Every few years, one organization or another will release a list of “The Greatest 100 Novels of All Time” or “The Books You Have to Read Before You Die.” These lists, although occasionally including a few surprises, tend to reflect the literary canon of the society that produce them; they include the same “great books” that are taught in high school and college, the same books that get handsome new editions on the anniversaries of their publication, the same books discussed in analyses and criticisms and essays. While this societal canon serves a purpose, I’ve always been more interested in the idea of a personal canon; a selection of books (or music, or art, etc.) that were important to the growth and development of an individual, rather than a group of people.
The societal canon is always going to be a popular topic. Discussions about the greatest novels of all time serve as entertainment; it’s fun to sit around and debate the merits of various books and what makes one better than another. There is never going to be complete agreement, so it can be an endless debate, and since people are bound to disagree vocally with any list, these types of stories are great for magazines or newspapers looking to draw readers. At the same time, these discussions also serve as an intellectual measuring stick. If a group at a dinner party starts talking about whether The Great Gatsby or Moby Dick is the better novel and you admit you’ve never read either, you’re probably going to end up feeling inferior while everyone else gets to feel superior. The societal canon helps a country or other group of people present a collective literary identity, which also ties in to education – if a young adult or a person foreign to a society wants to read a “great book,” it’s certainly easier to be able to rattle off a few “important books” than to take them to the fiction section of your library and say “Here, pick a book at random.”
However, these benefits can also end up being sources of frustration. As mentioned above, there is never going to be any consensus on the greatest novels of all time, so although it can be fun to talk about, you’re never going to reach a satisfying conclusion. Since the goal is consensus and the pool of possible options is so large, any oddball or unusual choices tend to get dropped in favor of agreement. As an intellectual measuring stick, reading choices are arbitrary and unreliable; lots of smart people prefer to read nonfiction instead of novels, or may be too busy designing particle accelerators to catch up on the classics. And the canon tends to present an oversimplified and idealized portrait of a society. One could argue that you could learn as much about the United States by reading 100 unrecognized genre paperbacks as you could 100 classic novels.
This is why I’d rather talk to people about the books that contributed to their personal development. Sometimes these can be books that also appear on classic novel lists, but often they’re weird kids books that were checked out of the library or random novels that were found on parents’ bookshelves, books that are in no way “important” to the culture of a society or the development of literature but were nevertheless important to how an individual turned out. It can be a lot harder to have a discussion about the personal canon; since it often includes books that not everybody has read, it requires greater explanation of and background information on each book. But on the other hand, you can create a definitive personal canon – since you are the only person who can say what your personal canon is, no one’s going to argue with you about it.
The benefits of discussing the personal canon with other people are 1) the possibility that you could learn about a great book that you’ve never heard of before, and 2) the chance that you could unknowingly share a favorite unappreciated book with someone else (this seems much more likely if your discussion takes place on the Internet, where you can find groups of people who share any of your predilections, no matter how unique and bizarre they are). There is also a con to such a discussion: it can be kind of nice to keep the personal canon personal; i.e., maintain the idea of a private list of books inside of you that made you who are you are, almost like a secret recipe for your psyche. However, I have made a list of a few selections from my personal canon that aren’t on any societal literary canon, and if you want to share some of yours with me, that would be great.
SELECTIONS FROM MY PERSONAL CANON
(Note: these are mainly books that were really important to me as a kid. It’s hard for me to assess books that were important to me in my 20s from my current perspective; give me another 10 years or so.)
The Book of Lists by David Wallechinsky, Irving Wallace, and Amy Wallace
