The Bright Book of Life is basically Harold Bloom’s choices of the best novels ever written. When you boil all these books down, Bloom think’s Moby-Dick and In Search of Lost Time are the two greatest novels. But I have a few quibbles. I’ve read most of these novels. I have never heard of Book of Numbers by Joshua Cohen. I like Ursula K. Le Guin but I would not consider The Left Hand of Darkness or The Dispossessed among the greatest novels. And where is Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude?
Some of Bloom’s choices are a little strange, too. The Ambassadors is a very good Henry James novel, but is it really better than Wings of the Dove? Does Joseph Conrad deserve three novel choices while George Orwell’s 1984 is ignored?
How many of these novels have you read? What are your favorites? GRADE: B+
Table of Contents:
Preface The Lost Traveller’s Dream xi
1 Don Quixote Miguel De Cervantes 3
2 Clarissa Samuel Richardson 22
3 Tom Jones Henry Fielding 33
4 Pride and Prejudice Jane Austen 39
5 Emma Jane Austen 46
6 Persuasion Jane Austen 52
7 I Promessi Sposi (The Betrothed) Alessandro Manzoni 61
8 The Red and the Black Stendhal 66
9 The Charterhouse of Parma Stendhal 71
10 The Vautrin Saga: Old Goriot, Lost Illusions, The Splendor and Misery of the Courtesans Honore De Balzac 76
11 The Captains Daughter Alexander Pushkin 82
12 Wuthering Heights Emily Bronte 93
13 Vanity Fair William Makepeace Thackeray 101
14 Moby-Dick Herman Melville 112
15 Bleak House Charles Dickens 152
16 Our Mutual Friend Charles Dickens 156
17 Madame Bovary Gustave Flaubert 161
18 Les Miserables Victor Hugo 166
19 A Sportsman’s Notebook Ivan Turgenev 172
20 First Love Ivan Turgenev 181
21 The Cossacks Leo Tolstoy 190
22 War and Peace Leo Tolstoy 197
23 Anna Karenina Leo Tolstoy 215
24 Hadji Murat Leo Tolstoy 229
25 The Return of the Native Thomas Hardy 238
26 The Brothers Karamazov Fyodor Dostoevsky 244
27 The Princess Casamassima Henry James 254
28 The Ambassadors Henry James 258
29 Nostromo Joseph Conrad 261
30 The Secret Agent Joseph Conrad 268
31 Under Western Eyes Joseph Conrad 273
32 The Reef Edith Wharton 277
33 The Rainbow D.H. Lawrence 286
34 Women in Love D.H. Lawrence 291
35 Ulysses James Joyce 300
36 The Magic Mountain Thomas Mann 354
37 To the Lighthouse Virginia Woolf 377
38 In Search of Lost Time Marcel Proust 387
39 The Master and Margarita Mikhail Bulgakov 391
40 Absalom, Absalom! William Faulkner 411
41 The Death of the Heart Elizabeth Bowen 427
42 Invisible Man Ralph Ellison 434
43 The Left Hand of Darkness Ursula K. Le Guin 447
44 The Dispossessed Ursula K. Le Guin 460
45 The Loser Thomas Bernhard 466
46 Blood Meridian Cormac McCarthy 472
47 The Rings of Saturn W. G. Sebald 485
48 Book of Numbers Joshua Cohen 504
Afterword The Changeling 511
I have only read 17. I don’t mind Le Guin being listed. I found Proust unreadable. The most boring stuff I ever read. He likes Austen and Bronte way too much for my tastes. And where is Raymond Chandler’s The Long Goodbye or Huckleberry Finn. Glad to see Blood Meridian listed.
Steve, my experience with trying to read Proust mirrors yours. It seems that Harold Bloom was not a fan of crime fiction. Or Twain.
Not true about Twain. He venerated Huck Finn.
Paul, I think Twain constructed Huck from a composite of people he knew.
This is what I would call “an English major’s list,” and—because I was an English major—no surprise I’ve read many of the books here, including all the English & American writers, plus some of the French & Russians. However, not only does Bloom fail to recommend any genre fiction (outside of Le Guin’s SF), he doesn’t challenge readers to try something outside the Western canon (I mean, even high schools are teaching THINGS FALL APART these days). All in all, a rather predictable list where even the “unexpected” choices (like INVISIBLE MAN or BLOOD MERIDIAN) seem safe.
Deb, I was surprised that Bloom included D. H. Lawrence who seems to have fallen out of favor in recent years. Yes, most of these choices are “safe.”
BLOOD MERIDIAN is arty western fiction, the Bulgakov a fantasy not too distant from the fantasies of other erudite fantasists. Le Guin is going to be increasing segregated from sf by snobs as time goes by. And Bloom is not the guy to turn to for multi-culti.
