Byrne Books

Too much is made of the content items in this series, as if though they were meant to be the non-plus ultra of reference guide for bibliophiles or film buffs, or architecture enthusiasts, etc. More than anything I take these wonderful publications and use them as great starting off points. In the countless millenia of human history, it's well understood that not every significant work of art, regardless of medium, will make it into a volume that limits the entries to 1001; however, the bulk do make it. I then take advantage and try to become more familiar with the minor ones, which, in most cases, I know nothing about. Yes, there are questionable entries, for example Saarinen's TWA terminal at JFK. Yes, it's a very noteworthy example of his style but is seeing it a life altering experience, in comparison to the Taj Mahal, Machu Picchu or the Louvre? For me, the answer is no, for someone else it may very well be and that's, I believe, the point of this series. As we all know, art is very subjective and the editors involved, choose accordingly based on their knowledge and tastes. Some folks take these things way too seriously, instead of just enjoying the content. No one thing is ever going to be all things to all people and that's what a number of folks seem to sometimes forget.

In my 70+ years, I have read, perhaps, 1001 books that are not related to my profession. Certainly many would not be included on any but an idosyncratic list. 1001 Books...is a well organized overview of the greatest literature man has produced. It provides a roadmap to reading those works of which one might be unaware and as a stimulus to read further the works of any author that intrigues. Of course, from any reader's point of view the list misses great works. How could it not for there are certainly more than 1001 books one might read and it reflects the author's point of view. 1001 Books...is a valuable resource.

Peter Boxall edits this massive anthology, perhaps better suited for browsing and delighting the quick skimmer than the owlish critic. Boxall explains in his eloquent introdction the reason for the volume. He links this Rizzoli compendium to Scheherezade, who kept her death nightly at bay by telling a story for a thousand-and-one nights. There's an unlimited, endless hint in such a great symbolic number; there's also "the mortal urgency" of her impending doom and her need for invention. In this tension between "the expansive and the contracted," and "the roomy and the constricted," over a hundred scholars suggest their small tales, urging you to seek out in their own "micro-event," a work (usually fiction, mostly novels-- or at least an imaginative memoir or prose-poem) that in three-hundred words encapsulates the experience of reading the whole work. Multiply this a thousand-fold, add graphics that often comment in their captions on the book jacket design's relevance to the work, toss in publicity photos of the author or illustrations of their characters, and you have a large tome that belies its free-wheeling, casual, and inviting nature.

The problem with such books of lists is that they often tilt towards the recent, the works enjoyed a year or two ago, and most of these being ones printed in the past generation. The table of contents takes from eighteen pages to cover all of pre-1700. The 18th century earns forty-two pages; the nineteenth a hundred and fifty. The twentieth expands from pp. 230-883, and the 2000s already occupy pp, 884-949. The sheer numbers, of course, of books now available may account for this embarassment of contemporary riches, but I suspect that the reality of what remains in print from past centuries, and what lies unknown beyond in archives or museums known only to a few scholars-- and the levels of literacy and quality of what survives into our era--do show a history lesson of its own about vanity, ephemera, and how lucky we moderns are to have so much to choose from in our libraries and bookstores.

In "Volumes to Go Before You Die," William Grimes (May 23, 2008, New York Times) noted that: "Quintessence, the British publishers, later decided that 'books' worked better than "novels" in the title." Primo Levi's "The Drowned and the Saved," David Jones' "In Parenthesis," George Saunders' "Pastoralia," Swift's "A Modest Proposal," Olaudah Equiano's "The Interesting Narrative," or Rousseau's "Reveries of a Solitary Walker" may not fit into our tidy notion of a fictional work as a novel, but they are the exceptions to the rule. There's an awful lot of space given to illustrations, this being published by an press devoted to art. I might have preferred more than 300 words for descriptions for many of the inclusions, but the appeal of the graphic layout might have suffered. Charles Kingsley's "The Water-Babies" gets a great depiction by J.W. Smith; I miss Thackeray's own cartoons for his "Vanity Fair," on the other hand. As the centuries slide towards cinema, adaptations of narratives for film and the stage provide vivid posters. Jean de Bosschere's 1923 rendering for Apuleius' "The Golden Ass" astonishes with its frank sexuality, while a French 1958 sign for "The Horror of Dracula" film distills its own tension between sex, love, and death crudely but effectively.

