Inspired by the excruciating ruminations of Lisa Chellman, I finally started a list I’ve been meaning to make for a long time. I think you’ll quickly discern the theme:

Audubon’s Elephant, by Duff Hart-Davis (2004)
Caesar’s Column, by Ignatius Donnelly and Walter Rideout (1960)
Cleopatra’s Nose, by Daniel J. Boorstin (1994)
Cleopatra’s Nose, by Judith Thurman (2007)
Corelli’s Mandolin, by Louis De Bernieres (1994)
D’Alembert’s Principle, by Andrew Crumey (1998)
Darconville’s Cat, by Alexander Theroux’s (1981)
Darwin’s Wink, by Alison Anderson (2004)
Descartes’ Error, by Antonio Damaso (1994) 
Flaubert’s Parrot, by Julian Barnes (1984)
Foucault’s Pendulum, by Umberto Eco (1989)
Galileo’s Daughter, by Dava Sobel (1999)
Galileo’s Finger, by Peter Atkins (2003)
Galileo’s Mistake, by Wade Rowland (2003)
Galileo’s Pendulum, by Roger G. Newton (2004)
Galileo’s Treasure Box, by Catherine Brighton (1987)
Kafka’s Prayer, by Paul Goodman (1947)
Prospero’s Daughter, by Elizabeth Nunez (2006)
Prospero’s Daughters, by Sally Stewart (2006)
Pushkin’s Button, by Serena Vitale (1999)
Rembrandt’s Eyes, by Simon Schama (1999)
Rembrandt’s Nose, by Michael Taylor (2007)
Schopenhauer’s Porcupines, by Deborah Anna Luepnitz (2002)
Schopenhauer’s Telescope, by Gerard Donovan (2003)
Stalin’s Nose, by Rory MacLean (1993)
Wittgenstein’s Poker, by David Edmonds and John Eidinow (2001)

There is, of course, an impressive Shakespearean subset:

Shakespeare’s Counselor, by Charlaine Harris (2001)
Shakespeare’s Daughter, by Peter W. Hassinger (2004)
Shakespeare’s Kitchen, by Lore Segal (2007)
Shakespeare’s Scribe, by Gary Blackwood (2000)
Shakespeare’s Spy, by Gary Blackwood (2003)

The question is, are there enough of these to create an A-Z? And should the rules restrict qualification to actual historical figures, or can we include titles like Alexander Theroux’s Darconville’s Cat (1981)?

These are just off the top of my head–there must be many more. Help me out!

Update #1: Bill Ott pointed me to his February 15, 2004 Back Page (”Working Titles“), which includes some good ones, especially a bunch of Galileos. Also, amazingly, his forthcoming column, in the May 15 issue, debunks the notion that we ever considered changing the name Booklist to Galileo’s Reviews.

Update #2: Donna Seaman offered a sweet-smelling quartet of books with “nose” in the title, including two Cleopatras.

Update #3: Sue-Ellen Beauregard suggested Prospero’s Daughter, and when I searched it, I found that Prospero had not one but two.

Update #4: More, more, more . . . good tips from Mary Ellen Quinn (Corelli), Ray Olson (Caesar, D’Alembert, Kafka), and Donna (Descartes).

I didn’t post yesterday because I was busy working on something for Booklist’s May 15 Spotlight on SF/Fantasy–a core collection of apocalyptic fiction that preceded The Road. Whew! I may as well have chosen SF that involves space travel, or fantasy that features scaly beasts. I’m exaggerating, of course, but (and I’m quoting myself in advance here):

the idea of the end of the world is hardly new. In fact, as we revisit the apocalyptic works that paved the way for this modern classic, we find that, for writers, the end of the world is practically an annual occurrence.

Rimshot!

Here’s a sneak peek at the shortlist. I’ll be doing a web-only version (or, if you prefer, “Booklist Online Exclusive”) that’s much, much longer.

