They are the books you see in rented beach houses or in the communal pile at backpacker hostels, left behind by travellers wanting to lighten their load. They’re the books on a waiting list at public libraries, chosen by book clubs, and reviewed in (non-literary) magazines.
They are not necessarily great books but they are good books, books that people read, enjoy, talk about, lend to others, escape into and re-read over the years.
There is nothing pretentious or highbrow about the Better Reading Top 100 list released on Tuesday. If you are a book snob – or lover of serious, high literature – then look away now. This list will have very little on it that will please you (apart from a couple of Austens, maybe). Where is James Joyce? Or Virginia Woolf? Or even Australia’s most exacting prose stylist, Helen Garner? Where are all the difficult books?
Voted for by 5,000 readers around Australia, the list is topped by Bryce Courtenay’s The Power of One. Released in 1989, and going on to sell millions around the world, The Power of One is the story of an English-speaking South African boy named Peekay in the years from 1939 to 1951.
Coming in at number two is The Book Thief by Australian Marcus Zusak, followed by that perennial favourite To Kill a Mockingbird, riding fresh waves of popularity after the release of its “prequel” perhaps. Tim Winton’s family saga Cloudstreet is at five, but is a second Bryce Courtney book, The Potato Factory, really worthy of eighth spot? And what is EL James’s Fifty Shades of Grey doing at 14? It’s titillating enough but the writing’s a mess.
Perhaps instead of “best books”, the list should be re-packaged as “best stories”. There are some cracker yarns here, like The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini (20), or The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson (29). It’s not surprising that most of the books on the list have been made into films.
But where is William Faulkner? Or Nabokov’s Lolita? Or Australia’s own Patrick White? The pleasures of cracking a difficult book are deeper and more mysterious than the soporific delights of poolside page-turners such as Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code (34).
To have your mind blown by, say, Thomas Pynchon’s Crying of Lot 49 (that’s part of its title, by the way, not its place on the list) is akin to travelling overseas for the first time: your world is enlarged and flooded with wonder. How can this universe have existed all this time, you marvel, and yet you’re only seeing it now. It’s the same experience reading a good but difficult book – it’s a trip.
To be a good reader is a skill, however, and this list of Australia’s favourite books suggests to me we haven’t yet mastered that skill. We all love the easy pleasures of a good story, the page turner, the hero’s journey. But too much of this and reading turns into passive entertainment, only one step away from watching television.
We should be reading more books that are tough, that require us to return again to a stubborn paragraph and underline it if necessary, to put a book down and ask ourselves: hmm, what did that mean? Zadie Smith (where are her books on this list?) said: “When you practise reading, and you work at a text, it can only give you what you put into it. It’s an old moral, but it’s completely true.”
There are some difficult and rewarding books on this list (I put Richard Flanagan’s Man Booker-winning The Narrow Road to the Deep North in this category; George Orwell’s 1984, too). But there’s not enough of the challenging stuff to add roughage to our reading diet of quick-release carbs.
In the context of reading for pleasure, well, this list is lovely. To have a year off and access to a hammock and shady trees, to return to such wonders as The Great Gatsby and Donna Tartt’s The Secret History, would be a year well spent. But let’s not mistake this list for the new canon.
Better Reading’s Top 10 reads
1) The Power of One by Bryce Courtenay (1989)
2) The Book Thief by Markus Zuzak (2005)
3) To Kill A Mockingbird by Harper Lee (1960)
4) Outlander by Diana Gabaldon (1991)
5) Cloudstreet by Tim Winton (1991)
6) Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn (2012)
7) Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen (1813)
8) The Potato Factory by Bryce Courtenay (1995)
9) The Bronze Horseman by Paullina Simons (2000)
10) Lord of the Rings by JRR Tolkien (1954)
