Wednesday, June 29, 2005

 

Review: An Ideal Husband by Oscar Wilde

Writing Style-6.6
Originality-9.0
Plot-7.0
Literary Merit-8.5
Overall-7.2

This is my first Oscar Wilde play (Amy says that The Importance of Being Earnest is the best). I’ve read a bunch of his quotes, there’s a ton of good one’s floating around out there. And he comes highly recommended by Morrissey:

‘A dreaded sunny day
so let’s go where we’re wanted
and I’ll meet you at the cemetery gates.
Keats and Yeats are on your side – but you lose.
While Wilde is on mine.’

Wilde is pretty darn funny. He pretty much pooh-poohs everything about society, sort of like a gay H.L. Mencken. Examples:

MRS. CHEVELEY: Ah! The strength of women comes from the fact that psychology cannot explain us. Men can be analyzed, women merely adored.
SIR ROBERT: You think science cannot grapple with the problem of women?
MRS. CHEVELEY: Science can never grapple with the irrational. That is why it has no future before it, in this world.
SIR ROBERT: And women represent the irrational.
MRS. CHEVELEY: Well-dressed women do.

SIR ROBERT CHILTON: Do you know, Arthur, I sometimes wish I were you.
LORD ARTHUR GORING: Do you know, Robert, sometimes I wish you were too. Except that you would probably make something useful out of my life, and that would never do.

And the more serious:

'Morality is simply the attitude we adopt towards people whom we personally dislike.'

This play is about marriage and politics. One character has a Dostoyevskian moral dilemma relating to his political career. Also wrapped up in this is his wife’s ideal of him as a perfect person, which of course he’s not, and neither is she, and neither is anyone else. So I guess that’s pretty much the point.

If you like Oscar Wilde quotes and you like reading plays definitely check this one out. There are funny, clever lines throughout and it’s a good story with a smart message.

Tuesday, June 28, 2005

 

Book News: Shelby Foote Passes Away

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/29/books/29foote.html?oref=login

I've read the first volume of his Civil War series and it's every bit as good as they say. The only problem is now I can't find volume 2 sold seperately for a decent price.

 

Review: Billy Bathgate by E.L. Doctorow

Writing style-7.6
Originality-7.1
Plot-7.9
Literary merit(whatever that means)-7.8
Overall-7.6

This is a really good book. Nothing to write home about, but a very entertaining, solid, smart novel.

Amy tells me I need shorter paragraphs when writing for the Web so I’m gonna try that against my better judgement.

It’s the story of a 15 year old kid who falls in with some gangsters in the depression era. He’s fatherless and poor and has a crazy mom so he’s quite aimless and in need of role models. The kids in the neighborhood all look up to mob boss Schultz. Billy gains cred and a lot of money when he becomes part of Schultz’s inner circle.

It’s got the whole 30’s gangster story feel with a good bit of Catcher in the Rye (of course, what book about a teenager maturing doesn’t get compared to Catcher?) and a dash of Theodore Dreiser’s An American tragedy (Billy, the poor street urchin, is enraptured by the money and notoriety and because of this his morals decline rapidly).

I found at times that my mind was wandering and I would have to go back and read certain paragraphs. I’m not sure why this was, maybe I was going through a low attention span cycle or something. I’m not sure why some writers like Richard Ford can write about a father picking up his kid from his ex-wife and spending time at the baseball hall of fame or James Agee can write endlessly about every tiny detail of a sharecropper’s existence and I am enthralled while others can be writing about the mob, murder, violence, political intrigues and I have trouble paying attention. E.L. Doctorow is a very accomplished, highly regarded writer… so. It’s a mystery.

Still, I’d recommend this book particularly if you like the 30’s gangster thang.

