{"id":3597,"date":"2009-03-11T10:48:10","date_gmt":"2009-03-11T14:48:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/?p=3597"},"modified":"2009-03-11T15:17:26","modified_gmt":"2009-03-11T19:17:26","slug":"0-fer-94","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/0-fer-94","title":{"rendered":"0-fer-94"},"content":{"rendered":"

I have a copy of Harold Bloom’s The Western Canon<\/a>\"\" that I take down from the shelf every year or so. I like to look through its four appendices and check off the “canonical” books that I’ve read. There are 37 pages of these lists<\/a>, broken down into four Vico-esque eras of history: Theocratic, Aristocratic, Democratic and Chaotic.<\/p>\n

I recall reading a New York <\/em>magazine interview around the time of The Western Canon<\/em>‘s publication (c. 1994) in which Mr. Bloom complained about having to produce the mammoth end-of-book list. His editors prevailed upon him to do it, I guess because it would be easier to hook reviewers, since they could now look to see if their favorite authors and titles had made the cut. And because dilettantes like me could start checklists!<\/p>\n

[UPDATE! Article found<\/a>, courtesy of Google’s copyright-be-damned policy! Here’s the paragraph I was trying to recall:<\/em><\/p>\n

The list, Bloom says, is intended to be suggestive rather than prescriptive \u00e2\u20ac\u201d which is just as well, since there are more than 850 authors cited. Indeed, says Bloom, the list may turn out to be a liability, stealing all the attention from the body of the book. “I was encouraged to do it by my agent and my editor,” he says woefully. “They may have been right, they may have been wrong. I’m not so sure that it was a good idea.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Go read it<\/a>!]<\/em><\/p>\n

I admit that I find it fun to measure myself against lists like this. And, yes, I’m enough of a geek that I get a little thrill putting a check-mark next to a title that I’ve finished after years of false starts. I’m not out to “finish” Mr. Bloom’s list, obviously; I could enjoyably spend the rest of my days just reading Shakespeare and ignoring the hundreds of other titles he suggested, and I think he’d find that a perfectly fine choice.<\/p>\n

But it’s nice to make progress. Last night, I took out my copy of The Western Canon<\/em> and was surprised to find that a few books I read last year were on Mr. Bloom’s list: Aegypt<\/a>\"\" and Love & Sleep<\/a>\"\". Check and check! Only 37 more books to go! On that page!<\/p>\n

After checking off those John Crowley books, I got down to business. I flipped back to the Aristocratic Age, looked for the “FRANCE” section, then the entry for Michel de Montaigne. I proceeded to put a dark check-mark next to “Essays, translated by Donald Frame<\/a>\"\",” because after more than 2 years of reading, I have finished all 1,045 pages of Montaigne’s Essays, beyotch!<\/strong><\/em><\/span><\/span> <\/strong><\/em><\/span>I am D-U-N done! Celebrate me!<\/p>\n

* * *<\/p>\n

Still, all of that reading added up to just one check-mark, and you readers know that I have plenty of 0-fers out there!<\/p>\n

I coincidentally came across a link to a literary blog I’d never read, The Elegant Variation<\/a>. Jason Kottke linked to this post about literary critic James Wood’s 1994 response to Mr. Bloom’s lists<\/a>. Mr. Wood offered up his own list of the best British & American books from 1945 to 1985!<\/p>\n

I jumped down to the bottom of the list and started working my way up. At first, I thought, “I have not read a single one of these books! This will be the greatest 0-fer of all time!”<\/p>\n

Eventually, I started coming across titles that I had read, so I decided to break the list down into four categories:<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. Books I’ve Read (18)<\/li>\n
  2. Books I’ve Started but Never Finished (5)<\/li>\n
  3. Books I’ve Never Started (78!)<\/li>\n
  4. Books (and\/or Authors) I’ve Never Heard Of (25!)<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    I could probably break #3 down into Books I Plan To Read Someday<\/em> and Books I Know I’ll Never Get Around To,<\/em> but hey.<\/p>\n

