The most 'infuriating' books ever written
Before “1,000 Books You Must Read Before You Die,” “A Lifetime Reading Plan,” and "Book Lust," there was the “imaginary library” unveiled in 1981 by Frederic Raphael and Kenneth McLeish in “The List of Books.”
It’s a slim little volume with an unusual page configuration -- more than twice as tall as it is wide. In a scant 159 pages, Raphael and McLeish list more than 3,000 titles grouped into 44 categories, mostly non-fiction, with allowances made for drama, poetry and novels. The intent, in their own words, was to “an imaginary library ... in which a reasonably literate person can hope to find both instruction and inspiration, art and amusement.”
Back in the '80s, I borrowed this book from the library a lot. I always meant to buy it someday. For whatever reason, the book never saw a third printing, so it disappeared from bookstores, and I forgot about it. It last rolled off the press in 1988 -- so long ago that one could read the “newest” titles recommended by the authors and likely not find a single reference to the Internet.
What sets The List apart from its younger cousins are the 13 Michelin Guide-type symbols (a magnifying glass, an American flag, an armchair, etc.) that Raphael and McLeish used to flag titles as (for example) a “major masterpiece,” a “seminal work that changed our thinking,” “a particular pleasure to read,” and so on. Some are “recommended for beginners on the subject” while more advanced volumes are deemed “difficult, worth preserving.”
These symbols of literary merit are liberally scattered throughout. Many titles have none; some boast as many as half a dozen -- like Plato’s “Phaedo,” which is: 1) a particular pleasure to read, 2) a seminal book that changed our thinking, 3) a standard work on the subject, 4) recommended for beginners in the subject, 5) a major masterpiece that is 6) not to be missed.
As a teenager, the titles that most interested me were those flagged by a magnifying glass or an asterisk, with the former denoting “difficult; worth preserving” and the latter “infuriating; possibly illuminating.” This second category was particularly exciting. I figured an “infuriating” book demanded even more of a reader than one that was merely “difficult.” A book so supremely difficult that it was … infuriating! Yet, with sufficient intellectual energy brought to bear, the serious reader might crack the code and bask in the glow of illumination. Honestly, these were not books I was likely to read, but they were books I wanted to know about.
Recently, I checked “The List of Books” out from the library -- the same library, I might add, where I first encountered it a quarter of a century ago, which raises the delightful possibility that it was the same copy that I held in my hands so long ago. Once again, I drifted toward “difficult” and “infuriating,” curious to know how decades had colored my perceptions and whether my original interpretation was correct.
Sixty-one titles, clustered mostly in history and politics, are considered by the authors to be “infuriating.” The subjectivity of the entire enterprise became clear, and I found myself slipping into the same indignant space late 20th century critics must have occupied when they wrote reviews demanding to know why this or that title was excluded. I haven’t actually read Lewis Morgan’s “Ancient Society,” for example, but I know enough about it -- and that has to count for something, doesn’t it? -- to know that excluding it from the list is an abomination. Questions abound. How can Peter Brooks’ 1968 treatise on dramatic theory be termed a seminal work that is both difficult and recommended for beginners? Why in the world is “Ulysses” not flagged as difficult?
Initially, my first hunch seemed correct. Reviewing all 61 titles flagged with the asterisk, one gets the impression that Raphael and McLeish were highlighting books they believed were extremely difficult to read. “Studies in Ethnomethodology,” after all, can’t be a book you fly through. And the reader comments section on Amazon.com for Roland Barthes' “Writing Degree Zero” includes a telling remark: “Writing Degree Zero is one of those 100-page books you need a 500-page book to really understand,” writes Mark Nadja. “You know you're in trouble when, like me, you find yourself having a problem fully comprehending even the `explanatory' preface.”
So it makes sense that Marx’s “Das Capital” is in the club, because -- his brilliance notwithstanding -- the man’s prose was frequently impregnable. But the exception to that rule complicates matters: “The Communist Manifesto,” a slim volume that happens to be very readable (thanks largely to the fact, one suspects, that Engels helped). “The Book of Lists” would have you believe that it, like “Capital,” is also infuriating. Why?
