Do celebrity reading lists matter?

The trouble with running a daily book site on the Internets is trying to feed the beast with new and interesting content.

An item I have seen before popped up today on my Facebook timeline, from Book Riot. 

It seems F. Scott Fitzgerald was drying out at a hospital in Asheville in 1936, and a nurse asked him what was worth reading. He dictated a list to her.

Sister Carrie: Theodore Dreiser
The Life of Jesus: Ernest Renan
A Doll’s House: Henrik Ibsen
Winesburg, Ohio: Sherwood Anderson
The Old Wives’ Tale: Arnold Bennett
The Maltese Falcon: Dashiell Hammett
The Red and the Black: Stendhal
The Short Stories of Guy De Maupassant
An Outline of Abnormal Psychology: edited by Gardner Murphy
The Stories of Anton Chekhov
The Best American Humorous Short Stories
Victory: Joseph Conrad
The Revolt of the Angels: Anatole France
The Plays of Oscar Wilde
Sanctuary: William Faulkner
Within a Budding Grove: Marcel Proust
The Guermantes Way: Marcel Proust
Swann’s Way: Marcel Proust
South Wind: Norman Douglas
The Garden Party: Katherine Mansfield
War and Peace: Leo Tolstoy
John Keats and Percy Bysshe Shelley: Complete Poetical Works

The thought came to me: why should we care what Scott Fitzgerald was good, eighty years ago? Of celebrity reading lists there are many (Brain Pickings has a big collection it re-runs periodically). Did Fitzgerald have some timeless, special insight?

The Book Riot blogger, known only as “Kath,” seemed to anticipate the issue. “[T]he list of books may surprise you, I myself haven’t heard of many of them.”

In 1936, asking someone famous for their favorite books was like asking, “What’s on your iPod?” Today.  “Simply handing over your iPod to a friend, your blind date, or the total stranger sitting next to you one the plane opens you up like a book,” Steven Levy wrote in his 2006 book, The Perfect Thing: How the iPod Shuffles Commerce, Culture, and Coolness. But for a public figure, there’s a studiedness to such revelations. The playlist- or reading list- has become an extension of one’s brand, as New York Times reporter Elizabeth Bumiller learned in 2005, when she asked President Bush what was on his.

As Jon Meacham reports it in his Steve Jobs bio, “She got a Rolling Stone editor, Joe Levy, to analyze the selections (heavy, she reported on traditional country-western artists), and he commented, ‘One thing that's interesting is that the president likes artists who don't like him.’” Meacham noted of the selections on Jobs’ personal device, that they “were those of a kid from the seventies with his heart in the sixties.”

Fitzgerald’s list is pretty conventional. With the exception of Keats and Shelley, who died in 1821 and 1822, and Stendhal (1842), the 22 authors all flourished within the previous fifty years- books Fitzgerald grew up with and a few that came out in his adult years.

The authors fall into three categories: the completely forgotten (outside specialist circles), like Katherine Mansfield, Anatole France, the collection of humorous stories (whose half life is short indeed), Gardner Murphy, De Maupassant, Norman Douglas and Ernest Renan.

Three live on because they were principally playwrights: Chekhov, Ibsen and Wilde.

The rest, most will recognize as names, but will have read nothing of their work. Dreiser, Conrad, Faulkner, Proust, Tolstoy are respected by not read; the Russian’s works get restaged once a generation as costume dramas on film.

Arnold Bennett and Sherwood Anderson were among the hotter tickets of the time; Bennett, a media celebrity, and Anderson, whose Winesburg, Ohio (1919) collection of stories influenced Fitzgerald’s contemporaries but was not, in its day, a best-seller.

Would knowing Fitzgerald liked these writers make me want to go read them? Not likely. I;e read half of them. Some were heavily anthologized in my school days. Others I was assigned in college classes, or read because I had a thing for American fiction from 1900 to 1945.

If I drew up a list for my time, it would run back to 1966. I wonder what I’d include? Do you have a must-read list, a literary iPod shuffle you share?