Friday, June 24, 2005

 

Review: The Stand by Stephen King

Writing Style: 5.2
Originality: 5.6
Plot:5.5
Literary Merit(whatever that means): 3.7
Overall:4.8

This book is half (the first half) a brilliant idea, well thought out, great character development, smart, edgy (American government and military is bad and capable of great atrocities), and dead-on perfect storytelling. The second half is completely random nonsense, God-sent miracles, stupidity, and just plain ridiculous crappiness. Alright, maybe I should begin with my experiences with Stephen King in the past and my general feeling towards him. I went through a King phase in middle school, as is apt to happen. I read some good stuff, I liked his books under the name Richard Bachmann, The Running Man and Rage stood out, and I read some horrible junk, I think there was one called the Dark Half and one called Thinner where a guy gets cursed by a gypsy and he starts to lose weight (That’s the whole book! Very scary stuff, huh, a guy losing weight? Shwew… really makes you stay up at night and the hairs on the back of your neck stand up). That’s all I remember. I never read The Shining, but I loved the movie and I know his stories have been adapted into other good movies (Stand By Me, The Green Mile, Shawshank Redemption, I think). But regardless, I can’t help but kinda feel like reading Stephen King is a hop, skip, and a jump away from reading John Grisham. That said, I picked this one out as a beach book. I don’t normally pick things I would call “beach books”, but recently I’ve been enjoying reading big, thick paperbacks that while they may be bestsellers are somewhat intelligent and I’ve had some success lately with Shogun, the George RR Martin Fire and Ice books, and An Instance of the Fingerpost by Ian Pears. The Stand looked like it had that kind of potential and I loved the premise even though it seems a little clichéd now it was probably pretty fresh when this was first published in 1978.

So the story is, the US military is doing secret germ warfare research in violation of international treaties. An accident occurs at a base, one guy escapes the emergency quarantine and spreads a superflu to the rest of the world that kills 99.4% of the population. The first half of the book is society dealing with this as the superflu takes over and the government tries to cover it up. Then when almost everyone is wiped out he (King) goes into several stories of the individuals who were immune and how they find each other and form groups and come together to set up a new society. This stuff is great. It’s perfectly paced, he doesn’t just kill everyone off in the first 50 pages and then get straight into scary violence and general eeriness. The flu spreads quietly at first and then people deal with denial and the government cover up and the media at first helping the government but then turning renegade and trying to warn everyone of what the government is doing. And then the idea of a handful of modern day people coming together to reinvent government in the middle of America. My gosh, this is brilliant, there are so many great things that a great writer could do with this! Could this be the same guy who wrote Thinner? But alas, I guess he just couldn’t keep it up. It feels like he spent all this time and effort setting up this scenario and then he figured that something huge and earth-shattering’s got to happen and what could be more earth-shattering than a superflu wiping out 99.4% of the world’s population? So he thought, well, I guess I’ve got to go with visions and dreams and miracles and supernatural characters to top that. And once he gets this ball rolling, it snowballs in a hurry. Basically, all the good people have a dream about a nice old black lady that lives in Nebraska so they flock to her, and all the bad people dream about a mean guy that lives in California and they flock to him (it kind of reminded me of the climax to American Gods by Neil Gaiman). So you’ve got the good community vs. the bad community for sole possession of America. No grey areas here folks, bad’s bad and good’s good. And guess what, God is good. So any time you build up a good conflict He just reaches down, performs a miracle, and poof everything’s right as rain. For Christ’s sake, what’s the point of building towards a climax when you’re just gonna ruin it with a God-damned miracle? Now don’t get me wrong folks, I’m a fan of the fantasy genre, I’ve no problem with gods and magic in my fiction, but you’ve got to set rules for it. You can’t have a human character with omnipotent powers, that’s a god, and it makes any sort of conflict boring, and if you do have a god he’s got to be complex. You can’t pretend to write an intelligent story about the true, real-life nature of evil in society and have some dumbass omnipotent, omniscient God who sits around twiddling his thumbs until right before the good guys are REALLY about to get whipped and then WHAM smash the baddies for them. Ah, it was painful and to have invested over 1100 pages for this?

