Bias – 50 Books to Read Before You Die

Good morning, class.

I love making lists. Ever since I started this blog I’ve been anxious to put the list of “50 Books to Read Before You Die” in order, from least favorite all the way up to favorite. I had to read them all first—so here’s a three-years-long dream coming true. I’ve read Every. Single. One.

To be honest, I paid more attention to the very least favorite and the top ten. The middle-ranked books got organized with a little less scrutiny. But I really can’t stand Martin Amis’ Money: A Suicide Note so it’s at the bottom. I wish I could unread it.

50.	Money: A Suicide Note by Martin Amis
49.	On the Road by Jack Kerouac
48.	A Bend in the River by V. S. Naipaul
47.	Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe
46.	The Quiet American by Graham Greene
45.	The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri
44.	The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer
43.	Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes
42.	The Stranger by Albert Camus
41.	Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
40.	Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift
39.	The War of the Worlds by H. G. Wells
38.	The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
37.	A Passage to India by E. M. Forster
36.	The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame
35.	The Way We Live Now by Anthony Trollope
34.	The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas
33.	A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens
32.	Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë
31.	Lord of the Flies by William Golding
30.	Memoirs of a Geisha by Arthur Golden
29.	The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde
28.	Moby-Dick by Herman Melville
27.	Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
26.	The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath
25.	Men Without Women by Ernest Hemingway
24.	Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë
23.	The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
22.	Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
21.	Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll
20.	Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier
19.	Hamlet by William Shakespeare
18.	Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
17.	1984 by George Orwell
16.	The Lord of the Rings Trilogy by J. R. R. Tolkien
15.	One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest by Ken Kesey
14.	Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
13.	The Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger
12.	The Diary of Anne Frank by Anne Frank
11.	Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
10.	The Color Purple by Alice Walker
9.	Birdsong by Sebastian Faulks
8.	The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Timeby Mark Haddon
7.	His Dark Materials Trilogy by Philip Pullman
6.	The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
5.	The Bible by Various
4.	Life of Pi by Yann Martel
3.	To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
2.	Harry Potter Series by J. K. Rowling
1.	Ulysses by James Joyce

Yes, of course Ulysses is my top pick. I know it’s certainly not everyone’s favorite, I know it’s one of my several biases . . . but I love it anyway.

After writing this list out, I looked back at some of my older posts—looks like I condemned ranking books a few times, making my list here a bit hypocritical. Well, maybe a person can’t compare one book to another in a hierarchical system like this . . . I may pick Ulysses as my favorite, but I can’t just pick it up and read it for fun the same way I can with a Harry Potter book. And, to be fair, while I picked Ulysses for the way it changed my perspective as a reader, and for the way it portrayed love and humanity, it’s not like Harry Potter didn’t do that for me first.

If I have a point, I guess it’s that a book’s meaning to you as a reader will constantly change—and that there are as many books as there are people, and as many complicated feelings about stories as there are relationships.

I’ve got one more blog post planned—I want to share some of my personal reflections about reading all 50 books. Then you can all graduate from Prof. Jeffrey’s class.

Until then,

Prof. Jeffrey

Hello again, class.

This isn’t a review or a critique of Anne Frank’s Diary—that’s not something I would consider appropriate for a book like this. The private journal entries of a teenager are a certain kind of sacred. There are parts about her Diary I don’t like, but they are a part of Anne Frank’s tragically cut-short life and deserve to be cherished.

The reason a book like this is published is not for something like literary merit or artistic value (though, miraculously, it has both anyway). The reason a book like this is published is to imprint the tragedies of history into the minds of as many people as possible, and to cherish the memory of a collective and personal loss. That also happens to be why it makes the list of 50 books to read before you die—not for the value of its content or structure, but for its universal need for recognition.

There is very little of the major story within the Diary, because that story happens mostly before and after Anne Frank’s writings—the text itself fills in the details of a story that’s already in place. I’m not taking any chances here—since we live in a world of Neo-Nazis, Holocaust deniers, and “fake news,” I’m going to recap the moments in history that The Diary of Anne Frank is a concrete part of.