At this point, it's helpful to recall that the root of “infuriate” is fury, which begs the question: Do the authors consider Marx, regardless of the difficulty of his prose, infuriating because he enraged the mid-19th century bourgeoisie? How could anyone have been infuriated by “Capital,” when few people likely even understood what the hell he was talking about?
The implication here seems to be that “infuriating” means “controversial.” It makes sense, then, to include Richard Aldington’s scandalous biography, “Lawrence of Arabia” -- one so hostile toward its subject that one reviewer has said reading it is “like standing under a waterfall of venom.” But if Aldington gets to be infuriating for throwing darts at T.E. Lawrence, why does Jerzy Kosinski get a pass for screwing around with the Holocaust? His controversial 1965 novel “The Painted Bird” appears in the list, but it didn’t make the “infuriating” cut. Curious, since many readers were infuriated to learn that it wasn’t nearly as autobiographical as implied and, in fact, that Kosinkski may not even have written it.
“Infuriating” clearly works both ways, because I cannot believe that Robert Graves retelling of “The Greek Myths” is infuriating for any of the same reasons that Jean Paul-Sartre’s “Being and Nothingness” is. I haven’t read the latter, but I’ll bet it’s a sonofabitch to get through.
Consider William Burroughs’ “Naked Lunch” (which doesn’t appear in the list), a book that Allen Ginsberg famously predicted would “drive everybody mad.” An obvious reference to the fact that the novel is incomprehensible. “Naked Lunch” is a notoriously difficult text, infuriatingly so. I actually have read it, but it didn’t make me angry -- but I can understand why June and Ward Cleaver would have been if they’d found a dog-eared copy and a flashlight stuffed under Beaver’s pillow.
It seems to me that if we’re considering a book’s capacity to illicit genuine fury, it cannot merely ruffle feathers within a community of specialists. Sigfried Gideon’s “Space, Time and Architecture: The Growth of a New Tradition” is deemed “infuriating,” but who, other than architects, becomes infuriated by a 960-page book about architecture? This seems insufficient. In my lifetime, the publication of a book that infuriates the general population is a rare event. “The Satanic Verses” and “American Psycho” come to mind, although those cases present a different problem: The vast majority of those angered by those books never actually read them.
Isn't that the case, really, with most "infuriating" books? How many people actually finished (or even started) "American Psycho"? I'm no different when it comes to judging books by the covers. While perusing the history shelf at a bookstore recently, I saw a book called "Being George Washington," by Glenn Beck, and immediately felt a sensation that approximates fury. The history shelf! A low-grade fury, to be sure; it wasn't what I'd feel if someone harmed my child. But my own personal bias -- and having observed the Beck phenomenon closely, I think it's a reasonably informed one -- leads me to believe that this man has no more business writing authoritatively about George Washington than I do writing a book called "Space, Time and Architecture." And yet, I never picked it up; its very existence pisses me off. One is obliged to ask: Why does the cover of a book ostensibly about one of the greatest of Americans feature a photograph of: Glenn Beck?
But I’m neglecting the rest of the phrase denoted by an asterick: These books are not only illuminating, but they are “possibly illuminating.” What does that mean? Possibly illuminating? The author may sound like he’s got his head up his ass, but we concede he may be on to something! Or: If you’re not a complete imbecile, you may learn something by reading this book.
These are minor matters, to be sure. One reader’s “infuriating” is another’s “exhilarating.” The bigger problem is the fact that large swaths of the book are horribly outdated. It has a science and technology section that is devoid of Stephen Hawking, Richard Dawkins, Ernst Mayer, David Quammen, Brian Greene, Stephen Jay Gould or even Carl Sagan. A current “paranormal and occult” section without Whitley Strieber’s “Communion” books is like a list of best fantasy novels that excludes “The Lord of the Rings.” Speaking of fantasy, a similar problem looms over in children’s literature: No Harry Potter. Also, since 1981, graphic novels have evolved light years beyond the cheap paper they used to be printed on. Consequently, those relying on “The List of Books” to decide which titles to scrape together in anticipation of the Zombie Apocalypse would remain oblivious to the work of Art Spiegelman, Joe Sacco, Neil Gaiman and Craig Thompson -- not to mention Robert Kirkman, which might come in handy.