The Bible

Earth Abides, by George R. Stewart (1949)

I Am Legend, by Richard Matheson (1954)

On the Beach, by Nevil Shute (1957)

A Canticle for Leibowitz, by Walter M. Miller, Jr. (1959)

The Stand, by Stephen King (1978)

Riddley Walker, by Russell Hoban (1980)

Fiskadoro, by Denis Johnson (1985)

Oryx and Crake, by Margaret Atwood (2003)

The Pesthouse, by Jim Crace (2007)

(OK, The Pesthouse came out after the road, but I had to put it on there anyway, since Crace couldn’t have McCarthy while he was writing it.)

According to recent polls by Harris Interactive, Americans’ favorite genre is crime fiction and their favorite book is the Bible. I’m sure Christopher Hitchens (God Is Not Great, 2007) could make a one-liner out of that, but I’ll just posit my suspicion that not everyone who picked the Bible has read it cover to cover.

Here’s the rest of the list:

#1 - The Bible
 
#2 - Gone with the Wind, by Margaret Mitchell
 
#3 - Lord of the Rings (series), by J.R.R. Tolkien
 
#4 - Harry Potter (series), by J.K. Rowling
 
#5 - The Stand, by Stephen King
 
#6 - The Da Vinci Code, by Dan Brown
 
#7 - To Kill a Mockingbird, by Harper Lee
 
#8 - Angels and Demons, by Dan Brown
 
#9 - Atlas Shrugged, by Ayn Rand

#10 - Catcher in the Rye, by J.D. Salinger

The Harris site has breakdowns by gender, race/ethnicity, generation, political party, region, and education. Interestingly, Democrats, Republicans, and Independents all agree on Gone with the Wind as the second-best book.

I’m reading Thomas Kohnstamm’s Do Travel Writers Go to Hell? A Swashbuckling Tale of High Adventures, Questionable Ethics & Professional Hedonism (Three Rivers). Kohnstamm, bitten early by the travel bug, has an early-life crisis (at the time the book takes place, he’s still in his twenties), walks away from his job, and flies to Brazil to write for the Lonely Planet guidebook.

The book’s emphasis on Kohnstamm’s wild ‘n’ crazy adventures made me think of Glasgow Phillips’ Royal Nonesuch: or, What Will I Do When I Grow Up? And also Dan Dunn’s Nobody Likes a Quitter (and Other Reasons to Avoid Rehab): The Loaded Life of an Outlaw Booze Writer…and also Tom Sykes’ What Did I Do Last Night?

Besides their seeming prediliction for titles in the form of questions, what do these books have in common? Well, they’re all writing in the shadow of Hunter S. Thompson, of course. The jacket copy on Kohnstamm’s book invokes the name of the gonzo great, and Dunn, apparently, was even a protege of Thompson. But making such comparisons is dangerous. In part because, if you measure your worth by feats of consumption, there’s actual danger in trying to be the “best.” But more because Thompson’s gift wasn’t his herculean intake of mind-altering substances, it was his mind itself. And, before he himself became a parody of himself [Ed: that reads like Nigel Tufnel channeling Austin Powers, dunnit?], the gonzo style allowed him a way to capture the weirdness at the heart of some of his stories–and it was new, a refreshing antidote to the style of journalism practiced by his contemporaries.

Also, he was insanely funny.

Writers who go gonzo without Thompson’s humor and savagely penetrating intellect run the risk of coming off like boring drunks. Or at least like self-absorbed, self-indulgent navel-gazers who think it’s funny to do journalism–or any job–poorly.

Having gotten all that off my chest, I think Kohnstamm’s book is actually the best of the lot. Roughly speaking, there are three elements in it: his early-life crisis and the pull of wanderlust; his drinking, drugging, and fornicating; and his expose of the business of writing travel guides. He plays the HST card on his first hand, during a booze-and-coke-fueled pub crawl with a character referred only to as “the Doctor,” but his sharp, funny writing and self-deprecation save the day. To wit:

There is nothing tough about writing–the act of writing is about as burly as operating a cash register…. 

But it’s his thoughts on travel writing that keep me turning pages: the Lonely Planet’s journey from backpacker tip sheet to middle-class faux-hobo itinerary; the loneliness that can ensue when it’s your job to write seriously about what everyone else does for fun; the impossible assignment of writing about travel that you can’t yourself afford. (In one brilliant scene, he gets thrown out of a hotel that he’s researching because he looks like he can’t afford to stay there.)

