This article is in the Category
Fiction for the Filofax
Chris Powling reflects on the rise of the Literary List (kids for the consumption of)
Warning: THE SLAVISH FOLLOWING OF LISTS CAN DAMAGE YOUR READING
Books for Keeps Health Warning
I’m still kicking myself, of course. But when a nice lady from The Times calls you in mid-afternoon and actually seeks your advice, it’s hard not to be instantly helpful. Especially when she tells you she’s also enlisting the opinions of Nina Bawden, Eunice McMullen, Shirley Hughes, Elaine Moss, Jan Mark, Elizabeth Attenborough, etc… I mean, it’s got to be all right, right?
Even so, by the time she’d phoned me back I was beginning to feel uneasy. ‘Sorry,’ I began. ‘I’m afraid I can’t stick to only six titles in each age category; kids and books are so diverse. About a dozen in every section is the smallest number I can manage.’ ‘Fine,’ she replied. ‘That’s what everyone’s saying.’
And so it turned out. When the article was printed on Friday, 19 February under the headline ‘The Times 50: Books Children Should Read’ it contained plenty of provisos to clear my conscience. ‘It would be a thousand pities if any list were taken as a blueprint of what every child should read at whatever age,’ Elaine Moss insisted. ‘Reading should be a pleasure.’ Puffin’s Elizabeth Attenborough echoed the same point – and showed more presence of mind than most of us by refusing to offer a list beyond the age of 14. ‘After that they should be reading and trying out absolutely everything.’ Nice one Elizabeth, I thought. I wish I’d said that. Still, according to the article, we’d all agreed on one point:
‘… we found [the experts] full of healthy misgivings about the whole idea. Unanimously they agreed that any mandatory check list was anathema.’ What a relief! That put us completely in the clear … Why, then, was I still so bothered?
Later that week I found out. Apparently The Times wasn’t the only national newspaper taking an interest in this issue. On the very same day – Friday, 19 February – the Daily Telegraph had also entered the… er, lists. No half-measures with them, though: the piece was called ‘The 100 books every school-leaver ought to have read’. There was no nonsense about consulting so-called ‘experts’, either. Here, augmented by a Tory MP, the team was strictly in-house: two of their own columnists plus their Arts and Literary editors. This bold stroke in excluding anyone tainted by first-hand experience of children and children’s books had brought a marked toughening in ‘the cultural content of the satchels that those leaving schools for the last time will carry with them’. For the object of the enterprise was to establish nothing less than ‘a core of reading of which those heading for industry, medicine, the law, the Church or perhaps even the dole queue ought to be aware.’
So take a good look at the books they recommend. Two questions seem to me to be prompted at once:
1) If the list is intended for every school-leaver, why is it so highbrow`? For the record, I know of at least one middle-aged bookworm – ‘literary’ by temperament, training and occupation – who’s still seven titles short of scoring this particular century. Yes, me.
2) How, given the list’s heavy bias towards the past, do we avoid convincing school-leavers that the only good writer is a dead writer?
The first question points to the sort of debate about what ‘literature’ actually is that’s routine in universities these days.
The second raises the matter of our relationship with it – do we want a mere tugging of forelocks or the sort of active engagement with texts that includes consideration of our own as well as the best of other people’s?
Neither question, needless to say, detains our Famous Five at the Telegraph. What they’re eager to establish is which notches count on a cultural totem pole. This, after all, is only a beginning. Why should they stop at ‘The 100 books every school-leaver ought to have read’? Surely we can now look forward to `The 100 poems every school-leaver ought to know by heart’? Or ‘The 100 movies every school-leaver ought to have sat through’? Or ‘The 100 paintings every school-leaver ought to have gawped at’? Come on, team. There’s work to be done. The filofax generation needs you. This is a show which will run and run – perhaps, with luck and a fair following wind, as far as ‘The 100 tunes every school-leaver ought to have whistled in the bath’. If Education is a commodity, subject like everything else to market forces, why not offer it in a form that’s handy, easy-to-operate, and above all testable?
