NYT “Best Book”

The New York Times has assembled, from readers’ recommendations, a list of twenty-five contenders for the title of “best book of the past 125 years.” It’s a silly, sorry list, starting with the word “best,” which seems to mean “what you like.” “Book” means “novel,” and “novel” means “novel in English” (with one exception). Just two “books” date from the 1920s, two from the 1930s, and two from the 1940s. And some of the choices: Charlotte’s Web? A Confederacy of Dunces? They are (or were) wonderful novels (John Kennedy Toole’s humor has dated badly), but sheesh. Gone with the Wind? Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone? Sheesh again.

The work most conspicuously missing from this list: Marcel Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu. It’s difficult to think that no reader thought to suggest it. Perhaps the Times didn’t want to privilege a particular translation by using the title In Search of Lost Time or Remembrance of Things Past. One publisher or another might be cross.

But is Proust’s “book” the best book of the past 125 years? It’s a silly question. As T.S. Eliot said in “East Coker” about the work of the writer, “there is no competition.” Or as the poet William Bronk said, in response to a survey asking for the ten best books of American poetry published since 1945, “Don’t ask me. I believe the arts are not competitive.”

Who else is missing from this list? Well, T.S. Eliot and William Bronk. Also Jorge Luis Borges, Willa Cather, Ralph Ellison, William Faulkner, Franz Kafka, Robert Musil, W.G. Sebald, and Virginia Woolf, for starters. If you’re going to make such a list, make it a good one.