Kevin Moffett in The Believer:
Then, in my last year of college in Gainesville, Florida, I was given secondhand a list of eighty-one books, the recommendations of Donald Barthelme to his students. Barthelme’s only guidance, passed on by Padgett Powell, one of Barthelme’s former students at the University of Houston and my teacher at the time, was to attack the books “in no particular order, just read them,” which is exactly what I, in my confident illiteracy, resolved to do.
I had heard of this syllabus and was thrilled that someone had preserved it. As Moffett notes, there is something of a theme connecting the books on this list:
If the list’s books are skewed toward Barthelme’s particular obsessions—one of the entries is “Beckett entire”—this is only to its credit. Most are novels. All but two of the books, Knut Hamsun’s Hunger and Flaubert’s Letters (numbers 15, 40), were written in the twentieth century, most in the past thirty years. And all have that dizzying sense of otherness and surprise common to great books, an affluence of vitality. There’s not a dull read in the group….
I’d refine this further by saying that each book on the list speaks in a voice that is astonishingly original. How appropriate: Barthelme, early in his career, was obsessed with finding a “cool sound” of his own. What better way for aspiring writers to find their own voice than to hone an ear for perfect literary pitch?
This is again echoed in an anecdote from John Barth in Further Fridays:
“How come you write the way you do?” an apprentice writer in my Johns Hopkins workshop once disingenuously asked Donald Barthelme, who was visiting. Without missing a beat, Don replied, “Because Samuel Beckett was already writing the way he does.”
Originality does not guarantee delight, of course, but it usually ensures that the author is paying close attention to how the story is being told. As readers, we can only benefit.
I’ve returned to this list many times over the years, usually when I am in desperate need of something to remind me why I love fiction. Some of these books are continuously in print while others require spelunking in used book stores. Either way, it’s worth the effort.
