I have just completed four new literature lists:
Best Novels of All Time – Ranked
Best Novels of All Time – Chronological
Best Plays of All Time – Ranked
Best Plays of All Time – Chronological
Enjoy!
It’s not quite the end of 2016, but like many of you out there, I am in a rush for the year to be over, so I’m publishing my end of year summary a few days early. Here are some of the highlights of my year in movie-watching and book-reading.
MOVIES
Number of Movies Seen in 2016: 64
Category
Feature Films: 37
Short Films: 17
Documentaries: 10
Date of Movie
1920-1930: 12
1930-1959: 10
1960-1979: 4
1980-1999: 3
2000-2014: 16
2015: 9
2016: 9
Highest Rated Movies
10/10
Shoe Shine (Italy, De Sica, 1946)
Anomalisa (US, Johnson & Kaufman, 2015)
Moonlight (US, Jenkins, 2016)
9/10
Ballet mécanique (France, Léger & Murphy, 1924)
The Freshman (US, Newmeyer & Taylor, 1925)
Ghosts Before Breakfast (Germany, Richter, 1928)
Lot in Sodom (US. Webber & Watson, 1933)
Meshes of the Afternoon (US, Deren & Hammid, 1943)
21-87 (US, Lipsett, 1964)
Land of Silence and Darkness (West Germany, Herzog, 1971)
The Cruise (US, Miller, 1998)
The Secret in their Eyes (Argentina, Campanella, 2009)
The Big Short (US, McKay, 2015)
45 Years (UK, Haigh, 2015)
Tangerine (US, Baker, 2015)
Son of Saul (Hungary, Jeles, 2015)
BOOKS
Number of books finished in 2016: 12
Category
Fiction: 4
Non-Fiction: 4
Epic Poems: 4
Date Published
1000-1299: 5
1300-1799: 0
1800-1999: 1
2000-2016: 6
Highest Rated Books
FIve Stars
The Tale of Genji (Japan, 1021). By Shikibu Murasaki
Europe Central (US, 2005). By William T. Vollmann
Lawrence in Arabia (UK, 2013). By Scott Anderson
Happy New Year to everyone who follows or otherwise reads Make Lists, Not War. I am thrilled to see that people from around the world have been checking out the lists on this site – every year the numbers grow. I particularly appreciate the comments and suggestions by some of the readers.
1. In this blog post, I have three announcements. The first is that 2015 was the best year so far for Make Lists, Not War since I began blogging in 2013. To give you a sense of the level of activity this year, here are some statistics, courtesy of the diligent folks at WordPress:
Total Views (2015): 60,095
Total Viewers (2015): 35,859
Top Ten Most Popular Lists (with links):
(1) Best Works of Art of All Time – The Critics’ Picks, Part 2
(2) Art History 101 – Part 1: Prehistoric Era – 1399 CE
(3) Best Operas of All Time – The Critics’ Picks
(4) Best Architecture of All Time – The Critics’ Picks
(5) Best Inventions of All Time – Chronological: Part II
(6) Best Works of Art of All Time – The Critics’ Picks, Part 1
(7) Best Inventions of All Time – Chronological: Part III
(8) Best Inventions of All Time – Chronological: Part I
(9) Best World Music of All Time – The Critics’ Picks
(10) Best Photography of All Time – The Critics’ Picks
Viewers’ Top 10 Countries of Origin:
(1) United States (29,011 views)
(2) United Kingdom (3,986)
(3) Canada (2,633)
(4) Germany (1,823)
(5) Australia (1,597)
(6) France (1,578)
(7) India (1,237)
(8) Italy (949)
(9) Netherlands (835)
(10) Spain (830)
Top 10 Search Terms
(1) “best operas”
(2) “greatest operas”
(3) “100 great short stories”
(4) “best operas of all time”
(5) “greatest works of art”
(6) “greatest paintings of all time”
(7) “best world music albums”
(8) “greatest architects of all time”
(9) “alfred stieglitz flatiron building 1903 photo reproduction”
(10) “greatest architecture of all time”
2. My next announcement is to introduce five new lists (actually, two two-part lists and one one-part list). Although I had already taken the Best Literature list and organized it by author, I had not made a list of Best Authors. Similarly, I had taken the Best Classical Music list and organized it by composer, but I hadn’t made a list of the Best Composers. I have now filled those gaps in the list-verse. In both cases, I collected lists of the best authors/best composers and combined them into meta-lists. I then made lists of each author/composer on more than two (for authors) or three (for composers) original source lists. In addition, I made a list of each author’s most highly-regarded literary works and for the composers, I made lists of their most highly-regarded music compositions. In the case of the writers, there is a two-part list organized chronologically by author’s date of birth. In the case of composers, there is a list organized chronologically by date of birth and a two-part list organized by rank (i.e., starting with the composer on the most lists). The results of these projects can be found by following the links below:
The Best Writers and their Best Works, Part 1: 850 BCE – 1870
The Best Writers and their Best Works, Part 2: 1871-Present
The Best Classical Composers and their Best Works, Ranked: Part 1
The Best Classical Composers and their Best Works, Ranked: Part 2
The Best Classical Composers and their Best Works: Chronological
3. My third announcement will be mostly of interest to my wife and others who know me personally. While I am devoted to the blog, and have a number of projects in the wings (more pictures! more descriptive/analytical essays!), it is a time-consuming labor of love that sometimes saps time and energy from other necessary activities and pursuits. After researching and creating over 160 lists that will remain fully accessible to viewers around most of the globe, I feel comfortable taking a hiatus from Make Lists, Not War for a significant portion of 2016, after which I hope to return with renewed vigor. Until then, please enjoy these lists and remember to Make Lists, Not War.
