townesvanfaulkner

Here's the latest version of Herndon's Hunderd. It's new and improved now with a running commentary. For those of you who saw the last version, the new entries are in bold. The stuff in brackets refers to the selections placement on other top book lists I found on the internet and any awards they may have won (sort of a 'don't just take my word for it'). But I'll specify what they are and provide links to them later. For now, I gotta go do some reading! Peace.


1. The Sound and the Fury-William Faulkner – Without question #1. No competition. [LM – 5, ML – 6, MLR – 33, R – 10, HBTWC]

2. Suttree-Cormac McCarthy – Without question #1 among living writers. The heir to Faulkner’s throne; which, I think has actually hurt his career, but not in my eyes. [MLR – 96, HBTWC]

3. One Hundred Years of Solitude-Gabriel Garcia Marquez – According to former president William Jefferson Clinton this is the greatest novel written since Faulkner. I guess Bill hasn’t read Suttree yet? [HBS – 9, HBTWC]

4. The Brothers Karamazov-Fyodor Dostoyevsky – There are no words for the three chapter conversation between Ivan and Alyosha where Ivan states his case against God and ends with the Grand Inquisitor. [HBS – 14, HBTWC]

5. 2001: A Space Odyssey-Arthur C. Clarke – For years my favorite novel and movie (before I started reading Literature with a capital L). The reason I went into propulsion engineering (which I’m not too happy about now in hindsight). Still, I think it’s an important novel and a friggin great read. [PESF – 15]

6. A Death in the Family-James Agee – Reads like a long poem. It’s hard not to cry for little Rufus. This book is what Look Homeward, Angel could have been but didn’t quite accomplish. [PP]

7. Death of a Salesman-Arthur Miller – I forced myself to include plays on this list because I wanted to give props to this one. [HBTWC]

8. All the King’s Men-Robert Penn Warren – Based loosely around the life of Louisiana governor Huey Long, one of the most complex and colorful characters in the history of American politics. This guy was caring enough about the working class to be considerably to the left of FDR’s New Deal politics but at the same time he ran probably the most corrupt state-wide political machine the country’s ever seen. [ML - 36, R – 38, HBTWC, PP]

9. Absalom, Absalom-William Faulkner – I really need to reread this one. I read the first half on planes going to a job interview in Connecticut (God, I’m glad I didn’t get that job) and it’s really not a good book to read on a plane. But the ending, which adds a lot of insight into what was going on in Quentin’s head during his chapter of Sound and Fury, literally kept me awake ALL night after I finished it. [LM – 32, MLR – 36, R – 58, HBTWC]

10. Dune-Frank Herbert – Man, do I wish I could erase the part of my memory that contains this book and read it again. It’s so action packed and cool, but smart too. It’s what you wish every sci-fi book could be when you pick them up, but this was the only one that ever followed through. [MLR – 14, PESF – 3, SFBK – 3, HA, NA]

11. War and Peace-Leo Tolstoy – This 1500 pager reads like it was 400 pages. Not at all the chore that I thought reading it was going to be and which reading Anna Karenina actually was. [HBS – 57, HBTWC]

12. Blood Meridian-Cormac McCarthy – The book doesn’t advertise this, but this novel is actually based on a true story. Cormac took an obscure memoir of someone who traveled with the real-life Glanton gang to write this. From what I understand, all of the violent scenes and massacres actually occurred and the Judge was a real character who was every bit as weird and creepy as Cormac presents him as. [LM -48, MLR – 54, HBTWC]

13. The Crossing-Cormac McCarthy – I thought that after Suttree, Blood Meridian, and All the Pretty Horses I had read the best McCarthy has to offer, but this one is every bit as good as any of them.

14. Beloved-Toni Morrison – What an amazing concept for a book about slavery. I wish there were more ghosts in great Literature. [LM – 12, MLR – 31, R – 7, PP, HBS - 37]

15. Light in August- William Faulkner – This novel is as accessible as The Reivers but as brilliant and magical and rich as Absalom, Absalom. [ML – 54, MLR – 89, R – 68, HBTWC]

16. The Sportswriter-Richard Ford – It’s hard to describe what makes this book so good. It’s so really, really realistically real.

