This evening I was watching an old Charlie Rose interview with the New Yorker film critic Anthony Lane. Lane happens to be my favorite critic and is a wonderful writer for the magazine on his off weeks—he shares the film critic role with David Denby—when he writes articles and profiles of people who interest him. Somewhere in my files I’ve kept his profiles of Patrick Leigh-Fermor and P. G. Wodehouse. Who can resist anyone who writes, about Wodehouse, “There is one short story, “Uncle Fred Flits By,” that I try not to study in depth more than once a fortnight.”
In his interview with Charlie Rose, Lane talks about the need for a film critic to know history and art and literature and popular culture; to be involved in the world; to have perspective. Lane possesses such a breadth of knowledge. It’s one reason his reviews are so much more than film reviews.
Sometimes I daydream about the fun I would have being someone else for a day or two. Anthony Lane is decidedly on my list. Mayor Bloomberg. Or, imagine the thrill being Tobias Meyer—worldwide head of contemporary art at Sotheby’s—conducting an evening sale in London. He has the distinction of selling the world’s most costly painting, a $104.2 million Picasso. When asked what he does, he answered, “I make art expensive.”
Now, what does any of this have to do with marketing? Nothing and everything. Have you ever tried to have a conversation with a young Silicon Valley entrepreneur about anything other than his latest idea? Hopeless. This is undoubtedly a generalization, but the very idea of “knowing things” in the broadest sense is a unknown concept. A former friend once reported that she overheard three young employees at Google wondering where Tonga was and deciding it was somewhere in the Caribbean. I know very intelligent Stanford grads who couldn’t identify a Californian field of columbine. Most surprising to me was one of my MBA students at USF who, on the day of the star’s death, asked, “Who’s Elizabeth Taylor?”
Maybe none of this matters. I wonder, though. I’ve worked with many companies on the development of brand campaigns. Brand campaigns are always driven by one person at a company. (I’ve written elsewhere in this blog that I believe all marketing begins with one person.) The most successful are people with broad experience and an all-encompassing worldview. People who know psychology and history and music and symbols; who have a cultural frame of reference in which to think about themselves and the brand they want to establish. Brands don’t live in isolation of the world around them. Clients who believe that a brand is its advertising miss the point entirely.
The top branding experience I’ve had was working with the management at Philips on a new global brand campaign, based, ironically, on their dull as dishwater tagline “Let’s Make Things Better.” The reason it was great was because the initiative was led by two exceptionally intelligent, well read, cultured individuals: Gerard Dufour and Kevin Greene. When Kevin, head of global advertising, came to brief the agency he had no deck, no PowerPoint, no strategy hand-out (that came later once the higher goal was communicated.) What he had was a reel of TV commercials: ten of the world’s best commercials in his opinion. They were from many different categories and times. Each was outstanding. He simply said, “I want that. I want a commercial on that reel. I want you to make Philips famous.” The process to get there was the most informed, intellectual route imaginable—interspersed with dinner conversation about Mikhail Bulgakov’s great novel The Master and Margarita, or a detailed history of Scottish single malt makers. Kevin’s colorful, half-Spanish-half-French boss Gerald Dufour, head of global marketing at Philips, only added to this unconventional route to produce an advertising campaign. At the time, Gerald’s best friend was the Russian conductor Valery Gergiev, the director of the Mariinsky Theatre and the principal conductor of the London Symphony Orchestra. Gerald and Valery took us to a production of Boris Godunov at the Met. When Gerald evaluated music for a commercial, he knew what he was doing. Too often, I hear clients say things like, “I’m not loving it…” Gee, that’s helpful: as though it has anything to do with an assistant brand manager’s personal taste.
Speaking of music and advertising, when I led global brand advertising for Fujitsu, our senior client, the head of Corporate Advertising, was Yasuo Sangu. Sangu-san was a remarkable man, not least because he was also the founder and president of the Frank Sinatra Society of Japan! Not only did he know every imaginable detail about Sinatra and his music—he had an entire room in his house devoted to Sinatra with thousands of recordings—but he was a world expert on jazz. When recording music for a commercial, Sangu-san would request specific musicians for each instrumental role. Many, many times he would call from Tokyo saying, “I see there’s going to be a special on PBS tomorrow night in New York of a 1950’s Sinatra/Garland concert. Could you tape it and send it to me please.”
We learn things by way of many pathways. Our parents and families; school; travel; museums; work. Being in the street. Listening to music. Looking at everything with a sense of wonder. Being open to all that’s new, that’s different. And reading.
I’ve been extraordinarily lucky in all of the above, both in having so many advantages presented and taking advantage of all of them. Reading, however, is available to everyone.
