I started but I never finished
Men’s Milestone Fiction is a (rather statistically dodgy) survey into the novels that men say changed their lives.
Something struck me as odd about the list. It includes a large number of those books that I feel embarrassed about not having read all the way through. Books I have picked up and looked at but then put down again. That I feel I ought to have read, that I can talk about because they are part of the culture and I’ve seen the film, but that I’ve never read through from begining to end.
Now I’m a fast reader and I read an awful lot of crap so it takes a lot to make a book that I don’t finish. But some of these books are books that I have read, found more or less interesting – in two or three cases brilliant – but not been compelled to take up again. This is really odd. I doubt if my total list of started but not finished books is more than a few dozen. That so many of them turn up on this list is strange.
Its really shameful to admit it but I have read some but not all of the words in each of these books. I started but I was not able to finish:
- Brighton Rock by Graham Greene
- Catch 22 by Joseph Heller
- Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka
- To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
- One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
- Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
- The Catcher in the Rye by JD Salinger
- The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
- Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut
- Ulysses by James Joyce
Are these “trophy” books? In either the modern sense, or the original meaning of a monument set up at the turning point of a battle (which also gives us our literary term “trope” and isn’t that far removed from what Jardine et al seem to mean by “milestone”). I mean, are they books that have a great reputation, that you ought to have read, so the men answering the questions said they had read them even if they hadn’t?
Or if that was true, wouldn’t the list also have included War and Peace (another one I never finished) or Moby Dick (which I finished the second time and which is of course brilliant and well worth reading every single word of)
And I’ve never read these at all:
- The Outsider by Albert Camus
- Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky
- The Great Gatsby by F Scott Fitzgerald
- High Fidelity by Nick Hornby
- The Book of Laughter and Forgetting by Milan Kundera
On the other hand I have read right through these few. All of which are good. Even though the first does have huge problems and Chinua Achebe was more or less right about it:
- Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
- 1984 by George Orwell
- The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
- The Hobbit by JRR Tolkien
- The Lord of the Rings by JRR Tolkien
Last year’s survey was the Woman’s Watershed Fiction (also on that web page) and another list produced by the BBC programme Woman’s Hour (http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/womanshour/wwf_longlist.shtml) which is based on a very different (though still self-selected) sample. (And I’m not at all suer what the difference is between it and the Women’s Watershed Fiction that preceded the Men’s Milestone survey, but the Orange prize website was unusuably slow so I gave up and used the BBC one instead)
The Woman’s Hour survey had as its top five:
- Pride and Prejudice
- To Kill a Mockingbird
- Jane Eyre
- The Women’s Room
- The Handmaid’s Tale
Of which I’ve read all but To Kill a Mockingbird. Three of them are wonderful. Pride and Prejudice is arguably the greatest novel in the language. The most problematic is The Women’s Room, which I thought failed in what it set out to do, precisely because when reading it I identified strongly with the female protagonist. The men in the book weren’t real people, I didn’t think I’d ever met anyone like them, and they were certainly not like me. So what seemed to be the central message – you can’t trust men, they always let you down in the end – didn’t work, because the men were too far-fetched for me to believe in them.
The total number of the books I’ve read on teh Woman’s Hour list is slightly larger than on the “male” list (11 out of 30 rather than 5/20). The four above plus these:
- Fear of Flying by Erica Jong
- I Capture The Castle by Dodie Smith
- Little Women by Louisa May Alcott
- Rebecca by Daphne Du Maurier
- Tess of the D’Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy
- To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf
- Woman on the Edge of Time by Marge Piercy
but the number I’ve read only bits of is much lower, four instead of ten:
- To Kill a Mockingbird
- Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
- The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath
- Bridget Jones’ Diary by Helen Fielding
(and that’s OK for the Plath & the Fielding because they are that sort of book anyway. Bridget Jones was published in parts and I’ve read some of them 
) Of course that leaves loads that I think I haven’t read at all, but then surely that should be allowed because there are two decent novels published every day and who can read all of them?
Tags: books