Building Your Library: A Covid Book Haul

Welcome back to the Maison Metropolitanist Library, a cosy digital reading space where I imagine you joining me on a rainy evening, to discuss books research, study methods, writing, and intellectual life. Today I imagine we’re sitting across the desk from each other, a fresh stack of books between us because I’m going to be going over some of the books I’ve ordered in 2020 (not all of them, this will be a growing series of book hauls so this is just my first order of books for 2020).

When I took my comprehensive exam (an exam at the Ph.D. level that tests a Ph.D. student’s knowledge of their field before advancing them to candidacy, which is when a Ph.D. student begins the final project of their Ph.D.: the dissertation) I was responsible for coming up with and reading a list of texts that consisted of 211 individual works—a modest goal in terms of the amount of literature that exists in the world but a daunting task to complete within one year, though, full transparency, of course, many of these texts a graduate student has already read as a part of their education and a part of the general literary canon. Needless to say, at the time I heavily utilized my university library as well as the New York Public library to access these texts. This year I decided to begin collecting the works I don’t own for my personal library and this week I decided to highlight my first COVID-19 book haul, show you what I’m adding to my library, and maybe inspire you to add to yours.

For those of you who are new to the Maison library, my building your library series focuses on selecting and recommending classics in order to build an enduring library, so you generally won’t find contemporary reading recommendations here. I pull a lot from my own research, and the three canons that I have formed as a comparatist working on the United States, Latin America, and France but as you can see from my current reading on instagram (The Tale of Genji) I do try to pick historical works of fiction that belong to a larger canon than purely my own research. When these works come directly from my research or relate directly to it, I discuss that, but I also discuss works that fall outside of my immediate research interests.

Finally, a note on curation. These days it can be particularly difficult to shop for classics, especially classics in translation because there are a lot of unknown publishers selling generic translations of classics because these works fall under fair use, which means the copyright has expired. This has two benefits: first, the publisher gets to collect the entirety of the profits from selling classics over 100 years old and second they do not have to go through the trouble of finding new and worthwhile fiction to publish. Many of these companies publish gorgeous covers, but as a researcher and as a teacher it’s always important to find a reliable copy rather than a pretty copy, preferably something with an informative introduction (though, for more on why I don’t recommend reading the introduction until after you have completed a text see this entry) and thorough footnotes or endnotes, particularly for older texts where the transitions and practices of the characters may be quite foreign to us as readers.

Today, because I have many books, I’m going to move through them chronologically from oldest to newest, first up is Miguel de Cervantes Don Quixote.

Moving chronologically, Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes is the oldest book I added to my collection. It was published in Spain in 1605, so at the very beginning of the seventeenth century. The edition I purchased is the Signet Classics edition, Translated by Tom Lathrop. While many people argue that officially the first novel ever written is the eleventh century classic The Tale of Genji by Mursaki Shikibu, Don Quixote is another commonly cited “first novel ever written,” and it continues to be the standard “first novel ever written” text on comprehensive exams lists, as it was for me. In the case of both The Tale of Genji and Don Quixote what makes these works interesting is that they do conform to much of what we recognize as the first novel today, but their authors were unknowingly inventing the genre so Don Quixote both is and isn’t a novel in some sense. We think of it as a novel, as the first novel, and so it is a novel in that way and an important benchmark in the tradition even when we date the novel back to Shikibu, but it also is not a novel because there was no such genre at the time and while writers today consciously know they are participating in this literary tradition, Cervantes would not have perceived himself that way. Nevertheless, he is the first novelist in the Spanish and European traditions of the novel, and one of the first novelists in the world.

Don Quixote is a parody of the “romance” genre. In fact, the entire premise of the narrative is that Don Quixote is a feudal lord but a modern feudal lord. What do I mean by that? Well, he is a feudal lord, but not like the lords and ladies of romances where, for example, the romances about Camelot aren’t constrained by realism. Rather, Don Quixote’s life does not consist of heroic adventures, instead, his occupation is to oversee agricultural production on his estate in order to feed himself, his people, and to make his living. But Don Quixote has a vice. He has shut himself up in his library, where he has read nothing but romances and convinced himself that he is, actually, a heroic knight, and must go on adventures. So, off he sets with his faithful squire, Sancho Panza, to lead the life of a knight errant. The idea that consuming fiction can cause a reader to lose all sense of reality is reflective of the moral panic around fiction during this period and into the eighteenth century. It’s a fun read, and the first novel on my comprehensive exam novel genre list, so, if you want to read like a comparative literature scholar this is typical way to start though though I’m sure Cristina Delano of @dra.delano on Instagram has her head in her hands because she writes about the outsized role Cervantes plays in representing Spanish literature and works on Peninsular mysteries so if you want to learn more about Spanish literature give her a follow.