Anne’s story is about a Jewish family that goes into hiding because of the Nazi regime, a radical political party, spreading from Germany. The Nazis declared that Jewish people were responsible for German failures in WWI and were an inferior race, leading to the hunt for and capture of Jewish people. What started as a political movement became the systematic racial genocide known today as the Holocaust.

Otto Frank, Anne’s father (1968)

The Frank family hid in a small set of rooms behind a bookcase in a warehouse, along with four other individuals. They hid there successfully for two years, but before the end of WWII, the Franks were captured and sent to concentration camps. All but Anne’s father Otto died in these camps, and after regaining his freedom, he found the contents of his daughter’s diary. He decided to have the contents published.

The book serves as a reminder of the tragedy of the Holocaust and the very human lives lost to history, despite the inhumanity with which those lives were portrayed by the Nazi party.

Which brings us to the Diary. Anne gets the blank diary as a birthday present in 1942, and she begins writing her everyday thoughts and feelings. Not long after, the family goes into hiding—most of her writings are various forms of cabin fever from the perspective of a teenager, which is equal parts boring, frightening, and inspiring. Anne is an amazing writer and an insightful (though never unbiased) person. She seems to always write with a purpose and represents childhood and youth in her own way. Even when the entry is dull, the writing is not.

I review her writing (like I said I wouldn’t earlier) because it was purposefully well-written. She writes about being a writer and about a future in journalism, and the Diary has stood the test of time partly because she wrote so well. This diary was her chance to practice her craft, and her craft is worth reviewing. She writes about her feuds with those hiding with her, her desires for romance, her thoughts on humanity, her daily routine, and her fears and doubts. Reading her diary is watching her transform over the course of two years in hiding.

And then the Diary ends, unceremoniously. The inhabitants of the “Secret Annexe” (as it’s known in English) were captured in 1944, and the writings of a young girl were ignored and left behind. The nature of the book’s ending forces a return to the historical facts of the end of Anne’s life. You’re reading it knowing that eventually, she will die—and then the book ends as incompletely as her life. The ending reshapes the Diary back into a historical artifact, along with the reports of her life in the concentration camp and the details known of her death.

The Diary itself doesn’t tell the story of Anne’s life as much as it reflects the vignettes that make up her experience—that of a teenager in hiding (which is special enough). But the statistics of her life and death, while telling a story, are heartless. Anne’s humanity is more alive in her own writing, which gives a voice to the millions of victims of the Holocaust that could only tell stories with the statistics of their lives and deaths. The picture on the cover of The Diary of Anne Frank becomes the face of this period in history.

And as important as that is, it tends to limit all that the Diary can be. The reason to pick up the Diary and start reading is because it represents one of the darkest moments in human history, and the book itself has a tendency to belong to that part of history. But it isn’t as dark as that—this book is one of the bright spots in an era of horror. The reason to continue reading it, once you’ve picked it up, isn’t to remember the Holocaust or the death of a child. The reason to continue reading it is to witness the unabridged beauty of a young girl’s voice.

The time I have put in to reading these books and writing these posts can feel unnecessary at times. Some of the books I’ve trudged through have felt like a bit of a waste. But The Diary of Anne Frank is one of those that restored me—I read it once in seventh grade, and it left very little impact at the time, so I’ve been willing to chalk it up as nothing more than an important piece of history. But reading it again helped me realize what I missed, and how important was. I’m happy I read it, and I’m happier I read it a second time.

Next up, I’m jumping backwards to read Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift. I’ve always liked the story for exactly what it is, even if it was never that special to me, but its effects can be seen everywhere in our society today. I’m excited about diving into it again.

Until then,

Prof. Jeffrey

Tag: Bias

Off-Topic: Definitive Ranking of All 50 Books

The Diary of Anne Frank

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