‘There is no mode of action, no form of emotion, that we do not share with the lower animals. It is only by language that we rise above them, or above each other - by language, which is the parent, and not the child, of thought.’
‘Aesthetic criticism returns us to the autonomy of imaginative literature and the sovereignty of the solitary soul, the reader not as a person in society but as the deep self, our ultimate inwardness.’
‘I cannot think of Emily Brontë’s work without thinking of a certain tree I once saw against a pallid sky.’
Do you know who you are? I would gamble what money I have that the answer is closer to a No than it is to a Yes. And why would I do that? I would first cast my gaze towards the rampant illiteracy of this age.
It would be somewhat shocking to hear that the average kid has read Harry Potter. It would be scandalous to hear he’s encountered Mark Twain. It would be suspect if he told you he had read Nietzsche. One of my ulterior motives (again, I must remind you, I have many) is to fight against this current. During the course of writing my novel, I came across the curious, lingering question of whether or not my audience would understand it, nevermind have the endurance to survive it, and the answer veered, once again, closer to No than it did Yes. So one of the twofold purposes of this blog then is to bring my audience into a higher form—a more exalted one, a literate, cultivated, sophisticated one; an audience that would understand the unvarnished truth of my novel, because I simply refuse to lower it down to you, to speak in a vulgar, barbaric way. No, you must all rise to the occasion, and if you wish to do so, I am enough of a gentleman to build a bridge, or extend an olive branch.
With that being said, I have assembled a list of the greatest books of all time—defined for our purposes here to be explicitly literary books, and so the great swath of history, philosophy, and non-fiction is immediately culled from the podium, and where possible, I have also excluded poetry as we understand it, although some canonical poets have made the cut, if only because they were too important to leave out (and here I must admit I have left out the one who was too important to include).
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