In the meantime, for those interested in TLOB’s 61 “infuriating; possibly illuminating” titles, here they are. If you'd like to see the same list in which titles are linked to the book on Amazon.com, you'll find it on my Reading Everest blog here:
Strategems and Spoils: A Social Anthropology of Politics (1969) F.G. Bailey
Configurations of Culture Growth (1947) A.L. Kroeber
Contemporary Archaeology (1972) Mark Leone, Ed.
Space, Time and Architecture: The Growth of a New Tradition (1941) Sigfried Giedion
The Architecture of Humanism: A Study in the History of Taste (1914) Geoffrey Scott
Design for the Real World (1971) Victor Papanek
Testimony (1979) Dmitri Shostakovich
Lawrence of Arabia (1955) Richard Aldington
Kenneth Grahame, 1859-1932 (1959) Peter Green
Creative Malady (1974) George W. Pickering
The Life of Jesus (1863) Ernest Renan
The Journal of Andrew Bihaly (1972) Andrew Tuttle
The Empty Space: A Book About the Theatre (1968) Peter Brook
Capitalism In Crisis: Inflation and the State (1976) Andrew Gamble/Paul Walton
Marxist Economics for Socialists: A Critique of Reformism (1978) John Harrison
Western Capitalism Since the War (1968) Michael Kidron
Capital (1867) Karl Marx
A Mirror for England: British Movies from Austerity to Influence (1971) Raymond Durgnant
Man-Made America: Chaos or Control (1963) Tunnard
Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee (1971) Dee Brown
Britain Through American Eyes (1974) Henry Steele Commager
Growing Old in America (1977) David Fischer
People of Paradox: An Inquiry Concerning the Origins of American Civilization (1972) Michael Kammen
Main Currents in Modern American History (1976) Gabriel Kolko
The England of Elizabeth (1950) A.L. Rowse
Movements in European History (1921) D.H. Lawrence
The Masters and the Slaves (1921) Giberto Freyre
Writing Degree Zero (1953) Roland Barthes
Reevalutation: Tradition and Development in English Poetry (1936) F. R. Leavis
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962) Thomas Kuhn
Gravity and Levity (1976) Alan McGlashan
Science and Western Domination (1976) Kurt Mendelsohn
Nature & the Greeks (1954) Erwin Schrodinger
The Cecil King Diary, 1965-1974 (2 vols.) Cecil King
Who Shall Live? Health, Economics and Social Choice (1975) V.R. Fuchs
Mirage of Health: Utopias, Progress and Biological Change (1959) Rene Dubos
The Greek Myths (1955) Robert Graves
Projegomena to the Study of Greek Religion (1903) Jane Harrison
Middle Eastern Mythology (1963) S.H. Hooke
The Gods of the Greeks (1951) C. Kerenyl
On Aggression (1963) Konrad Lorenz
E.S.P. A Scientific Evaluation (1966) C.E.M. Hansel
Philosophy of Existence (1937) Karl Jaspers
From a Logical Point of View (1953) Willard van Orman Quine
Being and Nothingness (1943) Jean-Paul Satre
The Wretched of the Earth (1961) Frantz Fanon
The Communist Manifesto (1848) Karl Marx and Frederich Engels
Political Parties (1913) Robert Michels
Poor People's Movements: Why They Succeed, How They Fail (1977) Frances Fox Piven
A Theory of Justice (1971) John Rawls
Reflections on Violence (1912) Georges Sorel
The Book of It (1923) Georg Groddeck
Christian Deviations (1954) Horton Davies
Christians in Contemporary Russia (1963) Nikita Strueve
Justine (1797) Marquis de Sade
The Social Sciences as Sorcery (1972) Stanislav Andreski
Studies in Ethnomethodology (1967) H. Garfinkel
The Coming Crisis of Western Sociology (1971) Alvin W. Gouldner
Social Amnesia (1975) R. Jacoby
The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899) Thorstein Veblen
Learning to Labour (1977) P. Willis
It’s a slim little volume with an unusual page configuration -- more than twice as tall as it is wide. In a scant 159 pages, Raphael and McLeish list more than 3,000 titles grouped into 44 categories, mostly non-fiction, with allowances made for drama, poetry and novels. The intent, in their own words, was to “an imaginary library ... in which a reasonably literate person can hope to find both instruction and inspiration, art and amusement.”
