The Book Of Lost Books: An Incomplete History Of All The Great Books You'll Never Read (2006) - Plot & Excerpts
Jeez, I just checked on the pub date for this book. 2006. Opps. I didn't think it was that long ago.Let me explain the opps. It relates to the book, so it's all good and relevant. Sometime in 2006 this book showed up in the store. Maybe it sold a few copies, maybe it didn't. I don't know. But even if it sold a couple inevitably after a few months the people who sign my paychecks and Random House said, "Hey, we don't need to keep this book in the stores anymore, send them home." Of course I said, No. This book looks interesting. This is the sort of book that booknerds will want to read, some bookish soul will be looking through the Literary Theory section and be joyed by this book. They will buy it! They didn't. Then I thought, some bookish type will be looking through the Literature Studies section (because we changed the name of the section for reasons I can't begin to understand, although I'm sure that a committee was formed and many people who make more than me sat around and thought should we change the name, and probably after quite some time it came to pass and someone on that committee probably felt like they had worked really hard for that paycheck), and they will be interested in this book. I even had the book faced out, and sometimes on a table. But still no one bought it. And I held on to it. Finally attrition and the realization that I had more important battles ahead of me to fight in the Quixotic war against the bland hegemony of corporate dictates, I let go of some of my old friends, the interesting but unselling books in some of the sort of obscure sections I'm the custodian of. You people had your chance to find this book on the shelf, you've failed me and now I will have to make room for newer books. Before getting rid of all three copies of the book I decided that I'd read one of those copies. The book had looked interesting to me in the past, and sometimes when I saw it I'd think, I should read this. On the surface this book looks wonderful. It's a book about books that we will never be able to read. The lost books. The ones burned in infamous conflagrations like the one(s) in Alexandria, and the ones in destroyed in private by their frustrated creators and by surviving loved ones who for various reasons didn't want particular works to be seen by the public. Books that were imagined, planned and never actually written by famous authors. Books that we do have but only in half-finished copies with no idea where the author would have taken the story. Books that were manuscripts that happened to get stolen, misplaced, destroyed in natural disasters or hidden for safe keeping under the ground and now live underneath a modern German housing development. Isn't this the kind of things that nerdish fans of things love? Don't these artifacts do something for a certain type of person more than the readily available legitimate releases? Aren't there certain authors who maybe I haven't read all their work, but if a mysterious 'lost' book appeared I'd want to read it asap even though I'm not tripping over myself to finish their oeuvre (for me, a lost Kafka story surfacing, would move right to the top of my must-read-now list, but for about fifteen years I've been ho hum about reading Amerika). In musical terms I think that this book appeals to the same type of people who salivate at the idea of more bootleg or basement tapes of Bob Dylan appearing (even if maybe it's just a recording of Dylan burping and farting the melody of "Like a Rolling Stone") than a new album being released. Unfortunately the book doesn't quite live up to what I wanted or what I thought was being promised by the book. The book does do a good job of showing what the lost books from a whole slew of authors are, but there is also just too much biographical detail given about some of the authors. More lost books, less talk, please! Sometimes the chapters on an author are about the tantalizing clues about what these books would really be like, other times they are mini-bios and description of the author's work with some mention at the end that there was supposed to be another book or two that the author would have written if he or she had lived long enough. Sometimes the lost books are more just the un-realized ideas of an author, which I'm not sure if actually correspond to a lost book. Can a book be lost if it were never really written? If I became a famous writer one day and someone could go through my emails where I mention ideas that I've thought of to friends, and maybe wrote a few pages of before growing bored with the idea is that a lost book or just a shitty idea, or yet another example of laziness and a general unfocused approach to things? Or is something like Pound's Cantos a lost book because he never finished it? Could it have ever been finished? I liked the book, and found many interesting things in it, but as the scope of the book moved from the ancient world to more modern writers my attention was starting to wane. The ancient world is full of lost books, and it's interesting (to me) to hear about what the great Greek playwrights had written that didn't survive, or the authors mentioned in ancient works whose entire corpus is lost to us. Maybe it's because I don't know that much about some of these people that I thought this part of the book was stronger. As the book moved through the centuries the authors became more familiar to me, and generally the lost books were more often works that authors destroyed themselves after early responses were poor, or just things they never got around to writing or finishing. For every Burton or Byron who had their works destroyed there are more Dickens and Austen types who just happened to succumb to mortality before they could finish what they started. Which it's interesting to point out these things, and I mean that, almost every chapter has some interesting things in it, but the book kind of turned into more a collection of little biographies, generally of writers that I already had little biographies about in my head. Except for a handful of authors and the minor English poets presented a lot of the material in the last third of the books wasn't that new, except sometimes for what the works were that never happened, but these tantalizing bits were just part of a short bit about an authors life. I can see why this book didn't make it. I think that Random House should have released this as a paperback, as a hardcover there is a kind of steep price for the sort of sale this book depends on. At least for me, little curio type books are much more likely to be gotten if they are around fifteen dollars than twenty-five. A couple of things that made me laugh, because I'm immature:By tradition Sappho's husband is asserted to be name Cercylas of Andros, which apparently translates to Mr. Cock from Mansville. I won't even bother to add a joke about Karen here.One of the playwright Menander's favorite plots could be summarized as "Whoops! I raped someone last night." Yes, this might be misogynistic, but I think this is a classical tradition that should be revitalized into romantic comedies by Hollywood.
