Help with my classics reading list?

[mal4mac]

No literary work has, or will ever be 100% accepted as great by the scholarly community. Harold Bloom, as influential as he is, is one "serious reader". Shakespeare was famously criticized by Tolstoy.

If only Bloom had panned Infinite Jest, I might have taken the plunge. But several other influential critics give it a thumbs down:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infinit...ical_reception

[mal4mac]

In the case of Rushdie, Amis, McEwan, and even Toni Morrison I get the sense their work is tailored to upper middle brow haut-bourgeois consumption. In the case of Rushdie I feel he's just playing a role of "sophisticated man of letters" ... but he's not actually breaking any artistic round like Faulkner or Joyce. It's as if we've regressed from high modernism or even the post-modernism of Nabokov and Pynchon.

For me, with writers like Amis, McEwan, Eggars, and Franzen, it's as if we've shrugged off the obscurities of high and post-modernism, returned to the Dickensian mainstream, and made serious reading enjoyable again.

I also feel that Rushdie is playing a role of "sophisticated man of letters", but I consider him to be following in this experimental, and rather tedious, pursuit in the company of Faulkner and Joyce. I don't want any of them on my list!

One good idea that came with post-modernism is that there is no "one tradition", that different pools of readers live in totally different environments, separate from each other, finding totally different things enjoyable, and forever disagreeing on "what's best". This seems to agree with my experience.

This divergence of opinion, of course, makes it very difficult to agree on a top fifty list!

In any case, thanks for reminding me about McEwan, I think he should be on the list with Saturday.