Hold it, though. Maybe … just maybe … I’m over-reacting. There does seem some glimmer of understanding in the article that there’s more at issue here than an amiable parlour-game. ‘No-one could claim this to be a definitive list,’ begins the final paragraph. And, earlier, ‘it would be an ideal child who had read the lot and a pretty remarkable one who could score more than 50 per cent.’ Really? Now that would explain why, in mid-article, there’s a rather startling concession. The list, we’re told, is what ‘an intelligent, school-leaver ought either to have read or at least to have thought about reading‘ (my italics). Dear me! What softies these hard-liners turn out to be …
The truth is, of course, that at every age and stage children ‘should be reading and trying out absolutely everything’. Lists of ‘classics’ can be a useful jog to the memory but following them slavishly is bound to bring the same result as making a meal out of every item on a menu: acute indigestion.
Mind you, there’s one strategy I would recommend to the Telegraph team. If they’re serious about creating a readership for these books, why not ban them completely? It worked a treat with Spycatcher.
THE TIMES 50: BOOKS CHILDREN SHOULD READ
AGES 3-7 | (The number of panellists’ votes per book is given, below) |
Just So Stories Rudyard Kipling |
6 |
The Tale of Peter Rabbit Beatrix Potter |
6 |
Charlotte‘s Web E.B. White |
5 |
The Very Hungry Caterpillar Eric Carle |
5 |
The World of Pooh A.A. Milne |
5 |
Dogger Shirley Hughes |
4 |
Mr Grumpy’s Outing John Burningham |
4 |
Where the Wild Things Are Maurice Sendak |
4 |
Each Peach Pear Plum Allan and Janet Ahlberg |
3 |
Mr Magnolia Quentin Blake |
3 |
Now We Are Six A.A. Milne |
3 |
Rosie’s Walk Pat Hutchins |
3 |
Where’s Spot? Eric Hill |
3 |
AGES 8-11 | (The number of panellists’ votes per book is given, below) |
The Wind in the Willows Kenneth Grahame |
8 |
The Hobbit J.R.R. Tolkien |
7 |
Tom’s Midnight Garden Philippa Pearce |
7 |
BFG Roald Dahl |
5 |
The Iron Man Ted Hughes |
5 |
The Secret Garden Frances Hodgson Burnett |
5 |
A Christmas Carol Charles Dickens |
4 |
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe C.S. Lewis |
4 |
Alice in Wonderland Lewis Carroll |
3 |
Complete Nonsense Book of Edward Lear Edward Lear |
3 |
The Ghost of Thomas Kempe Penelope Lively |
3 |
The Silver Sword Ian Serrailier |
3 |
Stig of the Dump Clive King |
3 |
The Stone Book Alan Garner |
3 |
The Treasure Seekers E. Nesbit |
3 |
The Turbulent Term of Tyke Tyler Gene Kemp |
3 |
The Wolves of Willoughby Chase Joan Aitken |
3 |
AGES 12-18 | (The number of panellists’ votes per book is given, below) |
Eagle of the Ninth Rosemary Sutcliffe |
6 |
Treasure Island R.L. Stevenson |
5 |
Brother in the Land Robert Swindells |
4 |
Smith Leon Garfield |
4 |
The Machine Gunners Robert Westall |
4 |
1984 George Orwell |
3 |
Carrie’s War Nina Bawden |
3 |
Catcher in the Rye J.D. Salinger |
3 |
The Box of Delights John Masefield |
3 |
The Diary of Anne Frank Anne Frank |
3 |
The Earthsea Trilogy Ursula Le Guin |
3 |
Emit and the Detectives Erich Kastner |
3 |
Goldengrove Jill Paton Walsh |
3 |
Huckleberry Finn Mark Twain |
3 |
Jane Eyre Charlotte Bronte |
3 |
The Hound of the Baskervilles A Conan Doyle |
3 |
Lord of the Flies William Golding |
3 |
Moonfleet J. Meade Falkner |
3 |
The Owl Service Alan Garner |
3 |
Pride and Prejudice Jane Austen |
3 |
THE DAILY TELEGRAPH CHOICE
CORNERSTONES
The Bible (authorised version)
The Iliad by Homer
Odes by Horace
The Canterbury Tales by Chaucer
The Inferno by Dante
Le Morte D’Arthur by Thomas Malory
The Plays by William Shakespeare
Don Quixote by Cervantes
Paradise Lost by John Milton
The Life of Samuel Johnson by James Boswell
On the Origin of Species by Charles Darwin
History of Western Philosophy by Bertrand Russell
