Notes before finally blacking out

I have just finished re-reading Ursula LeGuin's The Left Hand of Darkness. It's probably the third time I've read it, with a thirty year gap between the last two readings. It's a book that's stayed with me, that I've always thought of as a great book. But reading it again I have changed my judgment. Now I consider it to be an extraordinary novel, was weeping as I finished it.

*

I got to thinking about what were my favourite novels, written during my life, or, at least, the part of it where I could consider myself to have some semblance of critical taste. Say from 1950 onwards. The list I came up with:

The Left Hand of Darkness – Ursula LeGuin
The Thief's Journal – Jean Genet
City of Night – John Rechy
The Miracle of the Rose – Umberto Eco
Man in the High Castle – Philip K. Dick
The Naked Lunch – William S. Burroughs
Dhalgren – Samuel Delany
The Shockwave Rider – John Brunner

*

What to make of it? First, that it's obvious I haven't done all that much keeping up with fiction over the intervening years; it's pretty much a sixties list. Then that seven are male, but that inequality is also a sixties thing. Five of the writers are homosexual, six if you count Burroughs. Four of the books are science fiction; if you change that term to speculative fiction, which I prefer, then six fall into the category.

*

If I move away from the specific & into bodies of work, that is, favourite writers, then added to the above - & probably removing Rechy from the list since I consider him to be a one-book wonder, but such a book that I forgive him everything since - would be Borges, Donleavy, Ballard, Kerouac, Brautigan, Pynchon, Maxine Hong Kingston, Grass, Böll, William Gibson, Robbe-Grillet, Duras, Beckett, Trocchi, Eastlake, Vonnegut, de Mandiargues, Bowles, Dürrenmatt, Zelazny. Again, such sexual inequality.

*

What does it say about me? & what, further, if I admit that none of the books listed above would make it to my strictly rationed desert island bunker. That list would probably be:

The Collected Short Stories – J.G. Ballard
The New American Poetry – (ed) Donald M. Allen
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions – Thomas S. Kuhn
The Leaves of Grass – Walt Whitman &/or
The Collected Poems – William Carlos Williams
A Personal Anthology – Jorge Luis Borges
The Complete Nevèrÿon – Samuel Delany (cheating here; 4 books in 1)
The Ascent of Man – Jakob Bronowski
The Portable Magritte

*

All those Thes.