    It’s important to blaze one’s own trail through the library and not to take any single source as too much of an authority. After all, Mr. Bloom includes four books by Don DeLillo on his list, so it’s not like we should regard his modern section too seriously. It’s called “Chaotic” for a reason, right? (Mr. Wood puts one of Mr. DeLillo’s books on his list, too. Sigh.)<\/p>\n

    In the spirit of celebrating my lacunae, here’s this week’s modified 0-fer list! (Go to that TEV post<\/a> to get the original sequence of Mr. Wood’s list! And go check out that blog! It seems pretty neat!)<\/p>\n

    Books I’ve Read<\/em><\/span>
    \nWilliam Burroughs \u00e2\u20ac\u201c The Naked Lunch<\/em>
    \nKurt Vonnegut \u00e2\u20ac\u201c Slaughterhouse 5<\/em>
    \nRalph Ellison \u00e2\u20ac\u201c Invisible Man<\/em>
    \nFrederick Exley \u00e2\u20ac\u201c A Fan’s Notes<\/em>
    \nKazuo Ishiguro \u00e2\u20ac\u201c The Remains of the Day<\/em>
    \nPhilip Roth \u00e2\u20ac\u201c Goodbye, Columbus<\/em>; The Counterlife<\/em>
    \nJD Salinger \u00e2\u20ac\u201c The Catcher in the Rye<\/em>
    \nRobert Penn Warren \u00e2\u20ac\u201c All The King’s Men<\/em>
    \nDon DeLillo \u00e2\u20ac\u201c White Noise<\/em>
    \nMalcolm Lowry \u00e2\u20ac\u201c Under the Volcano<\/em>
    \nWalker Percy \u00e2\u20ac\u201c The Moviegoer<\/em>
    \nGeorge Orwell \u00e2\u20ac\u201c 1984<\/em>; Collected Essays and Journalism<\/em> (4 vols)
    \nJG Ballard \u00e2\u20ac\u201c Concrete Island<\/em>
    \nSaul Bellow \u00e2\u20ac\u201c Herzog<\/em>
    \nThomas Pynchon \u00e2\u20ac\u201c The Crying of Lot 49<\/em>; V<\/em><\/p>\n

    Books I’ve Started But Never Finished<\/em><\/span>
    \nHarold Brodkey \u00e2\u20ac\u201c Stories in an Almost Classical Mode<\/em>
    \nAS Byatt \u00e2\u20ac\u201c Still Life<\/em>
    \nToni Morrison \u00e2\u20ac\u201c Beloved<\/em>
    \nJack Kerouac \u00e2\u20ac\u201c On the Road<\/em>
    \nJoseph Heller \u00e2\u20ac\u201c Catch-22<\/em><\/p>\n

