Roger Shattuck

Candor and Perversion

Candid Books

1. The Beulah Quintet, by Mary Lee Settle — This five-volume historical novel traces certain recurring traits in a family line from the time of Cromwell up to the present in West Virginia. We have no other genuine Anglo-American saga, nor one with so wide an embrace for politics, class distinctions, enduring love, and a sense of the past. These five freestanding yet connected volumes afford a sweeping insight into the American spirit.
    
2. Personal Knowledge, by Michael Polanyi — It takes a philosophically trained mind to read the works of this physicist turned philosopher. Whereas E.O. Wilson becomes imprisoned in his doctrine of reductionism, Polanyi deals scrupulously with basic acts of learning and intelligence which cannot be systematized by logic and scientific method. In this era of technological fix, this is a tonic book.
    
3. Absalom, Absalom! by William Faulkner — Facing the challenges of language, of history, of morality, Faulkner was fearless. We shall be facing the mysteries and searing episodes of this Southern tale for years to come. He is the closest we can offer to Shakespeare.
    
4. The Stranger, by Albert Camus — Coming from a humble French family in Algeria, Camus trained himself as a novelist, playwright, and philosopher. In his great political joust with Sartre over Stalinism in 1952, Camus appeared to lose in the short run, but he certainly won in the long run. The Stranger, his shortest and most striking novel, remains something of an enigma. It asks for a discriminating reading to distinguish guilt from innocence.
    
5. In Search of Lost Time, by Marcel Proust — This immense novel (3,000 pages) combines sensitive narrative, philosophical analysis, raucous comedy, and probing psychology into a rich account of sheer living. Proust's lengthy sentences discourage some readers, but one can find one's way through. To enter his universe is like making a pilgrimage; each day brings its own reward. And arrival at the destination does not end the quest; it starts all over again on another level. Proust talks a great deal about memory and about art, yet everything he says leads back to the basic actions of everyday life, such as sleeping and eating and walking.
    
6. The Story of My Life, by Helen Keller — This book used to fill a shelf in ninth or tenth-grade classrooms in schools all across the country. There is no other book like it. Combined with Annie Sullivan's remarkable letters, The Story of My Life gives a double account — inside and outside — of how a profoundly disadvantaged child learns to learn, to speak, to love, and to respect others. It speaks so directly to teenage minds that I wonder why the book is missing now from most school programs. These two young women discovered the most basic principles of education and show up Rousseau as a narrow ideologue.
    
7. War and Peace, by Leo Tolstoy — How do we learn about life? The media today distort life so often and rely so heavily on stereotypes that we live with a caricature of ourselves. Tolstoy's great bear hug of a book both creates time and place and dramatizes contrasting human traits in the face of historical events. From this book, we learn about life at its fullest.
    
8. Either/Or, by Soren Kierkegaard — Plato invented the Socratic dialogue to keep philosophy from becoming too abstract, too far removed from ordinary life. Kierkegaard extended the dialogic principle into a double-barreled novel, each part of which contradicts and complements the other. Either/Or contains all our modern themes of ironic distance, aesthetic attitude, boredom, and cultivation of the self. Yet it also deals with what modernism leaves out: spiritual faith, moral choice, history, and the rewards of marriage.
    
9. Democracy in America, by Alexis de Tocqueville — What many historians rightly call the best book about the United States reads like a powerful movie documentary. Written by a French aristocrat on a semi-official mission, it describes the countryside, watches how people live in the great experiment of the first democracy, comments judiciously on it all, and makes incredibly astute predictions about the future — namely, today.
    
10. Frankenstein, by Mary Shelley — Just when it was needed, this nineteen-year-old romantic groupie wrote the only successful response to Goethe's Faust. Shelley shows that what drove Dr. Frankenstein to create his laboratory monster was not pure scientific yearning for the truth, but the desire for fame and glory.
     

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