enduring literature
I'm of the opinion that the literary movements of the first half of the twentieth century did us no favors. Not only did a lot of the books produced by modernism suck, but they carried along with them this bizarre conceit that we should like them because they were so bad.

Possibly we should extend the blame back to their predecessors? I object to the Romantics on ethical and philosophical grounds (ever since reading Plagues of the Mind) but at least those people knew how to tell a story. Tess of the d'Urbervilles may be maudlin and overwrought, but it does have characters, sentence structure, and a plot, and for that we should applaud it.

This modern fallacy that good writers can and should chuck all these things out the window is dwarfed only by the one that says that readers who don't get the deep inner meanings buried in the resulting mess must be card-carrying members of the bourgeois. If you're bored or annoyed or disgusted by hundreds of pages of tortured inner monologue written in a fractured style, then YOU are to blame!

I'm not of the opinion that one should never have to make an effort in literature. Struggling through some of the giants of literature is a noble endeavor and will arguably make you a better person. But the idea that a book can't be good unless it's a struggle? That's poison.

Ahem.

I could rant on about this topic at length, but this is really just a preamble to this wonderful list I found via Crof's Writing Fiction Blog: Fired From The Canon. Literary blog The Second Pass has compiled a list of books by literary giants that you should feel no compunction about skipping. Faulkner, Virginia Woolf and Cormac McCarthy make the cut (or don't), among many others!

I have been fortunate enough to have been spared all the books on this list*, and for most the argument seems strong for continuing in my ignorance. The only exception is One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez. Based on everything I know about it, I think it's something I would like, and perhaps more importantly, something I need to read regardless.

What about you? Are there any books on that list that make you beg to differ? Any books that you would add to it? Go!

* I have sort of a sense of smell that instinctively warns me away from books and films that I won't enjoy. My experience is that this internal early warning system tends to be fairly accurate. It's not simple luck that I've never tried to read On The Road.