<p>I just fell into this thread and it really struck me how much I would love to take a class with Mythmom and how fortunate her students are. </p>
<p>This is a great thread.</p>
<p>Man, how did I miss this thread? I agree with ^^ about taking a class from mythmom.</p>
<p>I was surprised that A Confederacy of Dunces didn’t make Time’s list.</p>
<p>^^ suzy - that’s one of those that I always planned to read someday, but that day hasn’t come yet. Twice I’ve nearly bought it at Half-Price Books</p>
<p>saintfan, it’s really really funny but it’s also sort of exhausting to read. I was only able to read it once, which is unusual for me if I like a book.</p>
<p>Robert Frost is my all time favorite poet. If he wrote it, I read it.
Re #120–The Great Gatsby gets better as I age. I hated it when I was young, revisited it later (due to accolades), and re-re-read it recently. It’s one of the reasons I think some literature is wasted on the young.</p>
<p>Mythmom- Thank you for pointing out what I missed. You solved a minor mystery: not seeing a title by Don Delillo. </p>
<p>I looked at sylvan’s list @ #77, not the direct link to the TIME website. More titles at the website, including Ubik and White Noise.</p>
<p>In looking at the list, I didn’t notice any Somerset Maugham. I’m not advocating for him; only that tastes change, especially considering how well published he was.</p>
<p>L.P. Hartley wrote well (at least that’s my memory of his work), but I doubt he’s read now.</p>
<p>An interesting discussion might be speculations on the fate of what some might call “serious” of “literary” writers. Or, recommendations of “less known” writers, like your advocating for Richard Powers.</p>
<p>Some writers, for me, are like directors, actors, or other artists, such as painters or choreographers: Individuals whom I’m curious about what they’ll do next. So, I’ll read the next book, see the next performance, go to the galleries…</p>
<p>I’d appreciate suggestions of hidden gems from everyone -</p>
<p>And, I agree with all of zoosermom’s comment (#121)</p>
<p>The last paragraph of The Great Gatsby is so magnificent, perhaps more so for a New Yorker when he calls New York Harbor “The green breast of the new world.”</p>
<p>His last line is one of the best in all literature: “And so we beat on, boats against the current, relentlessly into the past.”</p>
<p>For the rest, it has some wonderful defining conceits: the light at the end of Daisy’s dock and the large eyeglasses of the eye doctor that oversee all on a billboard. This “tags” make it easy to teach along with the theme of "the b****h goddess of success.</p>
<p>It is just quintessentially American in its subject. Doesn’t mean anyone has to like it.</p>
<p>BTW: There is a fabulous list of the best first and the best last lines in literature. I’m pretty sure that made the list along with Hemingways’s last line of The Sun Also Rises, “Isn’t it pretty to think so?” Jake answers this way when Lady Brett opines that they could have been so happy together had he not been injured in the war.</p>
<p>And thank you so much for the compliments. I had always wanted to be a writer, and though I am a closet writer, the bulk of my life has been spent as a professor of community college students, and I <em>do</em> love them and love teaching. After thirty years I am still happiest walking into a classroom. It beats all my leisure activities. It makes me wonder why I complain about going to work.</p>
<p>I will look for those two lists and post them. They’re so much fun because they yield themselves immediately – no time consuming books to procure and complete.</p>
<p>[American</a> Book Review :: Home](<a href=“http://americanbookreview.org/100BestLines.asp]American”>http://americanbookreview.org/100BestLines.asp)</p>
<p>[100</a> Best Last Lines From Novels list](<a href=“http://www.listal.com/list/100-best-last-lines-novels]100”>http://www.listal.com/list/100-best-last-lines-novels)</p>
<p>
Sorry, Tuppence, I should have posted the entire list before cutting away the stuff I have read. The TIME list starts with 1923, so they might have missed Somerset Maugham. Of Human Bondage was published in 1915.</p>
<p>Agree on many of the classics that one read in HS of college getting better with age and experience. One appreciates the bittersweet qualities and struggles more. I tend to re-read my old standbys each summer: Madame Bovary, Sophie’s Choice, Tender is the Night, Emily Dickinson, and a few others. I’m thinking about reprising Tess of the d’Urbervilles this year.
Question: Several authors - Somerset Maugham, William Styron and E.M. Forester - to give examples, seem to be sort of left out of the group maybe as not serious enough, too readable or something - If they were colleges they might be thought of as 2nd tier 
Again, as a total layperson, how does this work? What modern-ish authors do you feel also fit that edge group. We Were the Mulvaneys seems to me like a modern day Tess, but is nowhere to be found on the list. The author seems to be everywhere so I wonder. Again, not a professional judge of literary merit which is why I ask.</p>
<p>We play at Paste -
Till qualified, for Pearl -
Then, drop the Past -
And deem ourself a fool -</p>
<p>The Shapes - though - were similar -
And our new Hands
Learned Gem-Tactics -
Practicing Sands -</p>
<p>While I appreciated the language in Gatsby, I never liked the book all that much until I saw a “performance” by the Elevator Repair Service theater ensemble. They do an 8-hour word-for-word reading of the text (with intermissions and a dinner break), 13 performers with some props–sort of a dramatized audiobook, only much, much more than that. It’s incredible, and I came away from it understanding and loving the book in a much fuller way.</p>
<p>Did anybody else see this? It’s been in Chicago, Boston, and New York, and is currently in London–LA next.
