When a Dutch publishing house invited me to become a member of a committee that would choose the one hundred best novels ever written, in whatever language, I was flattered. The committee would consist of only three or four writers, so my opinion would count and the operation seemed to me respectable. The one hundred best novels would be published in a beautiful edition, bound in leather. In other words, it was a collector’s item if ever there was one.
Then the problems started.
I have read a certain number of novels, but still there are many novels out there which I have never even opened. I have never read Moby Dick—should I nevertheless put it on my list of the hundred best novels? If I don’t do it, it might seem like a statement. If I put on the list, I’m a hypocrite or maybe even worse a fraud.
Henry James? Never even read one book by him.
Faulkner? When I was fifteen I started reading The Sound and the Fury—I stopped after forty pages.
The more I thought about this list, the more problematic it became—maybe not so much the list itself, but my involvement. The list of novels I had actually read seemed to shrink every day. Even in my own bookshelves I found too many books which I had forgotten to read.
There were not only the classics which I had postponed reading because of time management, provoking a sense of guilt, but there were popular books, the trashy ones staring at me as well, blaming me for many things.
Somewhere in the back of my bookshelf I discovered a copy of The Da Vinci Code. Somebody must have given it to me—I never even opened it. I found two copies of a book by Candace Bushnell, both in Dutch and English. A publisher must have sent it to me. Never opened the books.
It is even more shameful to devour the books by Bushnell and to postpone reading Faulkner than to postpone reading both authors, but this didn’t come as a big relief.
I decided to inform the Dutch publisher that I was not up to the task.
That same day, I read a portrait of Paulo Coelho in the New Yorker. Another popular author I postponed reading.
In this article, Coelho is quoted as saying, “I don’t regret my experience with black magic.” After this I went straight to my bookstore, bought two books by Faulkner, four by James, and decided to become a hermit in the near future.