James Wood's best books since 1945 (Circa 1994)
Back in 1994, prompted by Harold Bloom's The Western Canon, James Wood presented Guardian readers with his own list of the best British and American writing since 1945. (He found Bloom a "fine, if prejudiced, reader of poetry, but an unreliable reader of prose.") The list was offered as a mild corrective, an exercise Wood considered "amusing." He was careful with his own caveats and omissions – he pled an "ignorance of the theatre" and realized that by omitting the category, he was overlooking the likes of Harold Pinter. He also excluded journalism other than essays and book reviews. And, finally, he cut the whole thing off around 1985 – unless "keeping to it would have meant omitting a writer's best work so far." The list is especially interesting given that Wood says he sough to "avoid the 'representative', 'important' or 'influential' and chosen, instead, books which I like, which seemed to me deep and beautiful, which aerate the soul and abrase the conscience … "
I had never seen the list – it's not available online – until Nicholas Richards, one of my readers, forwarded me a PDF of the original article. I've decided to go ahead and reproduce Wood's list in its entirety for a few reasons.
First, it seemed as good a way as any to remind my New York readers that Wood will be appearing this evening at Queens College with Peter Carey and E.L. Doctorow.
Second, I thought the list was pretty damned interesting, and I know many of you will, too, and, since it isn't online, well TEV is all about the public service.
But finally, I'm offering it as a corrective of its own to some of the foolishness that has cropped up around Wood of late. He certainly doesn't need me to defend him but this list should give the lie to the popular cliche of Wood as the hidebound dean of realism who thinks fiction stopped with Flaubert. The list appears in its entirety after the jump, typed up exactly as it ran (with its idiosyncrasies), but I think you'll find some surprises. Pynchon! Barthelme! DeLillo! And quite a few others. On Wood's best writing list. (One wonders whether Zadie Smith bothered to read through this list before kneecapping Wood in the pages of the NYRB.) Check it out – and discuss.
JG Farrell: The Siege of Krishnapur
Jane Bowles: Collected Works
LP Hartley: The Go-Between
Norman Mailer: The Naked and the Dead; Armies of the Night
Walter Abish: How German Is It
Harold Brodkey: Stories in an Almost Classical Mode
Cynthia Ozick: The Messiah of Stockholm; Art and Ardour
William Burroughs: The Naked Lunch
Kurt Vonnegut: Slaughterhouse 5
Elizabeth Bishop: The Complete Poems
John Cheever: Collected Stories; Falconer
Ralph Ellison: Invisible Man
Angus Wilson: The Wrong Set; Hemlock and After; Anglo-Saxon Attitudes
Fred Exley: A Fan's Notes
Randall Jarrell: Poetry and the Age
Robert Lowell: Life Studies; For the Union Dead; Near the Ocean
Bernard Malamud: The Assistant; The Stories of Bernard Malamud
William Trevor: Collected Stories
James Baldwin: The Fire Next Time; Giovanni's Room
Toni Morrison: Sula; Beloved
Henry Green: Loving; Concluding; Nothing
Howard Nemerov: Collected Poems
AS Byatt: Still Life
VS Naipaul: A House for Mr. Biswas; In a Free State; The Enigma of Arrival
Tim O'Brien: If I Die In A Combat Zone
Kazuo Ishiguro: The Remains of the Day
Flannery O'Connor: A Good Man Is Hard To Find
Frank O'Hara: Selected Poems
Sylvia Plath: Collected Poems
Ezra Pound: Pisan Cantos
John Barth: The Sotweed Factor
Saul Bellow: The Adventures of Augie March; Seize the Day; Herzog; Humboldt's Gift
John Berryman: The Dream Songs; The Freedom of the Poet and Other Essays
Thomas Pynchon: The Crying of Lot 49; V
Philip Roth: Goodbye, Columbus; The Counterlife; Reading Myself and Others
JD Salinger: The Catcher in the Rye
Donald Barthelme: Sixty Stories
Susan Sontag: Styles of Radical Will
Wallace Stevens: Collected Poems
Robert Penn Warren: All The King's Men
Eudora Welty: Collected Stories
William Carlos Williams: Paterson
Edmund White: A Boy's Own Story
Amy Clampitt: The Kingfisher
Don DeLillo: White Noise
WH Auden: The Dyer's Hand and Other Essays; Collected Poems
Paul Bailey: Gabriel's Lament
Angela Carter: The Magic Toyshop; Nights at the Circus
Bruce Chatwin: On The Black Hill
James Fenton: The Memory of War
William Golding: Lord of the Flies; The Spire
WS Graham: Collected Poems
Raymond Carver: The Stories of Raymond Carver
Martin Amis: Money; The Moronic Inferno
Jean Rhys: Wide Sargasso Sea
Graham Greene: The Heart of the Matter
Jonh Ashbery: Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror; Selected Poems
Geoffrey Hill: Collected Poems
Doris Lessing: The Golden Notebook
Ivy Compton-Burnett: A Heritage and its History
Muriel Spark: Memento Mori; The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie
Malcolm Lowry: Under the Volcano
Walker Percy: The Moviegoer
Phillip Larkin: Collected Poems
Ian McEwan: First Love Last Rites; The Cement Garden
Andrew Motion: Secret Narratives
Iris Murdoch: Under the Net; The Bell; The Nice and the Good
George Orwell: 1984; Collected Essay and Journalism (4 vols)
Carson McCullers: The Ballad of the Sad Cafe
JG Ballard: Concrete Island
Anthony Powell: A Dance of the Music of Time
John Updike: Of the Farm; The Centaur; The Rabbit Quartet; Hugging the Shore
Jeanette Winterson: Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit
Ted Hughes: Selected Poems 1957-81
VS Pritchett: Complete Stories; Complete Essays
Craig Raine: A Martian Sends A Postcard Home
Marianne Moore: Complete Poems
Elizabeth Taylor: The Wedding Group
Salman Rushdie: Midnight's Children; The Satanic Verses
Tom Paulin: Fivemiletown
Joseph Heller: Catch 22
Christine Brook-Rose: The Christine Brook-Rose Reader
Anthony Burgess: Earthly Powers
Alan Sillitoe: The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner
Graham Swift: Waterland
Iain Sinclair: Downriver
Evelyn Waugh: Brideshead Revisited; The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold; Through a Cloud
Jack Kerouac: On the Road
Denton Welch: A Voice Through a Cloud
Originally printed in the Guardian on Oct. 7, 1994.