[Elevator</a> Repair Service: Gatz](<a href=“http://elevator.org/shows/show.php?show=gatz]Elevator”>http://elevator.org/shows/show.php?show=gatz)</p>
<p>
When I was in high school friends and I would play a game where we would give each other lists of first and last lines and we’d have to figure out where they came from. Junk reading included.</p>
<p>Tuppence, I love L.P. Hartley, especially The Go-Between, which has the wonderful opening line “The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.”</p>
<p>Booklady: That is definitely on the list of best first lines! I just read through it.</p>
<p>Going back (after 9 pages) to the op’s question, I do wonder how something rises to the level of getting the kind of attention necessary to be elevated into the rarified status of “classic”. </p>
<p>For example, I read a book a few years ago called force of gravity, by R. S Jones. The book won the Whiting Writer’s Award and was well received by critics. It is, to me, very much on a par with Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar, which is certainly a well acknowledged work. But I don’t think this book is (or will be) as enduring. I don’t really understand (as an outsider to the book industry) why that is. Maybe mythmom has some insight here. It almost seems to me like one of those “it’s all in who you know” situations.</p>
<p>^I don’t know. Good reviews help, but some things end up in the canon I think because they are easy to teach. (See mythmom’s comments about The Great Gatsby.) I also sometimes think that things that are too cheerful and fun to read are often dismissed - especially with more recent literature.</p>
<p>I don’t think The Bell Jar is a very good book, as good as Plath’s poetry is. Plath herself was heartbroken because she wanted to be a writer of New Yorker type short stories and wasn’t. </p>
<p>I don’t know why high school teachers choose the books they do, and I think their consensus seems to make up the canon.</p>
<p>In the world of literary academics there is a different canon that many of the works mentioned would never be considered for. That canon is really about historical and stylistic significance.</p>
<p>The consensus of high school teachers is about teachability, theme, fame and sometimes brilliant insight about what kids need.</p>
<p>I loved a book that was on a list of optional reading over a summer: The Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime. My son ridiculed it so I made him read it. Narrated by an autistic boy, (we would have said Aspergers, but apparently, that’s no longer a diagnosis), the narrative style and the book are really one and the same. I think that’s why makes it interesting. I think a high school teacher might teach it was a plea for tolerance and understanding. It will probably not make the literary canon (though it might), but I can imagine many high school teachers teaching it.</p>
<p>A book like that is A Separate Peace which was a discussion topic among a group of about eight people I was visiting with. Everyone had read it in middle school (I am old enough to have gone to junior high, not middle school) or high school. My son and I were the only ones who liked it. I might not like it now. My son did like The Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime once he stopped laughing at how simplistic he thought it was and really got what the author was doing.</p>
<p>I don’t know if I answered anything, but I tried.</p>
<p>About the literary canon: It might be that no one would sit down and read The Faerie Queen cover to cover as pure entertainment, but I can’t imagine a study of Renaissance literature without it, and in that context I quite enjoyed it, and it informs my life in mysterious ways, and do almost all the odd bits and pieces I’ve read to be “educated” in my discipline. In fact, I <em>do</em> think that in the end I’ve gotten more out of my study of literature than out of the books I’ve simply read to enjoy.</p>
<p>But if I didn’t think that, my education would probably have been in vain. The academic impulse is very different from strictly personal reading. One is not better than the other, I don’t think, but they do each engage different parts of my being.</p>
<p>Interesting thoughts. I’ve been working on an art exhibit (writing all the blurbs) and in the process have been studying the early 20th c. illustrators. Today, my computer screen was covered with Norman Rockwell magazine covers. My son came up and said “He didn’t like Rockwell”. I said, he’s not my favorite artist either, and here’s why… And then I thought of this thread…</p>
<p>mathmom: That’s exactly what I mean. He’s part of the canon, interested to look at and think about and has shaped art and consciousness, whether we like it or not.</p>
<p>I don’t much like him either, but still I recognize his importance. I can also tell when a movie, TV show, commercial, ad or another painting is referencing Rockwell, and that gives depth to the new work. </p>
<p>To me, that is why the canon remains important so we can hear echoes and see reflections of past works on contemporary ones and trace the evolution of an idea, a trope, a perspective, whatever we want.</p>
<p>So, for example, Plath’s poems influenced an entire generation of confessional and feminist poets, but the Bell Jar did not, as much as it might be a good read for a weekend.</p>
<p>I think some of that goes back to the idea of a work bringing something “new” to the table. Not necessarily written in the best form, but new and different in style or in it’s characterization of the human condition. Think Kate Chopin’s The Awakening or more significantly Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook. </p>
<p>It took months for me to get through The Golden Notebook, which I alternately loved and hated, and ultimately felt was too long. But I understand the importance of the book and where it stands in the context of feminine writing (well a little bit at least ;)). And I’ve never read a book that at times seemed exactly like it was written by some alter-me.</p>