“Declaring the best book ever written is tricky business. Who’s to say what the best is? We went one step further: we crunched the numbers from 10 top books lists (Modern Library, the New York Public Library, St. John’s College reading list, Oprah’s, and more) to come up with The Top 100 Books of All Time. It’s a list of lists — a meta-list. Let the debate begin.”
1. War and Peace
2. 1984
3. Ulysses
4. Lolita
5. The Sound and the Fury
“I defy anyone to read just the last two chapters of ‘President Lincoln’—a passionate exegesis of the Second Inaugural Address and a straighforward sampling of the national and (surprisingly) global grief that followed the assassination—without tears. (Of course, it helps to have read the preceding nine hundred pages, as a reminder of the profundity of the loss.)”
Hendrik Hertzberg referring to Lincoln’s Virtues: An Ethical Biography and President Lincoln: The Duty of a Statesman, both by William Lee Miller.
Nearly every week I could recommend the fiction that appears in The New Yorker — and from time-to-time I do.
I thought this story by Jonathan Franzen from an issue a few weeks back was particularly worth mentioning.
The New Yorker BTW has a website configured for the iPhone.
I was busy over the weekend reading two novels by Rennie Airth — River of Darkness and The Blood-Dimmed Tide.
Both are set in England after World War I — one in 1921, the other in 1932 — and both are detective stories dealing with serial killers. They’re what I’d call literary, mystery novels. Good stuff.
Airth has a third John Madden mystery coming out in a few weeks.
Last week I read Michael McGarrity’s Nothing But Trouble, the 2006 addition to his series of Kevin Kerney mysteries. This one was really two stories — Kearney taking leave of his duties as Santa Fe Police Chief to work on a movie being made in the New Mexico Bootheel, and Kearney’s Army officer wife looking for a fugitive in Dublin. There’s almost no overlap. Odd.
McGarrity’s Kerney books are interesting to New Mexicans because of the local settings and I’ve enjoyed several of the series, especially those after he got his formula well-honed and before he got bored with it. Nothing special about this one.
Also recently, I’ve read my first two Nevada Barr Anna Pigeon mysteries, the first and the fifteenth (and latest) of the series featuring the National Park ranger. The two are Track of the Cat, set in Guadalupe Mountains National Park, and Borderline
I read Borderline on my iPhone.
The problem with best book lists — like the ones discussed here the past two days — is, I think, the use of the word “best.”
Best is the superlative of good, but otherwise it has no specificity.
Is the best pitcher in the league the one with the most strikeouts, the best ERA, the highest salary, or the most wins?
Is the best film the one that takes in the most money, has the most critical acclaim, or wins the Oscar?
Is the best place to live the one with the most jobs, the mildest climate, or the best coffee shops and pubs?
Is the best novel the one taught in the most literature courses, published in more editions, or celebrated each June 16th?
I would argue that the best novels of a century have to transcend being a book. They have to have been discussed continuously since they were published.
There is, for example, a scene in The Wire in prison where they discuss The Great Gatsby.
D’Angelo Barksdale:
He’s saying that the past is always with us. Where we come from, what we go through, how we go through it, all this shit matters. Like at the end of the book, ya know, boats and tides and all. It’s like you can change up, right, you can say you’re somebody new, you can give yourself a whole new story. But, what came first is who you really are and what happened before is what really happened. It don’t matter that some fool say he different cuz the things that make you different is what you really do, what you really go through.
The best novels may not be the best to read or the most enjoyable, or anyone’s favorite. And they may indeed have been written mostly by now dead white men. The language can be difficult; the cadence unfamiliar. But they are larger than that. To mention two 19th century classics, Moby Dick is not just a book about whaling; Huck Finn is not just a book about a boy and a river.
The fact that a novel is on the Modern Library best list is — in a way — almost validation that it should be on the list.
The 100 Essential New England Books
Moby Dick is number one.
Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
Hamlet by William Shakespeare
The Great Gatsby F. Scott Fitzgerald
In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust
The Stories of Anton Chekhov by Anton Chekhov
Middlemarch by George Eliot
The above is the consensus top 10 greatest books of all time from J. Peder Zane’s The Top Ten: Writers Pick Their Favorite Books
This list was made by the Radcliffe Publishing Course, long considered the top course in preparing people for work in publishing. It was made at the request of the Modern Library to increase the discussion.
BTW, the Modern Library list (provided in the earlier post) was quite controversial from the beginning.
Writing in … The New Yorker, Mr. Styron said he ”cheerfully” assented to the view that the Modern Library’s final list was ”weird” and that it displayed a ”generally oppressive stodginess.” He also acknowledged that the panel of judges that made the selection was ”entirely white, predominately male and somewhat doddering.” Mr. Schlesinger had calculated their average age at 69.