John B.
During our first dinner out together, over nachos and Dos Equis in a Tex-Mex place, the woman who would soon become my true love and later my wife said two things that made me realize that she was more than just beautiful and easy to talk with. First, she told me her father was a professor of English literature and that he taught her to love books. Second, she told me she was enrolled in an adult education course called, “The Short Story.” While our story, which continues with no signs of stopping 30 years after that meeting, would be better suited to a novel, the short story form continues to intrigue us both. Unlike the sprawl of the novel, where digressions are expected, and multiple story lines may be risked, the typical short story is single minded. It is the literary equivalent of Brunelleschi’s single-point perspective, where all lines converge at a point. Although some writers break the rules and introduce complex structures or reach across months, years or decades to tell their short stories, most confine themselves to a single main character, or a single event, and spend their energies pulling out all the strands of story and character, only to tuck them, albeit transformed, neatly back into place by the end (usually). After he retired, my father-in-law brought us into his home library and told us he had set aside the books he wanted to keep and we could take anything that remained. One of the books I took and still treasure is a short story anthology he had used to teach freshman English called The Expanded Moment. This phrase described so many of my favorite stories, which don’t plumb the depths of an entire life but of one of life’s many crucial instants, like the instant when a man realizes he is eating nachos with the woman he will spend his life with.
The purpose of this post is to introduce my newly-revised short story meta-lists. One is organized by rank (with the most-listed stories at the top) and the other is by chronology. (See Links at end of post.) The revision was sparked by a commenter’s concern that some of the literary works I’ve listed as short stories are actually novels or novellas. I’ve removed some of the offenders (A Christmas Carol, Dr. Jekyl and Mr. Hyde), but kept others (Heart of Darkness, Metamorphosis, The Death of Ivan Ilyich) because they are frequently included on lists of Best Short Stories as well as lists of Best Novellas. So I apologize to those who feel I’ve not gone far enough in culling the herd. The other reason I decided to revise was my lingering disappointment that the original lists were so heavily weighted towards English-language stories and so lacking in contemporary writers. So I went back to the Internet and found more lists that addressed these two problems somewhat, although the English-language bias is still evident.
In the course of compiling the revised short story lists, I began reminiscing about some of my personal favorites, many of which I first discovered in my wife’s bookshelves. I found that there were some stories and collections I remembered easily, while in other cases, I have only vague memories of a story that moved me but whose plot and characters are now only hazy ghosts. I tried to find some of these lost favorites (e.g., a very funny story in an Eastern European sci-fi anthology about a man who runs a red light) by plugging what I remembered of the plot into Google, but the Internet failed to work its magic. So, I qualify the following lists of favorites as ‘the ones I can remember.’
