Apropos our recent "meme" post (and watch this space in the days ahead for MOTEV's One Book Meme), we were asked about our James Wood reading list. It's essentially a list of books we've collected over the years that Wood has written about approvingly at one time or another. We've read a number of these since then but we thought in the interest of thoroughness, we'd put all the titles up. The James Wood Three Foot Shelf of Reading includes:
Don Quixote - Miguel Cervantes
Loving - Henry Green
Living - Henry Green
Party Going - Henry Green
Zeno's Conscience - Italo Svevo
Tristram Shandy - Laurence Sterne
A House for Mr. Biswas - V.S. Naipaul
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie - Muriel Spark
Hunger - Knut Hamsun
Short Stories - Anton Chekhov
Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
The Charterhouse of Parma - Stendahl
The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum - Heinrich Boll
To The Lighthouse - Virginia Woolf
Herzog - Saul Bellow
Humboldt's Gift - Saul Bellow
Collected Stories - Saul Bellow
Dead Souls - Nikolai Gogol
The Radetzky March - Joseph Roth
A House For Mr. Biswas is great. You'd never guess from its emotional generosity that Naipaul is such a bastard in real life.
Posted by: Nav | August 07, 2006 at 01:35 AM
Thanks for posting that. At least I've read some of them, so not so much a broken estate as one in need of further work!
Posted by: PaulSweeney | August 07, 2006 at 02:38 AM
Great list! Some of my favorites are one there; others I'd like to read. Tristram Shandy is one of the best.
Posted by: Dorothy | August 07, 2006 at 05:23 AM
Nice to see Boell's Katherina Blum there. It's really an amazing little book that packs a huge emotional wallop. Guess I need to find out who Henry Green is...
Posted by: Ken | August 07, 2006 at 09:44 AM
Hate to spoil the party, but I recall that Wood gave a very strong review of Ian McEwan's Saturday in the New Republic.
Posted by: Michael O'D | August 08, 2006 at 07:33 AM
Not spoiling anything, Michael. This isn't a list of every book Wood's reviewing positively. (That would include Brick Lane, and Robert Alter's The Five Books of Moses, among others.) It's more a list of books he appears, over time, to have given particular importance to, books that are clearly some kind of touchstone for him. They constitute "essential reading" ...
Posted by: TEV | August 08, 2006 at 08:58 AM
I would also add The Stories of J. F. Powers, described by Wood as containing "stories surely among the finest written by an American. And probably Bohumil Hrabal's Too Loud A Solitude, a novel he raves about as often as possible. And rightly so.
Posted by: Rogério Casanova | August 11, 2006 at 09:53 AM