Attempts to define the canon can be problematic even for Harold Bloom and Elaine Showalter, but Emily Temple, a Millennial who is a senior editor at Literary Hub, is not afraid to miss the mark. She glibly compiled a list of books she thinks shaped the literary culture in the U.S. from 1900 to the present. She says in her article “A Century of Books” (actually more than a century) that these books, “if read together, would give a fair picture of the landscape of literary culture for that decade.”
Wow, even as a confident young reviewer I did not suffer from this kind of hubris. And at the TLS or The New York Review of Books, this list would be a task for a team of contributors, among them critics, biographers, novelists, and sociologists.
But Temple writes,
Though the books on these lists need not be American in origin, I am looking for books that evoke some aspect of American life, actual or intellectual, in each decade—a global lens would require a much longer list. And of course, varied and complex as it is, there’s no list that could truly define American life over ten or any number of years, so I do not make any claim on exhaustiveness. I’ve simply selected books that, if read together, would give a fair picture of the landscape of literary culture for that decade—both as it was and as it is remembered. Finally, two process notes: I’ve limited myself to one book for author over the entire 12-part list, so you may see certain works skipped over in favor of others, even if both are important (for instance, I ignored Dubliners in the 1910s so I could include Ulysses in the 1920s), and in the case of translated work, I’ll be using the date of the English translation, for obvious reasons.
I do not take lists seriously, but the first thing that struck me was how little Temple knows about American history. Her ten choices per decade are bizarre–do Zane Grey’s Riders of the Purple Sage, Edgar Rice Burrough’s Tarzan of the Apes, and J. M. Barrie’s Peter and Wendy really deserve three slots in the 1910s?– but she is also surprisingly sexist, naming only two or three women per decade. Never mind that in the 1960s she left out Tillie Olsen, Doris Lessing, Mary McCarthy, Lillian Hellman, Denise Levertov, Ellen Willis, and Adrienne Rich. On her list for the 1970s, the height of Second Wave feminism, she mentions only one book by a woman: Judy Blume’s Are You There, God? It’s Me, Margaret. (Apparently it’s not so long ago that Temple was reading childrne’s books.)
it does make me wonder what on earth Millennials think the 1970s were about. Our Bodies, Ourselves changed women’s health care; Erica Jong’s best-selling Fear of Flying was compared to Henry Miller’s Tropic of Capricorn; Nora Ephron’s stunning essay,”A Few Words about Breasts,” in Crazy Salad made all small-breasted women feel better; Kate Millet’s Sexual Politics influenced literary criticism, as did The Madwoman in the Attic, by Susan Gubar and Sandra Gilbert; Ann Beattie’s minimalist first collection of stories, Distortions, and novel Chilly Scenes of Winter were published simultaneously in 1976; and The Environmental Handbook, released for the first Earth Day, introduced us to ways of saving the planet, if only people had listened….
If this list had been called “Fun Books in Amerika,” I wouldn’t have minded, but Temple takes herself too seriously. And this is why I don’t trust shallow online publications. Editors of print publications like The New York Times and The Washington Post are still careful about what they print and would have assigned “A Century of Reading” to writers who had done the reading.
Today, when I told my husband I was finishing up two books this month, he asked, “Is one of them War and Peace?”
I just finished Maureen Howard’s The Rags of Time, a kind of woman’s Ulysses, and the last in Howard’s quartet of novels on the seasons. And there are a few references to War and Peace.
I used to pore over Nicole Hollander’s Sylvia cartoons. Her eccentric character Sylvia lived with cats, was politically radical, and spent a lot of time reading in the bathtub. She was the only comic-strip heroine I identified with, besides Cathy Guisewite’s Cathy. I read Sylvia in an alternative paper. Hollander introduced Sylvia as a character in The Feminist Funnies in the ’70s, and the Sylvia strip was syndicated in 1981. Alas, Hollander retired Sylvia in 2012.
We filled our huge shopping bag with books. Am so glad I remembered to bring it, or I would have had to put some books back. (Well, I did put a few back.)
My husband is a nonfiction fan, and we found…
…a short biography of Buddha, Czeslaw Milosz’s Selected and Last Poems, and Sarah Bakewell’s How to Live: Or A Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer. 
I’ve never heard of Jane McCaffrey, but First You Try Everything looks intriguing. Perhaps I’ll get around to it, perhaps not.
And, last but not least, how could I resist The Art of the Wasted Day by Patricia Hampl, a book that, according to Maureen Corrigan at NPR, celebrates daydreaming?
A satisfying hour at the library: a good haul, and I hope I get around to some of these!
