If you had five books, and only five books, that you could take on a desert island for the rest of your life, what would they be? Yale University literary critic Harold Bloom is interviewed about his picks for five most important books in this week’s Newsweek magazine. What’s not on the list: the Holy Bible and Harry Potter.
It is little surprise that Bloom was willing to give up the Bible, since the unbelieving scholar has been an advocate for a resurgent Gnosticism (a Gnosticism he sees, interestingly, in contemporary Mormonism and in the “soul competency” beliefs of Southern Baptist moderates). Bloom tells Newsweek the Bible has “gotten all mixed up with questions of belief” in this “insanely religious” nation. Shakespeare, on the other hand, Bloom says, is “the beginning, the middle and the end.”
Bloom’s list includes, in order, the complete works of Shakespeare, Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, Dante’s Divine Comedy, Cervantes’ Don Quixote, and Homer’s Iliad.
As for children’s literature, Bloom commends the two Alice books by Lewis Carroll, which he calls “the finest literary fantasies ever written.” Bloom says: “They will last forever, and the Harry Potter books are going to wind up in the rubbish bin. The first six volumes have sold, I am told, 350 million copies. I know of no larger indictment of the world’s descent into subliteracy.”
And, in case you’re wondering if Professor Bloom is sure of himself on these recommendations, I’d say he is. When asked by Newsweek to disclose an important book he’s not yet read, Bloom replies, “I cannot think of a major work I have not ingested.”
