Customer Reviews

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

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Frankly, I'm amazed that this is Stuart Kelly's first book. He brings such an assured and confident voice to this project, one would think he's been crafting humorous treatises for years. As advertised, THE BOOK OF LOST BOOKS is a look at the works of notable authors that have been lost, destroyed, or never completed over the course of history.

Written in a dense and skittering style, Stuart has a flair for the turned phrase ("young [John] Milton could hit, but not hold, the notes") and a wicked sense of humor. While this book is chock-full of pathos, Stuart's wit keeps matters lively. Particularly enjoyable are Stuart's creative vocabulary choices ("a cack-handed servant") and historical facts. (For example, I had no idea that in the 200s BCE, an attempt was made to purge Confucian thought from China. Massive book burnings occurred, and 260 Confucian scholars were buried alive so that they could not reconstruct the books from memory.)

Organized into short chapters, Stuart begins with the dawn of written language, and he is in no hurry; by the time he gets to the 20th century, there are only a few dozen pages left in this extraordinary book. I look forward to Stuart Kelly's next project; THE BOOK OF LOST BOOKS is a complete success.

SIDELIGHT: I've subsequently heard Kelly state in an interview that he had only one copy of this book on his laptop. After sending the electronic files to the publisher, his laptop was stolen; thus his own book very nearly joined the distinguished company it was devoted to.

This is a great idea for a book. It is another book of books, but this one about books written and lost, or about books planned and never written, or about books partly written and never made really into books. This sounds very much like an idea from Borges.
This is a short list of the 'lost works' he writes about as given by Michiko Kakutani in the NYT.
"Homer's "Margites," a humorous epic about a fool, who, in Plato's words, "knew many things, but all badly"; the Arthurian epics contemplated by both Dryden and Milton but never written; Laurence Sterne's never completed "Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy," which concludes with one of the most famous unfinished sentences in literary history ("So that when I stretch'd out my hand, I caught hold of the Fille de Chambre's -") ; Lord Byron's supposedly explosive "Memoirs," which his publisher, executor and biographer had burned because, as one critic put it, they were "fit only for the brothel and would have damned" the poet "to everlasting infamy"; the novel, provisionally titled "Double Exposure" or "Double Take," that Sylvia Plath was reportedly working on before her suicide in 1963."

The work of course centers on those great names of world- literature from whom 'losses' might be missed. But I imagine another different kind of book might be written about all the great masterpieces never published, or never made known to the world. The problem is that no one knows what these are, except of course their own real or imaginary writers.

Kelly also writes of might- have- been - lost works, Pope's 'Dunciad' and most notably the work of Kafka which Kafka himself willed to the flames They were saved only because of the good judgment and loyalty of his great friend Max Brod.
Kelly in opening up worlds of literature which have been lost in a way shakes up our sense of the 'inherent rightness' of the Literary Canon. He gives a sense in a sense of the contingency of all Literary Greatness, of what is and might not have been, and what might have been and is not.
But he also provides a work rich in literary anecdote and story, which all lovers of books will find thought- provoking and enjoying.

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!

I really looked forward to this book after reading a review in the NY Times. However when I started to read it I became instantly bored. Although I was familiar with the majority of authors that Kelly covers I could not keep up with all the details he provides about their lives and the literature the wrote and was lost.

The chapters or sections are short which is good and he covers many people. I think if you really love or appreciate classical literature then this would be a good book for you. It just wasn't my cup of tea.

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.

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.

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.

Good: I really liked this book. It is fascinating how much we've lost from our past and amazing how much we've managed to retain. I can highly recommend this one to anyone with an interest in the history of literature.

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.