    Books I’ve Never Started<\/em><\/span>
    \nNorman Mailer \u00e2\u20ac\u201c The Naked and the Dead<\/em>; Armies of the Night<\/em>
    \nWalter Abish \u00e2\u20ac\u201c How German Is It<\/em>
    \nElizabeth Bishop \u00e2\u20ac\u201c The Complete Poems<\/em>
    \nJohn Cheever \u00e2\u20ac\u201c Collected Stories<\/em>; Falconer<\/em>
    \nToni Morrison \u00e2\u20ac\u201c Sula
    \nBernard Malamud \u00e2\u20ac\u201c The Assistant<\/em>; The Stories of Bernard Malamud<\/em>
    \nWilliam Trevor \u00e2\u20ac\u201c Collected Stories<\/em>
    \nJames Baldwin \u00e2\u20ac\u201c The Fire Next Time<\/em>; Giovanni’s Room<\/em>
    \nHoward Nemerov \u00e2\u20ac\u201c Collected Poems<\/em>
    \nVS Naipaul \u00e2\u20ac\u201c A House for Mr. Biswas; In a Free State; The Enigma of Arrival<\/em>
    \nPhilip Roth \u00e2\u20ac\u201c Reading Myself and Others<\/em>
    \nFlannery O’Connor \u00e2\u20ac\u201c A Good Man Is Hard To Find<\/em>
    \nFrank O’Hara \u00e2\u20ac\u201c Selected Poems<\/em>
    \nSylvia Plath \u00e2\u20ac\u201c Collected Poems<\/em>
    \nEzra Pound \u00e2\u20ac\u201c Pisan Cantos<\/em>
    \nJohn Barth \u00e2\u20ac\u201c The Sotweed Factor<\/em>
    \nSaul Bellow \u00e2\u20ac\u201c\u00c2\u00a0 The Adventures of Augie March; Seize the Day; Humboldt’s Gift<\/em>
    \nJohn Berryman \u00e2\u20ac\u201c The Dream Songs; The Freedom of the Poet and Other Essays<\/em>
    \nDonald Barthelme \u00e2\u20ac\u201c Sixty Stories<\/em>
    \nWallace Stevens \u00e2\u20ac\u201c Collected Poems<\/em>
    \nEudora Welty \u00e2\u20ac\u201c Collected Stories<\/em>
    \nWilliam Carlos Williams \u00e2\u20ac\u201c Paterson<\/em>
    \nEdmund White \u00e2\u20ac\u201c A Boy’s Own Story<\/em>
    \nAmy Clampitt \u00e2\u20ac\u201c The Kingfisher<\/em>
    \nWH Auden \u00e2\u20ac\u201c The Dyer’s Hand and Other Essays; Collected Poems<\/em>
    \nAngela Carter \u00e2\u20ac\u201c The Magic Toyshop; Nights at the Circus<\/em>
    \nBruce Chatwin \u00e2\u20ac\u201c On The Black Hill<\/em>
    \nWilliam Golding \u00e2\u20ac\u201c Lord of the Flies; The Spire<\/em>
    \nWS Graham \u00e2\u20ac\u201c Collected Poems<\/em>
    \nRaymond Carver \u00e2\u20ac\u201c The Stories of Raymond Carver<\/em>
    \nMartin Amis \u00e2\u20ac\u201c Money; The Moronic Inferno<\/em>
    \nJean Rhys \u00e2\u20ac\u201c Wide Sargasso Sea<\/em>
    \nGraham Greene \u00e2\u20ac\u201c The Heart of the Matter<\/em>
    \nJonh Ashbery \u00e2\u20ac\u201c Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror; Selected Poems<\/em>
    \nGeoffrey Hill \u00e2\u20ac\u201c Collected Poems<\/em>
    \nDoris Lessing \u00e2\u20ac\u201c The Golden Notebook<\/em>
    \nIvy Compton-Burnett \u00e2\u20ac\u201c A Heritage and its History<\/em>
    \nMuriel Spark \u00e2\u20ac\u201c Memento Mori; The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie<\/em>
    \nPhillip Larkin \u00e2\u20ac\u201c Collected Poems<\/em>
    \nIan McEwan \u00e2\u20ac\u201c First Love Last Rites; The Cement Garden<\/em>
    \nAndrew Motion \u00e2\u20ac\u201c Secret Narratives<\/em>
    \nIris Murdoch \u00e2\u20ac\u201c Under the Net; The Bell; The Nice and the Good<\/em>
    \nCarson McCullers \u00e2\u20ac\u201c The Ballad of the Sad Cafe<\/em>
    \nAnthony Powell \u00e2\u20ac\u201c A Dance of the Music of Time<\/em>
    \nJohn Updike \u00e2\u20ac\u201c Of the Farm; The Centaur; The Rabbit Quartet; Hugging the Shore<\/em>
    \nTed Hughes \u00e2\u20ac\u201c Selected Poems 1957-81<\/em>
    \nVS Pritchett \u00e2\u20ac\u201c Complete Stories; Complete Essays<\/em>
    \nMarianne Moore \u00e2\u20ac\u201c Complete Poems<\/em>
    \nSalman Rushdie \u00e2\u20ac\u201c Midnight’s Children; The Satanic Verses<\/em>
    \nAnthony Burgess \u00e2\u20ac\u201c Earthly Powers<\/em>
    \nAlan Sillitoe \u00e2\u20ac\u201c The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner<\/em>
    \nGraham Swift \u00e2\u20ac\u201c Waterland<\/em>
    \nIain Sinclair \u00e2\u20ac\u201c Downriver<\/em>
    \nEvelyn Waugh \u00e2\u20ac\u201c Brideshead Revisited; The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold<\/em><\/p>\n

