Books as the picks that click

I can't think of another harmless contraption that gets literary people as riled up, and in such a predictable way, as a list of the greatest books ever written. Yet these lists with all their appurtenances and fanfare will always be with us and, lo, what's this before me? It is "The Top Ten: Writers Pick Their Favorite Books," edited by J. Peder Zane (Norton, paperback, $14.95) . Oh, well, I hear you say, "favorite" is quite a different thing from "greatest," and you are right -- except the writers weren't in fact asked to pick their favorites. They were asked, according to Zane, "to provide a list, ranked, in order, of what you consider the ten greatest works of fiction of all time -- novels, story collections, plays, or poems."

That's uncompromising enough. But, before the book gets to the lists of the 125 writers who responded, three commentators weigh in to remove, as I see it, some of the absolutist glare from the mission. Sven Birkerts studies the lists and gets understandably jumpy, even confused, thinking that "Finnegans Wake" is absent -- though there it is: Fred Chappell's number four. The top 10 vote-getting books tell Birkerts that the majority of the writers favor old-fashioned narrative and, more to the point, given how vexing this matter of "greatness" is, that "no two lovers of literature love it the same way or for the same reason."

Mary Gaitskill undermines the literary categorical imperative further by correctly pointing out that one's estimation of a book is affected by how long ago one read or reread it: "Based on memory," she says, "you sometimes can't tell if a book really was great or if it just hit the spot that needed hitting at the time." And, indeed, when we travel ahead to her own list, we find evidence that she has recently read "Peter Pan," for how else, at number eight, could it outrank "Dead Souls" at number nine? David Orr finishes the preliminaries by pointing out that the lists tell us more about the writers who compiled them than they do about the relative greatness of the books that appear on them. This is the great truth, and an excellent example, in my view, is Kate Atkinson's wonderful, idiosyncratic choice of E. Nesbit's "The Railway Children."

Zane claims that "each and every one" of the 544 books that appear on these lists "is worth your time." But, maybe not: When we turn to that pesky "Finnegans Wake," its sponsor, Fred Chappell, astonishes us by admitting that he hasn't actually read much of it: "only enough to persuade me that it is worth a lifetime of attention, one that I haven't got." In other words, life is too short -- which is my own view of Joyce's exercise in vainglory. And then there is David Foster Wallace's list. What is this, one wonders, some kind of a jest? Erica Jong's "Fear of Flying"? Tom Clancy's "The Sum of All Fears"? Thomas Harris's "The Silence of the Lambs"? Or is this just the sort of fatuousness that one -- if one is me --associates with this writer?

You see what these lists do? They induce literary hives, a pruritus of censoriousness, impatience, and malice. Do they achieve anything else? Annie Proulx introduces her selection by saying: "I find this list of ten books project to be difficult, pointless, and wrong-headed. . . . Lists, unless grocery shopping lists, are truly a reductio ad absurdum." Possibly, but her list made my day, for she has my father's novel, "Wheat That Springeth Green," at number two, right after "The Odyssey."

I pored over the roster of books (as can you at toptenbooks.net/list.html), each of which had been selected by at least one writer. I expected to find the usual neglect of all the books and authors I consider "mine," the ones I snap up second hand so I can press them upon people who visit me. (I am a nuisance.) But I am wrong. Some are here: Charles Portis, Barbara Pym, Flann O'Brien, Penelope Fitzgerald, and, thank you Claire Messud and Heidi Julavits, here is V. S. Naipaul's " A House for Mr. Biswas," one of the greatest novels ever written. But, still, where are the other objects of my missionary zeal? Dawn Powell, J. G. Farrell, Molly Keane, E. F. Benson, J. R. Ackerley, Raymond Kennedy? Where is Anthony Burgess's "Malayan Trilogy," the Grossmiths' "Diary of a Nobody," and Kingsley Amis's "Lucky Jim," the funniest book ever written?

The last, I am happy to say, makes an appearance in Maureen Corrigan's "Leave Me Alone, I'm Reading: Finding and Losing Myself in Books" (Vintage, paperback, $13.95) -- though described there with tremendous restraint as "the funniest novel in the English language." Amis's is only one of the books entangled with Corrigan's life, which itself is presented as something like a course of reading. Significant events, people, and loved ones appear in it, but books are always there to gloss the proceedings. I believe most big readers see their lives this way, which is to say that the books we read give our lives its meaning and even their fascinating plots. Still, Corrigan, a university teacher as well as a book reviewer, really goes to town in the theory department, interpreting her life by means of a literary conceit of which she is the only begetter. That is "the female extreme adventure."

Unlike male extreme adventure tales, the female variant is, we are told, "light on feats of derring-do and braggadocio, heavy on anxious waiting and endurance." In 19th-century literature it often involves the grueling business of acquiring a husband. Today female extreme adventures, so called, entail such things as giving birth, pregnancy, wanted or otherwise, being in an abusive relationship, and caregiving. "Much space," Corrigan says, "is devoted in these stories to the value of a woman quietly keeping her nerve through hours -- sometimes years -- of strain. " In her own life the extremist of her extreme adventures is going to China to adopt a child, but soon enough almost everything she does begins to fall under that rubric, including meeting deadlines for submitting reviews. This is where I said, "What rot," and reflected on how I loathe the market-oriented expression "extreme adventure " anyway. And it's a pity, because there is much in these pages that is intelligent and perceptive on books and reading, and much that is entertaining and even extremely funny.

Katherine A. Powers, a writer and critic, lives in Cambridge. She can be reached at pow3@verizon.net.