17. A Confederacy of Dunces-John Kennedy Toole – Wow, what a treasure that we have this novel. It was written by a guy who couldn’t get it published and then he killed himself in his late twenties, I think. His mom sent the manuscript to Walker “most over-rated southern writer” Percy who loved it and got it published. Thanks, Walker! Your greatest contribution to American Literature. [PP]

18. Lonesome Dove-Larry McMurtry – If this story were written by Cormac McCarthy it would likely be my favorite novel. [PP]

19. Lolita-Vladimir Nabokov – Sick but beautiful. [LM – 9, ML – 4, MLR – 34, R – 11, HBTWC, HBS - 7]

20. Les Liasons Dangereuse-Pierre Choderlos De Laclos – There’s a reason this book has been adapted to movies so many times. It’s a great story with awesome characters. The book is surprisingly hilarious and there are great quotes throughout. I didn’t much care for the moral at the end, but the ride up to the fall was SO much fun.

21. All the Pretty Horses-Cormac McCarthy – There’s obviously so much to be learned in Mexico. [NBA, NBCC]

22. Wise Blood-Flannery O’Connor – Clearly the master of short stories. Still, I like it when her short stories are about the same characters and string together to make a novel. [LM- 56, MLR – 38, HBTWC]

23. As I Lay Dying-William Faulkner – Contains Faulkner’s shortest chapter. The entire contents of the chapter: “My mother is a fish.” [ML – 35, MLR – 67, R – 19, HBTWC]

24. Invisible Man-Ralph Ellison – I think this would make a phenomenal movie. Imagine the intro: the main character smoking a joint, listening to a jazz record, with the ceiling of his studio apartment covered in light bulbs stealing free electricity from the Man. Then cut to the Battle Royale scene. [LM – 18, ML – 19, MLR – 69, R – 24, HBTWC, NBA]

25. Go Down, Moses-William Faulkner – A series of stories, including The Bear, that sort of make up a novel. Is The Bear Faulkner’s most inspired writing? Perhaps more so than Sound and Fury even? Make sure that you only read the version of The Bear that is published in Go Down, Moses or Three Short Novels. There’s a version out there that leaves a chapter out.

26. The Grapes of Wrath-John Steinbeck – This book has so much heart. [LM – 34, ML – 10, MLR – 22, R – 3, HBTWC, PP]

27. Child of God-Cormac McCarthy – A necrophile, serial-killing, cave dweller is the main character. Only Cormac could infuse so much humanity into a story like this. [HBTWC]

28. The Orchard Keeper-Cormac McCarthy – Part ode to the east Tennessee landscape, part lament to a vanishing way of life. McCarthy’s award-winning debut novel.

29. The Unvanquished-William Faulkner – There’s a major scene in this one that’s so similar to a scene in Outer Dark (#31) it’s ridiculous. Fittingly, Faulkner is a step, nay, two steps ahead of McCarthy.

30. Slaughterhouse-Five-Kurt Vonnegut – Definitely the place to start with Vonnegut. [LM – 54, ML – 18, MLR – 23, R – 29]

31. Outer Dark-Cormac McCarthy – Sort of a precursor to Blood Meridian. One of the main characters is similar to the Judge.

32. The Sun Also Rises-Ernest Hemingway – Emasculation is so sad. [LM – 20, ML – 45, MLR – 63, R – 18, HBTWC, HBS - 86]

33. Song of Solomon-Toni Morrison – Among my favorite Toni Morrison character names: Guitar, Milkman, and a girl whose parents randomly open bible pages to find names for their children so she ends up being named Second Corinthians, or Cori for short. [R – 25, HBTWC]

34. The Rules of Attraction-Bret Easton Ellis – This is my favorite of his books and the setting and overall mood of the book has a lot to do with that. I like the small northeastern private school feel better than his typical LA/New York settings. Read this book in December while listening to old REM records (pre-Green era).

