Books From the Back Room

It isn’t difficult to find a recommended list of authors you should read or have read. Everyone acknowledges the literary importance of authors such as Shakespeare, Tolstoy, Faulkner, Proust, Goethe, Flaubert, Dante, Cervantes, Eliot, Dickens. But so many of these authors have been normalized in press and education that they, even when most successful, tend to inhabit the most hackneyed regions of our collective memory.

As an aging member of the university study of literature which adhered to the precepts of the (then) new criticism with potent demiurges the likes of F. R. Leavis, William Empson, Harold Bloom, and Frank Kermode, I worshipped the works of those giants of literature. But looking back I see that my education tended to direct me down the avenue of the acceptable canon and I missed a lot of stimulating reading through the years.

This isn’t to say that I didn’t sit on the bricks of Royce Hall reading the adventures of Candy, or didn’t scan the dangerous books in the back-row at Papa Bach, but when asked for a reading recommendation my faux-erudition would seize my conscience and suggest War and Peace or Madame Bovary or even Ulysses.

Wait. I take that back. It couldn’t have been faux-erudition because I had actually read the books I suggested and my reasons for mentioning them were sound. Perhaps I should have said faux-recommendation since despite the reasoning behind the recommendation, perhaps I was actually cloaking my gut-felt urge to skip over Bleak House and suggest a close reading of Naked Lunch.

In years past I have published a few lists of authors I would now feel perfectly safe to recommend. I also notice that even at the university level there are more and more non-canon books being read (both a good and a bad thing). As time goes on I’m sure I would add many new names to this list but for now here are sixty-plus authors I have recommended through the years.

Any additions you might make to extend the list?