Oh, it was so nice to sleep in this morning, even though one of my dreams was about the dog chewing on my arm!

Pagan got hold of READING I'VE LIKED by Clifton Fadiman. Pagan, an English major, commented on one game Fadiman played, and has given me permission to quote him and poke fun discuss. Fadiman in regular, Pagan in blue and me in red.

One of the games bibliomaniacs play in their weaker moments is the game of Century-Hencery, or literary provency. It's a harmless sport, the best of it being that there can never be a loser. Here's how it works. You list ten books you believe will be most widely read and generally admired a hundred or five-hundred or a thousand years from now. Then you defend your choices. Making the unwarrantable assumption that in 2441 our civilization will still be recognizably related to that of 1941, I will now set down ten works of literary imagination produced by the English-speaking race that I believe will be most universally alive (not merely admired in the schoolroom) five hundred years from now. Here they are, in no special order:

• The Plays of William Shakespeare
• Moby Dick
• Gulliver's Travels
• Robinson Crusoe
• Alice in Wonderland
• Huckleberry Finn
• Little Women
• A novel by Charles Dickens (probably David Copperfield or Pickwick Papers)
• Treasure Island
• The Mother Goose Rhymes

The rest is way too lengthy to quote, and as Jan wants this book anyway I won't ruin it. But I will synopsize a thesis he makes, that the world is biased, in terms of literary longevity, toward children's books. While Shakespeare and Moby Dick are not childrens' books by any means, books like Huckleberry Finn are often introduced to children even if much of content goes over their heads. For immortality, write for children: their taste changes more slowly than adults. I agree with this thesis. But it has to be a children's book with depth, with things that adults can enjoy on their level. I just reread a Winnie the Pooh collection, for instance, and laughed out loud at the various adventures.

The obvious flaw here is that this is all pre-television. And as a post-television child, I'll comment on some of the choices. Besides TV, which is the biggest literacy-killer, there's the Internet. There's no need to read through a long book when one can get immediate gratification with a couple of button-pushes.

Shakespeare, that's obvious. I never cared for it. I don't know what other people see in it. Watching the plays is infinitely less torturous than reading the plays, but I avoid either unless there's a good looking woman involved. Of course, Shakespeare IS the plays. He wasn't originally meant to be read. I've not read all the oeuvre, just the obvious suspects, like JULIUS CAESAR, HAMLET, MACBETH, ROMEO AND JULIET, LEAR, TAMING OF THE SHREW and some of the other comedies. In fact, I mentioned a couple of weeks ago that I'd not read THE TEMPEST. I've seen most of the plays, however, in various versions (I especially liked the Richard Bay puppet version of MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM!) The movies are usually fun, too. The only problem I have noticed, is that Shakespeare wrote with so many cliches! (*grin*)

Moby Dick: Oh, God, what an interminable, tiresome, dreary book. That's what I thought before I read it. I was reading on tape for visually impaired students, and one of them had MOBY DICK, so I reluctantly tackled it. It surprised me. It's FUNNY! It has puns and interesting undercurrents. I could do without the chapters about whales' biology and the catalogs of whales, but the rest of it was really enjoyable.I'm an English major, and I hate everything. Or so it seems. This is another whose value completely eludes me. I have hopes that some future generation will wake up and realize what an overrated piece of flotsom this thing really is, but I have little basis to think it'll ever happen. Oh, I think it's dead already. Most people haven't read it, and figure it's an "interminable, tiresome, dreary book."

Gulliver's Travels: Liked it, but it fits my cynical nature. I don't think children will read it--children don't read it now. The stuff children like--the part where Gulliver is tied down like King Kong, is usually followed by bitter disappointment that Gulliver doesn't get up and squish them all like the little cockroaches they are. Instead he kisses the ass of King and Crown, when he could rule, baby. No, I don't see this one hanging on in popular culture.Swift was definitely a misanthropist. I never thought this was much of a children's book, and the two books that aren't about Lilliput and Brobdignag aren't much fun. I agree that this one is probably dead already.

Robinson Crusoe: Always wanted to read it and never did. As a child I'd tried some of the classics--Gulliver's Travels (too young to appreciate the darkness in it), Don Quixote--I forget what else, and always wanted to heave them into the fireplace. And quickly grew gunshy of them, figuring it was going to be another waste of time--something where all the good stuff had already been lifted out and paraded around, but another 200 pages of crapola left between the covers, like a landmine waiting to be trod upon by an unsuspecting reader. It's the un-looked at 200 pages that I like the best. This is why I go for unabridged versions of COUNT OF MONTE CRISTO and LES MISERABLES. That said, I couldn't make it through ROBINSON CRUSOE. I liked SWISS FAMILY ROBINSON, though. (I also liked the original BOXCAR CHILDREN).

