Modern Library's Top 100 Novels of the 20th Century

I was vexed by some aspects of the NEA's Big Read list so I thought I'd look at the Modern Library list instead. This list was also controversial when it came out, not least because the #1 book on the list is an impenetrable fog of absinthe-laced stream-of-consciousness that few people ever really enjoyed or understood. But what the hey, let's look at the list, shall we? After the jump?

1 Ulysses – James Joyce
2 The Great Gatsby – F. Scott Fitzgerald
3 Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man – James Joyce
4 Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov
5 Brave New World – Aldous Huxley
6 The Sound and the Fury – William Faulkner
7 Catch-22 – Joseph Heller
8 Darkness at Noon – Arthur Koestler
9 Sons and Lovers – D.H. Lawrence
10 The Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck
11 Under the Volcano – Malcolm Lowry
12 The Way of All Flesh – Samuel Butler
13 1984 – George Orwell
14 I, Claudius – Robert Graves
15 To the Lighthouse – Virginia Woolf
16 An American Tragedy – Theodore Dreiser
17 The Heart is a Lonely Hunter – Carson McCullers
18 Slaugterhouse-Five – Kurt Vonnegut
19 Invisible Man – Ralph Ellison
20 Native Son – Richard Wright
21 Henderson the Rain King – Saul Bellow
22 Appointment in Samarra – John O'Hara
23 U.S.A. – John dos Passos
24 Winesburg, Ohio – Sherwood Anderson
25 A Passage to India – E.M. Forster
26 The Wings of the Dove – Henry James
27 The Ambassadors – Henry James
28 Tender is the Night – F. Scott Fitzgerald
29 The Studs Lonigan Trilogy – James T Farrell
30 The Good Soldier – Ford Madox Ford
31 Animal Farm – George Orwell
32 The Golden Bowl – Henry James
33 Sister Carrie – Theodore Dreiser
34 A Handful of Dust – Evelyn Waugh
35 As I Lay Dying – William Faulkner
36 All the King's Men – Robert Penn Warren
37 The Bridge of San Luis Rey – Thornton Wilder
38 Howard's End – E.M. Forster
39 Go Tell it on the Mountain – James Baldwin
40 The Heart of the Matter – Graham Greene
41 Lord of the Flies – William Golding
42 Deliverance – James Dickey
43 A Dance to the Music of Time – Anthony Powell
44 Point Counterpoint – Aldous Huxley
45 The Sun Also Rises – Ernest Hemingway
46 The Secret Agent – Joseph Conrad
47 Nostromo – Joseph Conrad
48 The Rainbow – D.H. Lawrence
49 Women in Love – D.H. Lawrence
50 Tropic of Cancer – Henry Miller
51 The Naked and the Dead – Norman Mailer
52 Portnoy's Complaint – Philip Roth
53 Pale Fire – Vladimir Nabokov
54 Light in August – William Faulkner
55 On the Road – Jack Kerouac
56 The Maltese Falcon – Dashiell Hammett
57 Parade's End – Ford Madox Ford
58 The Age of Innocence – Edith Wharton
59 Zuleika Dobson – Max Beerbohm
60 The Moviegoer – Walker Percy
61 Death Comes for the Archbishop – Willa Cather
62 From Here to Eternity – James Jones
63 The Wapshot Chronicles – John Cheever
64 The Catcher in the Rye – J.D. Salinger
65 A Clockwork Orange – Anthony Burgess
66 Of Human Bondage – W. Somerset Maugham
67 Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad
68 Main Street – Sinclair Lewis
69 The House of Mirth – Edith Wharton
70 The Alexandria Quartet – Lawrence Durrell
71 A High Wind in Jamaica – Richard Hughes
72 A House for Mr. Biswas – V.S. Naipaul
73 The Day of the Locust – Nathanael West
74 A Farewell to Arms – Ernest Hemingway
75 Scoop – Evelyn Waugh
76 The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie – Muriel Spark
77 Finnegans Wake – James Joyce
78 Kim – Rudyard Kipling
79 A Room With a View – E.M. Forster
80 Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh
81 The Adventures of Augie March – Saul Bellow
82 Angle of Repose – Wallace Stegner
83 A Bend in the River – V.S. Naipaul
84 The Death of the Heart – Elizabeth Bowen
85 Lord Jim – Joseph Conrad
86 Ragtime – E.L. Doctorow
87 The Old Wives' Tale – Arnold Bennett
88 The Call of the Wild – Jack London
89 Loving – Henry Green
90 Midnight's Children – Salman Rushdie
91 Tobacco Road – Erskine Caldwell
92 Ironweed – William Kennedy
93 The Magus – John Fowles
94 Wide Sargasso Sea – Jean Rhys
95 Under the Net – Iris Murdoch
96 Sophie's Choice – William Styron
97 The Sheltering Sky – Paul Bowles
98 The Postman Always Rings Twice – James M. Cain
99 The Ginger Man – J.P. Donleavy
100 The Magnificent Ambersons – Booth Tarkington

