We have a tottering stack of books on the bedside table. There is no rhyme nor reason to it: the books appear, as if by magic. Should we try Philip Roth’s dystopian novel, The Plot Against America? Or a translation of Arrian’s The Campaign Against Alexander? How about Susan Howatch’s literary-pop Silverbridge series, which was taught in a seminar at a university?
The question is: when will we sleep?
And so I am switching to anthologies, a more soothing form of bedtime reading, and more appropriate for the bedside table. One can dip into an anthology of poetry or stories and not be overwhelmed by a magnum opus. One can doze.
Here are some recommendations of great anthologies.
The Oxford Book of English Verse. There are two or three editions of this classic. I recommend The Oxford Book of English Verse, 1250-1915, edited by Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch. (We used to have an updated version, too, but I cannot find it.) If you’re like me, you will binge on Anonymous, or, if you prefer, Thomas Wyatt, Andrew Marvell, Christina Rossetti, and hundreds of other poems.
From Ink Lake: Canadian Stories Selected by Michael Ondaatje. This marvelous collection features many Canadian writers we have read for years but just as many who have not found an audience in the U.S. There are brilliant stories and excerpts from novels by Mordecai Richler, Mavis Gallant, Sandra Birdsell, Carol Shields, and Bharatee Mukherjee, but also lesser-known writers like Leon Rooke, Ethel Wilson, and Sheila Watson. N.B. We need to read more Canadian writers.
Dictionary of Saints, by Donald Attwater with Catherine Rachel John. This is a reference book, not an anthology, but the entries are fascinating. Who was Polycarp, Bishop and Martyr, you may ask! Or Isidore the Farm Servant? Why didn’t we study the saints in catechism? If only we’d gone to Catholic school!
The Oxford Book of Short Stories, edited by V. S. Pritchett. I highly recommend this anthology for common readers and for teachers who are tired of The Norton Anthology. Pritchett has chosen a short stories and novellas by writers of different eras and nationalities: Mary Lavin, R. K. Narayan, Eudora Welty, Joseph Conrad, Walter de la Mare, Doris Lessing, Katherine Anne Porter, and William Trevor, to name a few. You know I hate writing notes in books, but I did make a few marginal notes in The Secret Sharer. I scribbled either “dual secrets” or “duel of secrets.” It is illegible, but I’m inclined to go with “dual secrets.”
Short Stories by Latin American Women: The Magic and the Real, edited by Celia Correas de Zapata, with a foreword by Isabel Allende. “There never really was a women’s literature, strictly speaking, in Latin America,” writes Celia Correa de Zapata in the introduction. She introduce us to many women writers not commonly translated into English, among them Helena Araujo, Olga Orozco, and Maria Teresa Solari. In the biographies in the back of the book, you can learn more about their lives and works. Very few of their books have been translated. And yet there are all those Latin American men!
Perhaps an anthology will be more soothing than the expensive herbal remedies that should but do not help us sleep. Anyway, I like the look of an anthology on the bedside table.