Some Favorite Short Stories:
The Birthmark, by Nathaniel Hawthorne (US, 1843)
The Nose, by Nikolai Gogol (Russia, 1935-1836)
Bartleby the Scrivener, by Herman Melville (US, 1853)
The Death of Ivan Ilyich, by Leo Tolstoy (Russia, 1886)
The Open Boat, by Stephen Crane (US, 1897)
Heart of Darkness, by Joseph Conrad (Poland/UK, 1899)
The Dead, by James Joyce (Ireland, 1914)
Metamorphosis, by Franz Kafka (Austria-Hungary, 1914)
The Doll’s House, by Katherine Mansfield (New Zealand/UK, 1922)
Babylon Revisited, by F. Scott Fitzgerald (US, 1930)
The Jilting of Granny Wetherall, by Katherine Anne Porter (US, 1930)
Silent Snow, Secret Snow, by Conrad Aiken (US, 1934)
Death of a Traveling Salesman, by Eudora Welty (US, 1936)
June Recital, by Eudora Welty (US, 1947)
A Perfect Day for a Bananafish, by J.D. Salinger (US, 1948)
Unready to Wear, by Kurt Vonnegut (US, 1952)
A Good Man is Hard to Find, by Flannery O’Connor (US, 1953)
Teddy, by J.D. Salinger (US, 1953)
Harrison Bergeron, by Kurt Vonnegut (US, 1961)
Everything That Rises Must Converge, by Flannery O’Connor (US, 1961)
In the Region of Ice, by Joyce Carol Oates (US, 1966)
In the Heart of the Heart of the Country, by William Gass (US, 1968)
I Could See the Smallest Things, by Raymond Carver (US, 1980)
What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, by Raymond Carver (US, 1981)
Cathedral, by Raymond Carver (US, 1983)
A Father’s Story, by Andre Dubus (US, 1983)
Ship Fever, by Andrea Barrett (US, 1996)
Some Favorite Short Story Collections:
The Collected Tales of Edgar Allan Poe (US, 1832-1849)
The Collected Tales and Sketches of Nathaniel Hawthorne (US, 1832-1853)
The Queen of Spades and Other Stories, by Alexander Pushkin (Russia, c. 1890)
Great Short Works of Herman Melville, by Herman Melville (US, 1853-1891)
Dubliners, by James Joyce (Ireland, 1914)
Winesburg, Ohio, by Sherwood Anderson (US, 1919)
Babylon Revisited and Other Stories, by F. Scott Fitzgerald (US, 1920-1937)
Nine Stories, by J.D. Salinger (US, 1953)
A Good Man is Hard to Find and Other Stories, by Flannery O’Connor (US, 1955)
First Love and Other Sorrows, by Harold Brodkey (US, 1958)
The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway (US, 1923-1961; pub. 1987)
Labyrinths, by Jorge Luis Borges (Argentina, 1962)
The Collected Stories of Katherine Anne Porter (US, 1964)
The Past Through Tomorrow, by Robert Heinlein (US, 1967)
Welcome to the Monkey House, by Kurt Vonnegut (US, 1968)
Something I’ve Been Meaning to Tell You, by Alice Munro (Canada, 1974)
Enormous Changes at the Last Minute, by Grace Paley (US, 1974)
Secrets and Surprises, by Ann Beattie (US, 1977)
The Stories of John Cheever, by John Cheever (US, 1978)
Night Shift, by Stephen King (US, 1978)
What We Talk What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, by Raymond Carver (US, 1981)
Cathedral, by Raymond Carver (US, 1983)
The Elizabeth Stories, by Isabel Huggan (Canada, 1984)
The Old Forest and Other Stories, by Peter Taylor (US, 1985)
Transactions in a Foreign Currency, by Deborah Eisenberg (US, 1986)
Only the Little Bone, by David Huddle (US, 1986)
Rock Springs, by Richard Ford (US, 1987)
The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty (US, 1941-1988)
Dusk and Other Stories, by James Salter (US, 1988)
The Things They Carried, by Tim O’Brien (US, 1990)
The Effigy: Stories, by Joan Millman (US, 1990)
A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain, by Robert Olen Butler (US, 1992)
Runaway, by Alice Munro (Canada, 2004)
The Best American Short Stories (US, annual publication) (especially 1969, 1973, 1978, 1983-1989)
Prize Stories: The O. Henry Awards (US, 1987, 1993)
And here are the revised short story meta-lists I mentioned above:
The Best Short Stories of All Time – The Critics’ Picks
The Best Short Stories of All Time – Chronological
I have completely revised my poetry meta-lists. The most significant difference is that the ranked list contains links to the texts of nearly every poem, from the haikus of Bashō, Issa and Buson, to the epic poems of Homer, Dante, John Milton, and Ferdowsi. As you will see from the introductions to the revised lists, I tried very hard to include poets and poems from all over the world in order to counteract the persistent bias in favor of poems originally written in English. While I recognize that translating poetry is enormously challenging and that there may be dozens, even hundreds of legitimate translations for some non-English language poems, I am not willing to accept the notion that poetry is immune to translation. On the other hand, I recognize that in some ways, a poem’s translator becomes a collaborator of sorts, and that some translations are more ‘poetic’ than others. For an example, take a look at this website showing over 30 different translations of Matsuo Bashō’s most famous haiku (my favorite is by Alan Watts). Most of the links to translated poems include the name of the translator. In spite of my diligent efforts to be inclusive, the majority of the poems on the lists were originally written in English.
