Top Ten Older Books More People Should Read

Not sorry I'm late; I wanted to see what at least the British participants in the Long And Short Reviews link-up would list. (Why the British ones? asks a reader who has not yet drunk per coffee. Because daytime starts earlier there, so they've had a chance to post their lists.)

Excluding them from this list, I warmly second recommendations for:

Woman on the Edge of Time by Marge Piercy (recommended by Lydia Schoch)

Ring of Bright Water by Gavin Maxwell (recommended by Tanith Davenport)

1984 by George Orwell (recommended by George L. Thomas)

The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank (recommended by George L. Thomas)

The Chronicles of Narnia by C.S. Lewis (recommended by George L. Thomas)

I think our time has moved on from needing to reread Horton Hears a Who, the Seuss book with the Grinch in it, to needing to reread Yertle the Turtle. We could stand to revisit The Sneetches and The Lorax and Oh the Places You'll Go too, and somebody should be reading Hop on Pop and One Fish Two Fish Red Fish Blue Fish to every five-year-old, but what we desperately need as the Eurotrash make their plea to revive the feudal system is Yertle the Turtle. We need to reaffirm that the constitutional system of checks and balances was meant to limit the concentration of power in any individual's hands, NOT to aggravate it by setting up an "educated class" as an anointed, closed circle. 

I say this as an old-line Virginian: We need to affirm that although it's a good idea for those in power to be intelligent individuals with some education, access to positions of public leadership must be kept open to any intelligent individual who is willing to get an education--whether by having relatives who can get person into a big-name university, or by reading books from public libraries in the evenings when other laborers watch television. Yes, President Trump did abuse the privilege of issuing executive orders. So did President Obama. So did President Biden. We need to reaffirm and strengthen the requirement that important decisions be made primarily on the state level and, when on the federal level, by a consensus of elected officials from every state. We need also to affirm that elitist bigotry is (a) the root cause of most actual incidents of racist and sexist bigotry, and (b) more harmful than either, and (c) un-American, and (d) grounds for deportation of foreigners who babble about it, and (e) grounds for revoking the business license of corporations who attempt to arrogate it unto themselves. 

We need a policy like, "The Lilly corporation bribed newspapers to suppress accurate reportage about which drugs are involved in homicide-suicide cases. The Lilly corporation's, and the newspapers', right to remain in business shall be conditioned on their compensation of all survivors of homicide-suicide incidents and their front-page apologies to the said survivors, for as many days as there have been survivors and/or victims--which shall include the transfer of three-quarters of their stock to the said survivors. With due gratitude that their penalty is merely financial, as their offense was not." 

Anyone who is "educated" only far enough to claim that "the science" consists of studies funded by corporations that yield product-friendly results, and try to censor away the hard evidence that their products may be harmful, has been overeducated for per intelligence and should be publicly paraded as an example of why we must not, ever, entrust anything to an "educated class." At the very least, those who clutch their pearls and wail "But there are differences!" need to be reminded that we need morally educated leaders rather than academically educated ones, and the beginning of morality is that those who do need to be excluded from actively making decisions--very small children and the mental equivalents thereof, convicted felons, people who are completely cut off from reality--must be given priority consideration by those making decisions for them. But people who are competent to do jobs and pay taxes should be making decisions, about anything they may do that does not materially harm a complaining victim, for themselves. Nannyism, a pathological urge to make personal decisions for others, needs recognition as a major mental disorder.

The family-friendly metaphor for this type of policy is admirably told as the fable of Yertle the Turtle. So that's one of my Top Ten Older Books More People Should Read.

Should a Seuss book really be at the top of the list? Why not? Every list has to begin somewhere. This list is not final. It's a list of some twentieth century books that stand out in memory; not in the exact chronological order in which I read them, but reflecting that order. I might think of a different "top ten" on another day. Today I excluded books about religious practice, writing, knitting, music, and other interests everyone doesn't share from the list, and tried to pick books that could be valuable to anybody. 

1. Yertle the Turtle by Dr. Seuss, or alternatively, for those who need it spelled out for grown-ups,

2. The Vision of the Anointed by Thomas Sowell

3. What Are People For by Wendell Berry

4. The Last Word: On the Gentle Art of Verbal Self-Defense by Suzette Haden Elgin

5. Freedom of Simplicity by Richard J. Foster

6. How Children Learn by John Holt

7..Back to Eden by Jethro Kloss

8. The Hillary Trap by Laura Ingraham

9. The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood

10. My Year of Meats by Ruth Ozeki