I mention such pairings as they enrich the contents of the text. These may get overlooked, but the images arrest your flicking finger, and slow you down to attend to the printed captions, which in turn lure you into the summations of the stories. (There's also a clever frontispiece, "Vanitas" by Hans Holbein the Younger, that sums up the theme of the collection wittily.) Marlon Brando's daubed face as Kurtz juxtaposes with Conrad's mien and the "Heart of Darkness" entry; a few pages later, "Der Blaue Engel" with Marlene Dietrich and Emil Jennings entices you to look at the source, "Professor Unrat" by Heinrich Mann, and thus you may discover, as I did, a novel by Thomas Mann's brother I never knew of. Anthony Perkins from Orson Welles' film of Kafka's "The Trial" gains his own expressionistic contrast in a well-chosen still. Gary Cooper scrutinizes his copy of "A Farewell to Arms" during a break in its filming; Wyndham Lewis' angular self-portrait garishly sums up "The Apes of God" so well you may never want to read it.

The contents tend, until recent decades, to be largely British or Continental. This again reflects what's available in translation and kept in print, so charges of ethnocentric bias, I counter, are misplaced. This is the reality of the industry, and what one will find on the shelf and probably not in the local chain bookstore. Anyone who opens this will find delight and disappointment in what's made the final cut and what's left out. I leave that individual encounter up to you. As an aide-memoire, this will goad you into making good on at least a few dozen titles you always meant to get to but never did, or hundreds that you have vaguely heard of, and perhaps as many you had no clue, no idea, or no reason to know about before.

many reviewers have given this book a low rating because it leaves out many great works but i think that is unfair. no anthology can list all great literature and everyone is entitled to their own opinion of what books MUST be read. personally, i found this book very entertaining. i curled up on the couch and flipped through it for hours, reading the short synopsis on each book and marking pages of books that i had never heard of, which were MANY. i am an avid reader. i spend hours on Amazon, looking for new titles. i am at the library almost everyday to keep myself from spending my entire paycheck on books. so as a lover of books, i'm giving this book 5 stars because it gave me so many titles to look up and explore. i'm sure i have a long enough list of "must reads" to last me a lifetime now. and isn't that was a bibliophile looks for when they pick up a book like this?

The first thing to understand about this massive brick of a book is that the title is meant to catch one's attention and that like the contents, it must be taken with a very large grain of salt. Dial it down to "1001 Books You Might Like to Read at Some Point" and you're more on target. The second thing to understand is that for editorial purposes, "book" generally means "adult novel" for the most part, so there's no non-fiction or poetry or plays or essays or or children's books or short stories (with one or two unexplained exceptions). The third thing to understand is that the book originated in Britain, and as such, has a rather British emphasis and a rather decidedly modern tilt. (The editor teaches at the University of Sussex, and a disproportionate number of the contributors either teach there with him or are current or former doctoral students there.) With these points understood, most fiction-lovers will find this to be a really fun coffee-table or bathroom book to have around for years.