The revised poetry lists are:
The Best Poetry of All Time – A List with Links
The Best Poets and their Best Poems
The Best Poems of All Time – Chronological
In the process of developing the revised poetry lists, I created a meta-list of the Best Poets of All Time. As with the poetry lists, I used some affirmative action techniques to overcome the overwhelming bias towards English-speaking poets (except for the list on one website, which appeared to have been commandeered by Germanophiles). Here are the results, ranked, of the poets on three or more of the “Best Poets” lists I found:
On 16 “Best Poets” Lists
Emily Dickinson (US, 1830-1886)
On 15 Lists
William Shakespeare (UK, 1564-1616)
13 Lists
Dante Alighieri (Italy, 1265-1321)
Walt Whitman (US, 1819-1892)
W.B. Yeats (Ireland, 1865-1939)
12
William Blake (UK, 1757-1827)
Robert Frost (US, 1874-1963)
11
John Keats (UK, 1795-1821)
10
William Wordsworth (UK, 1770-1850)
Percy Bysshe Shelley (UK, 1792-1822)
Edgar Allan Poe (US, 1809-1849)
Rainer Maria Rilke (Czech Republic, 1875-1926)
T.S. Eliot (US/UK, 1888-1965)
9
Homer (Ancient Greece, c. 800-700 BCE)
John Donne (UK, 1572-1631)
John Milton (UK, 1608-1674)
Robert Burns (UK: Scotland, 1759-1796)
Pablo Neruda (Chile, 1904-1973)
Sylvia Plath (US, 1932-1963)
8
Geoffrey Chaucer (UK, c. 1343-1400)
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (Germany, 1749-1832)
Robert Browning (UK, 1812-1889)
Wallace Stevens (US, 1879-1955)
Langston Hughes (US, 1902-1967)
7
Virgil (Ancient Rome, 70-19 BCE)
Li Bai (Li Po) (China, 705-762 CE)
Jalal ad-Din Muhammad Rumi (Persia/Iran, 1207-1273)
George Gordon, Lord Byron (UK, 1788-1824)
Alfred, Lord Tennyson (UK, 1809-1892)
Charles Baudelaire (France, 1821-1867)
E.E. Cummings (US, 1894-1962)
6
Du Fu (Tu Fu) (China, 712-770)
Petrarch (Italy, 1304-1374)
Elizabeth Barrett Browning (UK, 1806-1861)
Thomas Hardy (UK, 1840-1928)
Ezra Pound (US, 1885-1972)
W.H. Auden (UK/US, 1907-1973)
Dylan Thomas (UK: Wales, 1914-1953)
5
Sappho (Ancient Greece, c.630-c.570 BCE)
Ovid (Ancient Rome, 43 BCE – 18 CE)
Alexander Pope (UK, 1688-1744)
Alexander Pushkin (Russia, 1799-1837)
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (US, 1807-1882)
Arthur Rimbaud (France, 1854-1891)
Rudyard Kipling (UK, 1865-1936)
William Carlos Williams (US, 1883-1963)
Elizabeth Bishop (US, 1911-1979)
4
Ferdowsi (Persia/Iran, 940-1020)
Omar Khayyam (Persia/Iran, 1048-1131)
Matsuo Bashō (Japan, 1644-1694)
Friedrich Schiller (Germany, 1759-1805)
Friedrich Hölderlin (Germany, 1770-1843)
Novalis (Georg Philipp Friedrich Freiherr von Hardenberg) (Germany, 1772-1801)
Samuel Taylor Coleridge (UK, 1772-1834)
Joseph Freiherr von Eichendorff (Poland/Germany, 1788-1857)
Victor Hugo (France, 1802-1885)
Ralph Waldo Emerson (US, 1803-1882)
Oscar Wilde (Ireland, 1854-1900)
Rabindranath Tagore (India, 1861-1941)
Carl Sandburg (US, 1878-1967)
Jorge Luis Borges (Argentina, 1899-1986)
Allen Ginsberg (US, 1926-1997)
Maya Angelou (US, 1928-2014)
3
Horace (Ancient Rome, 65-8 BCE)
Wang Wei (China, 699-759 CE)
Hafez (Persia/Iran, 1325-1390)
Sir Thomas Wyatt (UK, 1503-1542)
Luís Vaz de Camões (Portugal, 1524-1580)
Sir Walter Raleigh (UK, 1552-1618)
George Herbert (UK: Wales, 1593-1633)
Heinrich Heine (Germany, 1797-1856)
Giacomo Leopardi (Italy, 1798-1837)
Henrik Ibsen (Norway, 1828-1906)
Lewis Carroll (UK, 1832-1898)
Mark Twain (US, 1835-1910)
Robert Louis Stevenson (UK: Scotland, 1850-1894)
A.E. Housman (UK, 1859-1936)
Fernando Pessoa (Portugal, 1888-1935)
Anna Akhmatova (Russia, 1889-1966)
Marina Tsvetaeva (Russia, 1892-1941)
Edna St. Vincent Millay (US, 1892-1950)
Wilfred Owen (UK, 1893-1918)
Ogden Nash (US, 1902-1971)
