A Great Post on Writing by Mette Harrison

An avid reader friend of mine began reading through the books in a list called “100 books you must read before you die.”

She got to Jack Kerouac’s On The Road and went to Facebook and posted the following: “I don’t get the appeal. It’s about a group of boys/men who are irresponsible, drunks, whoring around taking advantage of others and being enabled by their women. Why is this a classic and why should I have wasted my time on it? Can some of my literary friends explain? I hated a brave new world and the handmaid’s tale too.”

Is the book a classic?

Should she read it before she dies?

Is it really that important?

Let me share an edited version of my response and then provide my list of 30 books you should read before you die.

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Annette, the unfortunate truth is that these lists of “classics” are a sham because there is no objective criteria for determining literary excellence.

Or maybe I should say that measuring quality in the arts isn’t like measuring the unambiguous, objective score of a baseball game. After books exhibit a certain level of proficiency, it becomes increasingly difficult to distinguish the quality of one book from another, especially because much of this depends on a reader’s interests and subjective experience of the story.

When it becomes hard to rank performances, people rely on other measures. One of the most powerful is social networks.

So if two readers find two different books that blow them away, one of the books might get all the attention because the one book gets picked up by a news service (The New York Times) or a platform (the Oprah Book Club effect) or some other social network of influence. A lot of the so-called literary classics only appear on various lists because they tapped into the academic network, which kept them alive far longer than they would have lasted otherwise.

On The Road is simply a book that made a stir among some circles in the 1950s. That’s it.

Was it more important or of higher quality than Exodus? The Chronicles of Narnia? Lord of the Rings? A Town Like Alice? All published in the 1950s as well.

It depends.

If you’re wanting to understand the 1950s beat culture, it would be an important book.

But if you’re wanting to understand fantasy writing of the time, it wouldn’t.

If you’re wanting to read a book that’s had a huge impact on popular culture, well, LOTR beats On The Road like a dog.

Some people have the feeling that the so-called classics have some inherent medicinal value because someone put them on a list and called them classics.

Nope. They’re just stories. Some of which can shed light on the issues and interests of a part of the culture in a given period. But if you’re not interested in that specific sub-culture, who cares?

And if you’re reading to be entertained, moved, uplifted, or educated—which ones do that best for Annette is for you to decide.

So all that to say I wouldn’t devalue your reaction to the book 

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I’m now going to give you my list.

But it’s not going to be a list of titles. Nor will it focus on a book’s impact on some sub-culture of a given period.

It’s going to be a real list. One that focuses on what so many of us go to stories for.

1. The one that makes you weep.
2. The one that makes you giggle and snort.
3. The one that reminds you of what it’s like to fall in love.
4. The one that gives you hope.
5. The one that you begin to read more and more slowly because you don’t want it to end.
6. The one that scares the soup out of you.
7. The one that you can’t put down, even though you need to wake up early in the morning.
8. The one that makes you wish you lived there.
9. The one that’s so good that when you close it, you immediately start to read it a second time.
10. The one that gives you and your child hours of pleasure together.
11. The one that gives you a sacred, spiritual experience.
12. The one that makes you reread some of the lines because the turns of phrase are just so delicious.
13. The one that gives you courage.
14. The one that takes you on an awesome adventure.
15. The one that makes you want to be a better person.
16. The one that bores you to tears (just so know you how good the others are).
17. The one that introduces you to a different culture that delights you.
18. The one that makes you think.
19. The one that lingers with you for days.
20. The one that gives you lovely insights.
21. The one that inspires you to love your spouse more.
22. The one that introduces you to the sorts of people you normally don’t like and makes you actually like them.
23. The one that delights you with its characters.
24. The one that whisks you away to a different historical period.
25. The one that inspires you to give your children a hug.
26. The one that gets your adrenaline pumping.
27. The one that sparks all sorts of ideas in your head.
28. The one that makes you wonder and start imagining what it would be like to be there.
29. The one that blows your freaking mind.
30. The one that makes you stand up in your living room and cheer.

We could do more than 30, couldn’t we?

Like the one that makes you think people from a different time period are just like us. And the one that makes you think people from that same period are completely alien.

But I think we’ll stop. That there above is a list.

Those are 30 books I think everyone will want to read before they die.