Among the very well read, I’m in the minor leagues. (You might say Susan Sontag headed the Majors.) Yet, reading has been a constant in my life since a small child. How I look at the world largely has been informed by what I’ve read. The single most moving and consequential course I had at Bowdoin was Literature as Philosophy, taught by the eccentric and brilliant philosopher C. Douglas McGee. (Doug and his wife Phoebe became life-long friends.) What the course and Professor McGee gave me was the profound understanding that a novel could be more than a novel: it could be a framework for living, for viewing the world in a larger way, for deeper insight into the human soul. The books we read and discussed are the touchstones to the way I think and the foundation to the idea I have that there are certain books that help to make us civilized.
So I’ve created a list of the books that have been most meaningful to me. This is obviously a highly personal list. It reflects my own preferences and life experience. It’s clearly the list of an American. There are “great” books on the list, as well as not so great but wonderful to me. I’ve read all of them–some many times. A Confederacy of Dunces I’ve read more than ten times, to date–every time I feel sad and low. It cheers me up immensely. (Based on the number of times I’ve read it, I guess those feelings have been too frequent.) Patrick Leigh-Fermor’s A Time of Gifts is maybe my favorite book. The Iliad is the start of it all for me. I’m reading two new translations right now. There are parts that no matter how many times I read them I always cry: Priam’s plea to Achilles for the body of his son Hector; Hector’s farewell to his wife and son. What father could not be brought to tears by these passages?
Jules Henry’s Pathways to Madness is perhaps the most important book–for me–that I’ve read. Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita my favorite novel (although that’s a hard one…Henry James’s The Ambassadors is a very close second.) Over this past summer I reread Brideshead Revisited four times because it’s the saddest, most nostalgic novel I know and it suited my heart-broken mood, unfortunately. (Even though a crusty Bowdoin English professor called it the best of 2nd rate novels.) Haruki Murakami is my favorite contemporary novelist…no, wait, that would be W. G. Sebald, but he died in a car accident ten years ago so maybe he doesn’t count as contemporary.
Then there are also terrific one-off reads that pop up—but don’t make the list– like last year’s biography of Cleopatra by Stacey Schiff. Or best sellers I refused to read, and then did, and was happily surprised by how good they were, like Alice Sebold’s The Lovely Bones. Or Stephen King (everyone should read his On Writing.)
Clearly no one else on earth would select this list of books. I used to think if anyone else ever read all these books they would be a civilized person, just like me. But then I realized they would simply be a lot like me, and who would want to be that. No equation with civilized. Maybe well-read, but hardly civilized. One can be illiterate and civilized.
So here they are. My plan was to select 100, but as usual that too-limited plan was abandoned, so now I label the list 100+ Books.
100+ Books
A Personal Selection
Niland Mortimer
Homer-Iliad
Homer-Odyssey
Euripides-Medea, The Trojan Women
Plato-The Republic, The Symposium
Aristotle-Poetics
Aristophanes-The Frogs
Sophocles-Oedipus the King
Virgil-The Aeneid
Beowulf
William Shakespeare-Plays, Sonnets
John Milton—Paradise Lost
W.B.Yeats—Collected Poems
Henry Fielding—Tom Jones
James Boswell—Life of Samuel Johnson
Virginia Woolf-To the Lighthouse
Samuel Beckett-Waiting for Godot
Dante-Divine Comedy
Chaucer-The Canterbury Tales
Walt Whitman—Leaves of Grass
Henry James-The Ambassadors
Henry James-The Golden Bowl
William James-Varieties of Religious Experience
E. M. Forster-A Passage to India, Howards End
Patrick Leigh-Fermor-A Time of Gifts, Between the Woods and Water, Mani
Charles Dickens-Bleak House, Pickwick Papers
Jane Austen-Pride and Prejudice
Emily Bronte-Wuthering Heights
William Wordsworth; John Keats; S. T. Coleridge—all of it.