Octavio Paz (Mexico, 1914-1998)
Philip Larkin (UK, 1922-1985)
Ted Hughes (UK, 1930-1998)
Shel Silverstein (US, 1930-1999)
Seamus Heaney (Ireland, 1939-2013)
Billy Collins (US, 1941- )
BOOKS
The obsessive-compulsive folks (and their algorithms) at Goodreads.com tell me that I completed 24 books in 2013. My stats page helpfully points out that the longest book I read this year was The Visual Arts: A History, by Hugh Honour, at 992 pages. (Curiously, no ‘shortest book’ stat is provided.) Most of the books I read this year come from two meta-lists I created: (1) Best Fiction Since 1900; and (2) Best Literature of All Time – Chronological. Of the 24 books I read in 2013, I gave the following seven a five-star rating:
Great Dialogues of Plato (c. 400 BCE). By Plato. Translated by W.H.D. Rouse.
I’m cheating a little here – I only read the Apology, the Symposium and the Crito. I read The Republic, too, but in a different translation (Grube). But I did read several of the other dialogues in a philosophy course in 1979, if that helps any. It is interesting to watch Plato go from Socrates’ chronicler to a philosopher with his own ideas (which he nevertheless continues to attribute to Socrates – an early example of branding?).
The Book of Disquiet (1935). By Fernando Pessoa. Translated by Richard Zenith.
I read this book from my Best Literature list out of chronological order because of our April 2013 trip to Portugal. I wasn’t disappointed. Pessoa’s narrator (Bernardo Soares, one of his many avatars) is an early existentialist (whole passages of Sartre’s Nausea appear to be cribbed from Disquiet) or perhaps undiagnosed depressive whose thoughts and emotions impart a dark-flavored energy onto everything in his exterior and interior world. He seems to find comfort in describing the minute details of the view from his office window or the surface of his desk. I can see why bookstores in the university towns of Portugal sell Pessoa t-shirts, even now, 75 years after his death.
Memoirs of Hadrian (1951). By Marguerite Yourcenar. Translated by Grace Frick.
A Roman emperor looks back on his life with a well-developed sense of himself and his opinions, a remarkable recall for names, places and events, and an uncanny ability to objectively assess both his strengths and weaknesses. Hadrian was a real emperor and this narrative is steeped in the facts of his life and times as they have survived. And yet while there is little (perhaps no) dialogue in Hadrian’s recitation, there is no question that it is a work of fiction and not history. Changing from the third person to the first person is not merely a grammatical change – we hear a historical character speaking to us through time.
Molloy; Molone Dies; The Unnameable (1951-1953). By Samuel Beckett.
It may be some kind of aesthetic crime to try and describe Beckett’s trilogy in my lazy prose. Each of Beckett’s sentences seems hewn in stone – it is impossible to imagine them any other way. He is postmodern in the sense that he doesn’t believe you can read a novel without knowing that it is a fiction, created by an author, for a reader, and therefore all these concepts – “fact” “fiction” “character” “author” “reader” “novel” – are subject to change without notice. Is the protagonist of all three novels the same character? Is there a protagonist or character, in any previously-understood sense, in the third novel at all? And, finally, how many stones does it have in its pocketses? This is one of those rare books, like Moby Dick, Ulysses, and Gravity’s Rainbow, that I look forward to re-reading, and re-re-reading, and so on, for there seem to be endless depths to plumb.