    Books (and\/or Authors) I’ve Never Heard Of<\/em><\/span>
    \nJG Farrell \u00e2\u20ac\u201c The Siege of Krishnapur<\/em>
    \nJane Bowles \u00e2\u20ac\u201c Collected Works<\/em>
    \nTim O’Brien \u00e2\u20ac\u201c If I Die In A Combat Zone<\/em>
    \nLP Hartley \u00e2\u20ac\u201c The Go-Between<\/em>
    \nCynthia Ozick \u00e2\u20ac\u201c The Messiah of Stockholm; Art and Ardour<\/em>
    \nAngus Wilson \u00e2\u20ac\u201c The Wrong Set; Hemlock and After; Anglo-Saxon Attitudes<\/em>
    \nRandall Jarrell \u00e2\u20ac\u201c Poetry and the Age<\/em>
    \nRobert Lowell \u00e2\u20ac\u201c Life Studies; For the Union Dead; Near the Ocean<\/em>
    \nHenry Green \u00e2\u20ac\u201c Loving; Concluding; Nothing<\/em>
    \nSusan Sontag \u00e2\u20ac\u201c Styles of Radical Will<\/em>
    \nPaul Bailey \u00e2\u20ac\u201c Gabriel’s Lament<\/em>
    \nJeanette Winterson \u00e2\u20ac\u201c Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit<\/em>
    \nCraig Raine \u00e2\u20ac\u201c A Martian Sends A Postcard Home<\/em>
    \nTom Paulin \u00e2\u20ac\u201c Fivemiletown<\/em>
    \nJames Fenton \u00e2\u20ac\u201c The Memory of War<\/em>
    \nDenton Welch \u00e2\u20ac\u201c A Voice Through a Cloud<\/em>
    \nChristine Brook-Rose \u00e2\u20ac\u201c The Christine Brook-Rose Reader<\/em>
    \nElizabeth Taylor \u00e2\u20ac\u201c The Wedding Group<\/em><\/p>\n

    At dinner last night, Amy asked me what my next giganto-reading project will be, now that I’ve finished reading Montaigne. The first three things to flash through my mind were Plutarch, Robert Caro’s LBJ biography, and Shakespeare. I told her, “I’m gonna take a break for a while.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    I have a copy of Harold Bloom’s The Western Canon that I take down from the shelf every year or so. I like to look through its four appendices and check off the “canonical” books that I’ve read. There are 37 pages of these lists, broken down into four Vico-esque eras of history: Theocratic, Aristocratic, … <\/p>\n

