15 books in 15 minutes

Via his co-blogger Carrie Frye, Terry Teachout passes on this quick game. Rules: Don’t take too long to think about it. Fifteen books you’ve read that will always stick with you. First fifteen you can recall in no more than fifteen minutes. Slight revision proposed: instead of the future tense (books that will always stick with you), use the past perfect. Name the fifteen books that have most influenced your thinking, that you have found yourself referring to most often in reflection, speech, and writing.

Here goes:

Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita
Henry James, The Portrait of a Lady
Saul Bellow, Mr Sammler’s Planet
Philip Roth, American Pastoral
George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four
Jane Austen, Persuasion
Francine Prose, Blue Angel
Janet Lewis, The Wife of Martin Guerre
J. V. Cunningham, The Collected Essays
—————, Collected Poems and Epigrams
Michael Oakeshott, Experience and Its Modes
Emmanuel Levinas, essays including “Ethics As First Philosophy” and “Art and Its Shadow” (both included in Seán Hand’s Levinas Reader)
Michael Wyschogrod, The Body of Faith
Gilbert Ryle, The Concept of Mind
Denis de Rougemont, Love in the Western World

Except perhaps for de Rougemont, not a single work of criticism comes to mind. In college I wrote under the spell of Leslie Fiedler’s Love and Death in the American Novel, but by the time I graduated I preferred the earlier essays in An End to Innocence. (A post title from yesterday alluded to that book.) The earlier Fiedler led me to the New York intellectuals, of whom I have been a distant relation ever since.

Update, I: J. V. Cunningham did not classify his essays as literary criticism but as philology. I accept his self-designation.

Update, II: Patrick Kurp joins in the fun, accepting my stipulation. (May the LORD bless thee and keep thee.) “This makes [the game] more interesting than so pallid a criterion as ‘favorite’ or ‘best,’ ” he says, implicitly cold-shouldering our earlier collaboration in drawing up a list of the Best American Fiction, 1968–1998, which brought us so much opprobrium. At any rate, Kurp’s list is more diverse and wide-ranging than mine, including only two works of fiction—and those by a Russian and an Australian!

“If such a list constitutes a Rorschach test,” he asks, “what have I learned?” This is a question I neglected to ask myself. I believe, though, that I can pinpoint the exact influence of each book on my list. I owe my personal happiness to de Rougemont, for instance, who permanently altered my conception of marriage. Orwell taught me to recognize the true ambition and threat of totalitarian regimes. Not merely do they seek to assume total power, but also to take control of their subjects’ minds. After the “election” of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the Iranian government moved quickly to disable Twitter and prevent blogging.

Update, III: Over at National Review Online’s Corner, Jonah Goldberg quotes the views on an internet expert about the problem of restoring heavy-volume traffic to Iran. Goldberg also has a striking graph, displaying how internet traffic in that country fell off a cliff on the night of June 13.