A Death in the Family (1957). By James Agee.
With its shifting narrative perspectives, carefully-drawn scenes; and an ability to convey powerful emotions without manipulation or sentimentality, this story is at its heart a simple story about a boy and his father.
Invisible Cities (1972). By Italo Calvino. Translated by Willliam Weaver.
Marco Polo describes to Genghis Khan the amazing places he has seen on his travels. One is more fantastic than the next. Each description is a little prose poem. Borges comes to mind. But if the cities aren’t ‘real’, are they nevertheless real in some other sense? And what do these conversations mean to Polo and Khan?
Conversations with Scorcese (Paperback edition, 2013). By Richard Schickel.
In the old days, directors denied that they had any agenda, any intellectual underpinnings or philosophical outlook. John Ford and Howard Hawks would tell you they just want to tell a story – point the camera and turn it on. Of course, these were deceptions, but while reading reviewer/documentarian Richard Schickel’s conversations with Martin Scorcese on life, the universe and Goodfellas. I wondered if there can be deception in a wall of words, a mask hidden behind the appearance of revealing secrets, telling all. Here we learn details about Scorcese’s childhood and life as a director, as well as stories about each of his movies, and his thoughts on more technical aspects of moviemaking. I raced through it and wished for more.
FILMS
I didn’t see any five-star movies in 2013 (excluding David Lean’s Great Expectations, which I’d seen before), but I did see quite a few movies that rated 4.5, which is often as good as it gets these days.
Pickup on South Street (Fuller, 1953)
San Soleil (Marker, 1983)
I Shot Andy Warhol (Harron, 1996)
The Piano Teacher (Haneke, 2001)
Ten (Kiarostomi, 2002)
Dogtooth (Lanthimos, 2009)
Marwencol (Malmberg, 2010)
Amour (Haneke, 2012)
Frances Ha (Baumbach, 2012)
Before Midnight (Linklater, 2013)
Blue Jasmine (Allen, 2013)
Nebraska (Payne, 2013)
The month of December is high season for listers and those who love lists. Because December is the time that arts critics in every newspaper, magazine, website, blog, TV or radio station look back over the past year and make lists (usually Top Ten lists, but not always) of the best accomplishments from the past 12 months. I’ve been collecting these lists – specifically for films, music and books – since 2002, and collating them to find out which items are on the most lists, and then making my own meta-lists. Why do I do this? One (somewhat inexplicable) reason is that I enjoy the process. But a better reason is that I believe it exposes me to the best of these three arts. Each list becomes a set of recommendations that I trust and that pushes me beyond my comfort zone. I know that some folks don’t trust critics and reviewers to guide their choices of what to see, what to read and what to listen to, but to me the critics’ lists are the best option available, given that you can’t read/watch/listen to everything and must make choices.
What are the other options for choosing what movies to see, books to read, music to listen to: (1) recommendations of friends and family; (2) following one particular expert, critic or reviewer; (3) critics’ reviews in newspapers, magazines and websites, or on radio or TV; (4) recommendations of people who sell movies or CDs or books, like Amazon; (5) trailers or other types of ads; (6) crowd-sourced websites like Goodreads or reviews on Amazon or other sites by ‘regular people’; or (7) meta-data sites like Metacritic and Rotten Tomatoes that collect critics’ reviews and assign ratings. I have tried most of these methods myself, and I find that – except for (7), which is very similar to what I do – they all leave me disappointed. I end up feeling like I have either adopted someone else’s tastes; sold out to The Man; ended up in a solipsistic spiral of stuff I know already, or that I’m just being exposed to the winners of various popularity contests judged by people completely unlike me who can’t spell and seem to base their opinions on completely irrational criteria. So instead I rely on the critics and reviewers – people who analyze works of art for a living and may know more than I do about their subject. While I may not agree with the tastes and judgment of each one, there is a pretty good chance that if several of them (or 10, 20 or 30 of them!) agree that a book is worth reading, a film is worth seeing, or an album is worth listening to, they are right. Plus, when you pool the lists of many critics, you get a much wider variety than under most of the other available methods. Taking this approach has led me to find masterpieces of artistic expression – from low to highbrow – that I would never have found had I just listened to what my friends’ recommended. And while the critics’ top ten isn’t always my top ten, I have never regretted a choice I’ve made based on these lists. (Even in the rare case that I don’t ‘like’ a highly rated book, recording or movie, I can appreciate the artistic qualities that led to its high rating and thus I benefit from it. I just won’t be watching/reading/listening to it again any time soon.)
