Bookmark Now

Over the years I’ve fielded many questions from journalists and readers about writing and reading. I don’t mind; I’m a talker and like answering questions. But there is one question that makes me shudder, no matter how often I answer it or how hard I think about it: What are your Top Ten books? Sometimes the question has been framed differently: Which authors have influenced you the most? Or what are the ten books you would like always to have on your bedside table? Or—this from Oprah Magazine, with its relentless aspirational spin—name five books that have made a difference to your life. No matter how it’s put, someone wants me to pronounce on my reading experiences and, presumably, reveal something of myself.

Lord, how I hate it. I hate it even though I’ve asked people the same question myself, have pondered others’ lists, or their bookshelves, or what they’re reading on the subway. I want to know what my friends have read on vacation. I think differently of someone who prefers Wilkie Collins over Charles Dickens, or Updike over Roth, or the Chronicles of Narnia over Lord of the Rings. It’s a given that our choice of books reveals our personalities, so surely it’s a legitimate question to ask writers, or anyone, what books they love. Yet I sweat over my list, worrying over it, changing it, doubting its veracity. It’s the same feeling I get when I’m at the optician’s having my eyes tested and she asks, “Which letter is clearer on the chart, the left E or the right E?” And I’m not sure because they look the same, but I have to choose because she needs a definite answer so that she can adjust my contact lenses. Whatever I answer, my choice feels so arbitrary that I wonder if I might be unintentionally lying.

I’m certainly familiar with the Top Ten format. I grew up listening to Casey Kasem every week, and I always look at the best seller lists when I read the books section of the newspaper or on Amazon. I thought the best parts of Nick Hornby’s High Fidelity were the lists. And I don’t mind being asked about my Top Ten films or albums. An Italian journalist once gave me five minutes to write down my five favorite films, albums, and books. I did the first two in a couple of minutes, but the books I stalled on and couldn’t finish. I am more at ease talking about music and films because they’re not my livelihood. Now that I am a writer by trade, I feel more responsible and less cavalier about my pronouncements on books. I’m expected to know better, not to be suckered by the literary equivalent of a mediocre Lyle Lovett album or the pretensions of The Matrix films. And I’m aware that my list is meant to be a projection of me, or at least of how I want people to see me. These factors make it hard not to be self-conscious about the list.

Casey Kasem and Amazon have it easy: Their lists are based on quantity, not quality. There is a simple, finite answer to what the Top Ten are on Amazon on October 1, 2004, at 11:30 A.M. (No. 1 is Jon Stewart Presents America: A Citizen’s Guide to Democracy Inaction): It’s how many have sold the most in the last hour. To come up with a Top Ten of all-time favorites is much trickier. It’s meant to be more permanent and less questionable. Yet my own Top Ten are almost as changeable as Casey Kasem’s, even though not linked to economics. At 11:30 A.M. on October 1, 2004, I am likely to include Anna Karenina as one of my Top Ten. On October 2, 2004, though, I might think it too long, too sentimental, too Oprah for my list.

Whenever I’m obliged to name my Top Ten I flounder between the Canon and the best sellers, the Big Books and the Best Loved, the head and the heart. This is not a new dilemma for me. On my own Web site I include a list of what I’ve read each month, with a star system of rating the books: one star for terrible, five stars for superb. For the first eighteen months I gave the books a single rating. After a while, though, I found the pressure to rate them was interfering with my reading experience. I could no longer enjoy a book, but fretted throughout as to whether to give it, say, three or four stars. I felt so compromised by having to rate the books that I considered dropping it, even though from feedback I knew that people loved seeing the ratings.

Finally I realized that I was usually torn between two conflicting ratings: one for whether or not the book was well written, the other for my reading experience of it. Perhaps—given how often the head and heart are at war—it’s not surprising that these two ratings often don’t match. Just because a book is well written doesn’t mean we like reading it. Conversely, a book can be poorly written but entertaining, especially if it’s just what we’re in the mood for at the time. I decided to be honest, and now I give books two ratings: one for the quality of the book itself (its style, structure, originality, etc.), the other for whether or not I actually had a good time reading it.

I suspect the first rating will remain the same over time—after all, the book itself never changes—but the second one may shift. Inevitably, the feeling we have of reading a great book fades, as fireworks, flower scents, and love affairs do. After a while all we can rank is our memory of how we felt about it. It’s a bit like recalling a vacation by looking at photo albums, which are only of “good” shots and don’t necessarily tell the full story of the trip. With only those photos as prompts, our memories of the vacation become about the Kodak moments rather than the other 99 percent.

