Top Ten

A friend posts, on Facebook — yes, I spend some time there every day —

[A friend] tagged me, asking for a list of ten books that have stayed with me in some way, so here goes, off the top of my head, right this minute:

Paul Klee, Pedagogical Sketchbook
Lou Harrison, Lou Harrison's Music Primer
Vergil, Georgics
N.O. Brown, Closing Time
Thomas Pynchon, Against the Day
James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State
Benedict Anderson, Language and Power
Marshall G.S. Hodgson, The Venture of Islam
Lawrence Weschler, Seeing is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees A Life of Contemporary Artist Robert Irwin
Edward Gorey, The Raging Tide, or the Black Doll's Imbroglio

"Rules: Don't take more than a few minutes and do not think too hard. They don't have to be the "right" books or great works of literature, just ones that have affected you in some way. Then tag 5 friends including me so I can see your list. Don't make fun of me. No particular order." So, on to:

and then, of course, he leads a list of five Facebook friends with me.

After nodding at three of his choices and agreeing with their worth I gave the matter a little thought, more than a few minutes, because it's in my nature to disregard direct instructions. So many books came to mind: Montaigne first, curiously; then Robert Nathan's One More Spring, of all things; Crime and Punishment, Shakespeare… would it be fair to consider the Encyclopedia Brittanica one of ten books? Even Brittanica Jr., which meant so much to me in my childhood?

Finnegans Wake. Tender Buttons. How restrict myself to only one Henry James novel, or one Austen? What about Tristram Shandy? Gulliver's Travels? The Great Gatsby?
How could I exclude Mallarmé, or the Tintin books, or Chekhov, or Turgenev? Pirandello?

Look at the relatively recent reading: Manzoni, Herman Bang, Harry Mulisch, Sebald, Walter Benjamin, Geert Mak, Woolf, Lady Murasaki, Vittorini, Levi, Patrick Leigh Fermor…

No, I'm sorry, Daniel; this is not a matter for the top of my head. Or, rather, this is the way the top of my head seems always to work — perhaps simply because, at my age, I have the leisure to take my time getting to the top.

In the end I think I've been honest: these are the — well, yes, eleven — books that have stayed with me in some way, over rather a long span. There's not a title here that hasn't been staying with me for at least twenty-five years, maybe thirty; and two or three of them made their first impression close to seventy years ago.

Are they in no particular order? No: they're in the order in which they occurred to me, in the course of the great sifting; and perhaps the last retrieved, of the eleven, were the first to make their impress…

Don't make fun of me.

R. H. Blyth: Zen in English Literature and Oriental Classics
John Cage: Silence
Christopher Alexander et al.: A Pattern Language
Wallace Stevens: Collected Poems
Francis Ponge: Le savon
W. A. Mozart: Letters
Georges Perec: W or the memory of childhood
Marcel Duchamp: Notes to the large glass
Homer: Iliad
Deems Taylor (ed.): A Treasury of Gilbert and Sullivan
Laura Ingalls Wilder: Farmer Boy

I've sent this on to five friends, of course, staying with Daniel's game. It'll be interesting to see if they join in…