|
|
|
Vol. 38, No. 18 |
 |
2-6-2008 Booktalk, 2/7/08
Anna Karenina and War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy Because Tolstoy, to my mind, is the greatest novelist we have ever had. He grasped the complicatedness of our hearts and minds as fully as any writer ever has — and his embrace is so huge. These novels are peopled with so many people, and we come to understand them all so thoroughly. And in War and Peace he accomplishes what I consider to be nearly impossible: Makes the things men do every bit as interesting to me as the things we can’t see them doing. Middlemarch by George Eliot Because it’s so smart and so wise and so completely absorbing, and — like with the ones by Tolstoy — so embracing. But after this, I have to cheat. I can’t name just two more books, and I can’t rank the others I love so much. There’s One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez (a theme emerges here: Another complicated, enormously embracing book) — I couldn’t complete such a list without that book. There’s Saul Bellow’s Herzog, which I have read a dozen times over the years and never tire of. There’s a marvelous contemporary memoir called A Country Year, by a writer named Sue Hubbell — a book I have given as a gift perhaps 20 times over the last 15 years, to anyone who’s in any kind of trouble, because it is so quietly uplifting (without attempting to “uplift” at all). And then, of course, as the famous New Yorker cartoon goes, there’s Chekhov ... What is your “guilty pleasure?” If you want to know about something I read with enormous pleasure that I “should be” ashamed of (but I even talk about this, and I do so often), it’s People magazine. I love People. Ask me anything about the life and times (and marriages, and divorces, and children, and confirmed bachelorhood, and feuds with parents) of the protagonists of this big, messy, ongoing (and talk about complicated) “novel” of contemporary life. I know it all. I like to think I’m the only English professor at OSU (and maybe anywhere) who would be glad to talk frankly about the failure of Meg Ryan and Dennis Quaid’s marriage. Booktalk appears regularly in onCampus, featuring an Ohio State staff or faculty member with significant literary accomplishments. To nominate someone for a future column, e-mail harris.587@osu.edu.
|
