This week saw the appearance of BBC Culture’s survey of the best 20 novels of the still-teenaged 21st century. But I’ve also been immersing myself in another recent addition to the seemingly endless body of literary lists – and one that’s far more personally profitable. Viz my immersion in myself in Flavorwire’s list of 50 Books Guaranteed to Make You More Interesting. Fifty! Talk about bang for your buck. And if you read all of them, imagine how interesting you would be! People would have to move away from you at parties in case they exploded with excitement.
The pure narcissism and annoying irresistibility of its title notwithstanding, the Flavorwire 50 is a pretty enticing list and, in fairness, obviously compiled and written, by Emily Temple, with tongue in cheek. “Everybody out there could stand to be a little more interesting,” she begins. “Yes, even you, trilingual lion-tamer astrophysicist reader.” Her recommendations range widely, from King Lear to Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis, from The Rings of Saturn by WG Sebald to The American Way of Death Revisited by Jessica Mitford. A Brief History of Time is immediately followed by Jewelle Gomez’s The Gilda Stories, a feminist lesbian vampire story that’s “bound to teach anybody something new”; and I wouldn’t presume to speak for Helen Oyeyemi, but in her place, I would be tickled to see White is For Witching nestling between Nabokov’s Speak, Memory and Homer’s Iliad.
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