    Continue reading “0-fer-94”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[568,4],"tags":[592,259,118,593],"class_list":["post-3597","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-0-fer","category-literature","tag-harold-bloom","tag-james-wood","tag-montaigne","tag-the-elegant-variation"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4C7K-W1","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":3895,"url":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/cinc0-fer-de-mayo","url_meta":{"origin":3597,"position":0},"title":"Cinc0-fer de Mayo","author":"Gil","date":"May 5, 2009","format":false,"excerpt":"In honor of \"Drink Corona (or whatever Mexican beer you choose) Day,\" I thought I'd go find some well-regarded Mexican authors whom I've never read a word of. Only having thought up this idea this morning, I decided to dive into the \"canonical appendixes\" of Harold Bloom's Western Canon, since\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "0-fer"","block_context":{"text":"0-fer","link":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/category\/literature\/0-fer"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"http:\/\/www.assoc-amazon.com\/e\/ir?t=virtualmemories-20&l=as2&o=1&a=1573225142","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":4097,"url":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/unrequired-reading-june-19-2009","url_meta":{"origin":3597,"position":1},"title":"Unrequired Reading: June 19, 2009","author":"Gil","date":"June 19, 2009","format":false,"excerpt":"Hot off the presses! Or my RSS reader. Whatever. Just click \"more\"! In Europe, 200 miles is a long distance. In America, 200 years is a long time. * * * The High Line and the nightmare of Olmstead. * * * The answer's pretty simple: Ryan Reynolds has no\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Architecture"","block_context":{"text":"Architecture","link":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/category\/architecture"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"http:\/\/www.assoc-amazon.com\/e\/ir?t=virtualmemories-20&l=as2&o=1&a=0679728759","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":9346,"url":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/episode-151-harold-bloom","url_meta":{"origin":3597,"position":2},"title":"Episode 151 – Harold Bloom","author":"Gil","date":"January 18, 2016","format":"audio","excerpt":"Virtual Memories Show #151: Harold Bloom I visited Harold Bloom in New Haven and we recorded a podcast. He recited poetry, and we talked about his new book, The Daemon Knows, the weight of age, the intifada of the young, and the epigraphs of his life. You should give it\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "literature"","block_context":{"text":"literature","link":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/category\/literature"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/wp-content\/uploads\/24214505752_7e8729961c_z.jpg?fit=640%2C480&resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200,"srcset":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/wp-content\/uploads\/24214505752_7e8729961c_z.jpg?fit=640%2C480&resize=350%2C200 1x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/wp-content\/uploads\/24214505752_7e8729961c_z.jpg?fit=640%2C480&resize=525%2C300 1.5x"},"classes":[]},{"id":4323,"url":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/well-0-fer-have-paris","url_meta":{"origin":3597,"position":3},"title":"We’ll 0-fer Have Paris","author":"Gil","date":"August 12, 2009","format":false,"excerpt":"A few weeks ago, I ran the 0-fer test on the first volume of the new Paris Review Interviews series. Since I'm utterly unimaginative, let's go check out Volume 2 and see which literary titans I've managed to avoid completely! Graham Greene (1953) \u00e2\u20ac\u201d I think I tried reading The\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "0-fer"","block_context":{"text":"0-fer","link":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/category\/literature\/0-fer"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"http:\/\/www.assoc-amazon.com\/e\/ir?t=virtualmemories-20&l=as2&o=1&a=0312361750","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":4870,"url":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/get-well-soon","url_meta":{"origin":3597,"position":4},"title":"Get Well Soon","author":"Gil","date":"January 16, 2010","format":false,"excerpt":"According to the Yale Daily News, Harold Bloom (79) is \"gravely ill\" and has cancelled his seminars for the semester. I hope he gets better. Here's my story about a conversation with the Bardolator.","rel":"","context":"In "literature"","block_context":{"text":"literature","link":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/category\/literature"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":3616,"url":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/7-rooms-of-bloom","url_meta":{"origin":3597,"position":5},"title":"7 Rooms of Bloom!","author":"Gil","date":"March 12, 2009","format":false,"excerpt":"[UPDATE: In 2016, I recorded a conversation with Harold Bloom for The Virtual Memories Show! I also recorded episodes with his friends and colleagues John Crowley, Sandy McClatchy and Langdon Hammer.] So, wait: I never told you about the time I called Harold Bloom? Geez! I've been blogging 6 years\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "literature"","block_context":{"text":"literature","link":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/category\/literature"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3597","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3597"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3597\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3606,"href":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3597\/revisions\/3606"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3597"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3597"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3597"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}