Posted by joffre on 27/10/2007, 13:30:55, in reply to "Re: Doris Lessing" I've also taken many suggestions from Bloom's appendices. I really wish that he'd written a work more like The New Lifetime Reading Plan or The Novel 100, shorter discussions of many more works. I'm reading through The Novel 100 now. I decided to get it after Rizwan recommended it to me. I find some of the rankings quirky. Gone with the Wind in the top hundred novels? I have read GwtW. I think it's almost unparalled popularity through sixty or seventy years means something. But to rank it over novels by Dickens and Austen etc. seems absurd. I wanted to read the introductions Daniel Burt offers, including that to GwtW. He has already increased my interest in three or four novels: Berlin Alexanderplatz, Oblomov, The Death of Artemio Cruz, and Native Son. I have always had some aversion to Richard Wright, never read him. I have a similar aversion to James Fenimore Cooper.
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I haven't read a lot of Bloom either, The Western Canon and How to Read and Why, a few articles I found online. I am very much an advocate of reading for solitary aesthetic pleasure and self-insight rather than some social purposes.
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