100 easiest to think of off the top of his head
Oh goody, a list. On the other hand it’s a pretty odd list. It’s Robert McCrum’s choice for The 100 best nonfiction books of all time – in English, though that’s not stated, and the last one is the bible which was not written in English. But that’s the only translation as far as I could tell, unless Popper wrote The Open Society in German, which I don’t think he did.
But McCrum includes poetry and drama in non-fiction, which seems like cheating. It lets him include the First Folio, which by all means, but non-fiction, really?
Anyway the contemporary and modern choices seem pretty meh to me – more most popular or most familiar than best. Naomi Klein’s No Logo? Top 100 of all time? Come on. And the Oliver Sacks book that was translated into a movie, when there are others that are such gems.
22. A Grief Observed by CS Lewis (1961)
This powerful study of loss asks: “Where is God?” and explores the feeling of solitude and sense of betrayal that even non-believers will recognise.23. The Elements of Style by William Strunk and EB White (1959)
Dorothy Parker and Stephen King have both urged aspiring writers towards this crisp guide to the English language where brevity is key.
No no no.
41. How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie (1936)
The original self-help manual on American life – with its influence stretching from the Great Depression to Donald Trump – has a lot to answer for.
Indeed, but that doesn’t make it one of the best.
73. Tales from Shakespeare by Charles and Mary Lamb (1807)
A troubled brother-and-sister team produced one of the 19th century’s bestselling volumes and simplified the complexity of Shakespeare’s plays for younger audiences.
Again, doesn’t make it a best.
93. Hydriotaphia, Urn Burial, or A Brief Discourse of the Sepulchral Urns Lately Found in Norfolk by Sir Thomas Browne (1658)
Browne earned his reputation as a “writer’s writer” with this dazzling short essay on burial customs.
Now you’re talking. Urn Burial is extraordinary. You can find it online, too, and it’s not really a book, more a long essay.
100. King James Bible: The Authorised Version (1611)
It is impossible to imagine the English-speaking world celebrated in this series without the King James Bible, which is as universal and influential as Shakespeare.
But it’s hardly non-fiction now is it?!
Got any nominees?
What a hotch-potch! What’s ‘Waiting for Godot’ (among other things) doing there? Does McCrum suppose that anything that is not a novel is non-fiction?
I was horrified, I am afraid, to see in second place Joan Didion’s ‘The Year of Magical Thinking’, a book which I disliked very much because it seemed far more interested in talking about being a successful writer, and being married to one, than with its ostensible subject – one barely got the sense of any personality, either that of the husband or that of the writer, since the writer’s feelings barely seemed to be about her husband at all (well, I suppose a personality in the her case does come across in a back-handed way: a cold one that likes to have or to show an obsession about writing and the writer’s life).
A far better prose book about the death of someone close to you is ‘Time Lived, Without Its Flow’ by Denise Riley, who is to my mind the best British poet writing at the moment. She is witty, truthful, splendidly lacking in sentimentality, and in consequence genuinely moving. The book was written after the death of her son, Jacob. ‘A Part Song’ is a sequence of poems also about her son’s death. Here’s one of them:
Each child gets cannibalised by its years.
It was a man who died, and in him died
The large-eyed boy, then the teen peacock
In the unremarked placid self-devouring
That makes up being alive. But all at once
Those natural overlaps got cut, then shuffled
Tight in a block, their layers patted square.
***
The penultimate poem begins with the wonderful and terrible line:
She do the bereaved in different voices…
Ahh – perhaps you know this but for anyone who doesn’t – that’s a variation on T S Eliot’s working title for The Waste Land: “he do the police in different voices” – which is from Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend.
Yes, the list is a hodge-podge with an awful lot of crap included.
Yes, I know that!
All good wishes for the Year of the Dog (here in East Asia, where we are hoping a war will not start or, rather, be started)! – my year, though my pride in being a Dog is much tempered by the reflection that I share the year with Donald Drumpf.
Wow. I don’t consider myself qualified to write that kind of article, and yet even I would find Strunk & White and Dale Carnegie (seriously?!) to be hilariously unworthy of such a list.
Anyway, for a non-terrible list (or list of lists of lists..) I’d recommend TheMillions.com
It is far easier to be a knocker than to be a praiser. That is what is so good about these ‘greats’ book lists. But what I find a bit depressing about them is the awareness they raise in me of the number of good books I have never read, and probably never will.