BEGINNINGS
The Tale of Peter Rabbit by Beatrix Potter
Winnie-the-Pooh by A. A. Milne
Alice‘s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll
The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame
The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett
The Hobbit by J. R. R. Tolkien
The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe by C. S. Lewis
Kidnapped by R. L. Stevenson
Just William by Richmal Crompton
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain
FICTION IN ENGLISH
Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe
Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift
Tom Jones by Henry Fielding
Tristram Shandy by Laurence Sterne
Mansfield Park by Jane Austen
Vanity Fair by William Makepeace Thackeray
Bleak House by Charles Dickens
Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte
Moby-Dick, or, The Whale by Herman Melville
The Portrait of a Lady by Henry James
Tess of the D’Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy
The Day’s Work by Rudyard Kipling
Chance by Joseph Conrad
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce
A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway
The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
Sons and Lovers by D. H. Lawrence
The History of Mr Polly by H. G. Wells
To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf
Point Counter Point by Aldous Huxley
Mr Norris Changes Trains by Christopher Isherwood
MODERN FICTION IN ENGLISH
The Power and the Glory by Graham Greene
Decline and Fall by Evelyn Waugh
Afternoon Men by Anthony Powell
Animal Farm by George Orwell
The Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger
Lucky Jim by Kingsley Arms
The Adventures of Augie March by Saul Bellow
Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell
A House for Mr Biswas by V. S. Naipaul
Hemlock and After by Angus Wilson
Lord of the Flies by William Golding
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Spark
The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
Darkness at Noon by Arthur Koestler
ENTERTAINMENT
Three Men in a Boat by Jerom e K. Jerome
The Diary of a Nobody by George and Weedon Grossmith
My Man Jeeves by P. G. Wodehouse
Tales of Mystery and Imagination by Edgar Allan Poe
The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Arthur Conan Doyle
The Murder of Roger Ackroyd by Agatha Christie
The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler
The Thirty-nine Steps by John Buchan
TRANSLATIONS
Short Stories by Guy de Maupassant
Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas
Le Grand Meaulnes by Alain-Fournier
The Plague by Albert Camus
Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
Dead Souls by Gogol
Confessions of the Confidence Trickster Felix Krull by Thomas Mann
Metamorphosis by Kafka
Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky
One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Confessions of Zeno by Italo Svevo
Dr Zhivago by Boris Pasternak
POETRY
The New Oxford Book of English Verse, editor Helen Gardner
Poems by Keats
Lyrical Ballads by Wordsworth and Coleridge
Don Juan by Byron
Idylls of the King by Tennyson
The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam by Edward FitzGerald
Collected Poems by T S Eliot
Collected Poems by W H Auden
High Windows by Philip Larkin
Les Fleurs du Mal by Baudelaire
PLAYS
Tartuffe by Moliere
Love for Love by William Congreve
The School for Scandal by Richard Brinsley Sheridan
The Importance of Being Earnest by Oscar Wilde
The Master Builder by Henrik Ibsen
The Cherry Orchard by Anton Chekhov
Saint Joan by George Bernard Shaw
Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett
POSTSCRIPTS
Father and Son by Edmund Gosse
Eminent Victorians by Lytton Strachey
Goodbye to all that by Robert Graves