Not Exactly the 10 I'd Have Chosen

I did post a Valentine cartoon, but I didn't post anything book-y about Valentine's Day. However, I just ran across a list of Ten Great Novels of Love on the blog of the Florida Center for the Literary Arts at Miami Dade College and couldn't resist posting them here to see what you think about the choices.


Blog author Chauncy Mabe writes: Here’s my beginners’ list of Ten Great Novels of Love, just to get the conversation started. These are given in the order I thought of them, no qualitative ranking is implied.

1. Lolita, by Vladimir Nabokov. Yes, this is a story about pedophilia, but Humbert Humbert, while a genuine comic villain, is a most romantic pedophile.

2. Pride and Prejudice, by Jane Austen. Including this title is so obvious, it’s like saying the sky is blue. Still, its greatness transcends its popularity, and it may be the only novel on this list with a genuine happy ending.

3. Gone with the Wind, by Margaret Mitchell. Darden Pyron, author of Southern Daughter, a biography of Mitchell, convinced me that GWTW is that rare popular novel that also has literary merit. Interestingly, in his landmark book The Mask of Sanity, pioneering psychiatrist Hervey Cleckley analyzed Scarlett O’Hara as a prime example of a psychopathic personality.

4. The French Lieutenant’s Woman, by John Fowles. Despite some modernist literary trickery, this is one of my personal favorites.

5. Giovanni’s Room, by James Baldwin. Still a young black firebrand, Baldwin risked his career when he published this daring story of gay love in 1956.

6. Madame Bovary, by Gustav Flaubert. One of the greatest of all time, Flaubert’s novel of Emma’s doomed search for romantic love is, with its emphasis on personal identity and fulfillment, possibly the first 20th century novel. It was published in 1856.

7. The Great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzgerald. Yes, I know this is really Nick Carraway’s story, but Gatsby’s pining for Daisy Buchanan is the engine that drives the plot.

8. A Farewell to Arms, by Ernest Hemingway. An axiom of literature is that the biggest romantics are always the tough guys. I could as easily have listed The Sun Also Rises or For Whom the Bell Tolls. The late dialogue between Henry and Catherine goes on and on and on, and gets pretty funny at times, surely not Hemingway’s intention, but it’s a great love story nonetheless.

9. Emma, Who Saved My Life, by Wilton Barnhardt. Another personal favorite, and another story of unrequited love. Published in 1989, it’s one of the best coming-of-age-in-NYC novels I’ve ever read. Hilarious, too. It never gets the attention it deserves.

10. The Unbearable Lightness of Being, by Milan Kundera. The story of a philandering doctor during the blooming freedoms of the Prague Spring, it’s a novel unlike any other in my experience, with it’s digressive mixture of intellectual power, romance, sex, liberty.

11. Okay, I’m cheating, but I can’t end a list like this without mentioning Lawrence Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet, four novels that tell the same stories from different points of view. Set in Egypt during the ’30s and ’40s, it’s central love affair is that of an impoverished English writer and a rich and beautiful Jewish socialite. It’s possibly the most romantic thing I’ve ever read.

I’ve left out a world of great love novels. What are some of yours?

Sunday Funnies

Gleanings from My Readings

Happy Valentines Day!
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"A person who can write a long letter with ease, cannot write ill."
---Jane Austen, in Pride and Prejudice

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Since I’ve been doing a lot more writing than reading lately, this week’s quotes are all observations about writing from Joan Bolker’s Writing Your Dissertation in Fifteen Minutes a Day (yes, the book I griped about last week).

“The only rules there are in the dissertation-writing process are the useful ones you make up for yourself.” (7)

“What does ‘ownership’ of your writing mean? It means that your writing belongs, for better or for worse, to you, and you alone. . . . Other people own their responses to it, but you own the writing.” (17)

“Sometimes writing a dissertation is a bit like having a serious, but not mortal, illness: it takes enormous energy to sustain life, you have to take very good care of yourself so you don’t collapse, and your defenses—in this case not white blood cells, but psychological defenses—are sky high. One symptom of this ‘illness’ is ‘dissertation paranoia,’ the powerful, not totally rational feeling that other people are out to harm you, and that you must be vigilant and fierce in order to protect yourself and your work. . . . Dissertation paranoia, fortunately . . . is time limited; It tends to disappear when your final draft has been accepted.” (27)

“Remember that you are entitled to put your dissertation first (not for several years, but for a while). Realize that it’s time you stopped asking other people’s permission to do so.” (66)

“It’s more common for the students I’ve worked with to read too much than to read too little. They use reading as a distraction, or as a way to avoid having to think their own thoughts, or as a magic charm: ‘If I read everything in the field, then I’ll be able to write and be sure I haven’t missed anything.” (69-70)

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Happy Reading! Or, maybe today it should be “Happy Writing!”