BiblioAddict

On the greatest novel of all time, being a naive English major, hating the books you read, loving the books you read, and why you should always pay attention in class:

Any poll that has The Da Vinci Code as the fifth greatest novel of all time is, frankly, null and void in my book – I don’t care what’s at the top of the list.

Besides, I stopped trusting those “greatest book lists/polls” a long time ago. Once, way back yonder, I got my hands on one of those “100 greatest books” lists. As I remember it, the list supposedly laid out the 100 greatest books ever written by American and British authors. It was given to me by my freshman English lit. professor, who asked as he handed it out, “Who can tell me what’s wrong with this list?”

I wasn’t listening. I was too busy circling all of the books that I’d read, and underlining those I’d at least heard of. The number was depressingly small. The combined number didn’t cover even half of the list. Added to that, the books that I hadn’t circled or underlined were so obscure, their titles so boring that I wasn’t sure that if given the chance I wanted to read them anyway.

But I was a newly-minted, excited and fairly naive English student. I was only a few months removed from the girl who, when she learned she’d been accepted to an English program went to the nearest bookstore and bought Laurence Stern’s Tristram Shandy. Why? Because it was the kind of novel I thought English majors would read. Though funny at times, I found it terribly exhausting and by the time I finished it I wasn’t sure if I liked it all. But that’s what English students did, I thought. They read exhausting, difficult books – not the books typically found on the bestseller lists or the romance and horror novels which had been my bread and butter though high school.

So, I was ready. I was ready to tackle the entire list from beginning to end. I would be the most well-read English student the world had ever seen. To be clear, this wasn’t about overachieving so much as it was about feeling that, having come from a poor family and gone to a poor school, I had a lot to make up for. I suspected that my fellow classmates had surely gone to better schools and had already read the great classics like George Orwell’s 1984 and Animal Farm. I, on the other hand, had been lucky to make it out having read at least Shakespeare’s Macbeth and Hamlet.

Over the next few months I hunted through used bookstores and loaded my library with the likes of Babbitt, The Sun Also Rises, The Great Gatsby, Catch-22, and A Brave New World. I suffered through many uninteresting “great” books as a result. A few of them I liked – A Brave New World had me thinking for days – but the majority of them left me cold. The Sun Also Rises – meh. The Great Gatsby – another, meh. I was beginning to think I was a poor English student.

Then one day as I was pouring over the list trying to decide upon a title I might actually enjoy, I finally saw what was wrong with the list. I began asking myself some very important questions. Who decided on this list? Where are the women on this list? Where are the minorities on this list? Exactly what makes these books so much more important than any other book? Why should I care, really?

The answers to those questions have been hashed and re-hashed again. Needless to say, I learned a valuable lesson – that all reading lists, from “100 greatest books” lists to “the best summer reads” lists should be taken with a grain of salt. At the end of the day, it’s all subjective. Some opinions may be more educated than others, but that doesn’t make them any more than opinions. You don’t have to like or even read a book because someone else says it’s great. Why waste your short reading life on books you probably won’t like just because you think you have to? That’s what happens when you don’t pay attention in class.