35. After the Fall-Arthur Miller – How cool is it that Arthur Miller was married to Marilyn Monroe? This critically maligned play features a character based on Marilyn and was written right after their divorce. I thought it made for really cool reading, not sure how it would play out onstage.

36. Hamlet-William Shakespeare – This one was really hard to rank and I would have preferred not to but I included Arthur Miller’s plays so I guess it should go in here somewhere. At any rate, it’s by far my favorite Shakespeare play.

37. Three Famous Short Novels: Spotted Horses, Old Man, The Bear-William Faulkner – This one was also hard to rank. It’s kinda superfluous seeing as how Spotted Horses is a chapter from The Hamlet (#45) and The Bear is in a more natural context in Go Down, Moses. Still, Old Man deserves recognition. It’s about the Mississippi river flooding in 1927. The same weather system that created the pivotal flood scenes in Their Eyes Were Watching God.

38. One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest-Ken Kesey – I was surprised at how much I related to this book. Don’t let the movie suffice for this one, read the book. [MLR – 90, R – 28]

39. A Song of Ice and Fire Series-George R.R. Martin – I was feeling pretty low and I was reading really heavy stuff like A Portrait of the Artist, which didn’t help. So, I had a hankering for just a mindless bestseller, something that I’d normally be embarrassed to buy or read in public. I thought maybe I’d try fantasy/sci-fi for old times’ sake. I did some Amazon research and found that this series was quite popular. It totally exceeded my expectations by a million miles and was exactly what I was looking for. If you ever yearn for fantasy on a grand, Tolkienesque scale that is geared towards adults who aren’t morons, this is it. Martin plans a series of 6 books, the first 3 of which are out and I have read and accounted for in this ranking. The 4th is due this summer (2005). Please, Mr. Martin, do not die before you finish this!

40. The Big Sky-A.B. Guthrie – If you love westerns geared towards adults who aren’t morons and you’ve read McCarthy’s western novels and Larry McMurtry, this should be your next stop.

41. Cold Mountain-Charles Frazier – This North Carolina author does his best Cormac McCarthy interpretation and pulls it off extremely well. Plus it’s set during the civil war, so it’s super, extra cool. [NBA]

42. The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch-Philip K. Dick – Gosh, it’s been so long since I read this one I barely remember it. I do remember loving it though and maintaining that it is my favorite Dick novel. It was on one of Amy’s reading lists in grad school at Penn State so I feel somewhat validated in this opinion. [PESF – 13]

43. Only Begotten Daughter-James Morrow – This guy, from State College, PA, writes religious satire in the fantasy/sci-fi realm. He’s won numerous World Fantasy Awards among other awards. Most of his books are laugh-out-loud funny. This one is about the second coming of Christ, but this time It’s a She, Julie Katz, and She’s born in Atlantic City in the modern era. Hilarity ensues. [WFA]

44. Independence Day-Richard Ford – The sequel to The Sportswriter. Our protagonist is now working as a real estate agent, a perfect existential profession. [P/F, PP]

45. The Hamlet-William Faulkner – This is where Faulkner starts to not quite measure up to his masterpieces, but for Christ’s sake, he’s still Faulkner so it’s friggin fabulous and must not be passed up.

