Fun with superlatives

I can't think of a superlative for Remarkable Reads: 34 Writers and Their Adventures in Reading, edited by J. Peder Zane. This book, however, is all about superlatives. Bebe Moore Campbell writes about the most memorable book she has read, Frederick Busch writes about the most dangerous book he has read, Robert Morgan about the wisest, Charles Frazier about the most tempting, Lee Smith about the most luminous, and so on.

The chosen books are fascinating, as are the superlatives and the essays explaining how those particular superlatives apply to those particular books. Many of the books are classics, or at least books you are likely to have heard about. Among these are E.M. Forster's Howards End, Doris Lessing's The Golden Notebook, J.D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye and Boris Pasternak's Doctor Zhivago. Other books may be new to most readers, such as The Tarahumara by Antonin Artaud and  Confessions of Zeno by Italo Svevo.

The superlatives don't always mean what you might think they mean. When Eric Wright calls Howards End the classiest book he has read, what he refers to is the novel's focus on the British class system of the time. Perhaps the most interesting thing Wright has to say is his observation that all the great children's books by British writers, from The Wind in the Willows to the Winnie-the-Pooh stories, were written by middle-class writers for middle-class children. All those references to nannies, cooks and housemaids meant little to children in lower classes. (Of course,  they mean little to today's middle-class children, but those children still love the stories.)

Possibly the book's best essay (there's my superlative) is the one in which Nasdijj describes To Tame a Land by Louis L'Amour as the saddest book he has read. He doesn't mean he shed any tears while reading it. Rather he means the novel is what he terms "cow manure." Nasdijj has worked as a cowboy and knows something of the history of the West, and this novel, he says, "kills even the shadow of truth." It describes "a picture of a place that never was and a time that never happened." He says he and other modern cowboys would sit around campfires at night and make fun of Louis L'Amour novels. That is sad.