Number One on his list:Moby-Dick by Herman MelvilleRead about all ten titles on Hoare's list.
First published in London in 1851 (in order to register its copyright in America), Melville's book mystified his British editor, who simply cut out parts he found immoral or blasphemous. Melville's madly digressive book - 135 chapters of everything you ever wanted to know about whales, and a lot you probably didn't - never sold out its first edition. The book languished until the 1920s when DH Lawrence, WH Auden and Virginia Woolf acclaimed it as a modernist text before its time. In Melville's metaphysical prose, the hunted whale becomes a numinous, immortal animal, an overarching symbol for his time, and our own.
--Marshal Zeringue
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