Complete article at following URL: http://www.buffalonews.com/editorial/20070204/1016990.asp

Editor's Choice

2/4/2007

Vladmir Nabokov's "Lolita" comes in ahead of works by Mark Twain and William Shakespeare.

The Top 10: Writers Pick Their Favorite Books edited by J. Peder Zane (Norton, 352 pp., $14.95 paperback original). It is, let's admit, not the most original of ideas. At least a few times a year, some hopeless bibliophile will reach across chasms of disinterest to other bibliophiles and produce a bibliophilic theme park like this - a compilation of 125 writers making their lists of "the 10 greatest books of all time." It's the kind of thing, in fact, that once caused Edmund Wilson to mimeograph a form letter that stated "Mr. Wilson regrets he is unable to. . . " (and then goes on to list all the importunities regularly visited upon writers in their quasi-public roles).

That being said, this one by the book editor of the Raleigh News and Observer is a dandy one. First of all, the writers included are a high level, cannily selected and wonderfully eclectic bunch - everyone from Tom Wolfe, John Irving, Stephen King, Joyce Carol Oates and David Foster Wallace to Kathryn Harrison, Edwidge Danticat, Mary Gaitskill and Lydia Millet.

Zane collates the responses, assigning points for positions on each list (1 through 10). What he comes up with is a superb portrait of literary taste in the doorstep years of the 21st century.

The Top 10: 1) Leo Tolstoy's "Anna Karenina" 2) Gustave Flaubert's "Madame Bovary" 3) Tolstoy's "War and Peace" 4) Vladimir Nabokov's "Lolita" 5) Mark Twain's "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" 6) William Shakespeare's "Hamlet" 7) F. Scott Fitzgerald's "The Great Gatsby" 8) Marcel Proust's "In Search of Lost Time," waywardly translated for years as "Remembrance of Things Past" 9) The Stories of Anton Chekhov and 10) George Eliot's "Middlemarch."

As literary snapshots of the zeitgeist go, that's more than a little revelatory. "Lolita" ahead of Twain, Shakespeare and Proust? No James Joyce's "Ulysses"? (By Zane's system, it's No. 14, after "Don Quixote," "Moby Dick" and "Great Expectations.")

[ ... ]

A book, then, that's equal parts rollicking game, X-ray of literary sensibility and fugitive profundity.

Nicely done, all around.

- Jeff Simon

All private editorial communications, without exception, are read by both co-editors.