The absence of George Orwell on these lists indicates something else I suppose, like greatness, genius if you like, is only in the eyes of an ever-diminishing number of beholders; ever temporary, and never universally recognised.
Sorry George, but you can’t win them all.
And where is Henry Lawson?
“Henry who?” Did someone ask?
http://bushmusicclub.blogspot.com.au/2017/07/report-on-henry-lawson-festival-in-como.html
I didn’t ask! I have been very fond of both Henry Lawson & Banjo Patterson since an Australian friend of my father’s gave me their works when I was 11 or 12.
But: Bacon’s Essays; Hardy’s ‘A Mathematician’s Apology’… but I think people make lists in order to be disagreed with; and the trouble with a category like ‘non-fiction’, is that it so large, shapeless and vague that even if you don’t stick Seamus Heaney’s ‘North’ (a splendid poetry collection, I admit’) and various plays in it, the criteria of choice are so various that….
My god, Henry Lawson fans abroad! What a refreshing sight. And I always felt that his writing edged out that of Banjo Paterson’s, largely because of his refusal to romanticise the lives of those he wrote about. And yet despite that, it was always evident that his sympathies lay with them, and that if he made their lives seem harsh, it was always out of an honesty borne of respect for them. The Drover’s Wife and Going Blind I always found especially haunting.
[Off topic, OB, you might find this post insteresting. More here.
Oh, a reading list! I like a good reading list! Or even a bad one, to be honest…
What? That… dunce chose the wrong Elizabeth David!
Seriously though. Maybe I am biased but French Provencial Cooking is the superior book.
Hmmm… I think I might allow poetry under the non-fiction banner, but drama? (Even drama in a poetical form, like Renaissance drama). No. Drama tells a story in a way that poetry hasn’t always, and rarely does today.
And Dale Carnegie?? Highly influential, yes, but as you point out, that’s a very different metric of worth .
Tim Harris @ 3 – happy new year to you! Dog or cat or otherwise.
Omar @ 5 – but Orwell is there; you must have missed it. Road to Wigan Pier. But it should have been the essays, which are available in a very fat Everyman edition.
Seconding Tim on Bacon’s Essays, which I thought of later yesterday when it was too late to add it to this. Also, Hazlitt ffs. He includes Strunk & White and Dale fucking Carnegie and omits Hazlitt.
And then, if we’re going to allow poetry, then hey! Wordsworth! Keats! Byron! (Yes, Byron. Don Juan is brilliantly witty.) Dickinson, Donne, Pope.
Seriously? I may have to re-read that. My main experience was a droning professor reading it out loud to us college freshmen in his droning professor voice, and my nearly going to sleep (I pride myself on never having actually gone to sleep in class, but he almost ruined that record for me). I’ll give it another look.
And yes, Dickinson, definitely Dickinson…and Percy Shelley’s Ozymandias.
Yep, seriously. I was dumbfounded myself – I knew only his familiar, more grandiose stuff, and DJ is not that.
Tim H. @#6:
Spot on.
I have been a fan of old Henry since first being presented with him at primary school, where our teacher was also a Gallipoli veteran who gave us a first-hand account of that campaign: a bit like having Orwell there to teach us about the Spanish Civil War. I have also done a pilgrimage to Anzac Cove and been shown over it by an excellent Turkish guide and historian.
As for the absence of Paterson, what other can one expect from a modern academic? Paterson merely wrote the finest narrative poem in the English language, which I know by heart, with Mathew Arnold (Sohrab and Rustum) in second place and breathing down his neck.
OB: Thanks. Orwell @ #39 in the list with The Road to Wigan Pier
Unlike the case of say, textbooks of physics, there is no objective yardstick for the judgement of creative literature. How does one prove that Shakespeare is superior to “Dale fucking Carnegie”?
Or, for that matter, to the adventures of Donald fucking Duck?
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43604/sohrab-and-rustum
https://www.poetrylibrary.edu.au/poets/paterson-a-b-banjo/the-man-from-snowy-river-0001004
Ah, The Man from Snowy River and Sohrab & Rustum – I know neither of them by heart, alas (though I have many poems by heart), but admire both – and with the latter, it was that final verse paragraph that moved me greatly when I was a teenager.
