Comments on: Halfway There

By: Doug

Doug — Sun, 19 Dec 2004 17:55:49 +0000

Rights might be an issue, but there are books as recently published as 1999, so that might not be such a big question.

By: Michael Brooke

Michael Brooke — Sat, 18 Dec 2004 15:06:28 +0000

Given that they’re republishing the books as well, dare I suggest that there might be a strong if not overwhelming correlation between the content of the list and those titles whose rights were available?

(When I programmed repertory cinemas for a living, one of my dream projects was to put together a comprehensive month-long history of animation. I more or less achieved my ambition in the mid-1990s… but had to leave one colossally important name out altogether. Fortunately, Disney’s reputation for awkwardness and litigiousness would have been universally known by our target audience, so no-one was especially surprised!)

By: novakant

novakant — Sat, 18 Dec 2004 15:02:26 +0000

It’s always fun and not entirely fair to pick on somebody else’s canon, but this selection is very quirky, maybe deliberately so. Leaving out Thomas Mann is really a bit of a shame, since he is the most important German novelist in the 20th century and a great read. And Irving and McCullers over Updike and Bellow is also very strange.
Some friendly, if unsolicited advice: IMHO you can skip the Deutschstunde, it’s rather bland. Also I would recommend Stiller over Gantenbein.

By: Michael S.

Michael S. — Sat, 18 Dec 2004 07:48:21 +0000

For what it’s worth, when I used to listen to German radio over the internet by way of language study, I think I heard the names of Updike and Roth mentioned there about a thousand times more often than on NPR.

By: David

David — Sat, 18 Dec 2004 07:02:05 +0000

The American choices are pretty bad. No Updike, no Roth, no Bellow? How could they miss the greatest American political novel: All the King’s Men ? Instead they list John Irving!