'The Best Books You Haven't Read'

Some writers try too hard to follow the Poundian injunction “Make It New” rather than the commonsensical “Make It Good.” From the reader’s perspective, there’s another sense in which novelty is overrated as a literary virtue. Blurb-heavy new books freighted with “buzz” tend to get disproportionate attention, which is more a function of marketing than literary worth. This post is not just another defense of old books over new. 

Even stalwart readers have blind spots, books and writers they have not only never read but never heard of. That’s the reason I’m a sucker for features like “The Best Books You Haven’t Read …” published in the December 2009 issue of The American Conservative and recommended to me by a longtime reader. The editors ask fifteen writers to vouch for books they suspect have been ignored, forgotten or neglected. Several suggest works I know fairly well and even treasure.

 

David Bromwich does readers the favor of citing by title two stories by Elizabeth Bowen, which is more helpful than making a vague gesture toward “her short fiction.” Both are set in London during World War II. Remember what Howard Moss said of the Anglo-Irish Bowen: “Her amazing vocabulary was partly the result, I think, of her conquering her stutter. She seemed to know synonyms for every word in English. Her celebrated command of language may have begun as an effort to circumvent it, and her wit, in part, derived from the successes and the failures thereof.”

 

Jeffrey Hart nominates one of my early bookish crushes – Sherwood Anderson. I read Winesburg, Ohio (1919) at age seventeen. Both of us were native Ohioans and that probably helped. Hart wisely dismisses most of Anderson’s other fiction, especially the novels. He had no gift for longer forms, with the partial exception of Poor White (1920). Anderson’s taint was sentimentality, which is death on any writer, and his prose was too often mushy. But as Hart notes, “No doubt about it, these sketches come to life on the page.”

 

Chilton Williamson Jr. recommends Charles Doughty’s Travels in Arabia Deserta (1888), which I reread during the early months of the COVID-19 lockdown. Williamson writes: “Arabia Deserta is notable for the depth of its empathy for an almost impossibly foreign people and culture. Doughty was one of those artists on whom, as Henry James said, nothing is lost. The book is remarkable also for its literary style.” All true.

 

Most of the other contributors nominate books previously unknown to me, several of which sound interesting. Many are devoted to politics, which I largely ignore, but a travel book, All the Time in the World (1966), by the English poet Hugo Williams, sounds good enough for me to have put on hold at the library. Jacob Heilbrunn proposes another intriguingly unknown quantity: The Nemesis of Power: The German Army in Politics, 1918-1945 (1954) by John Wheeler-Bennett.

 

The American Conservative  feature reminds us that we have no excuse for complaining that that we have nothing to read. That’s what libraries, interlibrary loan, bookstores and online book dealers are all about.