So on this list I've only read 12. But many of them are things I've no intention of ever bothering with, starting with number one, Ulysses. I'm not going to put 18 months of my time into a book I won't really understand even after I finish it the third time. I might someday consider Finnegan's Wake, but as a rule I'm not impressed by books that only 1% of readers will ever actually understand, and I refuse to be one of those people who's read Ulysses, and didn't like or understand it, but claims it's this wonderful work of literature so that they'll sound smart.

The Big Read

I'm stealing this blog thingy from Smittywife's good friend Starskin.

I will preface this with the following three comments:
1) The list is highly suspect
2) I'm doing this instead of reviewing several books that aren't on this list.
3) Ayzair, you are so tagged for this! Everybody else who wants to is, too.

The Big Read is an NEA program designed to encourage community reading initiatives. They've come up with this list of the top 100 books, using criteria they don't explain and that are highly suspect (The DaVinci Code? AYFKM? His Dark Materials? Lots of questionable choices here, and why both Chronicles of Narnia and TLTWATW...), and they estimate that the average adult has only read 6 of these. So, we are encouraged to:

1) Look at the list and bold those we have read.
2) Italicize those we intend to read.
3) Underline the books we LOVE
4) Reprint this list in our own blogs

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D'Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of ShakespeareOkay, seriously, I've only read about... 30% of Shakespeare, but I'm bolding it anyway
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveler's Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34 Emma - Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli's Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones's Diary - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte's Web - EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

Okay, so that's 28. Not too shabby. As I said to Smittywife (who has the list on her blog, too) what's more of a concern to me is the number of great classics on this list that I have no intention to read, no desire at all. War and Peace. Anna Karenina. Wuthering Heights. Emma.

I think I'm going to go look at the Library Association's list of 100 Greatest Books and see how many of those I've read.

Footprints Across the South

This morning I finished James Kautz' book Bartram's Trail Revisited. There has been a minor upsurge in interest in William Bartram in the last decade or so, and Kautz began working to retrace Bartram's trail in 2001, while living and teaching in the Atlanta area. My review is after the jump.

Several works have been written about Bartram, about his travels (not least, of course, Bartrams Travels); about the flora and fauna he collected, identified, was the first European to see and name; and about the land over which he traveled. Kautz has taken a different view: this book is about what the land looks like now. He is not a fanatic follower of the exact path Bartram trod (indeed, the exact path is not known, what with GPS not being invented until 200 years later and all; very good estimations are made based on Bartram's accounts but in some places all we can do is get within 10 or 20 miles of the likely path), but instead visits the places Bartram wrote about, and looks to see what they are like today.

It's a very enjoyable read--though I'll admit if you aren't from the South or at least haven't lived here you probably won't be that interested--and spans all sorts of topics. Kautz gets into history and politics, he visits both natural places and developed ones, he discusses issues of race and class (which sadly still pervade the South at every level), he talks about fishing and canoeing, and about shopping and restaurants.

The book is not written chronologically; it is laid out in roughly the order in which Bartram traveled, but Kautz took his own trips where and when he could over the course of five years. Though certainly you'll learn some things about Bartram from this book, really, it's a look at the world Bartram visited, 230 years later. What would the man see if he took the trip today?

Kautz manages to avoid being too pro-environment here, and certainly he understands the need of people to have jobs and places to live and things to eat. He is no starry-eyed tree-hugger bemoaning the loss of the wilderness Bartram traversed. But neither is he blind to the devastation Americans have wrought on their landscape, both physically and culturally. Consequently the book is not depressing or sad, although it could be. Instead it's an enjoyable read, thought-provoking for any resident of the South, and a good introduction into the world of William Bartram. It's not the best book I've read this year (I think it will be tough to top Emergency Sex), but I can certainly recommend it.

Smitty's List of Books, Lists 3-6

This post is mainly for me, so that I can find this information later. There were probably other places to put it but this one is easy to find, especially insofar as I may be getting a new computer in the relatively near term, and having this info in "the cloud," (Google's term for the internet) is probably for the best. If we sell the house, of course. So this is two lists of books here at the house that I haven't read yet--not all of which I am yearning to read anytime soon--and two more lists of books I would like to read. Mainly the first two lists are to scare me away from doing anything about the second two lists for at least a couple of months. Theoretically this will help me give form to my book buying, and also get me to read more. If I read four books from list three and two books from list four, I can buy a book from each of lists five and six. (Lists 1 and 2 are books I've already read and still own, and I don't need to put that here.) So this should encourage me to read off lists 3 and 4 since there are actually two books on list 5 that are contemporaneous enough I want to read them very soon, before they are overtaken by events. I should spend more of my downtime reading.