I think NINETEEN EIGHTY-FOUR (as Blair/Orwell apparently originally preferred) is certainly his most influential novel, but that ANIMAL FARM is better, as are some of his contemporary-mimetic items. I’ve yet to read the full novels of James, as a writing/editing major in college (very fond of the novellas).
In some moods, my favorite on his list is QUIXOTE.
Todd, I agree with you on ANIMAL FARM. If I was making a list like Bloom’s, I would include both of Orwell’s novels. I’m lukewarm on QUIXOTE. The second half was a slog for me.
I’ve read only a paltry 13 and none more recently than the two Le Guin novels in the seventies, and there are three that I’ve never even heard of, including one of the four by Tolstoy. I don’t suppose enjoyment figures much in a Harold Bloom list but I’ve enjoyed everything I’ve read by Faulkner and Dickens. I can read Henry James but, other than the short ones, I’d rather not. “Clarissa” is the most boring one I’ve had to read. Certainly “1984” should have been included. Not that I’m a big fan of Eliot, the most shocking omission to me is “Middlemarch”.
Michael, I agree with you on MIDDLEMARCH. I read CLARISSA in a BRITISH FICTION class and started to weary at around page 1,000.
I think if I wanted to induce a coma I would start with this reading list.
Dan, you’re right about some of the snoozers on this list.
The vast majority of this list are books I will never read voluntarily. My own personal list would include Ken Bruen, Joe Lansdale, Avram Davidson, Theodore Sturgeon, Dashiell Hammett, and many others. And where the hell is Alice in Wonderland and Huckleberyy Finn?
Jerry, ALICE IN WONDERLAND is a glaring omission. Like D. H. Lawrence, Mark Twain has fallen out of favor with the Literary Establishment. You need to add Jack Vance to your list of favorites!
Too many Russians, and on the whole a lot of these books are written in a very similar style about very similar people. No Fitzgerald, no Hemingway, no Twain, no Flannery O’Connor, no Achebe. I have read about 14 and only a few of them were favorites.
A dozen. Some I really hated, like RETURN OF THE NATIVE. And three Jane Austens but no Hammett or Chandler or, indeed, any other mystery? What a snob. I liked INVISIBLE MAN a lot, and LES MISERABLES (but that was 50 years ago) and BLEAK HOUSE.
Jeff, I’m with you on BLEAK HOUSE. I have a copy of OUR MUTUAL FRIEND but haven’t read it yet. Love HARD TIMES and NICOLAS NICKLEBY.
I have all the Dickens. OUR MUTUAL FRIEND is on my “read soon” (or whenever) list too.
Jeff, I usually associate reading Dickens with Summer Reading for some reason. There’s nothing like a lazy summer day, some ice tea, and Dickens!
I just looked at something on this in NYT.
I gotta say – after looking at that list, there is NOTHING there that I would revisit.
Maybe it’s too intellectual for me. Once was enough. Too many books, too little time.
Beth, as Deb points out, this is a list for ENGLISH MAJORS. I think we all read for enjoyment at this time in our lives.
Interestingly he left off Little, Big by John Crowley which he once called his favorite American novel of the 20th century. He said he had read it at least 45 times.
Steve, I wondered about that, too. Unless Bloom has another volume of THE BRIGHT BOOK OF LIFE in genres.
What Deb and Dan said. I wonder why this book was even published.
Rick, Harold Bloom died in 2019 but there were books in the pipeline. THE BRIGHT BOOK OF LIFE might be the last one published. Bloom was trying to sum up his reading and his career with his last books.
Too Euro-centric and yet missing ALL QUIET ON THE WESTERN FRONT, THE POWER AND THE GLORY, THE QUIET AMERICAN, THREE MEN IN A BOAT…
neeru, I totally agree with you! So many Good Books did not make Bloom’s list.
I probably read less than 20 of these – one Dostojevsky or … was enough for me. Most of those “classical” books from the 19th and early 20th century I found boring.
What I find strange as a German:
There’s only one German and one Austrian book there!
And not too many from France, Italy and Spain either …
But of course everybody has his favourites, the idea of “books to read” for everybody seems silly for me.
Wolf, I have to confess I’m not a big fan of Russian fiction either. As others have pointed out, the emphasis seems to be on British and American novels.
I’ve read zero from this list and I plan to keep it that way!
Bob, maybe Harold Bloom should have included Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee.
That I read!
I love Harold Bloom’s books and will buy this one—he was my professor almost forty years ago—but I am disappointed not to see “The Great Gatsby” in the table of contents because I would have liked to see what Bloom would have said about it.
Joseph, you can check out what your old Prof thought of THE GREAT GATSBY here: https://www.amazon.com/Gatsby-Blooms-Modern-Critical-Interpretations/dp/1604138203
Lists are meant to be disagreed with.
Joseph, I absolutely agree with you on lists. They tend to generate disagreements. The literary CANON is always debated.