Next in my stack is The Princess de Clèves by Madame de Lafayette, a French novel published in 1678, toward the end of the seventeenth century so we’re still in the same century. Madame de Lafayette was an aristocrat living in the Court of Louis XIV, the Sun King, though this novel was written prior to the court’s move to Versailles. I have, and am recommending, the Oxford World’s Classics edition which is translated by Terence Cave. When at a loss, the Oxford World’s Classics are always a solid choice, and the covers are gorgeous, now that I’ve collected a few it’s nice to see them lining up next to each other on my shelves looking uniform. The Princess de Clèves is considered one of the first French novels as well as the first psychological novel, which is to say the first novel to delve into the mind of its protagonist.

The Princess de Clèves pairs really well, actually, with The Tale of Genji because both are set in and detail court life. The Princess de Clèves follows the young and beautiful Mademoiselle de Chartres as she enters the court of Henri IV at the time when Mary Queen of Scots also resided in the French court, to give you some sense of temporality. The question of why Madame de Lafayette would have set her book in this particular and distant court and whether she was actually writing about the court of her own period is a persisting question. Interestingly, The Princess de Clèves (who was Mademoiselle de Chartres) along with her mother are the only two fictional characters in the story, while the rest of the characters were actually existing people with many tweaks to make the story work. This was, evidently, quite scandalous for the readers of the period, and disrupted (according to some critics at the time) the willing suspension of disbelief. There’s much to say about genre here, and like Shikibu and Cervantes before her it is clear that Madame de Lafayette was another trail blazing writer who was not afraid to defy the existing genre norms and created a work that at the time could not be categorized. For anyone interested in the historical development of the novel, whether specifically in the context of French literature, world literature, or perhaps as a writer trying to deepen your knowledge of the genre you want to write in, this is an enlightening read. Plus, in this edition there’s an additional two stories by Madame de Lafayette The Princesse de Montpensier and The Comptesse de Tende.

Published in 1851, The House of the Seven Gables usually takes second place in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s work, to The Scarlet Letter published in 1850, but it treads the familiar terrain of Salem and, like our previous texts, confronts the divergence of the novel from the romance genre. However, unlike our previous texts Hawthorne is well aware of what he is doing when he declares in the preface to The House of the Seven Gables that this is not a novel, but a romance because it will not be strictly realistic. I actually did not read any Hawthorn as a part of my comprehensive exams, though I did read The Scarlet Letter in high school. I picked up this book because I wanted to return to Hawthorne to continue expanding my knowledge of U.S. literature and to explore it as a possible text for teaching, and I’m so glad I did precisely because Hawthorne begins by consciously reflecting upon the genre he was writing in. The text is about a cursed family, the Pyncheons, who, because of the sin of their ancestor Jaffrey Pyncheon, a judge in the Salem witch trials who uses the trial as a way to enrich himself by taking another man’s land, never reach the wealth and power that was expected of their family.

Hawthorne was related to a judge of the Salem witch trials, and many view this work as a kind of reckoning with his own perception of the past and the wrongdoings of his family. The themes of the “romance” are quite timely today, considering questions of family, history, local belonging, and whose blood or bodies family “legacy” is built upon. Though, as so often isn’t true in real life, this family suffers the consequences of ill gotten gains.

Charles Baudelaire and Nathaniel Hawthorne were actually transatlantic contemporaries, and it’s hard to really decide, in a chronological ordering which volume ought to have come first, since The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays by Charles Baudelaire consists of works written at varying times, but I decided to order them thematically. Hawthorne’s work is still clearly rooted in and engaged with the establishment of the novel as a genre, whereas Baudelaire is a poet and essayist whose work is most well recognized for articulating a modern aesthetic. I already own a copy of The Painter of Modern Life, but, because Baudelaire comes up regularly in my research and writing I decided it was time to invest in the standard translation that researchers cite from which is Jonathan Mayne’s translation published by Phaidon Press. This volume is one of two books that prompted me to make the book purchase detailed in this post because I needed the English translation for an article I have since submitted (we’ll see what the outcome is). Because the article is actually on a U.S. novelist and not Baudelaire, it made more sense to go with the English translation than with the standard edition used by researchers in French. Baudelaire’s essay “The Painter of Modern Life” is probably his most well-recognized essay, and required reading for anyone working on urbanism in literature, French literature, and often is also standard reading as a part of the history of literary theory and criticism. In fact, if you have the Norton’s Anthology of Literary Theory and Criticism you can find at least excerpts of this essay if not the entire essay. Other essays in this volume include Baudelaire’s well recognized essay about Eugène Delacroix, two essays about Edgar Allen Poe who he famously admired and translated into French, amongst other works of art criticism. If you look into other volumes of Baudelaire, Jonathan Mayne is generally the translator to buy. “The Painter of Modern Life” is most recognized for its articulation of the flâneur, an urban wanderer who loses himself in the city and observation of the city.

