[lit-ideas] Re: P.S.
- From: David Ritchie <ritchierd@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Mon, 22 Jan 2007 12:08:35 -0800
Someone, off-list, wrote in response to my father's reading list,
PS: What are your 4 favorite novels?
Sometimes the simplest questions cause the most turmoil. You'd think
after umpteen years of reading and a first degree in Literature, I
could answer your query easily. The easy answer would be a flip one--I
like a lot of books, so I tend to recommend the ones I've most recently
read. I'm currently reading P.G. Wodehouse, "Full Moon," and finding
it a delight.
But I think you're asking, "What would the equivalent be to your
father's list?" Here goes:
P.G. Wodehouse would certainly be on it. I like almost all of the
eighty or so works of his that I've read. I think I'd choose "Joy in
the Morning," because it's so funny and because it was written, at a
solid four or five pages per day, while Wodehouse was locked up in jail
under suspicion at the end of the Second World War. No trace of the
surrounding circumstances can be found in the novel. There's a lesson
in concentration.
Next would be something by Graham Greene, a hommage really to my
Serious Youth and the kind of writing I used to like. I'd pick a work
full of Big Ideas and great swirly themes and what I can only call an
"attractive bleakness," the sort of thing you get in film noire.
Also--second stipulation-- a novel that is both terse and short, for
that was my taste at the time--probably partly because I had to do so
much reading for my degree. Sartre and Hemingway and Camus and Greene
and Waugh and even (strange inclusion) Bernanos all blurr in my memory,
books that suggest that some curtain can be lifted and a glimpse of the
universe's cynical or godly or even nihilistic workings may be on
offer. I think maybe, I'd choose "The Quiet American" to represent
this category, but you can get something pretty similar from John Le
Carre's thrillers about his character Smiley. Polar opposite from P.G.
Wodehouse.
Something driven by plot would be next. "Snow Falling on Cedars" or
"Gorky Park," detective novels, that sort of thing. The problem here
is that all works of this kind that I can recall (meaning that I've
read them recently) have been series--everything by Bernard Cornwell,
Forrester's Hornblower series, O'Brian's Aubrey Maturin series,
Alexander Kent's Bolithio series--which read like one extended story.
Again a contradiction; I have moved from a love of short novels to a
love of long series and of the kind of historical fiction that adds
what I'll call "living detail," how many shots per minute were needed
if you wanted to defeat a French column attack. (Maybe that's a "dying
detail"?) I've never developed a taste for the greats of this genre;
Dickens and Thackeray for example, bore me. I'm not fond of George
Eliot. I simply can't remember Walter Scott or Jane Austen or the any
of the Bronte sisters beyond the kind of glimpses you bring to mind
when someone asks, "Have you ever been to such and such a place?" And
you have.
Lastly? Douglas Adams, "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy." How
shallow, how diverting.
David Ritchie,
Portland, Oregon
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