'Books I Have Liked'

One way to classify readers is by their choice of reading matter across time. Some are specialists. They read deeply but narrowly, only science fiction or the Latin classics in translation. That strategy is alien to me because by nature I’m an omnivore, moving from Henry James to John Simon’s film criticism to a field guide to Texas birds. I’m interested in too many things and an expert in none of them, forever in danger of becoming a dilettante. I seek pleasure in the books I read but also learning. Guy Davenport’s explanation for why he writes is the mirror image of why and how I read. In his introductory note to The Hunter Gracchus (1996) he says: “I am not writing for scholars or fellow critics, but for people who like to read, to look at pictures, and to know things.” 

Another reader like me is Marianne Moore. She was fond of assembling book lists and recommending favorite writers and books in magazines and newspapers. She seems utterly without snobbery, a common ailment among a certain sort of reader. An appendix in The Complete Prose of Marianne Moore (ed. Patricia C. Willis, 1986) is devoted to “Booklists.” In the the nineteen-sixties, Moore contributed to a feature called “Books I Have Liked” published in the New York Herald Tribune Book Review (R.I.P. 1966). Here is her selection from the December 4, 1960 edition:

 

New Orleans (1959) by Oliver Evans; The Screens, and Other Poems (1960) by I.A. Richards; Ezra Pound (1960) by Charles Norman. I haven’t read any of these titles and only a small sample of Richards’ other poetry.

 

Here is Moore’s second contribution to “Books I Have Liked,” published December 5, 1961: La Fontaine: Poet and Counterpoet (1961) by Margaret Guiton; Out of My League  (1961) by George Plimpton; Snake Man (1960) by Alan Wykes. All of these books are unread, though I have read Moore’s translation of The Fables of La Fontaine (1954).

 

Finally, her “Books I Have Liked” from December 2, 1962: Victory Over Myself (1962) by Floyd Patterson and Milt Gross; The Heart to Artemis (1962) by Bryher; The Points of My Compass (1962) by E.B. White.

 

Those who know Moore’s work will see familiar themes – animals, sports, poetry. More than fifteen years ago I incorporated into a blog post the complete reading list Moore had prepared for inclusion in Raymond Queneau’s Pour Une Bibliothèque Idéale (1956). Her choices combine the obligatory (Jonathan Swift, Paul Valéry) and the inspired (Jean-Henri Fabre, Jacques Maritain). Eccentricity should never cancel out the essential. Reading is duty and whim.