This is a book to be savored. Anyone who loves literature, and especially anyone who collects books, will be fascinated by this look at so many works that are lost to the world. Some were lost over the centuries, such has Homer's epic comedy The Margites. Some were destroyed by their authors, such as parts II and III of Gogol's Dead Souls. Some were left unfinished due to the author's death, like Dickens' The Mystery of Edwin Drood. Some could never be finished, such as Leibniz's Universal Encyclopedia. Some were destroyed by accident, like the first draft of Carlyle's History of the French Revolution which was mistaken for scrap paper and burned in a fireplace. Some were physically lost like all of Hemingway's early writing which vanished in a misplaced suitcase during a trip to Switzerland.Although it is sad to think of so much lost literature, I choose to be optimistic about it. Like the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Nag Hammadi Library, some of these treasures may be waiting to be rediscovered. In some air tight jar in the Egyptian desert the lost plays of Sophocles may be waiting for us. In the ruins of a Medieval monastery there may be copies of the lost works of Aristotle. In some long forgotten London basement, buried under piles of paper, there may be a copy of Shakespeare's Love's Labour's Won. Somewhere in the archives of the KGB the lost manuscript of Bruno Schulz's The Messiah is stored away and someday someone is going to find it.
What do You think about The Book Of Lost Books: An Incomplete History Of All The Great Books You'll Never Read (2006)?
An interesting idea, imperfectly executed. There is a heavy emphasis on ancient Greek writers, so much so that Chaucer, who is one of the first writers you study in a survey English lit course, doesn't appear until a full third of the way in. Jane Austen is 70% in, Hemingway is 94%.Kelly also lumps in several different kinds of "lost" books. To my mind, a book that definitely existed but all copies have been destroyed or lost to time is different from a book that was left unfinished when the author died, which is also different than an idea an author had but never wrote about at all. The latter two are not so much "lost" as they are nonexistent.Other critiques: Too much reliance on long block quotations. Stuart Kelly liked his Word of the Day calendar a little too much. And I would have like one line under the author's name listing the lost work(s) to be discussed.Of course, like Kelly, I smile to imagine a library of the afterlife where all of these books sit on a shelf. Maybe dying wouldn't be so bad if you got to read three new Shakespeare plays and two new Austen novels on the other side.(Note: How did Edith Wharton's "The Buccaneers" get left out?)
—Rachel C.
For those who, like me, love books and anything to do with books you will find this book really interesting. Many of the authors you will have heard of such as Homer, Ernest Hemingway, Sylvia Plath, Dante, Dylan Thomas, Shakespeare, Flaubert etc, but many others were completely new to me. It amazes me how many books were burnt, not only by the writers themselves, but by their heirs as requested in their wills. Why would anyone spend their life writing and then want every scrap of it burnt. The book also gives a brief overview of the writers lives and this was fascinating. I have given the book 4 stars rather than 5 as some of the chapters were very short and were only saying the author had thought about writing a book. That may be the case but that part of it didn't make particularly interesting reading. The rest, however, I feel more than made up for this. Would definitely recommend if you like reading about books
—Wendy Jones
Some books—although I'm not likely to remember them for very long—are at least fun while reading them.This, on the other hand, was neither memorable nor fun.It was not engaging. It was not amusing. And the writing, at times, reeked of the author trying way too hard to be sly. Humanist authors assign to this bishop (or not) a singular work, to wit, his history of all things past and upcoming, which diachronously charts, from birth and youth to coffin and tomb, a living individual's span. An ambitious topic by most author's standards, but our Latin wordsmith flung on his opus an astonishing contstraint, viz., that in turn, from A at first to Z last, his books would forgo a customary graphic sign for a sound, cyclically; thus it was similar in its plan to that of Tryphiodorus, who, in his account of Calypso's wily inamorato, had to miss out glyphs in a chain or, to put it simply (in contrast to this paragraph), his triumph (in common with this paragraph) was a lipogram.Good gravy, what is going on up there?(And no, I don't even care that it was purposefully written that way for effect.)Didn't enjoy it. Didn't learn from it.Blegh.
—Krystle