Styron explained that the top books weren’t necessarily regarded as the best, rather they were just the novels all of the judges agreed should be included somewhere on the list.
Here’s the other list, the Radcliffe list. Its judges were mostly in their twenties, a majority were female, and not all were white.
In 1998, the Modern Library polled its editors and produced a list of the 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century. Number one, as you can see, was Ulysses by James Joyce, a novel set on one day, June 16, 1904. Hence, Bloomsday in honor of the novel’s protagonist, Leopold Bloom. The day is widely celebrated with readings, pub crawls and other good times.
My very own favorite niece, known on these pages as aimlsrdhd, began blogging last month:
We are a collective of three new writers each busy working on our first historical romance novels. We have had quite a journey taking the leap from avid readers to dedicated writers. Now, as writers striving to be authors, we are faced with an entirely new set of challenges and triumphs.
Join us as we embark on a search for the perfect revision, an agent, a publisher and the realization of our dream of working as professional authors.
The Quill Sisters – writers of historical romance novels.
I’m going to steal this whole blog post (she wouldn’t sue her uncle, would she?) to give you a taste.
I wish my dialogue was this good
So this morning Sassy (age 6) and The Bandit (age 4) are eating granola bars. Sassy’s has chocolate chips in it and The Bandit asks if he can have a bite. Usually, they are very good at sharing. Sassy is all solicitous and sweet when she says, “Do you want a chocolate chip? Do you?” Of course, he does so she gives him one, even going so far as to put it sweetly in his mouth for him. Then she says, again sweet as pie, “Was is good? Did you like it?” He nods that is was indeed very yummy. She puts her face right up to his, I thought she was going to kiss him and I was thinking, Wow, isn’t she a nice little girl. Then she whispers, “I got it off the floor.”
Seriously.
Considered the first serious western, The Virginian was published on this date in 1902. The novel by Owen Wister sold 300,000 copies in its first year. The University of Wyoming (the novel is set in Wyoming) has an online exhibit concerning The Virginian. According to the site:
Since its 1902 publication, The Virginian has left a lasting impact upon the American cultural landscape. In earlier years after its publication, The Virginian did much to popularize the American West. As a result, a romanticized view of the West became an integral part of the American popular imagination and cultural identity. In recent years, The Virginian has come under scrutiny. Wister’s portrayal of the West is seen by many as a myth at odds with reality.
When the San Francisco Chronicle listed the 100 best Western works of fiction in 1999, Wister’s novel was 46th.
Today is the birthday of two important and influential American writers, Peter Matthiessen (82) and Garry Wills (75).
[Matthiessen’s] father was a successful architect, and Matthiessen grew up in an affluent area of southwest Connecticut. He served in the Navy during World War II, studied at Yale, and then traveled to Paris, where he and two other young writers, Harold Humes and George Plimpton, decided to start a literary journal called The Paris Review.
After publishing two novels that weren’t very successful, Matthiessen took off on a trip across the United States in his Ford convertible, with a shotgun and a sleeping bag, looking for places where certain American animals were dying out: the bear, the wolf, the crane. His journey became the subject of his book Wildlife In America (1959), which was one of the books that helped launch the modern environmentalist movement in the United States. Matthiessen has continued to write books about nature, such as The Snow Leopard (1978).
[Wills] grew up in a conservative Roman Catholic family. He said, “[I was raised as] a Catholic cold warrior, praying after Mass every day for the conversion of Russia.” His father was an appliance salesman who believed that reading was a waste of time, and he used to pay Wills not to read.
Wills couldn’t stop reading, though. He got a job writing for the conservative National Review, but during the 1960s, he started traveling around the country, writing about protests and race riots. He began to argue against the Vietnam War and for federal support of civil rights. He continued to call himself a conservative, but other conservatives didn’t think so.
His first important book was Nixon Agonistes (1970), about Nixon’s 1968 campaign for the presidency. Since then he has written dozens of books, about religion, Shakespeare, the Kennedys, the Declaration of Independence, Ronald Reagan, John Wayne, The Gettysburg Address, and the papacy.
Arthur Conan Doyle was born 150 years ago today. A physician, Doyle modeled Shelock Holmes after a professor he knew in medical school. There are 56 stories and four novels featuring the famous detective.
Michael Lewis reviews The Snowball: Warren Buffett and the Business of Life. An excellent and telling review.
I don’t know about you but I’m re-reading Animal Farm just in case this swine flu thing gets serious.
