If Americans don’t
love the books that are usually supposed to constitute American
literature, then what do we love? One answer the Great American Read
list provides is that we love the books we read as children or
teenagers. A few venerable children’s classics retain a stubborn
foothold in the memory of readers: “ Tom Sawyer, ” “The Call of
the Wild.” But these are not the books most of us actually grow up
reading today. We are more likely to cut our teeth on children’s
fantasy titles, which make a strong showing on the list, especially
when they come from Britain: “Harry Potter,” of course, but also
the Narnia books, “The Lord of the Rings” and the founder of the
genre, “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.”
Alongside these
early favorites are the accessible literary works that feature on
many a middle school syllabus, often as the first “grown-up”
books we read: Harper Lee’s courtroom drama “To Kill a
Mockingbird,” John Knowles’s boarding-school story “A Separate
Peace,” John Steinbeck’s Depression-era saga “The Grapes of
Wrath.” Perhaps there is a similar touch of nostalgia involved in
the choice of more challenging classics like “Moby-Dick” and
“Heart of Darkness,” which are often read in high school or
college and then not opened again.
But other categories
stand out that have nothing to do with school. The Great American
Read list is heavy on genre writing: science fiction (“Jurassic
Park,” “Ready Player One”), mysteries and thrillers (“The Da
Vinci Code,” “Gone Girl”), and other best sellers (“Lonesome
Dove,” “The Help,” “The Clan of the Cave Bear”). Such books
get little respect from critics and are seldom taught in classrooms,
but they are the ones that people remember and love. Certainly, they
far outweigh contemporary literary fiction on the top 100 list,
though a few such titles do make an appearance— Toni Morrison’s
“Beloved,” Junot Díaz’s “The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar
Wao.”
In every genre, the
Great American Read list is very much a snapshot of a moment in time.
Thirty years ago, or 30 years from now, a similar poll would find
other titles to take pride of place. You can see this happening in
the absence from the list of books that were once enormously popular,
like the Sherlock Holmes stories of Arthur Conan Doyle and the
pioneering science fiction of H.G. Wells. ( Mary Shelley’s
“Frankenstein,” however, does make the cut.) By my count, of the
100 titles on the list, 23 were published in the 21st century—that
is, in less than the last 20 years—and another 60 were published in
the 20th century. That leaves just 17 titles to represent the
previous 3,000 years of world literature.
By the same token,
literature in translation makes a poor showing among America’s
favorites. Sixty-seven of the top 100 titles were written in the U.S.
and another 19 in Britain, leaving just 14 to represent the rest of
the world (and that includes English-language writing from Canada,
Nigeria and elsewhere). “War and Peace” and “Crime and
Punishment” take care of Russian literature; “The Count of Monte
Cristo” and “The Little Prince ” represent France. The foreign
language with the highest representation on the list is Spanish, with
books by Gabriel García Márquez and Rómulo Gallegos joining
Cervantes ’ masterpiece, “Don Quixote,” which is the oldest
book chosen (it was originally published in 1605).
Beyond statistics,
however, there are also literary insights that can be deduced from
the Great American Read list. For one thing, it seems clear that
American readers don’t care very much about good prose. “The Da
Vinci Code” and “Fifty Shades of Grey” are regularly cited as
examples of terrible writing, but both were mega-best sellers, and
both find a place among the top 100. This is not simply a matter of
readers preferring genre writing to literary writing. Rather, it
appears that, in any genre, readers prefer strictly functional prose
to stylistic elegance or idiosyncrasy. Isaac Asimov is on the top 100
list, but not Philip K. Dick ; James Patterson’s Alex Cross
mysteries and Agatha Christie’s “And Then There Were None,” but
not Elmore Leonard or Raymond Chandler.
Another way of
putting it is that when Americans read, we mostly read for story, not
for style. We want to know what happens next, and not to be slowed
down by writing that calls attention to itself. According to one
familiar indictment of modern literature, today’s literary writers
are unpopular precisely because they have lost interest in telling
stories and become obsessed with technique. In the 20th century, this
argument goes, literature became esoteric, self-regarding and
difficult, losing both the storytelling power and the mass readership
that writers like Balzac, Dickens and Twain had enjoyed.