Apparently, this is the expanded, uncut version. I’ve no idea why anyone would want an expanded version.

So there you have it. There’s a realistic, very smart first half of the book that is terribly addictive and then… well, I’ve said my piece. There are people out there that love this book, it’s easy to read, and if you like King or have a penchant for apocalyptic novels you might try it. But, be wary of investing the time building towards the things that I’ve warned you about.

Thursday, June 23, 2005

 

Review: The Rachel Papers by Martin Amis

Writing style: 8.1
Originality: 7.0
Plot: 7.2
Literary Merit(whatever that means): 7.5
Overall: 7.3

I thoroughly enjoyed this book. It’s short (clocking in at ~220 pages), easy to read, and very funny. It is Martin Amis’ debut novel published in 1973 and the first book I’ve read by the author. I look forward to reading more because I really liked his style and I’m curious to see how it develops over the course of his career. I thought of it as sort of a British version of The Rules of Attraction by Bret Easton Ellis because of the tone of the book, the age of the characters, the desiring and chasing after someone else, and the aimlessness of youth and it’s drug and sex culture (of course, The Rachel Papers was published first so maybe I should say that Rules reminds me of an American Rachel Papers). It’s a bildungsroman (the final chapter is actually called “Midnight: coming of age”) about a 20 year old male who “falls in love” with a girl named Rachel. The Rachel Papers refers to journal writings, notes, and stories that the main character, Charles Highway, writes about Rachel. It’s a pretty simple plot and maybe not that original of a message but it’s the way that the story is told that makes it so good, not to mention the humor. A good example of which is a scene where Rachel is at Charles apartment unexpectedly and he wants to seduce her:

I thought of saying, ‘Forgive me, I should like to be alone for a few moments,’ but what I in fact said was: ‘Hang on – just going to have a pee.’
Within two minutes I had sprayed my armpits, talc-ed my groin, hawked rigorously into the basin, straightened my bedcover, put the fire on, scattered LP covers and left-wing weeklies over the floor, thrown some chalky underpants and a cache of fetid socks actually out of the window, drawn the curtains, removed The Rachel Papers from my desk, and run upstairs again, not panting much.
‘Let’s… let’s go downstairs for a bit.’

Highly recommended for those of you that enjoy contemporary coming of age stories about hip, smart teens/twenty-somethings’ sexual escapades, disillusionment, and aimless wandering in search of purpose and meaning and whatnot.

 

Review: The Public Burning by Robert Coover

Top 100 Ranking: 97

Writing style: 8.5
Originality: 8.5
Plot: 6.0
Literary Merit(whatever that means): 9
Overall: 8.4

Wow, this is a daunting book to cover for my first review. I picked it up because I was playing with these top 100 lists and it was NUMBER 4!! on Larry McCaffery’s list. The plot sounded cool and I like historical fiction so I gave it a go. Ok, it’s centered around the Rosenberg’s execution in 1953 for spying for the Russians and providing them with nuclear secrets leading to their own development of the bomb. It’s narrated by then VP Richard M. Nixon and features Uncle Sam as a character who sometimes stands alone as a character and is sometimes an incarnation of the American president at the time, in this case Eisenhower. It’s mainly about cold war/anti-communism hysteria in the 50’s. It reminded me a lot of Catch-22 especially in the beginning of the book. Sort of, what Catch-22 did for WWII military life this book does for cold war domestic American life. The humor is very similar to Catch-22 in places (another similarity in my opinion is that both books seem to lose steam in the second half, after the joke has lost its freshness). A good example of the humor is that Time (the magazine) is the nation’s poet laureate and Coover takes snippets from Time articles of the time and puts them in the form of actual poetic verse.

