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Which novel is Madison writer Lorrie Moore's most favorite of 10 favorite works of fiction?
If you've read any of her books, you won't be surprised to discover Gustave Flaubert's "Madame Bovary" tops her list, followed quickly by Joyce's "Dubliners" and Homer's "Iliad."
Let's see. . . . Moore, who is renowned for her fine, cerebral yet humane short stories, seems to be taken by the classical literature of the heart. Her list goes on to include "The Decameron" by Giovanni Boccaccio, Chaucer's "Troilus and Criseyde," Shakespeare's "Romeo and Juliet," Charlotte Bronte's "Jane Eyre," "Washington Square" by Henry James and "Middlemarch" by George Eliot.
All giants of past centuries. But there, in 10th place, representing contemporary literature, is Alice Munro's "Open Secrets."
Moore is among 125 authors who reveal their literary loves in "Top Ten: Writers Pick Their Favorite Books," a compilation by J. Peder Zane, the book editor of the Raleigh News & Observer.
The book, out from Norton this month, makes interesting reading, slicing and dicing lists several different ways, even giving us a "Top Top Ten" list compiled by assigning points to each ranking on individual lists.
Annie Proulx starts with Homer's "The Odyssey" and "Wheat That Springeth Green" by J.F. Powers but toward the end she lists Orhan Pamuk's "The Black Book" and the haiku of Matsuo Basho. Proulx grumbles to Zane, "Lists, unless grocery shopping lists, are truly a reductio ad absurdum."
Maybe, but these are great fun. Tom Wolfe, Michael Chabon, Anita Shreve, Stephen King, Jonathan Franzen, Norman Mailer, - they're all making lists. The leading favorites? Shakespeare, with 11 titles, and William Faulkner and Henry James with six titles each.
Zane wanted to do a book of favorites because he wished one existed to help him as a reader, he told me recently at a meeting of the National Book Critics Circle, on whose board we both serve. He describes his book as "part Rand-McNally, part Zagat's, part cultural Prozac" and says it will take "the anxiety out of bibliophilia by offering a comprehensive and authoritative guide to the world's best books."
I don't know about anxiety. But I promise readers that they will get a kick out of the "Top Top Ten" list. It starts with Tolstoy's "Anna Karenina" and ends with "Middlemarch."
gjensen@journalsentinel.com
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