Tell me what you read and Ill tell you who you are

It's not often I get literary notes from a sunday news section whose main advertiser is Harbor Freight Tools. But there was a feature recently titled “75 best books of the past 75 years”. I was put off immediately when the only book listed for the 1940's was “A tree grows in Brooklyn”, a schmaltzy coming of age story. No 1984, The naked and the dead, Darkness at noon, not even The Fountainhead. In later decades there were some good choices but basically, this was a list of favorites from Ann Patchett. I'm sure Ms. Patchett sets out a nice plate of cookies and a fine tea service for her book club but she's not someone important like Harold Bloom. If you told me you were reading Willa Cather, Joan Didion, Donna Leon and especially George Eliot I'd say “good choices”. If you said your favorite authors were Nora Roberts, James Patterson and Salman Rushdie I would summon up my loudest John McEnroe and scream, “You cannot be serious!” If you said you read Orwell, Scott Fitzgerald, Phillip Larkin and Conrad I'd say, “You're my kind of reader.” If you astonish me with Geoff Dyer, Stoner, Erik Larson and Don DeLillo I will know you are also a protege of English Professor Alison Powell and I'd say, “That's my girl!” The poet Delmore Schwartz wrote: “The mind is like the city of London, smoky and populous”, But some minds are like Timbuktu: “Desolate and hard to reach”.