46. The Violent Bear It Away-Flannery O’Connor – I read this soon after McCarthy’s Child of God and was struck by just how similar their writing is in these books. And then I got to the last sentence of The Violent Bear It Away where it ends with, “...he moved steadily on, his face set toward the dark city, where the children of God lay sleeping”. I got chills. [HBTWC]

47. A Clockwork Orange-Anthony Burgess – I saw in the news the other day some kids beat a homeless person to death and said in court that they did it for fun and because they were bored. Reminded me of this book. [LM – 79, ML – 65, MLR – 55, R – 49]

48. The Lord of the Flies-William Golding – I avoided this for a long time thinking it was children’s literature. It’s anything but. It’s quite terrifying and violent, very eerie. [ML – 41, MLR – 25, R – 8]

49. The Handmaid’s Tale-Margaret Atwood – Things start to go wrong when the president is given an inordinate amount of power after a terrorist attack on congress. Hmmm… [MLR – 53, HBS - 25]

50. The Jungle-Upton Sinclair – Great book for a borderline socialist. Power to the people. [R – 45]

51. Black Boy-Richard Wright – My edition, and I think most newer editions, contains the original Black Boy, Wright’s story about growing up in Mississippi, and then the second half was his story about moving to Chicago, joining the communist party, and then becoming disillusioned with communism and white intellectuals. It’s less compelling reading than the first half but still an important story. [MLNF – 13, HBTWC]

52. The Cities of the Plain-Cormac McCarthy – McCarthy’s latest and pretty clearly least inspired work. The conclusion to the Border Trilogy following All the Pretty Horses and The Crossing. It’s kind of a disappointment. After it seemed like he put so much into the first two books, this one feels like he’s just trying to wrap it up and get on to something else. Speaking of which, No Country for Old Men is due out on July 19, 2005.

53. Sanctuary-William Faulkner – Faulkner says he wrote this one just for sensationalism’s sake and to sell books. I have trouble believing it because it’s pretty brilliant and much meatier than The Reivers. [HBTWC]

54. Everything That Rises Must Converge-Flannery O’Connor – There are very few writers who can write equally well about both sides of the arguments regarding religion and morality such that both devout Catholics and devout agnostics (myself) can both love them (The Brothers Karamazov comes to mind here). Flannery O’Connor is such a writer.

55. Darkness at Noon-Arthur Koestler – The anti-communist manifesto. I was turned on to this one because it was the highest ranked book I’d never heard of on the Modern Library’s top 100 at #7. I don’t know about #7, but it is a wonderful book and a concise critique of why communism failed. [ML – 8]

56. A Prayer for Owen Meany-John Irving – This one could have been higher but I just didn’t buy the ending, which felt contrived and cheesy. Still, Owen is a great character and you really come to love the little fella. Up until the last scene it’s a brilliant novel. [MLR – 28]

57. The Corrections-Jonathan Franzen – People keep mentioning this book to me and how much they liked it. Several of my friends can’t be wrong. It’s good. Hard to put my finger on why since there’s so many characters and so many themes, but it’s just good. So, let’s not belabor it shall we? [NBA]

58. One of Ours-Willa Cather – This one might be a little high at 58. I read it not long after Sept. 11, 2001 and was feeling particularly, uncharacteristically patriotic. I would say that I’m, well, significantly less so four years later. But, I’ll stick with my first instinct and leave it. I can’t go changing this list around every time my moods or beliefs swing. [PP]

59. The Illustrated Man-Ray Bradbury – The master of sci-fi short stories. This is my favorite collection.

60. The Confessions of Nat Turner-William Styron – A beautifully written account of the famous slave insurrection. An exploration into Nat Turner’s background and what might have caused this particular slave to rebel and so many others not to. [PP]

61. The Rocket Boys-Homer Hickam – Amy came home one day to find me lying on the floor literally balling. She thought someone had died or something, but I had just finished this book and was listening to a Mineral record. I was in a very weird, early-twenties, graduating college, emo kind of stage at the time and this book just struck a chord.

62. Sabbath’s Theatre-Philip Roth – I almost put this one down because the first 80 pages or so just seemed like gratuitous, dirty, dirty sex. But it actually turned into a respectable novel just in time and I ended up really loving it. [NBA]

63. Fay-Larry Brown – Larry Brown might be the greatest southern writer you’ve never heard of. Unfortunately, he passed away of a heart attack at the age of 53 last November (2004). But, he’s got 8-10 books out there and I’m looking forward to reading more of them.