I’ve never done any travel writing, but I have had a few experiences that resonate. I’ve written reviews of restaurants where the assigning publication wouldn’t cover the cost of a decent meal. And I contributed to a Chicago guidebook once–a great learning experience, but the pay probably didn’t cover the cost of my shoe leather.

So if booze is fuel for the journey, then so be it. But writers need to be careful not to get stuck at the bottom of the glass.

Or should that be “how-to-read books”? In the Independent, D. J. Taylor’s review of James Wood’s How Fiction Works mentions the “very considerable critical sub-genre: the literary user’s manual.” Which includes:

How to Read a Novel, by John Sutherland (2006)

How Novels Work, by John Mullan (2006)

Fifty-Two Ways to Read a Poem, by Ruth Padel (2002)

Aspects of the Novel, by E. M. Forster (1927)

Not to mention:

Reading Like a Writer, by Francine Prose (2006)

Reading Comics, by Douglas Wolk (2007)

On the how-to-review-a-book front, would-be reviewers should take note of Taylor’s first paragraph, which certainly made me want to read the rest of his review:

Whatever one may think about James Wood’s constant ejaculations, his ceremonious name-dropping (”W G Sebald once said to me…”) and his lecture-hall mannerisms - more of these in a moment - he really is an A-grade exponent of what university syllabi used to call “practical criticism”. Some of the best bits of this brief but luminous primer - and they are very good indeed - come when Wood strips the engine of some fabled fictional juggernaut down to its component parts with the aim of establishing just how a piece of prose works to bring off its effects, the way in which, as he puts it, a novel “teaches us how to read its narrator”.

Trying to catch up on a few older items today. The National Book Critics Circle’s “Best Recommended” list is now “Good Reads“–but the new list is still susceptible to some of the same old criticisms, capably voiced by Ron Hogan on Galleycat:

If you were ever truly fascinated by what a cluster of people “from Annie Proulx to Jonathan Franzen” were reading, well, now you know. Feel particularly moved to buy any of those books now?

And the worst thing is you should, since the books are all perfectly good books, some of them even great books. But a list created by committee that doesn’t even offer a capsule description of its contents, or even a one-line blurb, just isn’t the same as a genuinely passionate recommendation from someone whose judgment you trust.

Like Hogan, I think the list is a decent idea–just one that needs some refinement.

Fiction

Tree of Smoke, by Denis Johnson (Farrar)
The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, by Junot Diaz (Riverhead)
Diary of a Bad Year, by J. M. Coetzee  (Viking)
People of the Book, by Geraldine Brooks (Viking)
Zeroville, by Steve Erickson (Europa)

Nonfiction

The Rest Is Noise, by Alex Ross (FSG)
Brother, I’m Dying, by Edwidge Danticat (Knopf)
In Defense of Food, by Michael Pollan (Penguin)
Musicophilia, by Oliver Sacks (Knopf)
The Shock Doctrine, by Naomi Klein (Metropolitan)

Poetry

Elegy, by Mary Jo Bang (Graywolf)
Time and Materials, by Robert Hass (Ecco)
Gulf Music, by Robert Pinsky (FSG)
The Collected Poems, 1956-1998, by Zbigniew Herbert (Ecco)
Sharp Teeth, by Toby Barlow (Harper)

Busy, busy day here. But the new issue of Booklist is live, and so are Editors’ Choice and Top of the List. Check ‘em out–they’re free!

(Love or loathe our picks? Let me know!)

The Washington Post’s Top Ten Books of 2007.

The New York Times Sunday Book Review’s 10 Best Books of 2007.

(In common: The Savage Detectives, Tree of Smoke.)

The National Book Critics Circle launches a new kind of list: the Best Recommended List. (Publishers Weekly called it the Most Recommended List.)

(In common: Tree of Smoke.)

Booklist’s Top of the List? Coming soon.

Apparently the last half century has been a time of drought in Chicago letters. In its November issue, Chicago Magazine (”Tough Love: Great Chicago Novels“) offers its list of the “ten essential Chicago novels.” But while inclusion doesn’t necessarily hinge on a novel’s status as classic, the results skew that way, with only one post-1953 book–Sandra Cisnero’s The House on Mango Street (1984)–making the list.

