It’s complicated.
For starters, the post’s title is almost criminally subjective, even though the list below is, for sure, quite conventional. By “10 Greatest Books” I mean the 10 greatest works of Western literature (and only literature) in my book, so to speak. Your list might include only some of those listed, or—an impossibility, I should think—none. At any rate, ranking the greatest of most anything is, in itself, a work of fiction.
Also, I lied. An aesthetically justifiable count of “the greatest” would far exceed 10. My intent was but to follow convention once more, however unastounding it may be. (To go the opposite arithmetic direction, greatest is a superlative, hence there can be only one, whether a book or boxer. But we’ll put that aside as a mere, lexiconic quibble.)
Yet another complication is that I slapped the number “10” in the title. Again, I lied. The undisputed champion of Western literature—the one, the authentically greatest, writer—was, and shall always be, William Shakespeare. Apart from 154 unsurpassable sonnets, his body of work consists of up to 38 plays (depending on how one counts them; a few are collaborations). And virtually every one of them is a consummate masterpiece. Thus I can no more rank Hamlet above King Lear than I can place King Lear over Measure for Measure, or a couple dozen other of his literary tours de force.
And so this 10-count list is rather fluid; in fact, it’s more of a downpour—30-something-plus-nine; in addition, #6 is a multiple of seven.
Excluding the first, no descending order of genius is implied. As you can see, the list is anything but idiosyncratic, excepting the last, which I’ve included because of its immense originality, and because it’s stuck in my head—only recently did I read it, and because … well, to be explained.
1. Shakespeare’s oeuvre
2. Don Quixote, Cervantes
3. The Brothers Karamazov, Dostoevsky
4. The Iliad, Homer, as it were
5. The Odyssey
6. Anna Karenina, Tolstoy
7. The Divine Comedy, Dante
8. In Search of Lost Time, Proust
9. The Magic Mountain, Mann
10. Orlando, Virginia Woolf
The tenth, as noted, is an eccentric choice. A purely conventional list would instead have contained Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales and Milton’s Paradise Lost—but with those, goodbye “10,” and I couldn’t bear cutting either. So I opted for a lone Woolf, my favorite woman writer. Otherwise I’ve confined the list to the hallowed Western canon. (Outside of that august body—though I’ll go Bob Uecker here and say juuust outside—is Patrick O’Brien’s indescribably brilliant Master and Commander series. For that transcendent pleasure I thank the recommendation of a friend, the poet Norm Sibum. And if you read it, you’ll thank me.)
It’s kinda funny. More than once I heard the polemicist Christopher Hitchens say he’d really rather be talking the singular beauty of literature than further engaging the commonplace monstrosities of politics. Ha! Hitch died in 2011. He possessed no concept of the bottomless, sickening ugliness ahead. His formal training lay outside of literature. As did mine. Nonetheless, also like Hitchens, I find myself reaching for eternal lit rather than wallowing one more minute in the sewer of quotidian politics, what with its capital T.
But, one does what one must. And so I can’t turn away. Today’s moments, though, their distraction from it all, quite nice.
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