Here are the 2013 lists and Happy New Year:
Best Films of 2013
Best Books of 2013
Best Music of 2013
A global financial crisis in the middle of a U.S. presidential election toppled financial institutions and triggered government bail-outs. In the midst of it all, Americans elected their first African-American President, Barack Obama. In other news, Benazir Bhutto was assassinated in Pakistan and the Olympics were held in Beijing. Take a trip back to 2008 – the year that was too big to fail. I’ve compiled lists of the best films, music and books of 2008, according to the critics and bloggers who make those “Best of the Year” lists every December.
I’ve compiled a new list – The Best Poetry of All Time – The Critics’ Picks. It includes the best poems by dozens (hundreds? I didn’t count) of poets, both named and anonymous. I organized it by poet, chronologically by date of birth. Because that seemed like the thing to do.
To give you a sampling of what’s in store when you peruse the list, I’ve created two mini-lists from it: Best Epic Poems and Best Lyric Poems. The numbers in bold indicate how many of the original lists the poem was on.
BEST EPIC POEMS
Epic of Gilgamesh (c. 2000-1200 BCE) – Anonymous
The Iliad (c. 750-650 BCE) – Homer
The Odyssey (c. 750-650 BCE) – Homer
The Aeneid (29-19 BCE) – Virgil
Ramayana (c. 500 BCE – 100 CE) – Valmiki (attrib.)
Mahabarata (c. 800 BCE – 300 CE) – Vyasa (attrib.)
The Book of Kings (Shanameh) (1010) – Ferdowsi
Beowulf (c. 700-1025) – Anonymous
The Divine Comedy (1265-1321) – Dante Alighieri
The Canterbury Tales (1343-1400) – Geoffrey Chaucer
Paradise Lost (1667) – John Milton
BEST LYRIC POEMS
10
The Tyger (1794) – William Blake
9
My Love is Like A Red, Red Rose (1794) – Robert Burns
A Noiseless Patient Spider (1882) – Walt Whitman
Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night (1951) – Dylan Thomas
8
A Poison Tree (1794) – William Blake
Ozymandias (1818) – Percy Bysshe Shelley
The Canti (1835) – Giacomo Leopardi
O Captain! My Captain! (1865) – Walt Whitman
Dover Beach (1867) – Matthew Arnold
Stopping by the Woods on a Snowy Evening (1923) – Robert Frost
7
Holy Sonnet 10: “Death Be Not Proud” (1609) – John Donne
Jerusalem (1804-1810) – William Blake
The Raven (1845) – Edgar Allan Poe
When I Heard The Learn’d Astronomer (1867) – Walt Whitman
I Hear America Singing (1867) – Walt Whitman
‘Hope’ is the thing with feathers (c. 1850-1886) – Emily Dickinson
The Road Not Taken (1916) – Robert Frost
The Waste Land (1922) – T.S. Eliot
6
Daffodils (I Wandered Lonely As A Cloud) (1807) – William Wordsworth
How Do I Love Thee? (1845) – Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Jabberwocky (1871) – Lewis Carroll
The Listeners (1912) – Walter de la Mare
When You Are Old (1892) – William Butler Yeats
The Darkling Thrush (1901) – Thomas Hardy
The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock (1915) – T.S. Eliot
Dulce et Decorum Est (1917) – Wilfred Owen
5
Sonnet 18 “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day” (1609) – William Shakespeare
Sonnet 30 “When to the sessions of sweet silent thought” (1609) – William Shakespeare
Sonnet 65 “Since neither brass nor stone” (1609) – William Shakespeare
Sonnet 73 “That Time of year thou mayst in me behold” (1609) – William Shakespeare
To A Mouse, On Turning Her Up In Her Nest With The Plough (1785) – Robert Burns
The Garden Of Love (1794) – William Blake
The Rime Of The Ancient Mariner (1798) – Samuel Taylor Coleridge
She Walks In Beauty (1814) – Lord Byron
Ode on a Grecian Urn (1819) – John Keats
Ode on Melancholy (1819) – John Keats
Ode to a Nightingale (1819) – John Keats
Two in the Campagna (1855) – Robert Browning
Remember (1862) – Christina Rossetti
Because I could not stop for death (c. 1850-1886) – Emily Dickinson
Anthem For Doomed Youth (1917) – Wilfred Owen
The Bridge (1930) – Hart Crane
Lullaby (1940) – W.H. Auden
Death Fugue (1948) – Paul Celan
We Real Cool (1959) – Gwendolyn Brooks
Those Winter Sundays (1962) – Robert Hayden
Daddy (1962) – Sylvia Plath
The Cantos (1917-1969) – Ezra Pound
Since this original post, I have arranged the poetry list in chronological order: Best Poems of All Time – Chronological.
