Good Literature

Today in Literary Criticism class our professor asked us each to come up with 2 books we thought everyone should read. They could be fiction or non-fiction. (In some cases they were identified by author not title.) Here was what we came up with...

Official suggestions:
The Bible
Faust
1984
The Making of the English Working Class
Seymour
Huckleberry Finn
Aesop's Fables
Jane Eyre
East of Eden
Oscar Wilde
Infinite Jest
White Noise
Qur'an
The Hobbit
The Communist Manifesto
Zarathustra
Crime & Punishment
Brave New World
Borges
Slaughterhouse Five

Unofficial Suggestions:

Fight Club
Shakespeare

Our Prof then asked us to look over the list. He asked whether we thought we would get a good education taking a class that had these works for the book list. We all agreed we would. I thought to myself it would be a very heavy course!

Looking at this list there are a lot of religious, social and political themes. However, I feel a lot of areas are unrepresented. This seems like a very useful book list in a course based in a Caucasian, Middle-Class, Western neighbourhood. For sure we are not being biased just to look within the Christian faith for our texts but how far are we willing to expand these limits? The Qur'an is not that far away from The Bible in many senses. Also there is very little literature representing women, people from different culture groups, gender minorities or even local or Canadian authors. We might learn a lot about the classics, about European and North American history... but what type of education are we really receiving by reading this book list? A good one we say... but good how? Good because from a viewpoint of a literary critic these books are important milestones in literature? Good because these are some of the titles that we would expect to see appear if someone asked you what books you think everyone should read? Are these books good for expanding our horizons and making us more open to our fellow man? It is important to ask ourselves these questions I think.

It is also important to realize that of these books there is very little pop. fiction. Most of the books are intellectual or literary landmarks, many are classics. If you asked me my favorite book it would not be on this list. However if you asked me what book I thought everyone should read I would hum and haw for a bit (just as I did) and then say (as I did) Huckleberry Finn or Aesop's Fables. These aren't my favorite books. They were good books for sure and significant landmarks in literature. But what does that mean exactly? I certainly would not have said Harry Potter or Twilight or Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy or The DaVinci Code or any book of that nature when adding to this list... the question is why. I think perhaps literature is still stuck in an elitist notion. Good literature is about structure, aesthetics and big ideas that are portrayed in an intelligent and well thought out manner. Good literature is art. Pop Literature is entertainment. Basically literary critics are book snobs and terribly biased. Something important to think about. Or at least I believe it is.

What two books would you choose?