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Books Overboard: What Would You Throw Away?

Thursday, 16th July 2009

Parlour game time! The Literary Canon is an intimidating thing at the best of times but these days it's becoming grotesquely bloated. It could do with losing some weight. So, in that spirit, it's time to think of what books could safely be ditched without causing too much pain or guilt. The Second Pass starts the game by choosing ten books that (they think) your life might be improved by ignoring:

White Noise by Don DeLillo
Absalom, Absalom by William Faulkner
One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez
The Road by Cormac McCarthy
The Rainbow by D. H. Lawrence
On the Road by Jack Kerouac
The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen
The USA Trilogy by John Dos Passos
Jacob’s Room by Virginia Woolf
A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens

At The American Scene Noah Millman suggests this isn't quite fair, and that it's too easy to pick on someone's lesser works (Tale of Two Cities or Jacob's Room for instance) while also wondering if anyone really reads John Dos Passos anymore*. In other words, is he still in the canon? And is Cormac McCarthy part of it yet? Plus, as Millman says, Franzen's desperate desire to achieve canonical status almost makes it necessary to throw him off the boat in advance of his elevation to that status...

Anyway, Millman has some suggestions of his own too. But what canonical works would Spectator readers throw overboard, wishing them good riddance and a swift journey down to Davey Jones's Locker?

It would be easy to nominate Finnegan's Wake but that's a book that truly no-one reads anyway and so that makes it tempting to choose Ulysses. But actually, even a sceptic such as myself can enjoy Ulysses if it's broken up into sensibly-sized Bloom-nuggets. Read the first and last chapters, plus two others chosen more or less at random and you're likely to have drawn enough water from that well. Then, in later years, pick it up and read a page or two at a time before putting it away again and you'll be able to reflect that it's become an acquaitance with whom you're happy to share a drink once a year. So, Joyce stays. You might hate the book and often be bored by it, but I'm not sure one can quite get rid of it.

I'm not convinced that's so obviously true of Salman Rushdie. Everyone says Midnight's Children is his masterpiece and perhaps it is. Certainly, The Satanic Verses can't be, though it too is often lavishly-praised. The fatwa was appalling (and its consequences terrible) but so is the novel. Rambling, sophomoric, self-indulgent and, consequently and unsurprisingly, crushingly boring. That's my memory of it anyway and I don't think I've read anything by Rushdie since. My loss perhaps, but overboard it goes. (And I suspect it's only because I haven't read it that Midnight's Children is saved...)

I'm tempted to include Emile Zola's Germinal too, but am not sure that it's fair to do so, if only because it's so long since I read it and I've forgotten so much from it save its length and, in my memory at least, an unremitting bleakness that, eventually, one suspected had become a mark of honour for the author and a penance for the reader. Perhaps that's unfair, but I'd rather go back to Therese Raquin or La Bete Humaine anytime...

Finally, a brace of twentieth century classics to throw overboard: The Old Man and the Sea and For Whom the Bell Tolls. The former has always reeked of fakery to me and seemed to be trying-too-damn-hard-all-the-damn-time; the latter is flabby and ponderous and filled with far too much Big (or, to be fair, Biggish) Thinking for its own good. Why read these when you can have the short stories and The Sun Also Rises? Actually, I'd much rather return to Across the River and Into the Trees than go fishing with Santiago again.

So, there's my choices**. What would you abandon? And why?

*OK, someone must, but how many people do you know who do? That actually makes it seem worth going back to Dos Passos. Could be interesting!

**That is, today's choices. Tomorrow's might be different...

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Tim Hedges

July 16th, 2009 6:44am Report this comment

I have read Lampedusa's 'The Leopard' twice in English and once in Italian and apart from the famous quote about things changing in order to remain the same, found it shallow and poorly written. Also the title is properly translated not 'Leopard' but 'Ocelot'.

cuffleyburgers

July 16th, 2009 7:23am Report this comment

Unquestionably Birdsong by Sebastian Faulks if it was in there in the first place.

Das Kapital ditto, mindnumbingly boring and a frankly ridiculous book to have inspired so much evil.

Jonathan Cashdan

July 16th, 2009 7:40am Report this comment

What a refreshing idea for a book list!

JD Salinger's Catcher in the Rye has my vote as the most overrated novel I have had the misfortune to encounter - and by far.

To tell you why would require me to reread it. No way!

Austin Barry

July 16th, 2009 8:43am Report this comment

All novels by Martin Amis, being self-consciously over-written and with all the narrative tension of tide-tables. Mart should stick with his essays which are excellent.

Nick

July 16th, 2009 9:16am Report this comment

I'd go for pretty much the direct opposite advice for reading Ulysses - don't bother with any of the bits which don't have Bloom in them (which from memory includes about the first 70 pages), but do read the rest of it straight through. Wonderful book, slightly spoiled by (most of) the Stephen Dedalus bits.

Unsurprisingly, then, I think Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is staggeringly tedious.

And I'd also nominate the whole striving, thrusting, American with a capital A, this is great writing dammit, masculine, bloated, pompous second half of the 20th century school - Saul Bellow, Don DeLillo, etc. Biggest dead-end in literary history.

John Lea

July 16th, 2009 10:25am Report this comment

'Money' by Martin Amis was big, flashy and over-hyped, but ultimately read as shallow and dull. Like watching an interview with Katie Price.

I would second 'The Rainbow' as one of the all-time bores, and add Proust's 'A La Recherche' to the list of overrated tripe.

Cuffleyburgers: I can't believe you didn't like Birdsong. It's a classic.

Ben

July 16th, 2009 10:35am Report this comment

I'm going to defend The Leopard, and USA. They are both great. On the downside, anything by Umberto Eco, JK Rowling, and the dreaded Rushdie.

By the way, if you wish to throw in movies too, anything by Tarantino, he is utterly crap.

Carl Gardner

July 16th, 2009 11:33am Report this comment

Midnight's Children is quite good for about 150 pages, I'd say, then loses all sense of direction. Once it's in Bangladesh, cut your losses.

I disagree about Money, it's the one good Martin Amis novel I've read. But London Fields could easily be lost. I couldn't even read it on jury service, for heaven's sake.

Vernon God Little was awful - the worst novel ever to have won the Booker? No, I suppose there's a fair amount of competition for that, what with James Kelman's work, which I'd bin.

Both Paradise and especially Day by AL Kennedy were worth throwing out.

The entire Lord of the Rings thing. Balls from start to finish.

And anything by Nicola Barker.