One classic
expression of this complaint was made by the
journalist-turned-novelist Tom Wolfe, in his 1989 essay “Stalking
the Billion-Footed Beast.” After about 1960, Wolfe argued, the
novel was no longer about “tak[ing] real life and spread[ing] it
across the pages of a book”; instead, it had degenerated into “a
sublime literary game.” One of his particular targets of criticism
was none other than Philip Roth, whom Wolfe attacked for turning away
from the realistic style of his early work. Wolfe’s own novels,
like “The Bonfire of the Vanities,” were a deliberate attempt to
reverse this trend, to restore accessible realism to its place at the
center of fiction.
Yet the truth
revealed by the Great American Read list is that realism does not
seem any more beloved by American readers than postmodernism. Neither
Wolfe’s novels nor other classics of American realism—the
“Rabbit” books of John Updike, the terse stories of Raymond
Carver —make the top 100. On the contrary, most of our favorite
books offer stories that are larger than life. It is no coincidence
that many of the recent books on the list were made into popular
films or TV shows. In addition to “The Da Vinci Code” and “Fifty
Shades of Grey,” we find “Jurassic Park,” “The Hunt for Red
October,” and “A Song of Ice and Fire,” the series that became
“Game of Thrones.” These are all high-concept stories, in which
exciting adventures take place in fantastic or specialized worlds.
They were movies in prose even before they were translated to the
screen.
Perhaps, for many
readers, it does not make much difference whether a story is told in
print on a page or images on a screen. The narrative itself is what
matters. In fact, the Great American Read list confirms that there is
a great hunger in our culture for grand, mythic narratives. The
adoration of the Harry Potter books, like the nearly scriptural
status of the Star Wars movies, involves more than just fandom. These
are comprehensive universes, complete with their own laws and
histories, heroes and villains, morals and meanings. They serve the
purpose that was once served by epic poems like “The Iliad” or
“The Odyssey,” or even by biblical stories: They dramatize the
spiritual truths and longings that shape our world.
Indeed, while there
are some books on the top 100 list that could be categorized as
strictly escapist entertainment, what’s striking is how many of
them have a serious, didactic purpose. Americans are a moralistic
people—that’s one reason why we argue so bitterly about
politics—and our books reflect our love of sermons. “Atlas
Shrugged” is a sermon on individualism and capitalism, just as “The
Handmaid’s Tale” is a sermon on feminism and patriarchy. “The
Catcher in the Rye” and “ Siddhartha ” are books that help
young people, in particular, formulate a whole philosophy of life.
Then there are tales
of good fighting against evil, whether they take the form of teen
fantasies like “The Hunger Games” and “Twilight” or use an
explicitly Christian vocabulary, such as Frank E. Peretti’s “This
Present Darkness” and the “Left Behind” series, which is set in
a post-Rapture world. In a sense, you could say that the most
influential book on the list is John Bunyan’s “The Pilgrim’s
Progress,” from 1678, which helped to pioneer the combination of
religious moralizing and fantastic adventure.
The need for such
epic stories predates printed or even written literature and will
survive even if books disappear, as many writers and readers now
fear. In fact, the most interesting thing about the Great American
Read list is the way it reminds us that stories are something
separate from, and more fundamental than, what we call fiction, which
is a fairly recent category, historically speaking. After all, it
wasn’t until the 18th century that the novel became a dominant
literary form, first in Europe and then around the world.
In his classic 1936
essay “The Storyteller,” the German literary critic Walter
Benjamin argued that the novel was in some ways actually the opposite
of traditional storytelling. “What distinguishes the novel from the
story,” he wrote, “is its essential dependence on the book.”
Books can be well or
badly written, and it is a taste for the art of writing that makes
people interested in literature, where the “how” of the tale
matters as much as, or more than, the “what” and “why.” That
is why literary taste, like taste in food or music, can be educated:
We learn to enjoy things more, and to enjoy more things, as we
accumulate experience in reading. But before taste comes the need for
sustenance, and that is what America’s favorite books provide: the
stories that we need to make sense of our lives.