But, forgive me, there surely are very good reasons as to why Shakespeare is a greater writer than Matthew Arnold, say, and I could begin to give them – the range, the inventiveness, the energy, the insight into feelings, the memorable characters created, the difficult themes intelligently addressed… But I do not wish to get into this ‘objective/subjective’ argument, since it is a sort of red herring, trotted out mostly by the scientistically minded (I am not accusing you of this!), to whom science is all ‘objective’ and about knowledge, whereas the arts have nothing to with knowledge, are expressive of mere emotion, and are therefore subjective and arbitrary – and arbitrary where their value is concerned, too. (‘Subjective’ has become pretty well a synonym for ‘arbitrary’) This ‘objective/subjective’ dichotomy is wholly inadequate as an approach to anything.
Yeah. “Proving” anything isn’t the issue and if it were it still wouldn’t be in this post. It’s just all subjective, maaaaaaan, and I’m not claiming anything else.
I will however say that McCrum’s list is embarrassingly lazy.
Seemingly true, but…(yeah, there’s always a “but” isn’t there?)
Many people who are in the arts think they can tell what is objectively better. They blithely quote “rules” for art (mostly dating back to Aristotle), and spout things like “rule of three”, when there really is no such objective rule, but they believe there is. They will give you chapter and verse about how your work is objectively poorer than the other work they like better, and most new play development is based on the idea that there is some objective measurement by which you can tell the play is ready (though most who are involved in development would deny that they are trying to place objective values on a subjective emotional response, just sit in on one of these things some time, and listen to the pontificating). Of course, since these discussions rarely lead in the same direction twice, even with the exact same group, I would have to dispute that there is anything objective about it (and I am the scientist. It is the artists that are always trying to act like there is some objectively correct way to write/perform etc.
The problem is that everyone wants to put on the mantle of science, even when they are busy dismissing science as flawed, imperialist, western, patriarchal nonsense. So everyone tries to find a “rule”, a “law”, a “scientifically objective” way of doing whatever it is they do – and when that happens, what is really good about art gets lost in the machine that grinds everything down to the same formula. Fortunately, there is enough rebelliousness among artists to chuck the rule-givers off the bus and do what works for them…and for some group (perhaps small, but who cares?) of followers.
Well, all I can say, with respect, is that I have not come across such reference to objective ‘rules’ among good critics and philosophers who write well about the arts – Empson, Kermode, Bernard Williams, Martha Nussbaum et al – and since I act and direct, and work with musicians (my wife is a pianist, and I have been a coach for diction and interpretation for operas in English at the New National Theatre, Tokyo, working with first-rate conductors and singers, as well a coach for specialists in English song), and lecture here in Japan on poetry and drama, I can categorically say that I have never approached the arts and interpretation in the way you describe, and have come across nobody who does.
iknklast:
Yet again, the immortal bard to the rescue: Any old way you choose it, provided you are true to yourself.
At least, I think that’s what he said. As I recall.
From memory.
It was Polonius who said something along those lines to his son, Laertes. ‘This above all: to thine own self be true, And it must follow, as the night the day, Thou canst not then be false to any man.’ And Laertes was true to his own self – a self that turned out to be vengeful, murderous and treacherous, and so false. Shakespeare is not a fool, and does not deal in platitudes, though Polonius does. I think you are making the elementary mistake of assuming that a character is a mouthpiece for the author. Being true to yourself, whether in life or in the performing arts, is by no means necessarily going to stop you from being sentimental, false, hypocritical and a purveyor of bad art and many other things.
I warmly agree, by the way, about Byron’s ‘Don Juan’ – most of his other poetry I find unreadable and, if read, forgettable.
Tim:
I have never understood what is wrong with sentimentality. One can be both sincere and sentimental at the same time: witness Stephen Foster. I love his songs, and learned the passable piano, a fair bit through playing them.
But otherwise, I take your point. Back in my youth I was a Marxist, and thought in Marxist categories. Now I don’t. Rather, I see two types of people out there: a. the Givers, who give more than they take in life’s transactions, and b. the Takers, who do the opposite.
I have met one or two people who by their behaviour over a period of time convinced me that they had no conscience at all, and were so out of balance as to qualify as total opportunists and takers. But even then, I suppose they could always provide some rationalisation to justify their behaviour to themselves, the likeminded, and their own inner circle. A parson I once knew used to say “there is only one thing worse than immorality, and that is amorality.”
Then, every now and again, some public (usually political) identity comes along to provide a case study. Below is a necessary but not sufficient list of them.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1032574.Tyrants_History_s_100_Most_Evil_Despots_Dictators
Perhaps, Omar, I should have said ‘indulgent’ rather than ‘sentimental’.
