Good Books fo Swipe

To Humorist Frank Sullivan, lists of the "Greatest Books" are apt to sound phony and pedantic. Few people, he believes, would read Bacon's Novum Organum, for example, unless they had the latest Agatha Christie concealed inside. Last week Sullivan thought he had discovered a more honest list: the books niched so far this year by students at upstate New York's Union College.

Wrote Sullivan in PM: "A man who has swiped [these] books, and has read them, is on the road to . . .a liberal education." Some of the books Union men had borrowed for keeps: Andersen's and Grimm's Fairy Tales, Jane Eyre, The Decameron, Wuthering Heights, The Anatomy of Melancholy, Chesterfield's Letters, Art in the Armed Forces, Moll Flanders, Crime and Punishment, A Farewell to Arms, Isherwood's Prater Violet, Sons and Lovers, Up Front, Eugene O'Neill's Plays, The Portable Dorothy Parker, Tales of Edgar Allan Poe, Villon's Poems, Candide, Owen Wister's The Virginian, Rimbaud's Season in Hell, Waugh's Brideshead Revisited, Ward's The Snake Pit, Wakeman's The Hucksters.

Sullivan didn't admire all the Union selections--he had never read The Anatomy of Melancholy, considers Chesterfield dull and pompous, and The Virginian "tame stuff for a student in the atomic age." Besides, nobody had stolen any Shakespeare or Dickens. His consoling afterthought: "Well, the academic year is only half over."

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