preferences

It always interests me, how my views about literature differ so markedly from the scholarly consensus, especially when it comes to the issue of ranking books and writers. Maybe ranking is something that we ought not to do with literature || that's a question for another time || but we do rank literature, and it always seems like I see things differently from the experts. and ranking is the main issue. if some literary scholar - say Harold Bloom - made a list of the books and wrters that he thinks are canonical or valuable, I'm pretty much in agreement with what he writes. It's only when he, or any other scholar, starts to say X is better than Y, that I find myself disagreeing. 

I've written about some examples before....Bleak House is regarded as Dickens's best work, but I don't think so. I much prefer David Copperfield...and guess what - that was Dickens's favourite of his own novels. I've never even finished Bleak House, and I've read around 4 or so of Dickens's other long novels, and I enjoyed them enough to finish them. 

And then, with Dostoevsky, there's virtually universal agreement that The Brothers Karamazov is his best, but, again, I don't think so. I have read Karamazov, and it was pretty good, but, in my view, not as good as The Idiot or Demons (aka The Possessed). Those were powerful and passionate, but Karamazov is more philosophical. I like the fire. That's why Wuthering Heights is my favourite novel and I prefer Dostoevsky to Tolstoy. 

Another example is Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes. It's held in such high regard by the experts. It has a fairly good claim to being the first real novel, as we understand novels, (although, ironically, it can also be read as a story about a man who goes mad from reading too many of that era's equivalent of the novel - the romance....so in many ways it's a critique of the novel). Quite a few writers and scholars regard it as being not only the first novel but the best ever. Harold Bloom writes this about the book and the author: 

The combined influence of Cervantes and Shakespeare over-determines the entire course of subsequent Western literature. A fusion of Cervantes and Shakespeare produced Stendhal and Turgenev, Moby-Dick and Huckleberry Finn, Dostoevsky and Proust. (from Genius: A Mosaic of one hundred Examplary Creative Minds (2002) 

Given how highly Bloom rates Shakespeare, this is quite a statement.

I've read Don Quixote and I enjoyed it, but I didn't love it. It's not one of my all-time favourites. If my preferences matched the scholarly consensus, I think it would be one of my favourites. Same with War and Peace. I was surprised how readable War and Peace was because it's kind of a byword for long and daunting literature. It's definitely worth reading, but I probably wouldn't rate it as highly as the experts. Like Don Quixote, some people regard War and Peace as the best novel ever written, or at least in the top handful, and Leo Tolstoy is among the handful of writers that are the best of the best. 

But it's not just that my preferences differ from literary specialists. A lot of people besides the experts, prefer Tolstoy to Dostoevsky and prefer Karamazov to Dostoevsky's other novels. 

I wonder why we expect that there should be a consensus about these things. Maybe it's me...maybe most people do have views that reflect the consensus, but if the consensus was so clear and absolute, it probably wouldn't change over time, which it does. For example, most people, including literary scholars and critics, now regard Frankenstein as being one of the classics, but for a long time, it wasn't taken seriously.