Literary Wishlist

Best Books divides its reading lists into five categories: Aspects of Society; Language and Literature, The Arts; Science and Technology; and finally History. Each of these heads is subdivided into different disciplines. Each section has an overview of the problem provided by an expert Gloria Steinem on feminism, David Crystal on language, Malcolm Bradbury on American literature, Susan Sontag on photography, and so on.

Unlike the usual hype of blurbs, these are the experts in their respective fields. But how good are their reading lists for the beginner? They vary. For instance, take feminism, the only growth area for literary academics and perhaps the last bastion of radical thought. Gloria Steinem provides a succinct summary on the state of the movement today but all her recommendations are post-1970. There is no mention of Simone de Beauvoirs The Second Sex or Virginia Woolfs A Room of Ones Own both widely regarded as the bibles on womens liberation. Steinems listing is all right (she also mentions Vandana Shivas Staying Alive: Women, Ecology and Development) but offers nothing that you couldnt cull out from a library catalogue under feminism.

 

To write about photography, says Susan Sontag, is nothing less than to write about the world. There is no activity that touches on and obliges us to confront the principal issues of modernity political, moral and aesthetic... She suggests10 books including her own, On Photography, and Roland Barthes Camera Lucida. Strangely, Sontag does not include John Bergers Ways of Seeing which addresses photography in an oblique kind of way.

The rubric third world literature immediately ushers in a range of difficulties which is reflected in the list itself. First, it involves a range of political questions around the term third world; other alternatives are post colonial or black.Here it seems to be defined in terms of our experience of colonialism and imperialism and the recommended readings, therefore, are a mixed bag that examine debates around language, history. gender, and how issues of self-determination and independence affect the analysis of literary criticism. Almost all the books are African in origin (is it because we have little of literary and imaginative value?) which include Chinua Achebes Things Fall Apart, Ngugi wa Thiongos Petals of Bloodand Decolonising the Mind; V S Naipauls A Bend in the River; Wole Soyinkas Myth, Literature and the African World, Ashcroft et al: The Empire Strikes Back and Colonial Discourse and Postcolonial Theory. Taken together, they would provide a good introduction to literature but the

absence of Latin American, Caribbean and some of our own is conspicuous.

History texts have always created controversy, being increasingly regarded as instruments of social and psychological engineering by both the right and the left. The touchy subject, with its subtexts, interpretations, biases and omissions come under close scrutiny. Quite rightly, therefore, it occupies the largest space in the book, not scoffing at the idea that most of world history is primarily a history of oppression. As the Africans say: Unless lions have their own historians, the history of the hunt will always glorify the hunter.

Just how good is this Guide to books that matter? If you are a beginner, it will help to break ground because the introductions tell you the state of play in each subject. But its great weakness is that none of the readings make any mention of classical texts and without the classics you cant really get to grips with a subject.