For example:

when the migs offered battle
in numbers they were being
knocked down like grouse
on a scottish moor

one cocky pilot snorted
that the requirement for ace
hood ought to be raised
to ten kills then added:

“ten hell make it fifteen
or twenty and put a hundred
pounds of cabbage in our tail
Assemblies as a handicap!”

I wonder if Nixon ever read this book since it was published in 1977 during his lifetime. The publisher apparently didn’t pimp the book too much for fear of being sued. It features Nixon being caught masturbating to the thought of Ethel Rosenberg and being anally raped by Uncle Sam. But actually, I think it painted a pretty nice overall picture of ole Tricky Dick. He’s presented as a very intelligent, empathetic individual who tries to act as a diplomat and reach an agreement where the Rosenbergs will not have to be executed.

I don’t know much about the actual events surrounding the Rosenberg trial and execution, but it’s pretty clear that much of the book is fictionalized. I don’t believe that Nixon ever nearly had sex with Ethel or that the execution took place in public in Times Square (the source of the title, and pretty clearly a double entendre). However, the book is dedicated to the Supreme Court justice that called for a stay of execution so I assume that that actually took place. It’s also pretty clear that the author has some doubts as to the guilt of the Rosenbergs and, if they were guilty, what all the fuss was about and how much it would have actually helped the Russians. It certainly made me interested in learning more about the specifics of their trial.

Overall, this is an exceptionally entertaining book. It’s laugh-out-loud funny at times and extremely clever (though, again, I feel like this wears thin somewhere around page 400 out of ~650). The writing is very free, sort of stream-of-consciousnessy and very experimental at certain points. If you are someone who loves America and believes that America is literally blessed by God and can therefore do no wrong to the point that the American president is to you what the Pope is to Catholics then this is not the book for you. If you have some healthy doubts about certain policies of the US government and are interested in how the government and the media can work the public up into a rabid, moronic frenzy capable of virtually anything because of their fear and blind patriotism then you may find this book very timely and a delight to read. Highly recommended for those of you in this latter group and lovers of Catch-22.

Wednesday, June 08, 2005

 

Re: The acronyms in the brackets after each selection

After every book and comment I've got in brackets that books placement on other lists that I've found on the internet and liked. There are also awards that the books have received. here's the legend:

ML = Modern Library's list
MLR = Modern Library's Reader's list (where did they find these people? what's up with the Ayn Rand and L Ron Hubbard and Charles De Lint? the Reader's nonfiction list is even scarier.)
MLNF = Modern Library's Non Fiction list (this applies to Let us Now Praise Famous Men and Black Boy?)
LM = Larry McCaffery's list (this is a pretty cool list, a little to much postmodernism for my taste, but at least its bold)
R = Radcliffe publishing course (I really like this list, I think its well thought out and well rounded my only critiques are a) what's up with all the children's shit? b) its almost too well thought out to the point that it's kinda chickenshit, for instance, the highest book on the modern library list I had never heard of was #8 Darkness at Noon, which I decided to read and was phenomenal, the highest book on Larry McCaffery's list I'd never heard of was #4 the Public Burning which I'm about to finish and its great, the highest book on radcliffe I'd not heard of was #71 Rebecca)
HBTWC - Harold Bloom's The Western Canon (Amy says this guy was kinda controversial in grad school, but he loves Cormac McCarthy so I'm down with him)
HBS - Harvard Book Stores top 100 books (includes all books in general, Zinn's People's History is #1 so you know right off its a good list)
SFBK - Sci-Fi Book Club (I've got a bit of scifi on there so I'm including some scifi lists and awards)
PESF - Phobos Entertainments top 100 Sci-Fi
NBA - national Book Award
NBCC - National Book Critics Circle award
P/F - Pen/Faulkner
PP - Pulitzer
HA - Hugo Award (scifi)
NA - Nebula Award (also scifi)
WFA - World Fantasy Award

I'll try to get links to these lists up here soon.

Tuesday, June 07, 2005

 

Herndon's Hunderd

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.

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