The 306 Greatest Books #168 - The Complete Tales by Edgar Allan Poe

The next up on my reading of the 306 greatest books is The Complete Tales by Edgar Allan Poe. The book can be found on the Norwegian Book List.

Taking me almost exactly two years to finish, The Complete Stories by Edgar Allan Poe was the version of the book I chose to read for this list. It is listed as The Complete Tales and therefore I assumed The Complete Stories would work. I collect the Everyman's Library of books and the version they had only included the short stories and none of the poems. Still, at over 950 quite dense pages and 68 stories, it took a while to work through. That, and Poe's writing style was a bit more, verbose, than I was expecting. Of the 68 stories, I had actually only heard of, and read, three or four of them, with most remaining a complete mystery to me. The book is arranged chronologically and this is both a help, because you can see how his writing style evolved over time, but also a hindrance because in the beginning he wrote very sesquipedalian (ha! now there's a word). This means his vocabulary was so large that trying to read any of his early stories was an exercise in frustration, because not many people could understand his writings without extensive dictionary work. He was plainly brilliant, but his writing had a high barrier to it and I quickly grew tired of trying to wade through the text. I kept trying again and again over the two years and I noticed he eventually was able to hit a rhythm where his prose, while still having some larger words, was "dumbed down" enough to allow the regular reader to be able to enjoy the text. This turning point actually happened right around the time he published his longest work, "The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym". It was from here that I really started to enjoy his work. 

Personally, I am not the biggest fan of short stories because the quality is often all over the place. Some are great and some not so much, and I feel Poe is much the same. He wrote many of his stories with these random asides at the beginning that felt less a part of the story and more like he was philosophizing about anything. But once you get past these random asides, usually about a page or two in length, the story kicks in and is often enjoyable. His well known stories, like "The Tell-Tale Heart" and "The Pit and the Pendulum" are truly masterpieces and noticeably enjoyable amongst his other works. There is a reason they are picked out among his ample catalogue. But there are others I would recommend as well including the afore mentioned "The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym", "The Premature Burial", "The Gold-Bug", and one that is especially important in literary history, "The Murders in the Rue Morgue". As I was reading "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" I was convinced Poe just ripped of Doyle's Sherlock Holmes character. But as I thought about it, the timing didn't seem right and I looked it up and sure enough, one of Doyle's influences was Poe. "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" is essentially the original detective fiction. Poe then followed it up with two sequel short stories, "The Mystery of Marie Rogêt" and "The Purloined Letter". And although these aren't the sitting on the edge of your seat thrillers that we know of today in many detective stories, they are still enjoyable for what they are and a fun mystery to work through. Overall, I would say that the majority of Poe's work is excessively difficult to wade through and I wouldn't recommend most people to attempt it, however many of his works do stand out as simply outstanding and those are the ones everyone should cherry pick to read.