3. Nonfiction Books I Own And Haven't Read
On The Wealth of Nations, P.J. O'Rourke
General Washington's Christmas Farewell, Stanley Weintraub
The Last True Story I'll Ever Tell, John Crawford
Peace Kills, P.J. O'Rourke
When A Crocodile Eats The Sun, Peter Godwin
Notes From The Five States of Texas, A.C. Greene
Dark Star Safari, Paul Theroux
American Sphinx, Joseph J. Ellis
John Glenn, a Memoir, John Glenn
Flight: My Life in Mission Control, Chris Kraft
Failure is Not An Option, Gene Kranz
Lost Moon, Jim Lovell
Schirra's Space, Wally Schirra
The Victors, Stephen A. Ambrose
The Wilde Blue, Stephen A. Ambrose
Cradle Crew, Kenneth K. Blyth
Thud Ridge, Jack Broughton
The American Home Front, Alistair Cooke
Winged Victory, Geoffrey Perret
Passage to Union, Sarah H. Gordon
Consolidation: Jacksonville and Duval County, Richard Martin
Made in Detroit, Paul Clemens
The Intellectuals Speak Out About God, ed. Roy Varghese
United States: Essays, 1952-1992, Gore Vidal

4. Fiction Books I Own And Haven't Read
Primary Colors, Anonymous
Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen
Peter and the Starcatchers, Dave Barry
The Hornet's Nest, Jimmy Carter
Don Quixote, Miguel Cervantes
The Entitled, Frank DeFord
Train Man, P.T. Deuterman
The Alexandria Quartet, Lawrence Durrell
Short Lines, ed. Rob Johnson
The Grand Conspiracy, William Penn
Cryptonomicon, Neal Stephenson

5. Nonfiction Desiderata
River of Lakes, Bill Belleville
The Translator, Daoud Hari
A Long way Gone, Ishmael Beah
Nine Hills to Nambonkaha, Sarah Erdman
Out of Africa, Isak Dinesen
The Caliph's House, Tahir Shah
A Small Place, Jamaica Kincaid
River Town, Peter Hessler
Getting Stoned with Savages, J. Marten Troost
Honeymoon With My Brother, Franz Wisner
The Geography of Bliss, Eric Weiner
The Ends of the Earth, Robert D. Kaplan
Central Asia's Second Chance, Martha Brill Olcott
His Excellency, Joseph J. Ellis
1776, David McCullough
Guns, Germs, and Steel, Jared Diamond
Life in the Valley of Death, Alan Rabinowitz
The Bottom Billion, Paul Collier
How to Play in Traffic, Penn & Teller
At the Edge of Space: The X-15 Program, Milton O. Thompson
A Man On The Moon, Expanded Edition, Andrew Chaikin
Moon Lander, Tom Kelly
Last Man on the Moon, Gene Cernan
The Wrong Stuff?, Phil Scott
American Modern, J. Stewart Johnson
Full Moon, Michael Light

6. Fiction Desiderata
What is the What, Dave Eggers
Anthills of the Savannah, Chinua Achebe
Brave New World, Aldous Huxley
A Canticle For Liebowitz, Walter Miller Jr
Red Mars, Green Mars, and Blue Mars, Kim Stanley Robinson
Starship Troopers, Robert A. Heinlein
Hackers, ed. Jack Dann & Gardner Dozois
A Clockwork Orange, Anthony Burgess
The Reluctant Fundamentalist, Mohsin Hamid
Run, Ann Patchett
Lamb, Christopher Moore
Windy City, Scott Simon
Bangkok 8, John Burdett
Nature Girl, Carl Hiaasen
The Laughing Sutra, Mark Salzman
The Inner Circle, T.C. Boyle
Thank You For Smoking, Christopher Buckley
Ninety-two In the Shade, Tom McGuane
The Naked and the Dead, Norman Mailer
Midnight's Children, Salman Rushdie
Satanic Verses, Salman Rushdie
All the King's Men, Robert Penn Warren
The Adventures of Augie March, Saul Bellow
Portnoy's Complaint, Philip Roth
Dog Soldiers, Robert Stone
Their Eyes Were Watching God, Zora Neale Hurston
The Screwtape Letters, C.S. Lewis
Henderson the Rain King, Saul Bellow
The Power and the Glory, Graham Greene
At Swim-Two-Birds, Flann O'Brien
A Bend in the River, V.S. Naipaul
Revolutionary Road, Richard Yates
Lucky Jim, Kingsley Amis