Back in the '80s, I borrowed this book from the library a lot. I always meant to buy it someday. For whatever reason, the book never saw a third printing, so it disappeared from bookstores, and I forgot about it. It last rolled off the press in 1988 -- so long ago that one could read the “newest” titles recommended by the authors and likely not find a single reference to the Internet.
What sets The List apart from its younger cousins are the 13 Michelin Guide-type symbols (a magnifying glass, an American flag, an armchair, etc.) that Raphael and McLeish used to flag titles as (for example) a “major masterpiece,” a “seminal work that changed our thinking,” “a particular pleasure to read,” and so on. Some are “recommended for beginners on the subject” while more advanced volumes are deemed “difficult, worth preserving.”
These symbols of literary merit are liberally scattered throughout. Many titles have none; some boast as many as half a dozen -- like Plato’s “Phaedo,” which is: 1) a particular pleasure to read, 2) a seminal book that changed our thinking, 3) a standard work on the subject, 4) recommended for beginners in the subject, 5) a major masterpiece that is 6) not to be missed.
As a teenager, the titles that most interested me were those flagged by a magnifying glass or an asterisk, with the former denoting “difficult; worth preserving” and the latter “infuriating; possibly illuminating.” This second category was particularly exciting. I figured an “infuriating” book demanded even more of a reader than one that was merely “difficult.” A book so supremely difficult that it was … infuriating! Yet, with sufficient intellectual energy brought to bear, the serious reader might crack the code and bask in the glow of illumination. Honestly, these were not books I was likely to read, but they were books I wanted to know about.
Recently, I checked “The List of Books” out from the library -- the same library, I might add, where I first encountered it a quarter of a century ago, which raises the delightful possibility that it was the same copy that I held in my hands so long ago. Once again, I drifted toward “difficult” and “infuriating,” curious to know how decades had colored my perceptions and whether my original interpretation was correct.
Sixty-one titles, clustered mostly in history and politics, are considered by the authors to be “infuriating.” The subjectivity of the entire enterprise became clear, and I found myself slipping into the same indignant space late 20th century critics must have occupied when they wrote reviews demanding to know why this or that title was excluded. I haven’t actually read Lewis Morgan’s “Ancient Society,” for example, but I know enough about it -- and that has to count for something, doesn’t it? -- to know that excluding it from the list is an abomination. Questions abound. How can Peter Brooks’ 1968 treatise on dramatic theory be termed a seminal work that is both difficult and recommended for beginners? Why in the world is “Ulysses” not flagged as difficult?
Initially, my first hunch seemed correct. Reviewing all 61 titles flagged with the asterisk, one gets the impression that Raphael and McLeish were highlighting books they believed were extremely difficult to read. “Studies in Ethnomethodology,” after all, can’t be a book you fly through. And the reader comments section on Amazon.com for Roland Barthes' “Writing Degree Zero” includes a telling remark: “Writing Degree Zero is one of those 100-page books you need a 500-page book to really understand,” writes Mark Nadja. “You know you're in trouble when, like me, you find yourself having a problem fully comprehending even the `explanatory' preface.”
So it makes sense that Marx’s “Das Capital” is in the club, because -- his brilliance notwithstanding -- the man’s prose was frequently impregnable. But the exception to that rule complicates matters: “The Communist Manifesto,” a slim volume that happens to be very readable (thanks largely to the fact, one suspects, that Engels helped). “The Book of Lists” would have you believe that it, like “Capital,” is also infuriating. Why?
