Ten Best

The conversation continues over at the Metaxu Cafe about top-ten lists of fiction, mostly prompted by J. Peder Zane’s new book, in which he gets 125 writers’ opinions on the subject.

A scary-big proportion of the bloggers responding with their own lists are plunking their chips down on Stendahl and Proust and William Gaddis and just about everyone else who might go by the nickname Mr. Difficult, leading me to suspect that a lot of the people typing stuff on The Internets are way smarter, or more bibliophilic/agoraphobic, than we ever imagined. (And, as a side note, that they aren’t reading women.)

Keeping me from a complete crisis of confidence in my own reading history, the Seattle Times published Sherman Alexie’s top ten. Thank God, I’ve actually cracked open a few of them. And you get a real sense of the writer Alexie is by scrolling down his list.

Well, okay. Here’s the first ten that cross my mind:

• Herman Melville, Moby Dick
• Edward P. Jones, The Known World
• Anton Chekhov, The Complete Short Stories
• Joseph Heller, Catch-22
• Russell Banks, Cloudsplitter
• Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast
• Philip Roth, American Pastoral
• Wallace Stegner, Angle of Repose
• Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek
• Rick Bass, The Sky, the Stars, the Wilderness

I know–for me, too, an embarrassing dearth of female writers; I have huge gaps in my library. Of course, given the proportions of women and men in writing programs and in entry-level publishing jobs now, the joke will definitely be on the Y-chromosome in a decade or so.