The ultimate reading list, created by librarians

October 24, 2016 11:41 AM

We asked our librarian delegates to help us build the perfect library by answering one simple question: which one book couldn’t you live without?
posted by infini (38 comments total)

Guess... ↓↓↓↓↓
posted by Huck500 at 12:08 PM on October 24, 2016 [7 favorites]

It's a good list.

Me, If you put Dog Years in my left hand & Under The Volcano in my right hand & told me I had to set one down forever, I'd be mightily conflicted.
posted by Devils Rancher at 12:12 PM on October 24, 2016

It bugged the shit out of me that the list was not alphabetized by author.
posted by Sternmeyer at 12:24 PM on October 24, 2016 [9 favorites]

I call snenanigans! No librarian would stop at 1 book, and none of tlisted books are Ranganathan'sThe Five Laws of Library Science. Or Proust.

Plus what n00b alphabetized by articles?
posted by GenjiandProust at 12:49 PM on October 24, 2016 [10 favorites]

I wonder what "Orange (author unknown)" is?

> Plus what n00b alphabetized by articles?

Not a librarian, that's for sure; the author is some OUPBlogger, not a professional in the field. (I subscribe to the OUPBlog RSS feed; there's some interesting stuff, but a lot of it is slightly elevated clickbait.)
posted by languagehat at 1:00 PM on October 24, 2016 [3 favorites]

I wonder what "Orange (author unknown)" is?
Well, it's not the only fruit.
posted by comealongpole at 1:20 PM on October 24, 2016 [3 favorites]

I wish they would post the full list!
posted by branravenraven at 1:26 PM on October 24, 2016

I call shenanigans. There is no librarian on earth for whom The Martian is their prerequisite for life continuing to be meaningful or whatever. This looks a lot like that list of popular books from a while back, that would sometimes get passed around as "THE BBC CLAIMS YOU NEVER READ THESE" and then it had like Harry Potter and stuff and your entire Facebook feed was outraged that the BBC thought they were dumb.
posted by anotherpanacea at 1:31 PM on October 24, 2016 [6 favorites]

I feel sorry for the librarian who couldn't live without Into Thin Air. Pathetic.
posted by dubwisened at 2:11 PM on October 24, 2016 [1 favorite]

It's also obvious that none of these librarians have ever read Wallace Stegner. Even more pathetic.
posted by dubwisened at 2:13 PM on October 24, 2016 [1 favorite]

What? No Terry Pratchett?
No Neal Stephenson?
posted by Mesaverdian at 2:47 PM on October 24, 2016 [1 favorite]

There should be so much more, not of orange, of words, of how terrible orange is and life.
posted by aws17576 at 2:57 PM on October 24, 2016 [2 favorites]

 → What? No Terry Pratchett?

Good Omens is in there.
posted by scruss at 3:00 PM on October 24, 2016 [1 favorite]

The Pillars of the Earth was the only real record scratch for me. Isn't a little cheesy?
posted by Bee'sWing at 3:04 PM on October 24, 2016 [3 favorites]

Why isn't a dictionary included here? Or for that matter, any non-fiction. Or perhaps the article does a poor job of reporting the question the librarians were asked?
posted by JimInLoganSquare at 3:27 PM on October 24, 2016

For me, if anyone cares, Gravity's Rainbow. Easily read from cover to cover and then again.
posted by Splunge at 3:40 PM on October 24, 2016

I can't tell if some of the snobbery in this thread is sarcastic or not.
posted by delight at 3:53 PM on October 24, 2016 [4 favorites]

Room is in there, but nothing by Toni Morrison, so, you know. Legitimate list.
posted by BaffledWaffle at 3:55 PM on October 24, 2016

I took the question posed to these librarians as "what book could you personally not live without?" in which case I can understand all of these answers. I mean, I could definitely live without some of these books - the mere mention of The Goldfinch still sends me into a rage - but it's all subjective.

Just because this list doesn't check all of metafilter's erudite boxes doesn't mean it isn't legit.
posted by lyssabee at 4:26 PM on October 24, 2016 [2 favorites]

Altogether, I think we ought to read only books that bite and sting us. If the book we are reading doesn’t shake us awake like a blow to the skull, why bother reading it in the first place? So that it can make us happy, as you put it? Good God, we’d be just as happy if we had no books at all; books that make us happy we could, in a pinch, also write ourselves. What we need are books that hit us like a most painful misfortune, like the death of someone we loved more than we love ourselves, that make us feel as though we had been banished to the woods, far from any human presence, like suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us. That is what I believe.

posted by Gerald Bostock at 4:32 PM on October 24, 2016 [5 favorites]

I wonder what "Orange (author unknown)" is?