At this point, it's helpful to recall that the root of “infuriate” is fury, which begs the question: Do the authors consider Marx, regardless of the difficulty of his prose, infuriating because he enraged the mid-19th century bourgeoisie? How could anyone have been infuriated by “Capital,” when few people likely even understood what the hell he was talking about?
The implication here seems to be that “infuriating” means “controversial.” It makes sense, then, to include Richard Aldington’s scandalous biography, “Lawrence of Arabia” -- one so hostile toward its subject that one reviewer has said reading it is “like standing under a waterfall of venom.” But if Aldington gets to be infuriating for throwing darts at T.E. Lawrence, why does Jerzy Kosinski get a pass for screwing around with the Holocaust? His controversial 1965 novel “The Painted Bird” appears in the list, but it didn’t make the “infuriating” cut. Curious, since many readers were infuriated to learn that it wasn’t nearly as autobiographical as implied and, in fact, that Kosinkski may not even have written it.
“Infuriating” clearly works both ways, because I cannot believe that Robert Graves retelling of “The Greek Myths” is infuriating for any of the same reasons that Jean Paul-Sartre’s “Being and Nothingness” is. I haven’t read the latter, but I’ll bet it’s a sonofabitch to get through.
Consider William Burroughs’ “Naked Lunch” (which doesn’t appear in the list), a book that Allen Ginsberg famously predicted would “drive everybody mad.” An obvious reference to the fact that the novel is incomprehensible. “Naked Lunch” is a notoriously difficult text, infuriatingly so. I actually have read it, but it didn’t make me angry -- but I can understand why June and Ward Cleaver would have been if they’d found a dog-eared copy and a flashlight stuffed under Beaver’s pillow.
It seems to me that if we’re considering a book’s capacity to illicit genuine fury, it cannot merely ruffle feathers within a community of specialists. Sigfried Gideon’s “Space, Time and Architecture: The Growth of a New Tradition” is deemed “infuriating,” but who, other than architects, becomes infuriated by a 960-page book about architecture? This seems insufficient. In my lifetime, the publication of a book that infuriates the general population is a rare event. “The Satanic Verses” and “American Psycho” come to mind, although those cases present a different problem: The vast majority of those angered by those books never actually read them.
Isn't that the case, really, with most "infuriating" books? How many people actually finished (or even started) "American Psycho"? I'm no different when it comes to judging books by the covers. While perusing the history shelf at a bookstore recently, I saw a book called "Being George Washington," by Glenn Beck, and immediately felt a sensation that approximates fury. The history shelf! A low-grade fury, to be sure; it wasn't what I'd feel if someone harmed my child. But my own personal bias -- and having observed the Beck phenomenon closely, I think it's a reasonably informed one -- leads me to believe that this man has no more business writing authoritatively about George Washington than I do writing a book called "Space, Time and Architecture." And yet, I never picked it up; its very existence pisses me off. One is obliged to ask: Why does the cover of a book ostensibly about one of the greatest of Americans feature a photograph of: Glenn Beck?
But I’m neglecting the rest of the phrase denoted by an asterick: These books are not only illuminating, but they are “possibly illuminating.” What does that mean? Possibly illuminating? The author may sound like he’s got his head up his ass, but we concede he may be on to something! Or: If you’re not a complete imbecile, you may learn something by reading this book.
These are minor matters, to be sure. One reader’s “infuriating” is another’s “exhilarating.” The bigger problem is the fact that large swaths of the book are horribly outdated. It has a science and technology section that is devoid of Stephen Hawking, Richard Dawkins, Ernst Mayer, David Quammen, Brian Greene, Stephen Jay Gould or even Carl Sagan. A current “paranormal and occult” section without Whitley Strieber’s “Communion” books is like a list of best fantasy novels that excludes “The Lord of the Rings.” Speaking of fantasy, a similar problem looms over in children’s literature: No Harry Potter. Also, since 1981, graphic novels have evolved light years beyond the cheap paper they used to be printed on. Consequently, those relying on “The List of Books” to decide which titles to scrape together in anticipation of the Zombie Apocalypse would remain oblivious to the work of Art Spiegelman, Joe Sacco, Neil Gaiman and Craig Thompson -- not to mention Robert Kirkman, which might come in handy.