Thomas Mann-The Magic Mountain
Thomas Mann-Dr. Faustus
Joseph Conrad-Heart of Darkness, Victory
George Santayana-The Last Puritan
Herman Melville-Moby Dick
Melville-Billy Budd
Nathaniel Hawthorne-The Scarlet Letter, stories
T. Nansen-Farthest North
Bible-Old Testament (only)
Fernand Braudel—The Mediterranean
Ivan Turgenev-Home of the Gentry, Fathers and Sons
D.H. Lawrence -Women in Love
Gustav Flaubert-Madame Bovary
Leo Tolstoy-War and Peace
Dostoyevsky-Crime and Punishment
Dostoyevsky-The Brothers Karamazov
Montaigne-Essays
H. D. Thoreau–Walden
R. W. Emerson–Essays
T.S. Elliott-The Waste Land, Four Quartets
George Meredith-The Egoist, Modern Love
Cervantes-Don Quixote
Yukio Mishima-The Sea of Fertility
Colin Thubron-Shadow of the Silk Road
Lawrence Durrell-Bitter Lemons, The Alexandria Quartet
Marcel Proust-Remembrance of Things Past
John Swain-River of Time
James Joyce-Ulysses, Dubliners
DeToqueville-Democracy in America, The Old Regime and the Revolution
W.G. Sebald-Emigrants, The Rings of Saturn
George Elliott-Middlemarch
Jan Morris—Trieste and the Meaning of Nowhere, Venice
H.V.Morton, In Search of London
Nicolas Bouvier, The Way of the World
Stephen Hawking-A Brief History of Time
Flannery O’Connor—Collected Stories
Eudora Welty-Collected Stories, Losing Battles
George Orwell-1984
Mary Lavin—Collected Stories
William Faulkner-The Sound and the Fury
Haruki Murakami—The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, Kafka on the Shore, 1Q84
Yasunari Kawabata—The Master of Go
Charles Darwin-The Origin of Species
Sigmund Freud-Civilization and its Discontents
James Fraser-The Golden Bough
F. Scott Fitzgerald-The Great Gatsby
V.S. Naipaul—In A Free State
Harold Acton—The Bourbons of Naples
Balzac—The Human Comedy—yes, all of it.
J.R.R.Tolkien-The Lord of the Rings
Mikhail Bulgakov-The Master and Margarita
Lampedusa-The Leopard
Marquez-One Hundred Years of Solitude
Antoine de Saint-Exupery-Wind, Sand and Stars
Ernest Hemingway-A Farewell to Arms, For Whom the Bell Tolls
Thomas Wolfe-Look Homeward, Angel
Descartes-Meditations on First Philosophy
Hume-A Treatise of Human Nature
Jung-Psychological Types
Locke-An Essay Concerning Human Understanding
Hobbes-Leviathan
Jules Henry-Pathways to Madness
Willa Cather-The Song of the Lark, My Antonia
John Updike-Rabbit Angstrom novels
M.F.K. Fisher-Two Towns in Provence
Iris Origo-War in the Val D’Orcia
Albert Camus-The Stranger
Jules Henry-Pathways to Madness
Marguerite Yourcenar-Memoirs of Hadrian
Mark Twain-Huckleberry Finn, Innocents Abroad
Robert Byron-The Road to Oxiana
Tatiana Metternich-Tatiana
Marie Vassilchikov-Berlin Diaries
Gunter Grass—The Tim Drum
Waverly Root, The Food of Italy, The Food of France
Toole, J.K.-The Confederacy of Dunces
V. Nabokov-Speak, Memory, Lolita
Maurice O’Sullivan—Twenty Years A-Growing
Norman Lewis—Voices of the Old Sea
Rebecca West-Black Lamb and Gray Falcon
Wallace Stevens—Collected Poems
Barbara Grizutti Harrison-Italian Days
Tim O’Brien-The Things They Carried
Stephen King-Carrie
John Steinbeck—The Grapes of Wrath
Thorton Wilder—Our Town
J.D. Salinger—The Catcher in the Rye
Ford Maddox Ford-The Good Soldier
Somerville & Ross—Experiences of an Irish R.M.
John Synge—The Playboy of the Western World
Sherwood Anderson-Many Marriages, Collected Stories
C.V. Cavafy-Collected Poems
Mikhail Lermontov-A Hero of Our Time
Claude Levi-Strauss—Triste Tropiques
Kenneth Clark-Civilisation
Evelyn Waugh-Brideshead Revisited
Oliver Statler-Japanese Inn, Japanese Pilgrimage
Barbara Pym-A Few Green Leaves
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe—The Sufferings of Young Werther
Henrik Ibsen—Hedda Gabler, A Doll’s House, Ghosts
Guy Davenport-Tatlin
Edmund de Waal—The Hare with Amber Eyes
Michel Houellebecq—The Map and the Territory
Peter Carey—The True History of the Kelly Gang
A. B. Facey—A Fortunate Life
Simon Schama—Landscape and Memory, Citizens
Jane Jacobs—The Death and Life of Great American Cities
Bill Wilson—AA Big Book
Wallace Stegner—Crossing to Safety
J. M. Synge—The Playboy of the Western World
Henry Beston—The Outermost House
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