And, please forgive me for banging on about this, but I think it is important. iknklast speaks about what is ‘really good about art’ – well, this at once raises the question what IS good about art and about particular works of art or particular performances. For if ‘goodness’ in the arts points only to the subjective and arbitrary tastes of whoever, then one is really in no position to speak about what is ‘really good about art’, and it is not possible to make any argued claims as to the greatness of J.S. Bach in comparison with, say, Johann Christian Pepusch, as to ‘King Lear’ being a greater play than ‘Titus Andronicus’ or ‘Gorboduc’, or as to Milton’s ‘Paradise Lost’ being a greater poem than Clinton Herring’s ‘Christmas Time’.
The assertion that aesthetic judgement is subjective and arbitrary, and therefore opposed to the objectivity of science, is something that I have come across again and again from people, both scientists and non-scientists; it derives from positivism and ultimately, I think, from Platonism. But we do make aesthetic judgements, some of which may be wrong (I have reviewed poetry and plays for, among other publications, PN Review, Plays International, the Financial Times, and the Chicago Review, and know what it is to be dismissive of something that I later come to feel is good, or to over-value something that is not so good), but some of which hold up for generations among people who take the arts seriously and provide argument and evidence for their judgements.
But judgement is not a matter only for reader, listener, spectator and critic. Artists are constantly making judgements as they create whatever it is they are creating. As an actor or director, I am constantly making judgements as to character, the expressive use of space (for dramatic interpretation is fundamentally the articulation in space of what is adumbrated in the text, or score – for I have directed Monteverdi’s ‘L’Orfeo’), the force of a particular line, etc. And being married to a concert pianist, and a good one, I have spent over 40 years discussing interpretation. Wanda Landowska remarked that the good musician should be able to say why she played a particular phrase in a particular way – and I largely agree, with the proviso that the justification for how one performs something is often properly post hoc, after one has discovered a way of performing that phrase. Again, you cannot teach young actors or performers of any kind, unless you are able to make meaningful judgements and get across to the students why you are making such judgements are – I have had the good fortune to have had good and savage teachers (as did my wife).
That is why I find the supposed subjective/objective dichotomy so inadequate.
I’m not a fan of ranking things, but anyway here are some non-fiction books that have made me ever so slightly little less clueless:
David Archer: The Long Thaw – How Humans Are Changing the Next 100,000 Years of Earth’s Climate
Laura Bates: Everyday Sexism
Sean Carroll: From Eternity to Here – The Quest for the Ultimate Theory of Time
Sean Carroll: The Particle at the End of the Universe – How the Hunt for the Higgs Boson Leads Us to the Edge of a New World
Barbara Ehrenreich: Bright Sided – How Positive Thinking Is Undermining America
Thomas Gilovich: How We Know What Isn’t So – The Fallibility of Human Reason in Everyday Life
Michelle Goldberg: Kingdom Coming – The Rise of Christian Nationalism
Michelle Goldberg: The Means of Reproduction – Sex, Power and the Future of the World
James Hansen: Storms of my Grandchildren – The Truth About the Coming Climate Catastrophe and Our Last Chance to Save Humanity
Margaret Heffernan: Willful Blindness – Why We Ignore the Obvious at Our Peril
Susan Jacoby: The Age of American Unreason
Daniel Kahneman: Thinking, Fast and Slow
Bill McKibben: Eaarth – Making a Life on a Tough New Planet
Naomi Oreskes / Eric Connway: Merchants of Doubt – How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming
Lisa Randall: Warped Passages – Unraveling the Mysteries of the Universe’s Hidden Dimensions
Daniel Simons / Christopher Chabris: The Inivisible Gorilla – And Other Ways Our Intuition Deceives Us
Stuart Sutherland: Irrationality
Carol Tavris / Elliot Aronson: Mistakes Were Made (but Not by Me) – Why We Justify Foolish Beliefs, Bad Decisions and Hurtful Acts
Okay, Bjarte, why did you just go into my Library Thing account, and copy my books into your list? ;-)
Tim, I think what you’re saying is all true, but…I am also involved in the theatre community, as a writer, and I encounter that every time I try to turn out a play. I violated some “rule” they hold to be inviolate, and they will start spouting scientific sounding language that they feel supports their position, but isn’t scientific; it is just what they have been told by similarly confident people. Perhaps if there were a way to test these rules, we might find they were right, but until then, I feel that I have to make those judgments (like the ones you make) as to the proper structure for the play I am trying to create and the proper number of characters, acts, scenes, etc. I am also free to change my mind and accept what they say as valid, but the more they cast it as if there is some scientifically demonstrated fact behind that, the more I am likely to dig in my heels, because I’m a bit of a contrarian. Meanwhile, I have seen lovely plays in my group destroyed by people who assume that, because these people have more theatre experience than they do, everything the others tell them is right – ending up with a wonderful little O’Henry twist of a story turning into the banality of an after school special – but is that conclusion I reached objective? Or subjective?