My memory of specific details in books is terrible. Often I can’t remember how books end. What happens at the end of The Catcher in the Rye? Or Margaret Atwood’s Alias Grace? Or Rose Tremain’s Restoration? All have been in my Top Ten at one time or another. I remember loving some of Atwood’s early novels, but that’s all I remember. I read them at least twenty years ago; what would I think of them now? Is it legal to say you love a book when you can’t actually remember anything about it? In fact, when I think of the books I was so passionate about when I was young, I wonder if I would love them as much now. When the films of Lord of the Rings came out, several friends admitted trying to reread the books they had loved as teenagers, but they couldn’t finish them. Me, I’m preserving my teenage obsession.

Could the same also be said of books I read in early adult-hood? Or ten years ago? Or even a year ago? In 2003 I read just one book I gave five stars to: Ann Patchett’s Bel Canto. On looking over my ratings now, I noticed, too, that I gave Mark Haddon’s Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time just three stars. A year on, would I change either rating? Yes—I think they would both get four stars. Maybe next year those stars would be changed yet again. My response to a book is built on shifting sands, buffeted by the other books I read, the things other people say about the books, and how much the book continues to ring bells in my head or disappears among all the others.

It’s not just our memory that is fickle—so are our reading experiences. The process of reading and absorbing a book is very much tied to the time and place and emotional state in which the books are read. Starting with L. M. Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables at age eleven and up through Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials in 2002 (more contenders for the Top Ten), I have consistently loved books that I’ve read when I’ve been sick in bed. In these fractured, frantic times, it’s rare to have several unbroken hours and days in which to do nothing but read. In my sickbed I read as I expect writers intended me to: in a concentrated, unbroken period of time in which the interior world of the book swells and takes over the real world. The characters are rounded, the landscapes three-dimensional, the plot twists comprehensible and satisfying.

So often, though, I’m not sick in bed and don’t have the time to read more than a few pages at night before sleep pulls me under. It is a rare book that wins the battle against drooping eyelids. I’ve fallen asleep over Austen and Atwood, Wilkie Collins and Philip Pullman. Many times I’ve known that I would have enjoyed a book more if I’d given it the chance of a fair chunk of uninterrupted time. In short, liking or not liking a book depends a great deal on the quality of time we make for it. That is as important, if not more so, than the writing itself, and can make all the difference between three stars and five stars, a Top Ten or nowhere near the charts.

Asking someone what his or her Top Ten books are is a very twenty-first-century question. It’s hard to imagine getting Austen, George Eliot, Tolstoy, Woolf, or Faulkner to name their Top Ten reads. Even recent venerables like Margaret Atwood and Toni Morrison would very likely give the question short shrift. (Morrison once replied thus to a nervous journalist’s question about whether she uses a pen and paper or computer when she writes: “You really have collapsed, haven’t you?” Imagine her response to a Top Ten request!) Writers from the past were unlikely to be sympathetic to the current thinking that shapes such a question: the desire not to take the time to delve but to know someone at a glance. Jane Austen easily used half a page describing someone’s eyes; she would not appreciate summarizing her reading tastes in ten titles.

But in this time-tight world, where New Yorker articles are getting shorter and newspaper interviews often turn into questionnaires about favorite foods, our greatest fear (in five words or less), and how we would like to be remembered, the Top Ten makes the perfect sound bite. It saves readers time: We assume we know someone and so don’t have to read the whole interview, much less, God forbid, their books.

I suspect past writers would also sense the contradiction grating behind the question. We want to know someone’s Top Ten as an encapsulation of a writer, and yet we also expect the list to reflect a kind of Platonic ideal of writing. Perhaps someone else could get away with listing a Danielle Steele in his or her Top Ten, but a writer would be laughed out of town. We are expected to list our favorite books, yes, but those are really meant to be the best books as well. People may accept that our lists change, for all of the reasons I’ve discussed, but they do expect each list to be sound. That makes it impossible to answer honestly, which is why Austen would dismiss the question with a witty, self-deprecating remark, and Atwood would probably answer briefly and caustically enough to make any questioner feel foolish.

In the end, the Top Ten list does not give us a full picture of a person, but rather ten slices of his or her life, as viewed optimistically by him or her at the moment of compilation—say, October 1, 2004, at 11:30 A.M. Certainly books are better, more sophisticated indicators of character than, say, shoes or restaurants or vacation destinations. But even the “best” book—whatever that really means—is not as complicated as we are. A list is not enough. If I gave my optician an honest answer about my eyesight I would take as long as Jane Austen to describe my eyes. My appointment with her would take longer, and cost more, but I might well see more clearly as a result.