Doctor Scratch wrote:Lol. No, no: I'm right on this one, Dr. Peterson. *Both* lists are by Quindlen (save the very last one, and the first one, by Somerset Maugham). Here, check it out, cut-and-pasted straight from the article:
Lists abound: Here is a list, recently published by Orem, Utah Public Library:
Orem Library's Best
"Ten big, thick wonderful books as recommended by Anna Quindlen":
I guess you're the one who botched the reading this time around. What an embarrassing mistake!
Oh, let me tell you: I'm mortified beyond words.
But let's see:
Lists abound: Here is a list, recently published by Orem, Utah Public Library:
Orem Library's Best
"Ten big, thick wonderful books as recommended by Anna Quindlen":
[1] Gone With the Wind, Margaret Mitchell;
[2] Vanity Fair, William Makepeace Thackeray [one of my all-time favorites]
[3] East of Eden, John Steinbeck
[4] The Forsyte Saga, John Galsworthy
[5] Buddenbrooks, Thomas Mann [another of my all-time favorites]
[6] Can You Forgive Her? Anthony Trollope [his Barchester novels are all wonderful!]
[7] Sophie's Choice, William Styron
[8] Underworld, Don DeLillo
[9] Lonesome Dove, Larry McMurtry
It is as good a list as any to begin a reading list for the rest of 2001. Though here is another interesting list:
The Ten Books One Would Save in a Fire (If One Could Save Only Ten)*
[1]Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen
[2]Bleak House, Charles Dickens
[3]Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoi
[4]The Sound and the Fury, William Faulkner
[5]The Golden Notebook, Doris Lessing
[6]Middlemarch, George Eliot
[7]Sons and Lovers, D.H. Lawrence
[8]The Collected Poems of W.B. Yeats
[9]The Collected Plays of William Shakespeare
[10]The House of Mirth, Edith Wharton
*from Anna Quindlen, in A Passion for Books, edited by Rabinowitz and Kaplan, 1999, p. 173.
Please note the words that I've bolded, and the bolded numbers that I've inserted.
The second list is indeed a list of
ten big books, and it's definitely from Anna Quindlen. The first list, however, is a list of
nine books. And it may or may not be from Anna Quindlen.
Be that as it may -- I grant that it's ambiguous -- it does nothing, really, to advance your cause. You and Karl would like to suggest that Mormons would find
Sophie's Choice too scary to teach at BYU or to recommend. Yet Richard Cracroft, a Mormon academic writing to a Mormon audience, clearly recommends it. That he does so by citing a list compiled by the probably-Mormon librarians at the Orem Public Library goes no distance at all toward demonstrating that Mormons would find it too "edgy" for what you want to depict as their little provincial minds. Nor does it matter a whit whether the Mormon Dr. Cracroft and the probably-Mormon librarians at the Orem Public Library are endorsing it as part of a list of recommendations by Anna Quindlen.
They're still endorsing it in either case.Doctor Scratch wrote:Yes; of course it's "all right" to read The Canterbury Tales. Who on earth would ever doubt that it is? The Brethren, maybe? Or folks who are accustomed to obeying them?
It was the work of a Google second to locate a citation of the
Canterbury Tales in General Conference, by Jeffrey Holland:
http://www.LDS.org/ldsorg/v/index.jsp?h ... 82620aRCRDAnd this recommendation of the
Canterbury Tales in the September 1971
Ensign:
http://www.LDS.org/ldsorg/v/index.jsp?h ... 82620aRCRDAnd this citation of the
Canterbury Tales in the February 1974
New Era:
http://www.LDS.org/ldsorg/v/index.jsp?h ... 82620aRCRDSo. Mormons would be scared of
Sophie's Choice? Nope. Wrong.
And the Brethren would never countenance the
Canterbury Tales? Nope. Wrong
again.Scratch thinks in terms of hostile stereotypes that aren't supported by the facts? Yep. All too true. He just makes things up.