Conscience by Alice Mattison. Told from three points-of-view, this counter-culture classic focuses on the consequences of reading, or rereading, a Vietnam-era novel about a terrorist. Olive Grossman, a biographer of women writers, has agreed to write an introduction to a new edition of Bright Morning of Pain, which was based on the life of Olive’s best friend, Helen, a conscience-stricken anti-war activist who became a terrorist and died in a robbery. Olive’s husband Griff, an African-American high-school principal, is portrayed in the novel as a militant with a gun. (Both Olive and Griff knew the author.) Griff reads the novel for the first time, and the circle of readers opens when Griff leaves the book in the office of the director of a drop-in center. Complicated politics, complicated emotions. Fascinating, labyrinthine, and psychologically pitch-perfect. And here is a link to 
OVID IS IN THE NEWS, AND NOT IN A GOOD WAY. The classicist Donna Zuckerberg, Mark Zuckerberg’s sister, has noted a disturbing trend among the online Red Pill communities, a group of conservative alt.right men who resent women and say that men have been disenfranchised. They are using Ovid’s comic didactic poem, Ars Amatoria (The Art of Love), as a serious pick-up guide. You can read more about this at 
ARE YOU A HOMER FAN? The Odyssey has groupies.
I am reading Rena Rossner’s brilliant fantasy novel, The Sisters of the Winter Wood, a retelling of Christina Rossetti’s Goblin Market. It also has elements of fairy tales, myths, and Jewish stories and folktales.
And so, on this lovely Indian summer day, I sat on a bench and read Rossetti. The book is so tiny that I was confident no one would see what I was reading. (I only see people reading phones; I wonder if books are outlawed.) Fascinating to note Rossner’s mimicry of Rossetti’s style and content: she alternates chapters from the two sisters’ perspectives, Liba’s in prose, Layla’s in poetry. (They are Lizzie and Laura in the poem.) And Rossetti’s and Rossner’s fruit-sellers are equally seductive. Rossner is not primarily a poet, but it is a very clever undertaking.
WHAT OTHER EDITIONS OF CLASSICS SHOULD WE CONSIDER? Madeline Raynor reveals in her article,”These Book Covers Are So Terrible You Won’t Believe They’re Real” at 
Ye gods! Who are these women?
Not great, but not terrible.
How important is cover art to you? And are there covers that put you off ? And, most important, does price matter?
I retire early to bed with books these days. What do I recommend? Zola’s Germinal and Stanley Middleton’s Valley of Decision.
What do I think many, many years later? Well, it is gloomy. Set in a coal-mining town in France, it details the harshness of the work and everyday life. People live like animals, they sleep in shifts in crowded houses, they beg, they starve, they fornicate practically in public. The main character is Etienne, the son of the alcoholics in Zola’s L’Assommoir (The Drinking Den). He arrives at loose ends and takes a job in the mines. The focus is largely on Etienne and the Maheu family. All of the Maheus, except the wife and youngest children, work in the mine, and the conditions are horrendous. Etienne preaches radical ideas and organizes a strike. And the strike is a disaster, because the miners have no power.
Stanley Middleton’s Valley of Decision is melancholy but upbeat after Germinal. Middleton won the Booker Prize in 1974 for Holiday. Set in the Midlands, Valley of Decision is a beautifully-written novel about musical careers and a marriage on the rocks. David and his wife Mary are happy. They have a lot in common: David teaches music and is an amateur cellist; Mary is a former opera singer. When she is offered a gig in the U.S. singing opera on a two-months’ university tour, David and Mary agree she should do it. It is an opportunity for Mary, though she doesn’t want a professional career.
Some of my paperbacks have fallen apart. Not surprisingly, my Washington Square paperback of Jane Eyre (the first I had) is no longer readable.
The Folio Society books were overall a good influence. Who needs to read the latest Booker Prize winner when we’re busy with the FS edition of Jude the Obscure? My discovery? I started rereading the classics because the books were so attractive.. I especially recommend the beautiful edition of Wuthering Heights, with an introduction by Patti Smith and illustrations by Rovina Cai.
Has anyone bought Knickerbocker flexibound classics? They’re on sale at Barnes and Noble for $10. They look very cute, with a flexible cover and a strap that closes it like a Moleskine notebook. I have read most of the titles, though.
I’ve been thinking about the kind of books I read. Classics, pop fiction, poetry, biography–anything except romances.
Can writers be great and twee? I love Rachel Ferguson’s Alas, Poor Lady, a brilliant novel about a distressed gentlewoman. But an earlier book, The Brontes Went to Woolworths, is so fanciful that I conclude it is twee. As the book description at Goodreads says, the Carne sisters “live a life unchecked by their mother in their bohemian town house. Irrepressibly imaginative, the sisters cannot resist making up stories as they have done since childhood; from their talking nursery toys, Ironface the Doll and Dion Saffyn the pierrot, to their fulsomely-imagined friendship with real high-court Judge Toddington…”
What about the brilliant, underrated writer, Rumer Godden? She is usually delegated to the rank of dead pop writers, but I adore Kingfishers Catch Fire, a kind of pre-hippie novel about a single mother and two children who move to Kashmir to live cheaply. But there is occasionally something mannered about her voice, her rhetorical repetition, and chronological jumping around. I happen to like that myself. Twee or not twee?