“No question now, what had happened to the faces of the pigs. The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.”
Fiction: Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout
Drama: Ruined by Lynn Nottage
History: The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family by Annette Gordon-Reed
Biography: American Lion: Andrew Jackson in the White House by Jon Meacham
Poetry: The Shadow of Sirius by W.S. Merwin
General Nonfiction: Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II by Douglas A. Blackmon
Music: Double Sextet by Steve Reich, premiered March 26, 2008 in Richmond
Two years ago today NewMexiKen posted a review of The Worst Hard Time
Egan’s book is subtitled The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl. Centered around the Oklahoma and Texas panhandles, southeastern Colorado and southwestern Kansas, and particularly Boise City, Oklahoma, and Dalhart, Texas, Egan tells a half-dozen personal stories from the greatest environmental disaster in American history.
It was a lost world then; it is a lost world now. The government treats it like throwaway land, the place where Indians were betrayed, where Japanese Americans were forced into internment camps during World War II, where German POWs were imprisoned. The only growth industries now are pigs and prisons. Over the last half-century, towns have collapsed and entire counties have been all but abandoned to the old and the dying. Hurricanes that buried city blocks farther south, tornadoes that knocked down everything in their paths, grassfires that burned from one horizon to another— all have come and gone through the southern plains. But nothing has matched the black blizzards. American meteorologists rated the Dust Bowl the number one weather event of the twentieth century. And as they go over the scars of the land, historians say it was the nation’s worst prolonged environmental disaster.
And the worst of it was man made.
But it’s the stories of the people where Egan excels; of lost jobs, lost farms, lost children, and lost hope. Even in the years before the drought and dust, life was tough.
In the fall of 1922, Hazel saddled up Pecos and rode off to a one-room, wood-frame building sitting alone in the grassland: the schoolhouse. It was Hazel’s first job. She had to be there before the bell rang — five-and-a-half miles by horseback each way — to haul in drinking water from the well, to sweep dirt from the floor, and shoo hornets and flies from inside. The school had thirty-nine students in eight grades, and the person who had to teach them all, Hazel Lucas, was seventeen years old. … After school, Hazel had to do the janitor work and get the next day’s kindling — dry weeds or sun-toasted cow manure.
One of nine kids, Ike Osteen grew up in a dugout. A dugout is just that — a home dug into the hide of the prairie. The floor was dirt. Above ground, the walls were plank boards, with no insulation on the inside and black tarpaper on the outside. Every spring, Ike’s mother poured boiling water over the walls to kill fresh-hatched bugs. The family heated the dugout with cow chips, which burned in an old stove and left a turd smell slow to dissipate. The toilet was outside, a hole in the ground. Water was hauled in from a deeper hole in the ground.
Egan’s book won the National Book Award.
On Tuesday night, the first Kindle software reader appeared, and it’s a free iPhone app. Called Kindle for iPhone, the app replicates the basic book-reading functions of the hardware Kindle device, and can be thought of as a complement to that device, which has more features. However, you don’t have to own a hardware Kindle to use this app. You can now choose instead to use your iPhone or iPod Touch as the reader for books from Kindle’s catalog.
Walt Mossberg has the first review.
NewMexiKen picked up the app last night but I haven’t had a chance to check it out yet. My eyes are so full of water from spring allergies it’s a wonder I can find my iPhone let alone read anything on it.
A fine appreciation of Wallace Stegner by Timothy Egan.
Everywhere else, though, Stegner has grown in stature. For starters, there are rivers undammed, desert vistas unspoiled and forests uncut in the wondrous West because of his pen.
He influenced several presidents, from Kennedy to Clinton, to see that “something will have gone out of us as a people if we ever let the remaining wilderness be destroyed,” as he wrote.
How many writers of fiction can make that claim?
February 18th was the 100th anniversary of Stegner’s birth.
… winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1993 is 78 today. The following is from the press release announcing her selection:
“who, in novels characterized by visionary force and poetic import, gives life to an essential aspect of American reality.”
“My work requires me to think about how free I can be as an African-American woman writer in my genderized, sexualized, wholly racialized world”. These are the words of this year’s Nobel Laureate in Literature, the American writer Toni Morrison, in her book of essays “Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination” (1992). And she adds, “My project rises from delight, not disappointment…”
Toni Morrison is 62 years old, and was born in Lorain, Ohio, in the United States. Her works comprise novels and essays. In her academic career she is a professor in the humanities at the University of Princeton, New Jersey.