There appears to be a human impulse to attribute a work of art to a single creator. Maybe this is a consequence of the monotheistic religions that so many humans embrace (or perhaps monotheism is a result of the same human impulse). We honor and celebrate the skill and imagination, the creative power of book authors, playwrights, poets, painters, sculptors, songwriters, musicians, and film directors. The underlying theory, I suppose, is that it takes the creative vision of a single mind to produce a fully-realized work of art. The most controversial application of this theory is the auteur theory developed by French film critics in the 1950s and championed in the U.S. by Andrew Sarris. According to the theory, a film’s director is its author, in the same way that the single person who writes a book is its author. The trouble with the theory is that movies are also a collaborative art – an enterprise involving the coordinated artistic and technical skills of many individuals in addition to the director, such as the screenwriter, the cinematographer, the editor, the sound crew, the set designer, costumers, as well as the actors. The auteur critics used their theory to champion lesser-known directors like Samuel Fuller and Douglas Sirk by showing how they used the relative obscurity of genre and “B” movies to put forth a personal artistic vision. But the theory works less well for many of the films produced by the Hollywood studio system in the 1930s and 1940s, when the director may have been just another cog in the machine. Gone With the Wind seems more a product of its producer, David O. Selznick’s vision, than than of its director, Victor Fleming.
Music can also be a collaborative art, especially in the ensembles of rock and jazz, where songwriting and performing are often spread among a number of talented individuals, working together but also taking opportunities to “solo” and improvise, temporarily elevating the individual above the ensemble. Even classical music, in which the composer’s manuscript is usually sacred, conductors and musicians “interpret” the piece, bringing something of their own style and personality to the final performance.
Painting and sculpture, which are now seen as extremely individualistic, were not always so (and, for massive public art projects, are not so even now). A painter or sculptor in the Renaissance, for example, had many assistants, who often executed some of the work. Painters were even known to charge higher rates depending on the percentage of the work they did themselves. Furthermore, those clients commissioning paintings and sculptures often had very specific requirements about the content of the work. The notion of a painter sitting down to a blank canvas and painting whatever he or she pleased is a relatively recent phenomenon.
Are book authors (and poets and playwrights), then, the only true auteurs? In many cases, the author sits down, writes his or her book alone and then sees it published in substantially the same form. But in other cases, this image ignores the reality of publishers and editors who influence not just the subject of books but the style. (Thomas Wolfe is one famous example of a writer who delivered a mass of disorganized writing to his editor, who then whipped it into shape. Yet the editor is not considered a co-author.) There are also ‘authors’, like Homer and those to whom many ancient manuscripts are attributed, who are merely symbols for the centuries of oral tradition that led to the Iliad, the Odyssey and other works handed down over time. And all artists are influenced by other artists – some steal directly, others unconsciously. Some are rebels; some are reformers, and some wish to return to times gone by. They are influenced by the market – what will sell, what will not. The political climate affects them as well as their personal circumstances.
I have raised all these complications as a preface to introducing a number of new lists. Actually, they are mostly reworkings of older lists (although a few of them dig deeper than the lists I’ve already published). These new lists all have one thing in common: they are organized by artist (as in performer, author, director). Some are alphabetical; some are chronological. The main idea is to see the lists in a different way: through the lens of the individual creator and their body of work. They are particularly useful in answering the question: “Which one should I try first?” (E.g., Which David Bowie or Charles Mingus album? Which Titian painting? Which Dickens book? Which Godard film?) Or, for those who have dabbled already, “Which should I try next?”
Rock, pop, R&B, etc.: Musicians and Their Best Albums
Jazz: Jazz Artists and their Best Recordings
Books: Great Authors and their Masterworks, Part 1: 850 BCE – 1870
Books: Great Authors and their Masterworks, Part 2: 1871-Present
Film: Film Directors and their Best Films
Visual Arts: Great Artists and Their Masterpieces