mean, some people may be surprised, but I wasn’t. But the work of Tom Clancy is included on some lists here. Stephen King’s books are listed here. Popular fiction can also be great fiction if it’s fiction that matters to you.
Kokai: We talked about some of the main books on the list, the ones that got the most responses, and the fact that these are books that we all know from high school. What big surprises did you find?
Zane: I think the biggest surprise was that before I started soliciting the lists from the writers, I made my own top 10 list, and four of my top five picks were not mentioned on anybody else’s list. So, I don’t know what Tom Wolfe or Norman Mailer or Andrew McCall-Smith or any of the other contributors were thinking. I can’t believe that anybody could make a list that didn’t have my favorite books on it! But in fact, that was the case. And that was one of the reasons why we created a Web site where readers can post their own top 10 lists. It’s www.toptenbooks.net. Because the range of great books out there can barely be contained, even in a book that includes 544 titles. I’m hoping that The Top Ten is a good start. But it’s limitless. And that’s the great thing about literature — there is always one more book or 10 more books or 100 more books to be discovered.
Kokai: There may be some people who are in the same boat that I am — that we read a lot of these books when we were younger because we had to. Is it worth our while to go back, look at something like The Top Ten or visit the Top Ten Web site and find out that this is the type of book that I remember reading back in high school in college when I had to, and it might be worthwhile to review it again and try to discover why it was that people think it is so great and not just something that I have to write a book report about?
Zane: Exactly. And I think that there is nothing better than doing something because you want to, rather than because you have to. And another interesting finding here that’s not surprising, but we rank the authors by the number of titles mentioned. And it was no surprise — the winner was William Shakespeare.
Kokai: I am shocked. Shocked!
Zane: With 11 titles mentioned, William Faulkner was next with six. And then Henry James also had six. Hemingway had five. I mean, what that is telling you is — these are great books, these are great writers. You knew that, but maybe you haven’t thought about it in a while. And one of the things we wanted to do was to remind people of this greatness. I remember the first time I read Moby Dick. I was 24 years old. And I put it down, and I wished I had never read it, so I could pick it up again and read it for the first time, because it was that great. Not every great book is going to move you in that way.
I think one of the reasons that we read, and we read a lot, is to come across those few books that we really have a powerful connection with. But if this book can lead people to discover two or three books — if you can add two or three books to your own personal top 10 list in the next 10 years because of a book that you encountered here — I can tell you, I had never read George Simenon before, who is a terrific. He is a French writer. He is actually Belgian, but he wrote in French. He published more than 500 books during his lifetime, including the Maigret series, mystery series. Never read him before. Ian Pears, who is a great British mystery writer, recommended him. I can’t stop reading him. He is an incredible discovery for me, someone I had never heard of before. And that is a real joy.