She has written six novels, each of them of great interest. Her oeuvre is unusually finely wrought and cohesive, yet at the same time rich in variation. One can delight in her unique narrative technique, varying from book to book and developed independently, even though its roots stem from Faulkner and American writers from further south. The lasting impression is nevertheless sympathy, humanity, of the kind which is always based on profound humour.
“Song of Solomon” (1978) with its description of the black world in life and legend, forms an excellent introduction to the work of Toni Morrison. Milkman Dead’s quest for his real self and its source reflects a basic theme in the novels. The Solomon of the title, the southern ancestor, was to be found in the songs of childhood games. His inner intensity had borne him back, like Icarus, through the air to the Africa of his roots. This insight finally becomes Milkman’s too.
“Beloved” (1987) continues to widen the themes and to weave together the places and times in the network of motifs. The combination of realistic notation and folklore paradoxically intensifies the credibility. There is enormous power in the depiction of Sethe’s action to liberate her child from the life she envisages for it, and the consequences of this action for Sethe’s own life.
In her latest novel “Jazz” (1992), Toni Morrison uses a device which is akin to the way jazz itself is played. The book’s first lines provide a synopsis, and in reading the novel one becomes aware of a narrator who varies, embellishes and intensifies. The result is a richly complex, sensuously conveyed image of the events, the characters and moods.
As the motivation for the award implies, Toni Morrison is a literary artist of the first rank. She delves into the language itself, a language she wants to liberate from the fetters of race. And she addresses us with the lustre of poetry.
The Writer’s Almanac, as they often do, had some insight in 2004 about Toni Morrison:
She didn’t start writing fiction until she was in her thirties. She wasn’t happy with her marriage, and writing helped her escape her daily troubles. She later said, “It was as though I had nothing left but my imagination. . . . I wrote like someone with a dirty habit. Secretly. Compulsively. Slyly.” She joined a small writing group, and one day she didn’t have anything to bring to the group meeting, so she jotted down a story about a black girl who wants blue eyes. The story later became her first novel, The Bluest Eye (1969). She wrote most of it in the mornings and on weekends while she was working as an editor for Random House and raising her children on her own. …
Morrison said, “[Writing] stretches you . . . [and] makes you stay in touch with yourself. . . . It’s like going under water for me, the danger. Yet I’m certain I’m going to come up.”
In 1999, San Francisco Chronicle readers ranked the 100 best non-fiction and fiction books of the 20th century written in, about, or by an author from the Western United States.
NewMexiKen has posted the top 10 from the lists several times, but repeats them each year — because the lists are interesting, but primarily to honor Wallace Stegner, who was born 100 years ago today.
Stegner is first in fiction, second in non-fiction; now that’s a writer.
TOP 10 FICTION
1. “Angle of Repose,” by Wallace Stegner
2. “The Grapes of Wrath,” by John Steinbeck
3. “Sometimes a Great Notion,” by Ken Kesey
4. “The Call of the Wild,” by Jack London
5. “The Big Sleep,” by Raymond Chandler
6. “Animal Dreams,” by Barbara Kingsolver
7. “Death Comes for the Archbishop,” by Willa Cather
8. “The Day of the Locust,” by Nathanael West
9. “Blood Meridian,” by Cormac McCarthy
10. “The Maltese Falcon,” by Dashiell Hammett
TOP 10 NON-FICTION
1. “Land of Little Rain,” Mary Austin
2. “Beyond the Hundredth Meridian,” Wallace Stegner
3. “Desert Solitaire,” Edward Abbey
4. “This House of Sky,” Ivan Doig
5. “Son of the Morning Star,” Evan S. Connell
6. Western trilogy, Bernard DeVoto
7. “Assembling California,” John McPhee
8. “My First Summer in the Sierra,” John Muir
9. “The White Album,” Joan Didion
10. “City of Quartz,” Mike Davis
His father was a schemer who was constantly moving the family from place to place, hoping to strike it rich in one of the Western boomtowns. He watched as his father tried and failed to plant a farm in North Dakota, tried and failed to run a lunchroom in the backwoods of Washington state, sold bootleg liquor in Great Falls, Montana, poured the family’s savings into an invention that was supposed to detect gold in the ground, and finally bought a piece of redwood forest in California, only to cut it all down and sell it for firewood. By the time Stegner was 20, he had lived in more than 20 different houses, including, at one point, a derailed dining car. But though he had a tough childhood, Stegner grew to love the great open wilderness of the American West.
. . .
He’d already begun writing fiction, but he wanted to write a new kind of novel about the American West. At that time, the only novels being published about the West were full of cowboys and heroic pioneers. Stegner said, “I wanted to write about what happens to the pioneer virtues and the pioneer type of family when the frontiers are gone and the opportunities all used up. The result was his first big success, his novel The Big Rock Candy Mountain (1943), loosely based on the experiences of his own family. It tells the story of a man named Bo Mason and his wife, Elsa, who travel over the American West, trying to make it rich.