64. The Fountains of Paradise-Arthur C. Clarke – This one really got to me during my engineering “phase”. Written in 1979, this book is about building a space elevator. They actually held the first ever space elevator conference a year or two ago. [HA, NA]

65. Neuromancer-William Gibson – What The Matrix is to movies, Neuromancer is to books. Of course, The Matrix had the benefit of being made in 1999. 15 years after William Gibson kicked off the cyberpunk revolution with Neuromancer. [PESF – 33, SFBK – 6, HA, NA]

66. The World According to Garp-John Irving – Has a lot of similarities with Owen Meany. I don’t want to give anything away here but I think if you like one you’ll like the other. Basically, I feel like Garp as a novel has a little bit more dignity because it doesn’t have the kooky ending, but I just loved Owen’s character more. [MLR – 64, R – 37]

67. Less Than Zero-Bret Easton Ellis – This book was published in 1985, Ellis was born in 1964. You do the math and that means that this was published (published, not written mind you) when the author was 20 or 21 years old. Holy mother of God.

68. The Unbearable Lightness of Being-Milan Kundera – This was hard to rank. I feel like it deserves better than #68 because it’s obviously a brilliant novel. But, truth be told, I think a great deal of the brilliance was over my head. I just didn’t grasp all of the intricacies and had trouble tying it all together. However, there are so many levels to this book that you could enjoy it on. Kundera is very observant and keen on the different aspects of people’s personalities. The sheer joy of relating to parts of his characters or recognizing traits that you’ve noticed in others is enough to enjoy the book and warrant its place on this list. [HBTWC]

69. At Heaven’s Gate-Robert Penn Warren – I wasn’t sure where to go with RPW after All the King’s Men. I was attracted to this one because it was inspired by Nashville local politics around the time the novel was published (1943). This one was very good. If you liked King’s Men you can’t go wrong here, though it sounds like World Enough and Time is perhaps his second most acclaimed novel. I look forward to it whenever I get around to it.

70. Childhood’s End-Arthur C. Clarke – Clarke revolutionized sci-fi by taking the standard confrontation with alien beings and instead of fighting them or describing how different they look than us and what their world is like he looked at this imaginary confrontation and asked deeper questions like: how would we ever even conceive of what they are doing here or how their technology works since they would be so inconceivably more advanced than us, would they still perpetrate wars, perhaps they are what guides our evolution? His genius lies not in the setting up of these confrontations but in the conclusions where instead of tidily wrapping up the story with perhaps a clever plot twist at the end and explaining the aliens motives or technology or beliefs, he left a great deal of ambiguity which naturally rings more true since these civilizations would have to be so much farther advanced than us to have supported interstellar travel. Childhood’s End, published in 1953, is the early turning point in Clarke’s thinking, which led towards smarter, harder, more realistic sci-fi. [PESF – 1, SFBK – 7]

71. The Kreutzer Sonata-Leo Tolstoy – A classic novella about jealousy. The Kreutzer Sonata is a Beethoven sonata written for piano and violin. You should check it out, it’s phenomenal. The story is about a husband whose wife plays piano and finds a male companion to play violin with her. The husband hears them playing the Kreutzer Sonata and as the music builds he becomes certain that they are having an affair and he goes into a murderous rage. It’s pure genius.

72. The Martian Chronicles-Ray Bradbury – Amy read this for a class in grad school and loved it. It’s short stories but they are sort of tied together in that they are all forays to the alien planet of Mars. [PESF – 79]

73. Ender’s Game-Orson Scott Card – This is just super-cool sci-fi. I want to say more but I don’t want to give anything away. [MLR – 59, SFBK – 22, PESF – 34, HA, NA]

74. Deathbird Stories-Harlan Ellison – Another sci-fi short story writer. Not quite up to par with Bradbury, but Deathbird Stories is widely regarded as his greatest collection. This book is almost as much horror as it is sci-fi, most of the stories are about violence and evil and so forth. He opens the book with a caveat not to read too many of the stories in the same sitting. Amy wasn’t able to get into it. [SFBK – 18, PESF - 76]

75. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?-Philip K. Dick – This is what Bladerunner was based on. [SFBK – 8]

76. About a Boy-Nick Hornby – This made a surprisingly good movie starring Hugh Grant.

77. Let Us Now Praise Famous Men-James Agee – I know this is not a novel, but it is High Art and I’ve got plays on here too, so, give me a break already. James Agee and photographer Walker Evans spent a couple of months living with 3 sharecropper families in Alabama during the Depression. They document their lives with grace and dignity out the ying-yang. It’s really amazing. [HBTWC]

78. Blameless in Abaddon-James Morrow – This is a sequel to Towing Jehovah (in which God dies and His body falls into the Mediterranean at 0 deg. longitude and 0 deg. latitude and the Vatican hires an oil tanker captain to tow His gigantic body to the Arctic to be preserved and keep it secret from the rest of the world that God is dead). Blameless in Abaddon is a modern-day Jobian tale about a lawyer whose wife dies of cancer and he puts God (who is now barely alive and whose body is the central attraction at an amusement park in Florida run by the Southern Baptists) on trial for crimes against humanity. Sacrilegious hilarity ensues once again.

79. A Gathering of Old Men-Ernest J. Gaines – This book kicked butt. I loved routing for the old men.

80. The Lord of the Rings Trilogy-J.R.R. Tolkien – Shew… another tough one to rank. I’ll be honest, I thought certain parts were terribly boring and I spent years in between books because I wasn’t compelled to read on in the trilogy. But simply for the accomplishment of building such a rich world from scratch and starting a whole genre it deserves at least this spot. [MLR – 4, R – 40, HBS - 5]

81. Shogun-James Clavell – This was super-cool. I thought it was going to be about warring Japanese tribes but it’s actually about what it would be like to wake up in a totally alien civilization. The first Portuguese ship wrecks on the coast of feudal Japan.

82. Lincoln-Gore Vidal – It just seems to flow that James Clavell’s Shogun and Gore Vidal’s Lincoln are back to back on this list, doesn’t it? This is a must read for Civil War fans. [HBTWC]

83. American Psycho-Bret Easton Ellis – I like this book more and more as I reflect on it. Perhaps its rank at #83 is an artifact of having ranked it too soon after reading it before the initial shock had worn off. It’s pretty gruesome and I had to take periodic breaks from it. But I don’t think the violence is as gratuitous as it first seems. I think its hard to convince some people that certain policies/societies/beliefs/whatever(social contructs) lead from point A to point B to point C to point D, with point D being, for some, death/oppression/sexual objectification/whatever(bad things) and points B and C have obscured the root cause of this badness (kind of like money laundering). What I think Ellis has done is take artistic license to wrap the string of points around to where point A explicitly (very explicitly) leads to point D. [LM – 76]

84. The Color Purple-Alice Walker– I had a real good feeling about this one when I picked it up and saw that it was a series of letters to God written in black, southern dialect. It didn’t disappoint at all. [NBA, PP]

85. Hyperion-Dan Simmons – Someone at NASA was giving away some sci-fi paperbacks outside their office one day and among them was this Hugo award winner that I decided to pick up. I hadn’t read hardcore sci-fi in a while and this book restored my faith in the genre. Unfortunately, I’ve read plenty of sci-fi crap since then and have strayed away of late. [HA]

86. Martian Time Slip-Philip K. Dick – Uh, let’s see, it’s set on Mars, there are some Martians, there’s very little water, and this time Dick uses schizophrenia and drugs to screw with your mind and make you question what’s reality and what isn’t.

