Books. Books. Books. I was surrounded by them as a child. My family is rife with avid readers. My Dad used to make us read the New York Times Top Ten list- every year, both Fiction and Non-Fiction. Until one time in the early Seventies when he threw Jacqueline Susan's: "Valley of the Dolls" on the table and pronounced: "Literature as we knew it is Dead. This book cost thirty dollars now. In two years you will be able to buy it at a thrift shop for a quarter." He was right.
When I was in Fifth Grade, I decided to read a thousand book during Summer Break. The Librarian thought I was kidding, so after a few times of getting six or ten books a day, she started testing me when I brought them back. She kept a record. At the end of the Summer, I got a certificate from both the Library and The Governor for my accomplishment. It wasn't any real big deal. Two thirds of them were Children's books with more drawings than words. I grew up Catholic, so a whole bunch of them were Saint Books, basically just short histories of their lives, and in most cases, horrible deaths. Almost all were Martyrs. They were easy reads, as were all the "Hardy Boy's" Books. The Tom Swift books. And even the "Nancy Drew Books" And those were probably the "hardest books" I read in that flurry of words. Being a natural speed reader helped. And yes, I still found time to play.
So flash forward to the Millennium. The New York Times put out a lists of the Top 100 Books of all time. And they put out a list of the Top 100 Most Popular Books of all time. Only 27 books made both lists. The Bible was on both. The Number one book of all time (Novel)? "Ulysses" by James Joyce. The only book in either list that I had not read. Well, I did read it, but never finished it. Not until 2002. I started reading it way back in 1967. I hated it. To me it was just a book that said don't wander from Bar to Bar in Dublin if you were Jewish. But all my Writer friends consider it the best Novel ever. Sigh. It is just one day in Dublin.
My daughter were both in HS at that time, and my younger daughter loves real literature...and is a Writer. Even back then she wolfed down books like most folks eat M&M's. So we compared how many of the books we had read from that list. I had all but two (and finally finished them both, Ulysses being the stopgap). She had only read 32 of them. But I said that wasn't a fair comparison, since I was almost fifty and she was still a teen. So let's compare how many we read in High School. And I was in for a shock. 23 of the books on that list were required reading when I went to HS. I had read 37 of them by the end of my Senior Year. In her HS, she had read only Nine. Of which only two were required reading. Two! It turns out, they stopped teaching most of the Classics, English Lit had moved on to much more modern "classics". As she said: "Women, especially single Mom's with dire life stories, replaced old dead white men." Wow.
So today, I looked up the Top 100 Novels, for 2023. I found three Lists: Good Reads, Reddit, and the Guardian. And none of them agree on the Top Ten, and Ulysses wasn't on any of them as best book ever. So time... and tastes... change.
There is even a Top 100 Books for genres now: True Crime, Romance, Mystery, Science Fiction, Non- Fiction Fantasy, you name it. Even Cookbooks have a Top 100! So many books. Most books topping the list nowadays are chosen for popularity and not depth. They aren't really sterling examples of literature, but just things folks like right now. As my Dad would say: "In a year you will be buying that same book out of bin for a quarter." Yep.
What books make your Top Ten? Maybe someday,I will post my personal Top Ten, but boy oh boy, that would take some real sorting. LOL