Comparative European Lit 101. We all took at least one course in college with a name something like that. But there was always, in the back of my head, a small nagging question: Why do we compare literature? We read it, we enjoy it, we try to understand it. But compare it?

But now as I think about it, I realize that the only way to completely understand books is to analyze the history, culture, language, and personalities that go into them. Besides influencing one another, writers change society, and society returns the favor.

And I find myself, probably more and more as time goes on, doing comparative lit in my head. Spontaneously. Even obsessively. I compare genres, I compare authors, I compare centuries, eras, hemispheres? I need to know where the books I read fit into the world. It means something. It’s important.

But sometimes (oftentimes, really), my mind comes up with pretty goofy groups of books or writers that, for some crazy reason and certainly out of abject ignorance, it wants to read and compare. The silly thing is that these books have no valid reason for being grouped together and being compared. But the surprising thing is that, once in a while, the comparisons turn out to be quite apt.

Well, this is embarrassing, but it won’t be clear unless I give you examples:

Group A: Room at the Top;  Dark at the Top of the Stairs

Group B: Lost Horizon;  Teahouse of the August Moon;  The Ugly American

Group C: To Have and to Hold;  To Have and Have Not

Group D: Samuel Johnson;  Samuel Richardson;  Samuel Butler

Group E: The Power and the Glory;  The Sound and the Fury

Group F: Rebecca West;  Nathanael West;  Jessamyn West

Group G: Thomas Wolfe;  Tom Wolfe;  Tobias Wolff

You get the picture. . . Silly, huh? So what I wonder is: am I the only one who makes up these odd, goofy groupings of famous books or authors? If not, I’d be curious to hear the groups that other readers have put together in their own heads. It may be a whole new discipline in the mysterious field of comparative lit.