If Baudelaire is the poet of modern life, Émile Zola was certainly the novelist of modern life. His ambitious Rougon-Macquart series was a series of novels meant to provide a sociological picture of life in the Second Empire, which is the period when Napoleon III ruled France and also the period when Baron Haussmann undertook his legendary (and not in a good way) modernization of Paris. Zola is widely considered to be the father of the realist genre of fiction and one of its greatest practitioners. His idea was to make fiction parallel, as closely as possible, quotidian human life, though, his novels are anything but quotidian and he certainly knew how to both write an entertaining novel and tell a great advertising tale about what he was trying to accomplish. Realist writing tends to be grounded in positivist assumptions about human nature, that we are more nature than nurture basically.

While this isn’t the only Zola novel I own, this is certainly the most significant for my research. Zola predates my period, but, like “The Painter of Modern Life” The Ladies Paradise (1883) is the work that any student of literature and the city is required to read, even more so if you work on French literature at all, but I would go so far as to say anyone working on modern urbanism and looking to read about it in literature should be reading this novel. The Ladies Paradise is set in a Parisian department store at the time when department stores were first appearing in urban centers. It follows working-girl Denise Baudu, who comes to Paris to begin again. While she’s working in the Paris shops her life intersects repeatedly with a character from a previous Zola novel Octave Mouret, the ambitious owner of the novel’s department store. The novel tells the story of Paris’s modernization as much as it tells the story of these two characters, and it famously has a fictional version of Baron Haussmann. It’s an incredibly entertaining novel and if I were going to recommend just one novel to get from this list (and that’s a tough call to make) this would be the one. The cover synopsis describes it as “one of Zola’s greatest novels of the modern city.” The version I’m recommending is, again, the Oxford World’s Classics edition translated by Brian Nelson and what I like about the Oxford World’s Classics editions is that they contain a wealth of secondary information like great introductions and a bibliography of noteworthy criticism on the text. Reading this novel was one of the highlights of preparing for my comprehensive exam, and I’m so excited to finally have my own physical copy. I’m particularly looking forward to reading the introduction to this version before diving back into the novel.

The final book in my order pile is Edith Wharton’s The Writing of Fiction: The Classic Guide to the Art of the Short Story and the Novel. Many of you will know that Wharton is an author I’m researching and writing about, and I wanted to get this book to take a look at the canon of literature that she would create while tracing her education as an author and crafting her advice to aspiring novelists. If you’re an aspiring novelist it’s an interesting read, and actually, you’ll find a number of the authors and texts I’ve written about today among her recommended works. Wharton was an unabashed Francophile. Of course, if you’re looking for an introduction to Wharton I would recommend reading The Age of Innocence, The Custom of the Country, or The House of Mirth though if you want an example of her naturalist writing then Ethan Frome is the go to novela, but the novels I’ve recommended are more representative of her work and also set in the city. The Age of Innocence won the Pulitzer Prize in 1921, making Wharton the first woman novelist to receive the prize, so that’s a historically noteworthy work in U.S. fiction for that reason as well. There’s no real reason to read The Writing of Fiction besides sheer personal curiosity, for research reasons, or to learn more about Wharton’s formidable knowledge of literature as she synthesizes it into writing advice (again if you’re an aspiring writer). If you’re a Wharton fan it is something you might choose to delve into, and if you’re a writer who loves reading about writers or writers on writing then it is a slim volume you can add to your collection. I have the Touchstone version published by Simon & Schuster.

So, that’s it, that’s my haul overview. As you can see, we’ll both be busy reading for a while. In the spirit of full disclosure, I’ve linked to my own bookshop.org affiliate account, so if you want to support the work you find here at Maison Metropolitanist or on The Metropolitanist ordering through my affiliate links is the only way you can currently financially contribute to this website. I encourage you to support your local bookstores, and, personally, I’m staying off Amazon so during COVID I’ve used bookshop because I want very specific versions of books and it’s tiresome to slog through various bookstore websites trying to find the exact version I want (if they even have it). I hope you’ve enjoyed the blog today, and for the comments I hope you’ll consider telling me which text, out of the ones listed here, interests you the most. Please, make yourself comfortable by the fireplace, peruse the shelves, you’ll find other entries here on Baudelaire, Wharton, reading, studying literature, what is comparative literature, and more, so, take a digital stroll through my library. Happy reading!