I see they didn't give any author information for the Bible.
posted by justsomebodythatyouusedtoknow at 4:34 PM on October 24, 2016 [1 favorite]

These are some white librarians, right?
posted by allthinky at 4:41 PM on October 24, 2016 [4 favorites]

I wonder what "Orange (author unknown)" is?

FDA's Approved Drug Products with Therapeutic Equivalence Evaluations, perhaps? I could see how that might be useful in some contexts.

Or maybe they meant the Orange Box?
posted by effbot at 4:43 PM on October 24, 2016

Yeah, when I saw that multiple librarians liked John Irving, I knew I was in for a disappointment.
posted by janey47 at 4:49 PM on October 24, 2016 [3 favorites]

They probably just mean an orange. It's thirsty work making bicycles out of coconuts and so on.

I like the idea behind this article but what a waste to just ask librarians for their favorite book instead of the one they refer patrons to most often or the one that most recently solved a reference puzzle or whatever. Librarians, too, like The Bible and Harry Potter: well, yeah. They're people too. An /r/books-level "Books you must read before you die!" list isn't exactly inspiring me to rush to a library here...
posted by No-sword at 5:49 PM on October 24, 2016 [1 favorite]

Orange was originally going to be a biography of John Boehner, but it became the latest book about Donald Drumpf...
posted by Chuffy at 5:51 PM on October 24, 2016

Oh, and snarky comment about listicle that omits my favorite book,

Other snarky comment...Perfume? Wow.
posted by Chuffy at 5:52 PM on October 24, 2016

i hate this kind of crap. there is not one novel that's changed my life, and there's no book i can't live without. everything i've ever read has made me who i am and i couldn't live happily without a public library.
posted by superior julie at 6:04 PM on October 24, 2016 [5 favorites]

Yeah, when I saw that multiple librarians liked John Irving, I knew I was in for a disappointment.

A Prayer For Owen Meany has some value as a piece of writing. Sure, Irving tends to make his point early & often to where you feel sort of bludgeoned by the end of his books (The Ciderhouse Rules exhausted me), but I've read it twice & was thoroughly entertained both times. The value of epistemological doubt vs. spiritual & religious certainty that he puts forth as sort of a sidebar gave this skeptical spiritualist a bite or two to chew on.
posted by Devils Rancher at 6:42 PM on October 24, 2016

wtf: Rich Dad, Poor Dad by Robert Kiyosaki?
posted by storybored at 8:22 PM on October 24, 2016 [1 favorite]

Given that each person only could name one I would have expected a lot more along the lines of To the Lighthouse and Middlemarch and a lot less Harry Potter or Narnia. Regardless of what you think about the overall list (and I have no problem with it), it demonstrates a lot of librarians read to entertain themselves and don't view a "pick a book" question as an invitation to impress some stranger.
posted by mark k at 9:44 PM on October 24, 2016 [2 favorites]

Unfortunately the the title is "The Ultimate Reading List" and not "Here are some books some people like".
posted by paper chromatographologist at 6:37 AM on October 25, 2016 [1 favorite]

A list of books librarians like, and they included the definitive article ("the") in the alphabetizing process? How ironic. Also, on preview, what was said about MeFites' snobbery...but in this case, well-deserved snobbery. The list is middlebrow as shit. There must be some editing involved here; I can't believe no librarians would list a book more challenging and rich than the ones listed here.
posted by kozad at 7:18 AM on October 25, 2016

I don't get the concept. There are only a couple of books that I have read more than once (Moby Dick and Herodotus) and I could easily live without those books. The book I cannot live without is the next book I want to read, and all the ones after that. There are just too many unread books to spend time re-reading.
posted by charlesminus at 8:56 AM on October 25, 2016

You're entitled to your opinion, but I agree with Nabokov:

“Curiously enough, one cannot read a book; one can only reread it. A good reader, a major reader, an active and creative reader is a rereader.”

Doesn't hold for pop fiction, of course, but I don't understand how one can disagree when it comes to real literature. I've read War and Peace four times and am looking forward to the fifth.
posted by languagehat at 9:43 AM on October 25, 2016 [1 favorite]

My rereads might not be as weighty as above but include The Grand Sophy from Georgette Heyer, anything by Gerald Durrell, Agatha Christie, PD James, and Lois McMaster Bujold. It's comfort food, not fine cuisine.
posted by infini at 12:07 PM on October 25, 2016

'Larousse Gastronomique.'
posted by clavdivs at 3:19 PM on October 25, 2016 [1 favorite]

I'm gonna go ahead and add to the snobbery.

This is . . . underwhelming. Several head-scratchers, and a lot of really boring white people novels, with almost no nonfiction. An OED? Gibbon? A Calculus textbook?

This librarian is judging you.
posted by aspersioncast at 5:08 PM on October 25, 2016 [1 favorite]