Stegner went on to write dozens of novels about the West, including Angle of Repose (1971) and The Spectator Bird (1976). But he also started one of the most influential creative writing programs in the country, at Stanford University, where his students included Wendell Berry, Larry McMurtry, Robert Stone, Ken Kesey, Raymond Carver, and Scott Turow.
The Writer’s Almanac (2007)
“Twenty-five books the new president should have by his bedside.”
The Washington Monthly solicited suggestions from a number of prominent people on What Obama Should Read. It’s an interesting and varied and suggestive text.
Elsewhere, Michiko Kakutani, discusses the role of books in President-elect Obama’s life: From Books, President-elect Barack Obama Found His Voice.
The ever-awesome Matt Taibbi disconstructs Tom Friedman (who was once worth reading); a laugh-out-loud takedown of someone who constantly needs taking down.
Taibbi begins:
When some time ago a friend of mine told me that Thomas Friedman’s new book, Hot, Flat, and Crowded, was going to be a kind of environmentalist clarion call against American consumerism, I almost died laughing.
Beautiful, I thought. Just when you begin to lose faith in America’s ability to fall for absolutely anything—just when you begin to think we Americans as a race might finally outgrow the lovable credulousness that leads us to fork over our credit card numbers to every half-baked TV pitchman hawking a magic dick-enlarging pill, or a way to make millions on the Internet while sitting at home and pounding doughnuts— along comes Thomas Friedman, porn-stached resident of a positively obscene 114,000 square foot suburban Maryland mega-monstro-mansion and husband to the heir of one of the largest shopping-mall chains in the world, reinventing himself as an oracle of anti-consumerist conservationism.
Where does a man who needs his own offshore drilling platform just to keep the east wing of his house heated get the balls to write a book chiding America for driving energy inefficient automobiles? Where does a guy whose family bulldozed 2.1 million square feet of pristine Hawaiian wilderness to put a Gap, an Old Navy, a Sears, an Abercrombie and even a motherfucking Foot Locker in paradise get off preaching to the rest of us about the need for a “Green Revolution”? Well, he’ll explain it all to you in 438 crisply written pages for just $27.95, $30.95 if you have the misfortune to be Canadian.
“Clear some space on your bookshelf as six of our state’s best authors name the New Mexico books that have influenced them. At the top of the list: A collection of moving environmental essays, a novel with a conscience, a historical diary, and three Southwestern classics.”
It’s the birthday of Jacob Grimm, born in Hanau, Germany (1785), one of the men responsible for collecting fairy tales like “Little Red Riding Hood,” “Rumpelstiltskin,” “Snow White,” “Rapunzel,” and “Hansel and Grethel.” He and his younger brother, Wilhelm, collected more than 200 German folk tales and published Grimm’s Fairy Tales in 1812.
Lots of people thought the stories weren’t appropriate for children. There was violence, grief, an old woman who ate kids, abandoned children, and young women chopping off pieces of their feet to fit in slippers. But the book was still a big success, and it changed the way scholars collected folklore — trying to present straightforward narratives as people told them, instead of taking the basic story and turning it into a sophisticated literary piece.
In “Hansel and Grethel,” Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm wrote: “The old woman had only pretended to be so kind; she was in reality a wicked witch, who lay in wait for children, and had only built the little house of bread in order to entice them there. When a child fell into her power, she killed it, cooked and ate it, and that was a feast day with her.”
… was born in Petrovichi, Russia, on this date in 1920. The Writer’s Almanac profile today includes this:
His family immigrated to the United States when he was three years old, and his parents opened a candy shop in Brooklyn. He spent most of his time working in the family store, and he was fascinated by the shop’s newspaper stand, which sold the latest issues of popular magazines. When his father finally relented and let him read pulp fiction, Asimov started reading science fiction obsessively.
He started writing science fiction as well. He published his first story when he was 18, and published 30 more stories in the next three years. At age 21, he wrote his most famous story after a conversation with his friend and editor John Campbell. Campbell had been reading Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Nature, which includes the passage, “If the stars should appear one night in a thousand years, how would men believe and adore; and preserve for many generations the remembrance of the city of God which has been shown!” Asimov went home and wrote the story “Nightfall” (1941), about a planet with six suns that has a sunset once every 2,049 years. It’s been anthologized over and over, and many people still consider it the best science fiction short story ever written.
Asimov died in 1992.