Modern Library Top 100

http://www.modernlibrary.com/top-100/100-best-novels/

#1 Ulysses, James Joyce
#2 The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald
#3 A 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 Slaughterhouse 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. (series), 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 Howards 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 (series), Anthony Powell
#44 Point Counter Point, 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 House of Mirth, Edith Wharton
#70 The Alexandria Quartet, Lawrence Durell
#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 Finnegan's 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

Winesburg, Ohio

Winesburg, Ohio
by Sherwood Anderson
read: 2012
Modern Library #24

"Clyde was born in an unincorporated town in Northeast Ohio to a woman who spent her childhood dreaming of marriage only to find the reality was a constraining sadness lurking beneath the surface, and to a man whose dreams of moving to a big East coast city were dashed by Clyde's birth.  The family moved to Winesburg when Clyde was eight, and he became fast friends with Nell, the girl next door, who had been rendered mute by an illness she contracted in infancy.  As they got older, she leaned on him to help her communicate, as they spent so much time together that he could tell what she was thinking by a facial expression, a posture, a tilt of her head, even a breath.

"When Clyde got older he received a letter from a estranged uncle who had a business in New York City, inviting Clyde to apprentice at his shop.  He told Nell excitedly of his opportunity, and the look she gave him was not one he recognized.  He did not yet realize the underlying emotion or that he felt the same way.

"After several months in New York, during which the frequency of their letters diminished, Clyde had occasion to return to Winesburg.  He got off the train in the town depot, wearing a hat and shoes he had acquired with his first paycheck.  They did not quite fit.  He stopped by Nell's home and was about to knock when he saw her through the window.  She was sitting in a rocking chair, knitting.  She looked the same as when he had last seen her except for a new weariness around the eyes.  She sighed, and Clyde saw the rising and falling of her chest and suddenly understood the look she had given him before he left.  A lump formed in his throat.  Clyde did not knock; he walked on and left her there, knitting and saying nothing to herself or anyone.  He never saw Nell again."

Sherwood Anderson didn't write the above; I did.  But if you like that story and you want to read like 22 more versions of it, you should read Winesburg, Ohio.

The Call of the Wild

The Call of the Wild
by Jack London
read: approximately 1996
Modern Library #88, Guardian 1000 Novels

Read for school (not required, but we had a choice of authors for summer reading and I chose this).  I only remember two things about this book: 1) Ethan Hawke yelling at the dog to leave him and throwing sticks to get him to run away and 2) oh yeah, that was White Fang, not The Call of the Wild.

The Surprising Adventures of Baron Munchausen

The Surprising Adventures of Baron Munchausen
by Rudolf Erich Raspe
read: 2012
Guardian 1000 Novels

I'm a bit tired of writing "I don't remember much about this book," so let's come at this from both ends.   The Surprising Adventures of Baron Munchausen is the most recent book I've finished.

I wonder sometimes about my affinity for the novel as an art form.  It's easy to say, "it's timeless," but the truth is that the novel is only about 400-500 years old.  It really wasn't a viable medium before the invention and adoption of the printing press in the fifteenth century.  Movies, of course, have only been viable technologically for 100 years.  I'm accustomed to thinking of the novel as a "more legitimate" art form, but part of that is its failure as an entertainment medium.  TV is more entertaining than books, so books must be art, right?  Of course that's a silly simplification.  I do wonder at times if the novel (and perhaps, the written word in general) is something of an anachronism.  Why would a modern writer choose to work in this art form rather than telling his story through a more accessible medium like TV?

For me, I find the written word more thought-provoking.  A moment is a moment on film, but a moment can be a sentence, a paragraph, or a chapter in a novel.  Filmmakers can choose different camera angles, but an author can break down the sight, smell, or touch of the scene.  He can even choose to ignore external stimulus and bring the reader into the hidden world of a character's thoughts.  The novel is a more open format, because it isn't confined by communicating only what can be seen or heard.  Master filmmakers can fill in these gaps as ably as the best writers, and the written word isn't without its limitations as a medium, but the idea that writing can take us to a more personal, hidden place carries water.

Why this long-winded introduction?  Just to say that, while I prefer the novel to the moving picture, there are certain genres that work for me better in film.  The Surprising Adventures of Baron Munchausen, a collection of outrageous tall tales of the Baron's heroic journeys across the world (and even to the moon), is one.  The Terry Gilliam film (a loose adaptation) is terrific, funny, full of great visual imagery, and titillating to the imagination.  Reading similar material in book format just feels flat and monochrome and lifeless.

The Grapes of Wrath

The Grapes of Wrath
by John Steinbeck
read: circa 1996
Time 100 Novels, Modern Library #10, Guardian 1000 Novels, Pulitzer Prize, National Book Award

Another required book for school, read during my sophomore year of high school.  We had been required to read East Of Eden the summer leading up to that school year, and while I liked both books, 1500+ pages of Steinbeck was a bit much (especially since we ended up giving short shrift to Faulkner, Fitzgerald, Hemingway, and pretty much everyone post-1950).  I also thought East Of Eden was a better book.  I understand why Grapes of Wrath is more important historically: it captures the dust bowl, the migration to California,  and the misery of impoverished rural folks of that time period.  I just found the more personal story of sibling rivalry in East Of Eden to be more affecting.

I have Woody Guthrie's album Dust Bowl Ballads, so whenever "The Ballad of Tom Joad" comes on in shuffle I get a little plot refresher.  I remember that Tom Joad is the main character for most of the book only to disappear towards the end.  This led to a debate in English class as to who the main character was, with the class coming to the inarguable conclusion that the family was in fact the lead character.  I still find this pretty unsatisfying.

The French Lieutenant's Woman

The French Lieutenant's Woman
by John Fowles
read: approximately 1996
Time 100 Novels, Guardian 1000 Novels

I read surprisingly few of the Time 100 novels in school.  The French Lieutenant's Woman was required reading one summer, maybe before Junior year.  I remember quite a few things about it for how long ago that was.  I was sixteen or seventeen when I read it, so obviously the pretty graphic sex scene left a lasting impression.  It still seems kind weird that they had us read that for school.

The novel is also notable for the interjection of the narrator as a physical character fairly far into the book, and his role in sorting out multiple endings.  The book has kind of a "Schrodinger's Cat" ending to it, where Fowles writes two endings, leaving it up to a coin flip which one is actually last.  It sounds weird; it kind of is.  At the time I didn't ask questions like "Why did he decide to do that?  Was it a statement about the arbitrariness of fate and the role of chance in our lives?  Or was it a statement rebelling against the expectations that novel readers have that a book has an ending at all?"  At the time, it seemed like cleverness for its own sake.  I'm not sure I can rule that out fifteen years later, but I did like the book, and the fact that I remember this stuff at all speaks well of it.

The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe

The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe
by C.S. Lewis
part of the Chronicles of Narnia series
read: approximately 1988
Time 100 Novels, Guardian 1000 Novels

This was certainly the first book on the Time list I read.  I don't remember exactly when I read it, or when I got my complete set of the Chronices of Narnia series, but I know I read them all in elementary school.  Something about a lion, something about kids going to another dimension, I think there was a goat guy of some kind ... man, I should go back and read these again.  I suspect one of the plusses of having a kid will be getting to re-read all the great children's books I haven't thought about in 20 years.