Donald Barthelme's Reading List

This is probably old news to a lot of people, but The Believer has an article (from 2003) called DONALD BARTHELME’S SYLLABUS: A NON-READER PURSUES A LITERARY EDUCATION ARMED WITH NOTHING BUT THE DON’S TOP EIGHTY-ONE. It's quite diverting: the list itself, as well as Kevin Moffett's account of his experience tackling it. I get the feeling that Barthelme deliberately included quite a few obscure titles, ones that are no doubt useful to read, however. I guess I'm referring to Gogol's Wife by Tommaso Landolfi, Tragic Magic (which is awesome) by Wesley Brown, The Palm-Wine Drunkard by Amos Tutola, and The Oranging of America by Max Apple. DFW mentions Max Apple in his essay on TV and US fiction, I believe. Barthelme also tried to represent a range of styles on his list. Writers (at first glance) far removed from him in terms of aesthetic make the cut: Saul Bellow, Anne Beattie, Bernard Malamud, John Updike, John Cheever, Ray Carver. Postmodern cohorts of his who are represented include: John Barth, William Gass, Thomas Pynchon, and John Hawkes. William Gaddis and Robert Coover don't make the list, oddly enough.

Last summer I tracked down the ten shortest books on the list and tried to read one per day. I made it five days before burning myself out. I've been proceeding more slowly since then. I plan to finish the list, because it consists of the recommendations of one of my favorite authors, but there are so many other books I need to read.

From an article by John Barth in the NYT: "He [Donald Barthelme] then produced for the seminar his 'short list': five books he recommended to the attention of aspiring American fiction writers. No doubt the list changed from time to time; just then it consisted of Rabelais's Gargantua and Pantagruel, Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy, the stories of Heinrich von Kleist, Flaubert's Bouvard and Pecuchet and Flann O'Brien's At Swim-Two-Birds - a fair sample of the kind of nonlinear narration, sportive form and cohabitation of radical fantasy with quotidian detail that mark his own fiction. He readily admired other, more 'traditional' writers, but it is from the likes of these that he felt his genealogical descent."