87. Moby Dick-Herman Melville – This book begins and ends superbly and there’s some parts in between that are great too. I love all the biblical stuff and the grandness of the tale and its themes. But, the lengthy technical descriptions of whaling and whales and whale ships and whale pictures and what not in between are just too laborious and painful to read to warrant a higher ranking. If I could select certain chapters and condense this book to about half its size it would easily be top 20. [HBTWC]

88. This is the Way the World Ends-James Morrow – The title tells you the plot. More classic Morrow.

89. The World Jones Made-Philip K. Dick – After a while all these Dick books start to run together. There’s a guy displaced from reality by some clever sci-fi device. He can’t tell real from unreal and he’s a sort of detective trying to find the truth. In the end, instead of finding the truth, it just gets weirder. Variations on this story get me every time though.

90. Rendezvous With Rama-Arthur C. Clarke – A celebration of mystery and encounters with the unknown. [HA, NA]

91. Breakfast of Champions-Kurt Vonnegut – I read this too soon after Slaughterhouse-Five and started to get tired of Vonnegut’s tone about halfway through it. Otherwise, you can’t go wrong with this one. [HBS – 89]

92. God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater-Kurt Vonnegut – The main character, Mr. Rosewater, in this book reminded Amy and I both of Ignatius from Confederacy of Dunces. This is a really funny book. We still laugh together regularly when we think back to one particular scene.

93. Glamorama-Bret Easton Ellis – The characters and the violence in this one are very similar to American Psycho except updated to the 90’s. So, it’s not quite as fresh here. Plus the plot jumps all over the place. It gets very phildickian in the ways that I described phildickianess in entry #89, which is a bit of a twist from American Psycho. I think maybe Ellis was aware of the phildickianess because there is a scene where he mentions that in someone’s apartment they have a complete collection of all of Philip K. Dick’s novels on a book shelf, it seemed sort of out of the blue and since I had already felt the similarities I couldn’t help but chuckle. The cameos of all the famous people are really cool.

94. From Here to Eternity-James Jones – This is the first of a WWII trilogy with the second book being The Thin Red Line. From Here to Eternity presents life in the army in the lead up to WWII. [ML – 62, NBA]

95. Empire Falls-Richard Russo – This is a great book set in a small town in BFE Maine. I thought it was funny how much it reminded me of Kingsport, TN. [PP, HBS - 60]

96. The Winds of War-Herman Wouk – Another lead up to WWII novel with the sequel being War and Remembrance. This one is quite a bit more romantic about war than James Jones though. The scope is quite impressive in this one. The story revolves around one military family, but Wouk cleverly manages to place them in circumstances such that you get a big picture of the war. The father is a diplomat in Europe and meets Hitler, Churchill, etc, the sons are in the Navy and get caught up in the fighting, one of them falls in love and marries a Jewish girl from Poland, the wife and daughter present a picture of the home front.

97. The End of the Affair-Graham Greene – This is my first and only Graham Greene novel so far, so I can’t really compare it with any of his others. The writing is great since it’s so captivating with a fairly sparse plot. I really enjoyed the love story. The End of the Affair refers to a promise to God that one of the lovers makes in the face of her partners possible death during a World War II bombing. It makes for a fairly interesting dilemma. Gosh, I sure do like religious dilemmas a whole lot to be a secularist. Wonder what’s going on there?

98. Look Homeward, Angel-Thomas Wolfe – I’ll hate to have to see this one drop off the list after I read three more books that are better than it because I really respect it and loved parts of it. It’s too long though and I think he tries a little too hard at times like he’s being really cognizant of producing Great Literature.

99. Dragonlance: Chronicles and Legends-Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman – These books were my first ever favorite books. I read them when I was in middle school. I’ve since reread the Chronicles as an adult and it didn’t quite hold up but it wasn’t too bad either. You can do a LOT worse in the fantasy genre believe me. I have a great amount of fondness for these books.

100. The Hobbit-J.R.R. Tolkien – I won’t say much about this one since it obviously won’t be on here long. It’s the Hobbit, you know the story. Maybe I should have lumped it together with the trilogy since this is my single favorite book of the four actually.