One of the people after the last festival where my play was presented did her damndest – came and stood in my face and practically poked her finger at me – to get me to admit that my play was crap and that it was only saved by the actress who had the lead role. I refused to agree to that, because I believe she is wrong. She believed no one would ever respond positively to my play without that actress. I told her the play has been very positively received in other settings – without that actress. She humphed away in disbelief. Which of us was being objective? Either? Neither? It is my opinion (unstated to this woman) that the actress she was so fond of ruined the play by turning it into a misogynistic work (and it had nothing to do with women’s rights; it had to do with colony collapse disorder!). Everyone else pointed out that the audience laughed and applauded at those parts. Which of us is right? Was it ruined by this added sexual subtext? Or was it saved? How do we know?
Meanwhile, the group that produced the play were sure they were being objective in telling me they thought my play was crap, and the other I submitted (that they chose not to do because it was too dark) was great drama. My playwriting mentor in my MFA thought otherwise; while not calling the dark one crap, she obviously didn’t care for it, and didn’t see it as a play that worked on any level. She loved the colony collapse disorder one that the other group hated…but she didn’t present things as objective truth. She left room for the possibility that other people might view the play differently, and that her response was not necessarily going to be shared by all people, laying it up against a matrix and checking boxes that led ultimately to “good” or “bad”. So I’ve had both experiences.
[…] a comment by Bjarte Foshaug on 100 easiest to think of off the top of his […]
iknklast, I’ll return your books next week ;)
Oh dear, iknklast: yes, I can see very clearly the type of person you are having to deal with. Well, I’m in a position where I can simply not work with such people after that sort of thing happens, so I’m lucky. That sort of callow confidence is infuriating — excusable perhaps in a young person but inexcusable as people get older and in addition start assuming that because they are ‘experienced’ they can browbeat others — I am reminded of the mother in Tennyson’s ‘Locksley Hall’: ‘With a little hoard of maxims preaching down a daughter’s heart’. Of course, such people mostly are not in fact experienced, since they have not, because of their native dogmatism, learned from experience; and, surely, they are not ‘objective’ — for being objective in the arts, it seems to me, lies in recognising just how complex the arts are, and how unamenable they mostly are to theoretical and supposedly intellectual approaches and easy answers; your play-writing mentor, by the way, sounds a splendid person.
For what clearly comes out from what you say is how complex these matters are (and theatre is surely the most complex of the arts)— so that it is often difficult if not near-impossible to put your finger on what went wrong, what went right, or even what really happened on occasion. But I have seen audiences (or parts of them) laughing and applauding in totally unjustified places during plays — but invariably in some sort of community theatre, where the audience, or part of them, feel they have constantly to show its support for the production, whatever its quality, or where the necessary distance between player and audience is compromised so that the audience feel they are part of the show (of course audiences are part of the show, but not in that way — unless in the case of pantomime, or some kind of participatory theatre). And there are of course the actors who play up in order to draw attention to themselves or who go against the clear intention of the text to make what they suppose is some telling effect (this last is of course also a fault of directors: I once saw one of Edward Bond’s great war plays, performed in Japanese, ruined by an incompetent and insensitive director — it’s the director-as-dog syndrome: just as dogs like to put their mark on trees, certain directors — and actors — like to put their mark on plays…). It seems to me, from what you say about what was done to your play, that you are right (I shan’t say ‘objective’! — I think the word is best avoided): if it was about colony collapse disorder, then the introduction of the obvious theme of misogyny — however ready and easy a way it was to make an appeal to audiences, or certain members of them — was wholly unjustified — and would still be unjustified even if it led to a better reception from a certain kind of audience.
Milton spoke of having a ‘fit audience…, though few’; and I tend to agree with him.
I’d better shut up!
Happy New Year to all! And thank you to Holms for the Lawson stories, which I liked.