Five post-2002 books were included in a sidebar called “The New School” (”Chicago lit lives!”–whew). So apparently only time will tell if the editors’ opinions are correct.

Great Chicago Novels

The Cliff-Dwellers, by Henry Blake Fuller (1893)
Sister Carrie, by Theodore Dreiser (1900)
The Pit, by Frank Norris (1903)
The Jungle, by Upton Sinclair (1906)
The Studs Lonigan Trilogy, by James T. Farrell (1932-5)
Native Son, by Richard Wright (1940)
The Man with the Golden Arm, by Nelson Algren (1949)
Maud Martha, by Gwendolyn Brooks (1953)
The Adventures of Augie March, by Saul Bellow (1953)
The House on Mango Street, by Sandra Cisneros (1984)

The New School

47th Street Black, by Bayo Ojikutu (2003)
I Sailed with Magellan, by Stuart Dybek (2004)
Hairstyles of the Damned, by Joe Meno (2004)
My Sister’s Continent, by Gina Frangello (2006)
Then We Came to the End, by Joshua Ferris (2007)

Want to weigh in? Vote for your favorite. When I wrote this, The Jungle was, perhaps predictably, leading the pack with 26% of the vote. (Is prose a criterion?) Commenters also offered props for The Year Diz Came to Town, by Robert Goldsborough, a hard-to-find e-book; Stuart Dybek’s The Coast of Chicago, a short-story collection, and Erik Larson’s Devil in the White City, a work of nonfiction.

More useful suggestions included:

Passing, by Nella Larsen (1929)
Knock on Any Door, by Willard Motley (1947)
The Time Traveler’s Wife, by Audrey Niffenegger (2003)
The Easy Hour, by Leslie Stella (2003)
Crossing California, by Adam Langer (2004)
Happy Baby, by Stephen Elliott (2004)

In a brief article in USA Today (”Novels about 9/11 can’t stack up to non-fiction“), Bob Minzesheimer notes that nonfiction about 9/11 outnumbers novels by a staggering ratio:

Six years after the twin towers fell, enough non-fiction has been published about Sept. 11, 2001, to fill an entire section of a bookstore: 1,036 titles, according to Books in Print.

But novels inspired by 9/11 could fit on one shelf. There are only about 30, and none has seized the public imagination.

There have been, of course, some well-respected and well-reviewed 9/11 novels. (I gave Jay McInerney’s The Good Life high praise, and other Booklist reviewers have starred reviews of Don DeLillo’s Falling Man, Jess Walter’s The Zero, and John Updike’s Terrorist.) Yet there seems to be this assumption out there that the 9/11 novel hasn’t been written. Will it be? Do we need it to be?

C. Max Magee makes some good points at The Millions:

…the subtext of these articles, and there have been many in many venues over the years, is twofold.

First is that the serious novel’s driving function is to make sense of our complicated world, to distill it to its essence so that years from now, when a young man asks how 9/11 felt, an old man can wordlessly slip a book into his hand. Second is this idea that every major event requires the culture to produce innumerable artifacts that are explicitly about that event. There are hundreds of films and TV shows that are primarily about 9/11, but where, the culture watchers ask, are all the novels?

Linking to an earlier post, he cites his own previous answer to the question:

I would argue that nearly every serious novel written since 9/11 is a “9/11 novel.” Writers, artists, and filmmakers, consciously or subconsciously, react to the world around them some way, and 9/11, from many angles, is incontrovertibly a part of our world. For example, even Michael Chabon’s The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, which is set in an alternate universe in which a temporary Jewish homeland has been set up in Alaska, is a “9/11 novel” in that it has internalized the post-9/11 sensibilities of shadowy government meddling in the Middle East and the feeling of an impending global and religiously motivated conflict. To expect a novel to explicitly place 9/11 into a context that offers us all some greater understanding of it is to misunderstand how fiction works, as Jerome Weeks implies. What we are really looking for (as ever) is a defining novel of our time.

Well said.