Great works

The software canon.

Great books

At the New York Times, thoughtful pieces by Pankaj Mishra and Daniel Mendelsohn on how Harold Bloom's Western Canon book might have been received today.

ABCs

Not ABCs of the novel - ABCs of the style book! One of my favorite stages in book-writing is when I get the copy-edited manuscript back from the publisher, usually along with a customized style sheet that includes all the proper names given in the text. (Here was a bit of something similar for The Magic Circle.) This book doesn't have a lot of unusual nouns in it, but it does have an amazing canon of proper names. Too long to paste in the whole thing, but this will give a taste of it:

Aciman, André
Acocella, Joan
Adorno, Theodor
Alexievich, Svetlana
Allworthy, Squire
Anthony, Piers
Assingham, Fanny
Augustine, St.
Austen, Jane
Baldwin, James
Balzac, Honoré de
Banks, Iain M.
Barthes, Roland
Beckett, Samuel
Beddoes, Thomas Lovell
Bennet, Elizabeth
Bernhard, Thomas
Berlin, Isaiah
Blake, Nicholas
Blake, William
Bloom, Harold
Boileau, Nicolas
Borges, Jorge Luis
Boswell, James
Boyd, William
Brainard, Joe
Breton, André
Browne, Sir Thomas
Bruen, Ken
Buckner, Brent
Burgess, Anthony
Burke, Edmund
Burroughs, William
Burt, Stephen
Burton, Robert
Byron, Lord
Carter, Angela
Celan, Paul
Chandler, Raymond
Cheever, John
Child, Lee
Christensen, Kate
Crichton, Michael
Coelho, Paulo
Conan Doyle, Sir Arthur
Conrad, Joseph

Loving literature

At Slate, various writers on the "great books" they most hate. The one here that most resonates with me (could have written these sentences myself, and in fact may quote them in the style book) is Daniel Mendelsohn on Joyce:

Honestly I've never been persuaded by Ulysses. To my mind, Joyce's best and most genuine work is the wonderful Dubliners; everything afterwards smacks of striving to write a "great" work, rather than simply striving to write—it's all too voulu. Although there are, of course, beautiful and breathtakingly authentic things in the novel (who could not love that tang of urine in the breakfast kidneys?), what spoils Ulysses for me, each time, is the oppressive allusiveness, the wearyingly overdetermined referentiality, the heavy constructedness of it all. Reading the book, for me, is never a rich and wonderful journey, filled with marvels and (no matter how many times you may read a book) surprises—the experience I want from a large and important novel; it's more like being on one of those Easter egg hunts you went on as a child—you constantly feel yourself being managed, being carefully steered in the direction of effortfully planted treats. Which, of course, makes them not feel very much like treats at all.

NB this obviously all intensely subjective: other writers name some personal favorites of mine, including Hardy's novels and the Iliad (and I love the behavioral psychology in Gravity's Rainbow - I'm only about 150 pages in, so we will see whether I still feel the same way when I finish, but it is a surprisingly enjoyable reread). The great book I most love to hate, I think, is The Great Gatsby, which seems to me infinitely inferior to Fitzgerald's stories...