One of my colleagues at the university where I once taught, a math professor and an avid reader of books, asked me what I thought was the greatest novel I had ever read. Without hesitation I named, “The Red and the Black” by Stendhal, a trailblazing 19th-century French novel my colleague had never heard of. I read it as a teenager and it haunted me all my life.
A year later, he excitedly told me that the editor of his hometown newspaper, the Des Moines Register in Iowa, agreed with me: In his compilation of a “greatest books” list, my friend said, the newspaper editor designated Stendhal’s novel as the greatest of all time. Thus inspired, I began the lifelong project of compiling my own “greatest” list.
As a general rule, we have no way of knowing how great thoughts or ideas are created in a human mind (otherwise we would be mass-producing such thinkers and mass-marketing their works) as they seem to exist in entirely accidental, providential spheres of life. But we know, by simply understanding historical developments in various epochs and eras, that some historical periods are more prone to producing such great thoughts and ideas than others. We often call them “The Golden Age” of this or that development.
Why, for example, did the Renaissance produce such a high number of great artists and sculptors? Why did the 19th century see the abundance of great philosophical ideas that are quite unique to that era?
It is possible that we — in this era of algorithmic cycle of attention and neglect in America — are actually harboring a good number of great thinkers and great works of ideas in our midst, like another Marcus Aurelius, only to be discovered and celebrated centuries later.
Common sense tells us that it is highly unlikely. We just don’t “think big” anymore, and the “Golden Age” of such great thoughts and ideas would never return. In such musing and melancholia, facing my own twilight years ahead, I decided to “preserve” some of the greatest ideas in human civilization as my own “greatest list.”
I have selected the list with only one single criterion: They have inspired my own being and existence. It still continues to nourish my intellect and my soul.
So here, as a new year’s gift to the reader — fully aware that such lists are fraught with biases and disagreements — is my own “Greatest Book List”:
The greatest single book: “The Bible,” drafted by God, edited by man.
The greatest book of philosophy: “The Republic,” by Plato.
The greatest European novel of all time: “The Red and the Black,” by Stendhal.
The greatest Asian novel of all time: “Three Kingdoms,” by Luo Guanzhong.
The greatest American novel (1): “Moby Dick,” by Herman Melville.
The greatest American novel (2): “The Grapes of Wrath,” by John Steinbeck.
The greatest short novels:
“The Captain’s Daughter,” by Alexander Pushkin.
“Ethan Frome,” by Edith Wharton.
“The Stranger,” by Albert Camus.
The greatest Bible translation into English: “The King James Bible.”
The greatest Catholic poem: “Divine Comedy,” by Dante.
The greatest Protestant poem: “Paradise Lost,” by John Milton.
The greatest philosophical reflections: “Meditations,” by Marcus Aurelius.
The greatest cautionary tale: “Gulliver’s Travels,” by Jonathan Swift.
The greatest Utopian book: “Utopia,” by Thomas More.
The greatest American Utopian book: “Looking Backward,” by Edward Bellamy.
The greatest spiritual companion: “The Imitation of Christ,” by A Kempis.
The greatest American philosophy: “Walden,” by Henry David Thoreau.
The greatest revolutionary statement: “The Communist Manifesto,” by Marx & Engels.
The greatest biographies:
“Parallel Lives,” by Plutarch.
“Butler’s Lives of the Saints,” by Alban Butler.
“John Brown,” by W.E.B. Dubois.
The greatest autobiographies:
“Confessions,” by St. Augustine.
“Story of a Soul,” by St. Therese of Lisieux.
“The Diary of Anne Frank,” by Anne Frank.
“The Autobiograpy of Malcolm X,” by Malcolm X (and Alex Haley).
The greatest books on war:
Civil War: “The Red Badge of Courage,” by Stephen Crane.
World War I: “All Quiet on the Western Front,” by Erich Maria Remarque.
World War II: “To Hell and Back,” by Audie Murphy.
Korean War: “Pork Chop Hill,” by S. L. A. Marshall.
Vietnam War: “The Pentagon Papers,” by Department of Defense.
The greatest American social criticisms:
“The Theory of the Leisure Class,” by Thorstein Veblen.
“White Collar,” by C. Wright Mills.
“The Dead End,” by Jon Huer.
The greatest life-saving quote of all time: “We’ve met the enemy, and he is us!” by Pogo.
Jon Huer, columnist for the Recorder and retired professor, lives in Greenfield.