In the meantime, for those interested in TLOB’s 61 “infuriating; possibly illuminating” titles, here they are. If you'd like to see the same list in which titles are linked to the book on Amazon.com, you'll find it on my Reading Everest blog here:
Strategems and Spoils: A Social Anthropology of Politics (1969) F.G. Bailey
Configurations of Culture Growth (1947) A.L. Kroeber
Contemporary Archaeology (1972) Mark Leone, Ed.
Space, Time and Architecture: The Growth of a New Tradition (1941) Sigfried Giedion
The Architecture of Humanism: A Study in the History of Taste (1914) Geoffrey Scott
Design for the Real World (1971) Victor Papanek
Testimony (1979) Dmitri Shostakovich
Lawrence of Arabia (1955) Richard Aldington
Kenneth Grahame, 1859-1932 (1959) Peter Green
Creative Malady (1974) George W. Pickering
The Life of Jesus (1863) Ernest Renan
The Journal of Andrew Bihaly (1972) Andrew Tuttle
The Empty Space: A Book About the Theatre (1968) Peter Brook
Capitalism In Crisis: Inflation and the State (1976) Andrew Gamble/Paul Walton
Marxist Economics for Socialists: A Critique of Reformism (1978) John Harrison
Western Capitalism Since the War (1968) Michael Kidron
Capital (1867) Karl Marx
A Mirror for England: British Movies from Austerity to Influence (1971) Raymond Durgnant
Man-Made America: Chaos or Control (1963) Tunnard
Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee (1971) Dee Brown
Britain Through American Eyes (1974) Henry Steele Commager
Growing Old in America (1977) David Fischer
People of Paradox: An Inquiry Concerning the Origins of American Civilization (1972) Michael Kammen
Main Currents in Modern American History (1976) Gabriel Kolko
The England of Elizabeth (1950) A.L. Rowse
Movements in European History (1921) D.H. Lawrence
The Masters and the Slaves (1921) Giberto Freyre
Writing Degree Zero (1953) Roland Barthes
Reevalutation: Tradition and Development in English Poetry (1936) F. R. Leavis
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962) Thomas Kuhn
Gravity and Levity (1976) Alan McGlashan
Science and Western Domination (1976) Kurt Mendelsohn
Nature & the Greeks (1954) Erwin Schrodinger
The Cecil King Diary, 1965-1974 (2 vols.) Cecil King
Who Shall Live? Health, Economics and Social Choice (1975) V.R. Fuchs
Mirage of Health: Utopias, Progress and Biological Change (1959) Rene Dubos
The Greek Myths (1955) Robert Graves
Projegomena to the Study of Greek Religion (1903) Jane Harrison
Middle Eastern Mythology (1963) S.H. Hooke
The Gods of the Greeks (1951) C. Kerenyl
On Aggression (1963) Konrad Lorenz
E.S.P. A Scientific Evaluation (1966) C.E.M. Hansel
Philosophy of Existence (1937) Karl Jaspers
From a Logical Point of View (1953) Willard van Orman Quine
Being and Nothingness (1943) Jean-Paul Satre
The Wretched of the Earth (1961) Frantz Fanon
The Communist Manifesto (1848) Karl Marx and Frederich Engels
Political Parties (1913) Robert Michels
Poor People's Movements: Why They Succeed, How They Fail (1977) Frances Fox Piven
A Theory of Justice (1971) John Rawls
Reflections on Violence (1912) Georges Sorel
The Book of It (1923) Georg Groddeck
Christian Deviations (1954) Horton Davies
Christians in Contemporary Russia (1963) Nikita Strueve
Justine (1797) Marquis de Sade
The Social Sciences as Sorcery (1972) Stanislav Andreski
Studies in Ethnomethodology (1967) H. Garfinkel
The Coming Crisis of Western Sociology (1971) Alvin W. Gouldner
Social Amnesia (1975) R. Jacoby
The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899) Thorstein Veblen
Learning to Labour (1977) P. Willis