Alice In Wonderland. Skipped as a child, probably for the Don Quixote rule, but also because I never liked Carroll--I don't care for nonsense verse (or nonsense prose). I still don't. I'm guessing this is the one that'll be around 500 years from now--precisely because it's so nonsensical that it'll be open to subsequent generations. God help them. Blech. I like a lot of Carroll, the little things, but I could never really enjoy the ALICE books. It seemed to me that the author had had too many of the mushrooms! The total lack of plot was the problem. I like the characters Alice meets.

Huckleberry Finn. I tried both Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn as a kid and could not get interested in them whatsoever. My father loves Huck Finn. It's one of the only fiction titles he's ever read and may be the only one he truly enjoyed (well, he liked Sawyer too). He still remembers things from that book and he hasn't read it in half a century. But--my dad grew up in the depression, in the desert, dirt poor. I'm thinking there was a lot less distance between his world and Tom and Huck's. In my world, Tom and Huck might as well have been green men from Mars--we had nothing in common at all. I couldn't get interested in them at all. It wasn't until I was an adult that I could get anything out of them. And even then--Huck Finn is more like chemotherapy. You take it because you need it, even if your hair falls out in clumps in the process. It's a disjointed jumble of a book, written and flowing in fits and starts. I don't think Twain read over it more than once--I think he was happy to get it done and out the door.

So my verdict: it won't last as popular literature. It'll be a classroom book. Hell--it already is. I loved both these books, and most all the other Twain I've read. I read TOM SAWYER out loud to the kids when we went to Hannibal. HUCK FINN is a journey, both exterior, on the River, and interior, to realize that the slave is a person. I agree with Fadiman here. (Well, I'm working on just 100 years, since I can have no clue about 500. I intend to still be around and hopefully alert in 2041 so I can see if I'm right.)

Little Women: Never read it. Chick book. More to the point--I don't know anyone who has. Certainly not as a child. I think this one is already dead.Hey. I've read it at least three times. The first time I was about 8 but I had to stop when Beth died. (My Mom warned me.) I still cry at that part. It's a wonderful book, but I am sure you're right, that it's already dead. My own choice for this slot would be anything by Jane Austen. As "chick books" they seem to have more lasting impact.

Dickens: See my comments about Moby Dick. How is it possible that you got an English degree? TALE OF TWO CITIES is wonderful. DAVID COPPERFIELD is OK, though I prefer OLIVER TWIST. I dip into Dickens on a regular basis. I haven't read the complete ouevre here, either.

Treasure Island: destroyed by television, and I'm sure subsequent generations will find it so. I read it when I was older, and found it unbearably bad because it had been ruined by the cliches that it had created. I know that it's not really the book's fault that it's been ripped off and cliched so thoroughly, but it has. Casablanca felt the same way when I saw it the first (and only) time.

But then, I hate everything. You sure do. I read this before Disney got hold of it, and absolutely loved it.

Mother Goose: I don't have kids, I'm not around kids, and I have no idea if they're still being exposed to these things or not. I know I was, though I don't remember ever giving a tinkers damn for them. Who gives a rats ass about The Old Woman in the Shoe when I had Shel Silverstein's ABC book lying around? I think it's important to learn these, just to have a cultural context. Besides, they have good tunes with them and kids love them.

So there--I've pecked holes into everything, as I'm good at doing. But that's all true. As a somewhat recent child, I think (and hope) most of these things are a goner. English major, eh? You probably think everything should be postmodernist Pynchon. Blech.

I think Fadiman was right (within my 2041 caveat) about Shakespeare, Twain, Dickens, and (maybe) Mother Goose. I'd add Harry Potter (well, that would have to be 2100), Jane Austen, WAR AND PEACE (to take the place of MOBY DICK) and LES MISERABLES mostly because I like it so much. I can't think of two more to make ten, right now.

Comments? If you DON'T want me to quote you, please let me know, as I think this could become another entry if enough people have opinions on it.

ObGoe: James Lindgren on Bellesiles and the San Francisco Pink Pistols