The Book of Lost Books: An Incomplete History of All the Great Books You'll Never Read

The Book of Lost Books: An Incomplete History of All the Great Books You'll Never Read | Stuart Kelly | Odd, but interesting, topic

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The Book of Lost B...

	The Book of Lost Books: An Incomplete History of All the Great Books You'll Never Read Stuart Kelly Random House, 2006 - 368 pages average customer review:based on 8 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

In an age when deleted scenes from Adam Sandler movies are saved, it?s sobering to realize that some of the world?s greatest prose and poetry has gone missing. This witty, wry, and unique new book rectifies that wrong. Part detective story, part history lesson, part exposé, The Book of Lost Books is the first guide to literature?s what-ifs and never-weres.
In compulsively readable fashion, Stuart Kelly reveals details about tantalizing vanished works by the famous, the acclaimed, and the influential, from the time of cave drawings to the late twentieth century. Here are the true stories behind stories, poems, and plays that now exist only in imagination:

·Aristophanes? Heracles, the Stage Manager was one of the playwright?s several spoofs that disappeared.
·Love?s Labours Won may have been a sequel to Shakespeare?s Love?s Labours Lost?or was it just an alternative title for The Taming of the Shrew?
·Jane Austen?s incomplete novel Sanditon, was a critique of hypochondriacs and cures started when the author was fatally ill.
·Nikolai Gogol burned the second half of Dead Souls after a religious conversion convinced him that literature was paganism.
·Some of the thousand pages of William Burroughs?s original Naked Lunch were stolen and sold on the street by Algerian street boys.
·Sylvia Plath?s widower, Ted Hughes, claimed that the 130 pages of her second novel, perhaps based on their marriage, were lost after her death.

Whether destroyed (Socrates? versions of Aesop?s Fables), misplaced (Malcolm Lowry?s Ultramarine was pinched from his publisher?s car), interrupted by the author?s death (Robert Louis Stevenson?s Weir of Hermiston), or simply never begun (Vladimir Nabokov?s Speak, America, a second volume of his memoirs), these missing links create a history of literature for a parallel world. Civilized and satirical, erudite yet accessible, The Book of Lost Books is itself a find.

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Erudite Yet Entertaining

This is an extremely erudite look at some of the lost works of world literature, from the ancient world down to the near present. To fully appreciate some of Stuart Kelly's observations the reader ought to have been immersed in the subject for a long lifetime. Obviously very few of us have had anything like that sort of exposure, yet Kelly's work holds interest for us as well.

First, Kelly provides an interesting overview of how often things go badly wrong for an author and his works: Fires break out, wars end badly, depressions (economic and emotional) sink in, etc, etc, all of them likely to cause the loss of some or all of an author's work. Second, Kelly writes well and wittily, so that even when I had never heard of or had barely a nodding acquaintaince with an author's works before I found his stories and anecdotes captivating. This is especially useful because Kelly does not confine himself to mourning the loss of potentially great literary works, but also celebrates the fact that some evidently awful writings didn't survive. Thirdly, reading this book reminds us again of the great role chance and coincidence play in history and literature and allows us to muse on such fascinating questions as "What if that maid had found something else to start the fire with in Harriet Taylor's London drawing room on March 6, 1835?" or "What if Queen Victoria had let Charles Dickens tell her the ending of 'The Mystery of Edwin Drood' three months before his death?"

Any sort of book that inspires readers to ponder such questions is well worth the time and money!

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Odd, but interesting, topic

Reading even the first part of this book makes one wonder how the world's literature might have been different if the Great Library of Alexandria had not been burned. The loss of ancient manuscripts was incalculable, and so today we are left with a mere fraction of the writings that were preserved in that institution. This book goes much more into loss, theft, misplacement, and just sheer non-written works, from the earliest writings right until today. We read how many writings have not come down to us for one reason or another, and as avid readers, we must all mourn their disappearance. We, and the world, are much poorer for their loss.

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Staccato bits of Genius

When I read the description alone, I knew I had to read this book. Any bibliophile would also be entraced by this book about books. How pleasantly suprised I was to learn that Kelly is also a fun, breezy writer, and his style and wit, are a joy to read. However, the organization of the book, into many small sections (calling them chapters is quite generous), often turned me off. Many of these sections are just a page or two. Granted, the source material is often lacking, but I would have prefered to read more about less.

Great idea but it doesn't blossom

I say this in all sincerity: this is not an appealing book in that the author somehow forgot that people would be trying to read it. That's the best way I know how to summarize my thoughts on this one.

The objective here was to list books which have been either "lost" or they never existed to begin with. Here's an example of the latter: "The Wolf" by Frank Norris which was never written because Frank Norris died before it happened.

A "lost" book featured by Kelly is Geoffrey Chaucer's "Book of the Leoun" whereas it's stated on page 105, "...of which no copies survive". Sometimes specific reasons are offered as to why such books were lost and in some instances Kelly remains a little vague on such points.

It was clear to me that Kelly decided that a little humor, subtly conveyed, might lighten up this possibly boring subject matter. I'll confess to grinning a couple of times but I really wanted to learn about "lost books" and the witty wallpaper sort of got in the way at times -- this is primarily a reference work and I think that the author would have served his readership better if he had eliminated the humor and filled the space with more facts about lost books.

With that, I will say that I extricated some information that was useful to me but I think that Kelly has inadvertently diminished his potentially superb book with a slight mishandling of the text.

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It can get lost

I was very excited about reading this book after seeing a review in Library Journal, however, once I did get my hands on it, I was not as thrilled. Not only is it often dry and full of uninteresting facts (that almost want you to think that Kelly must be a smart guy to throw all these in there) that don't add to the book. While it is a comprehensive piece on many notable lost works, Kelly doesn't even venture to imagine how some of the lost works were lost, or even bother to explain to the reader what was lost (the chapters are organized by author only). Overall it didn't hold my interest and I was expecting the book to be as intriguing as the subject matter.

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