chickenfeet

Take five books off your bookshelf: I took 5 fairly random books from the various piles around the room I am in.

First sentence from Book no 1: 'Two women had arranged to have tea together, in the flat of one of them which was in a rather distant and not so fashionable quarter of the Left Bank'.

Last sentence from page 50 of Book no 2 -- last sentence on page fifty: 'Eleanor wrote that their great difficulty would be in managing their first break with their friends'.

Second sentence on page 100 of Book no 3: 'Canfield was polite, softening his rejection by saying if Sybille were to write a full-length novel one day he would be pleased to read it'.

Next to the last sentence on p 150 of book no 4: 'Because it's true, you know--he's not like any of them, he's completely alien to that whole bright, corrupt court'.

Final sentence of book 5: 'We have many more evenings before us if we want them'.

Make these sentences into a paragraph:

Two women had arranged to have tea together, in the flat of one of them which was in a rather distant and not so fashionable quarter of the Left Bank. Eleanor wrote that their great difficulty would be in managing their first break with their friends. Canfield was polite, softening his rejection by saying if Sybille were to write a full-length novel one day he would be pleased to read it. Because it's true, you know--he's not like any of them, he's completely alien to that whole bright, corrupt court. We have many more evenings before us if we want them.

1: Beyond This Limit: Selected Shorter Fiction of Naomi Mitchison (I skipped the editorial introduction.)
2. Mary Gordon, Chase of the Wild Goose (about the Ladies of Llangollen).
3. Selina Hastings, Sybille Bedford: an appetite for life
4. Pamela Dean, Tam Lin
4. Barbara Pym, Jane and Prudence.

Dr rdrz are by now aware that one way to irk the hedjog is to compile lists of the 100 Greatest Novels that Everybody Should Read.

Especially when a) you go culturally woezing:

Never has such a list been more needed. Dwindling attention spans, screens, Netflix; whatever we blame, reading for pleasure is a dying pursuit. Half of adults in the UK say they never read, and levels among children and young people are at their lowest in 20 years. This year has been declared the National Year of Reading to address this crisis. “Read the best books first, or you may not have a chance to read them at all,” Henry David Thoreau advised. We are here to help.

And b) in There Is A History, the article actually admits that These Lists Change Over Time!!! and certain 'Big Beasts' who were considered Timelessly Major Urgent Phalluses some decades ago are Out! Out! Out!

Is anything more wearisome than the implicit 'should' that haunts these lists?

I am so there for this apercu:

But where is Nancy Mitford’s glittering 1945 The Pursuit of Love, which deserves a place for its last two lines alone? The comic novel, like science fiction and crime, rarely fares well in bookish horse races.

Personally, we would not take reading advice from Mr Thoreau to begin with, and we sit here, hymning the work of those presses that are recovering the neglected and overlooked (perhaps overlooked is better than 'forgotten', I mutter to myself) works from the past that do not make the big bowwow lists like this - Furrowed Middlebrow, Persephone, British Library Women Writers and the mother of them all, Virago.