Wastrel’s Reviews > "Reader's Digest" Illustrated Dictionary of Essential Knowledge: Information That Everyone Needs to Know > Status Update

So, my parade of ignorance from this chapter*:

Peter Benchley - author of 'Jaws' and several other blockbuster novels. First host of the Discovery Channel's "Shark Week" (the book doesn't mention that).

Joe Orton - one of those names I vaguely recognise, but I couldn't have named any of his works (Entertaining Mr Sloane, Loot).

Nigel Molesworth - fictional character in 1950s school novels. I recognise the name, but probably only from Pratchett allusions or the like.

Harold Robbins - one of the best-selling authors of all time. Sold over 750 million copies! Of 25 bestsellers! In over 30 languages! Wikipedia quotes someone opining that he was "as much a part of the sexual and social revolution as the pill, Playboy and pot." Referenced in Star Trek (as one of the giants of literature) and Fawlty Towers. Impressively, he managed to write a dozen new novels in the 15 years after his own death. However, I've never consciously heard of the guy. Although I do very, very vaguely recognise the title of The Dream Merchants

"Sex-and-shopping novels" - novels about sex and shopping, which in the 90s apparently dominated the bestseller lists. Obviously I'm aware of the concept, but I hadn't heard that name. It suggests Judith Krantz, Shirley Conran and Jackie Collins (I've only heard of the last), and mentions the 30m-copy-selling The Valley of the Dolls as a spiritual progenitor of the modern genre.

Wild Swans - a 1990s novel of early 20th century China. It must have been pretty massive in the 90s to have made this small 'most important things in english literature ever' list by 1995. And indeed, it's sold 13 million copies and won some awards.

More generally, while I know of them, I suspect that the literary relevance of people like Thomas Keneally, Catherine Cookson and John Fowles has declined somewhat since the 90s...



*this lists aren't very good for my vanity, are they? I mean, I'd like to stress that I'm familiar with the great majority of these entries, but listing the things I DO know would take rather longer than listing what I don't, so...

Anyway, the English Literature chapter - another 30 pages (is that a coincidence? will each chapter be 30 pages?) - includes a fairly wide and mixed selection of authors, again attempting to present all the names you might be expected to recognise in polite conversation at a dinner party. These range from the ancient to the modern, and from the scholarly to the popular - although the range in the modern references is from low- to middle-brow, nothing obscure or elitist.

There's a bit of a bias toward Britain/Ireland over America - so there's Alan Bennett (as well as Arnold Bennett), Billy Liar, and JM Synge, but no John Updike. Surprisingly, no Sinclair Lewis either, despite the Nobel.

Inevitably, there's also a huge bias away from the Commonwealth - there isn't even an entry on Wole Soyinka. However, I did notice mention of Chinua Achebe and Derek Walcott, so it's not as completely white as it might have been if the list had been compiled a decade earlier...

On the other hand, 20th century women actually get quite a few mentions here - from Rebecca West and Barbara Pym down to Sue Townsend.


While I'm thinking of it, I'll go through the Nobel Laureates who wrote in English, and see who's missing...

Mentioned: Kipling; Yeats; Shaw; Eliot; Faulkner; Hemingway; Steinbeck; Bellow; Golding; Walcott; Morrison; Naipaul; Pinter; Lessing.

Missing: Tagore (now there's a nice trivia question - first Nobel Laureate for literature in English); Lewis; O'Neill; Buck; Russell and Churchill (I'm guessing they appear elsewhere in the book!); White; Soyinka; Gordimer; Munroe; Dylan; Ishiguro.

Midway: Galsworthy (no entry for him, but one for the Forsyte Saga).

So can't say they ignore non-white or non-British/Irish/American authors, per se, but there certainly seems to be a bit of a skew!

To be fair, to repeat: this isn't meant to be a list based on objective brilliance, or even literary significance. Although it's never explicitly stated, the basis of this 'dictionary' is the idea of what knowledge is 'essential', i.e. necessary in polite society. And it's reasonable to think that in the 1990s, knowledge of Morrison and Walcott was just more widespread in English society than knowlege of Soyinka and Gordimer...

That said, you'd have thought that, even without going all-out into crusading mode, they could at least have found room for the small number of Nobel laureates!

By contrast, the least meritorious entry IMO is for Vita Sackville-West. I mean no disrespect to her, but they can't even remember the name of anything they wrote, and her entry is basically just "she and her husband both had homosexual love affairs but stayed together", plus "Orlando is based on her", plus "check out her garden if you happen to be in the area, it's really nice". Does that really merit two paragraphs in a list that can't fit in dozens of major literary figures from history?

Finally: the chapter includes not just author names, but also some works, some fictional characters, and a random handful of famous lines.

Aside from arbitrariness, the biggest problem is repetition, particularly of authors and their works. Langland and Plowman both get entries; so do Bunyan and the Progress; so do Tolkien and LOTR; so do Salinger and Catcher; Thurber and Walter Mitty; and so on. I'm OK with, for example, having entries for half the plays of Shakespeare, but with authors overwhelmingly famous for one thing, do we really need entries for both novel and author? Given how many authors are missing? It takes up so much space that could be put to better use.


And one oddity I noticed myself: they find room for The Water Babies, but they don't find room to mention E Nesbitt? Huh?

Update: no, World Literature only gets 14 pages, and has to carry a bunch of genre definitions as well. To be fair, mythology has been split off into its own section.

Points of ignorance:
- The Bacchae: I knew it existed, but I had no idea what the plot was.

- Nikos Kazantzakis: I'd heard of his novels, but wouldn't have been able to tell you who wrote them.

- Jean de La Fontaine: wrote a French adaptation of Aesop. [heard the name in the context of the history of fairy tales, but didn't know what exactly he'd done]


Not sure that QUITE so much of the summary of world literature has to be Greek plays.

Interesting that in 1995, the Spanish pronunciation of 'quixote' is offered, but only as a variant form.




- Luigi Pirandello: name rings a bell, and I've heard of Six Characters in Search of an Author, but no more than that.