Each of the 1001 books is given roughly 300 words in which to "respond...to what makes each novel compelling, to what it is about each novel that makes one absolutely need to read it." However, with around 100 contributors, the style of these varies wildly: some focus on the book's prose style, some its context, many are mere plot summaries, and unfortunately very few are genuinely inspirational. Arranged chronologically by date of original publication, the book grants roughly 80 pages to the years leading up to 1800, 140 pages to the 1800s, 650 pages to the 1900s, and 65 pages to the relatively recent 2000s. Aside from the 300 words and some basic bibliographic information, almost each selection is accompanied by some kind of artwork (jacket art, author photos, stills from film adaptations, etc.), making the book vivid and gorgeous throughout. Of course, the real fun in a book like this is the arguments it provokes, and the general hue and outcry about omissions or disproportional representation. Before I get into my own pet peeve, here's a little context:

-- The most heavily represented authors are J.M. Coetzee and Charles Dickens with 11 entries each, Samuel Beckett with 10, Graham Greene and Virginia Woolf with 9, Paul Auster, J.G. Ballard, and Ian McEwan with 8, and Saul Bellow, Dom DeLillo, Thomas Hardy, D.H. Lawrence, Philip Roth, and Salman Rushdie with 7. This does not include instances where trilogies have been lumped together into a lone entry, as is done several times. And I'll admit this is based on a quick run through the index, rather than a careful parsing, so I may have missed one or two people or miscounted slightly.

-- Despite the above, many prominent writers are completely missing, such as the following: William Boyd (Any Human Heart), Ray Bradberry (The Martian Chronicles, Fahrenheit 451), Willa Cather (Death Comes For the Archbishop), Roddy Doyle (Barrytown Trilogy), Arthur Koestler (Darkness at Noon), Naguib Mahfouz (Cairo Trilogy), Norman Mailer (The Naked and the Dead), Bernard Malamud (The Fixer), Cormac McCarthy (All the Pretty Horses, No Country For Old Men), George McDonald Fraser (Flashman series), John O'Hara (Appointment in Samarra), Orhan Pamuk (My Name is Red), Walker Percy (The Moviegoer), Ayn Rand (The Fountainhead, Atlas Shrugged), J.K. Rowling (Harry Potter series), Jane Smiley, Wallace Stegner (Crossing to Safety), William Styron (Sophie's Choice), Anne Tyler (The Accidental Tourist). Again, I'll admit the above list is largely compiled from other reviewers' mentions.

-- Although you would think a book like this would give a token nod to the established critical orthodoxy, only about half of Booker Prize winners appear, and only about 2/3 of Nobel Prize winners who were known for their novels appear. That's not to say that every prize-winning book is a must read, but when they come at the expense of decent, but entirely unremarkable, selections such as Zadie Smith's "On Beauty" or Ardal O'Hanlon's "The Talk of the Town," one has to wonder...

-- Genre fiction gets very short shrift. Crime and science fiction are represented by the most obvious of choices (Chandler, Christie, Hammett, Asimov, and Clarke for example, although there are three Elmore Leonards). Horror gets a brief look-in with Dracula, Frankenstein, a Lovecraft short story and a Stephen King book. Aside from the obvious Tolkein, there's a lone fantasy title. Adventure tales are represented by H. Rider Haggard. And there are no westerns whatsoever. It's as if there was an editorial decision made that genre selections must be included and somewhat was assigned the task of rounding up the usual suspects. Oh yes, it's worth pointing out that a token graphic novel (Watchmen) was included, so that's nice.

My own personal bone to pick is with the Eurocentrism of the selections. I did a quick and dirty tabulation and found that roughly 70% of the selections were from Western Europe, roughly 25% from the U.S., and roughly 5% the rest of the world. The world's most populous country, China (currently 1 in 5 humans is Chinese), is represented by exactly zero entries. Ditto for the entire Arab-speaking/reading world. Don't even get me started on Africa -- entries authored by white African authors outnumber those by non-white African authors by a 2:1 ratio. And not coincidentally, all the non-white African writers represented all wrote in English. It's not that hard to find excellent fiction in translation, and as an example, I would point to the omission of Nobel laureates like Mahfouz, Pamuk, and pretty much every other non-Western winner. Anyway, that's just my own pet peeve, and most others probably don't care.

Ultimately, it's a fun book to have lying around to dip into from now and then or as a provocation to oneself or others.