Musing Mondays: What Makes the Best ... The Best?

Today’s Musing Mondays (hosted by just one more page…) is as follows: Today’s MUSING MONDAYS post is about the “Best Books.” There’s been some discussion on my blog this week about what should or shouldn’t make a “best” books list. What elements do you think lands a book in that “best” category? Think of your top 5 best books and tune in next week to see the collated list.

Let’s see, I guess I should start with my top 5 Best Books in order to organize my thoughts. So, here are what I consider to be the Top 5 Best Books on my list (in no particular order):

1. The Shining by Stephen King
2. To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
3. Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
4. Lord of the Flies by William Golding
5. Libra by Don DeLillo

Okay … how’s that for a disparate list? One horror novel, one classic of American literature, one science fiction classic, one British fantasy and a representative of the haute littérature. However, as I examine the list I have compiled here, I do see some threads that run through the various stories these books are telling. First and foremost, however, is that they are all kick-ass stories. Each one of these books is gripping and a bona fide page-turner. They cannot be put down and each begs to be read deep into the wee hours of the morning.

Second: They are all books that deal, in one way or another, with a kind of social commentary. I have spent the last five to six years making the case (academically-speaking) for Stephen King’s The Shining as a touchstone book of the 1970s and the socio-economic moment during the 70s (when it was written) as a portrayal of the perceived struggle of white middle-class males against such forces as Women’s Liberation, the ERA, Affirmative Action and Gay Rights. It shows the struggle between the New Man (enlightened, participating in the family and child-rearing, in touch with his “feminine side” to use the phrase of the day) and the Old Man (self-sufficient, masculine, macho, punishing children rather than raising them). To Kill a Mockingbird hardly needs to be spoken of in terms of its social commentary; Lee’s adept hand at navigating the waters of racial tensions in the Deep South during the Depression is timeless. Bradbury’s dystopian tale of a world without books is social commentary as science fiction in the grand tradition of the genre from H.G. Wells and Jules Verne to George Schuyler and Samuel Delaney. Golding’s little morality play is a shocking indictment of the atavistic and animalistic nature of man, and shows just how close to the surface the primal urges lie, and just how little provocation they need to surface. Finally, DeLillo’s Libra is a triumph of the futility of trying to construct the unconstructable and how little we actually know about the events that make up history.

Third: They are all books that are shocking in their turn, whether it be King’s violence, Lee’s portrayal of racism, Bradbury’s dystopia, Golding’s failure of culture or DeLillo’s obfuscation. They use the shock value of their topics to convey their message. This is not to say that they set out to purposely shock the reader (though that is a thin argument with King) but the topics they confront—domestic abuse, racism, illiteracy, atavism, assassination—require or demand a certain level of shock to the Reader to unseat them from their place of familiarity. Creating within them a sense of what I like to call “uncomfortable defamiliarity,” which I have defined as meaning that you associate with the characters … but only to a certain extent. For example, you may get angry with your spouse, but you would never consider chasing them with a mallet, but also that thought may have crossed your mind … only to be dismissed immediately. Or, to frame it differently, you may think you would stay with Roger on the beach to protect the Littluns … but Jack’s tribe of hunters is seductive and beguiling and alluring, and wouldn’t you love to run, and hunt and chant “KILL THE PIG! CUT HIS THROAT! KILL THE PIG! BASH HIM IN!”

Fourth: They are layered books that are complex in their construction, meaning, and message. These are books that acquire meaning over time. Each time I pick up The Shining or Fahrenheit or Libra there is something new that jumps out at me, a new perspective or avenue that I hadn’t noticed previously that opens up new inroads into the novel.

While this is by no means an exhaustive list of the reasons why these books are on my Top 5, but it is a good representative sample of why these books are there, and what I look for in books: (1) a kick-ass story (which includes things like language use, expert handling of prose, complex character development … all that kind of “nuts and bolts” stuff), (2) a book that deal with its social situation … writing can be a political act, and good books are written in reaction to society, (3) they are shocking and make the reader examine what he or she believes and (4) they are complex and, to trot out the old cliché, like a fine wine get better and better with age.