My 10 favourite literary works

A list of the 10 literary works I think about, or revisit, most often: 

• The Iliad 
• The Odyssey 
• King Lear 
• Othello 
• Shakespeare’s Sonnets 
• Don Quixote 
• War and Peace
• Anna Karenina 
• Moby-Dick 
• Mansfield Park

This looks quite basic, does it? But the central figures of my personal canon do happen to be Homer, Shakespeare, and Tolstoy, so I can’t pretend they’re not, just to avoid being called pretentious. 

I refuse to choose between the Iliad and the Odyssey, the same way I refuse to choose between War and Peace and Anna Karenina. 

2 epic poems, 2 plays, 1 sonnet sequence, 5 novels (4 of which are over 700 pages). 2 in ancient Greek, 5 in the English language (4 English and 1 American), 1 in Spanish, 2 in Russian. 2 from the 8th century BC, 4 from the 17th century, 4 from the 19th century. All Western. 9 written by men.

If you have been reading my blog and/or my tweets, I’m sure I’ve been annoying enough about these works for any choices to be a surprise. Maybe the Sonnets, as I don’t blog about them, but I do revisit them often—there’s a Shakespeare sonnet for every mood (I went out yesterday and on the way home thought of Sonnet 34—guess what happened). The only surprises, I guess, are the exclusions of Greek tragedies (couldn’t pick one) and Chekhov’s stories (what do you do with short stories on such a list?)—a longer list of my personal canon would include Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, The Tale of Genji, all of Shakespeare, Molière, the (dirty) poems of Hồ Xuân Hương, Tom Jones, Hong lou meng (better known as Dream of the Red Chamber or Story of the Stone), Wuthering Heights, Charles Dickens, John Keats, Madame Bovary, The Brothers Karamazov, the plays of Henrik Ibsen (especially The Wild Duck and Rosmersholm), the short stories of Akutagawa, the short stories of Flannery O’Connor, The Metamorphosis (Kafka), Invisible Man, Lolita, Pnin, the poems of Hàn Mặc Tử (especially Đau thương), etc. 

The only thing that bothers me, which is perhaps irrational, is that my literary tastes are strongly Western. I am Vietnamese, I can read well two languages (my Norwegian isn’t on the same level), I spent years promoting East Asian classics, but in the end, my favourite 18th century novel is still Tom Jones, not Hong lou meng; my favourite female writer is still Jane Austen, not Murasaki Shikibu; the central figures of my personal canon are still Homer, Shakespeare, and Tolstoy, not Nguyễn Du… Japanese cinema may be the one I know and love the best after English-language cinema, but in literature, my tastes are markedly Western. 

Does this mean I have lost my roots? Mất gốc? (The Vietnamese phrase carries much harsher overtones). 

I suppose the main thing is that I’m most fascinated by human nature and the human mind, and most interested in characters, which is probably also why I much prefer the Greeks to the Romans (you probably have noticed, with horror, the absence of Virgil and Ovid on my personal canon). Generally, Japanese writers—at least the ones I have read—don’t seem to explore the complexities and contradictions and irrationalities of people as we see in Western literature. Their characters are more opaque, even impressionistic; on the one hand, Japanese novels convey that sense of human mystery, the sense that we can never truly know another human being, which I like; but on the other hand, the characters also feel less alive, and don’t leave deep impressions on my mind like Akhilleus, Cleopatra, or Andrei Bolkonsky. The characters in Hong lou meng in comparison are alive, especially Shi Xiangyun (Sử Tương Vân) and Weng Xifeng (Vương Hy Phượng), but they don’t have the depth and complexity of Elektra, Hamlet, or Anna Karenina, and frankly I think Cao Xueqin takes a lot more pages to give life to a character (which Shakespeare can do in five words: “I was adored once too”). 

I’m also not much of a poetry person, despite liking the little I have read of Donne, Keats, Bùi Giáng, etc. I have The Oxford Book of English Verse, and lately have been slowly getting through The Oxford Book of Sonnets, trying to be less of a philistine, but unfortunately still have a strong taste for narratives and characters. My favourite poet (restricting to only those I can read in the original) is therefore a dramatic poet (and before you ask, I read Shakespeare’s sonnets as dramatic monologues, not autobiographical pieces). 

(If I were pretentious, as some people might call me, I would pretend to love poetry, but I acknowledge my failing).  

My tastes are also predominantly classic. When I first got into literature properly, I was mostly reading the 20th century, then slowly went further back, and further back. Over the years, those 20th century novels for some reason haven’t had a lasting impression, haven’t been part of my mental furniture—I barely remember much of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, or Toni Morrison. But it’s not just because I read them in my late teens and early 20s, not just because I read them before finding my favourite writers—since my discovery of Tolstoy, Shakespeare, and others, I have read and enjoyed modern books only for them to have caused nothing but a few ripples in my mind—I haven’t found myself thinking about Muriel Spark, R. K. Narayan, or Soseki. Even Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead, which I read only last September and considered highly, has left no imprints. Shouldn’t they resonate more, being more recent? But they don’t, and I don’t know why. My favourite 20th century writer right now is possibly Primo Levi, but that’s non-fiction. 

It’s curious which works of literature speak to us and haunt our minds.