I love that dirty water: English major Edition
So the Globe this weekend ran a list of the top 100 New England books, and by that they mean books about the region, or books written by New England writers. I clicked on the link on boston.com, ready to mock all the provincial literary choices collected therein, but I have to say, it’s a pretty solid list. I was anticipating a few generous reaches (John Dos Passos went to Harvard, and the USA trilogy is, ostensibly, at least a little bit about New England, technically, right?), but it doesn’t appear that the rules needed to be bent too much to get a good list going. It’s also funny when you can see Mike Mulligan and his Steam Shovel and The Call of Cthulhu on the same best-of list.
They also have a fun little interactive feature where you can check off books on the list that you’ve already read, or would like to read. You’ll be proud to hear, treasured reader, that I was able to check off 17 books from the list, which doesn’t sound like a lot, especially coming from an allegedly voracious reader like myself, but consider that I more than tripled-up the average of 5 books by the 1,300 odd folks who have gone through the list at press time. A lot of those people are probably actual New Englanders! And they probably all loaded up on the kids’ books. (EVERYBODY has read Charlotte’s Web. Who’s got The Trumpet of the Swan under their belts, eh?)
I was pleasantly surprised by how I’ve read all of these books, too. There were enough selections that I read in high school (The Scarlet Letter, The Catcher in the Rye, Our Town, etc.), but only one that I’d read in college (The Rise of Silas Lapham). A whopping three were books that my book club read (Little Children, The Emperor’s Children, and my go-to book recommendation, The Secret History). I read The Last Hurrah purely because I felt like it. And, full disclosure, I haven’t actually completed Common Ground or On the Road, but I have every intention to, so I felt not problem with checking them off.
Yay books!
This entry was posted on Sunday, June 14th, 2009 at 10:53 pm and is filed under Reading and Writing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.