List of the Day: Favorite Series

I can't resist a list. So when I saw this "Top 10" event on Random Ramblings, I was sucked in. 

I enjoy a good series, usually a mystery, sometimes a literary series. I'm not a fan of sci-fi or fantasy, so several more popular series will never make my list. And I limited this to adult books, so my all-time favorite Trixie Belden series didn't make the cut, no matter how many times I read it as a child.

Here is my list of favorite "series" in alphabetical order by author's name.

Kate Atkinson's Jackson Brodie mysteries

James Lee Burke's Dave Robechiex cop mysteries (reviews here and here)

Lee Child's Jack Reacher mysteries

Lawrence Durrell's Alexandria Quartet 

John Lescroarte's Dismas Hardy lawyer mysteries (discussed here)

David Lodge's academia trilogy (review here)

Anthony Powell's Dance to the Music of Time (discussed here)

Philip Roth's Nate Zuckerman books

Julia Spencer-Fleming's Clare Furguson priest mysteries (reviews here and here)

John Updike's Rabbit books

A Mini-Smackdown: Modern Library v. Radcliffe

Finishing the books on the Modern Library's list of Top 100 Novels of the 20th Century inspired me, in a round about way, to start Rose City Reader.  I was so jazzed by finishing the list that I started adopting other Must Read lists.  The Radcliffe Publishing Course's list of Top 100 Novels of the 20th Century immediately caught my eye because it is the declared rival of the Modern Library list.

The Radcliffe list is nagging at me right now. I have only 14 or so books to finish before I have completed the list -- a tantalizingly achievable goal. Having recently finished Where Angels Fear to Tread (reviewed here), I am one step closer.

There is a tremendous amount of overlap between the two lists. If I had to chose which list really represented the "best" 100 novels of the 2th Century, I would pick the Modern Library list for a couple of reasons. First, I think the Radcliffe list leans in general to books that are more popular (Gone with the Wind, for example, which also won the Pulitzer, so I'm not knocking it, but still), while the Modern Library list includes books that are more literary. For example, the Modern Library list includes An American Tragedy, which I thought was heavy going, but it was a groundbreaking work so I agree that it should be on the list.

Second, but along the same lines, the Radcliffe list includes a number of children's books. They are good children's books, but I would have chosen only from books for adults.

Finally, while I understand that the Modern Library list is often criticized for not having "enough" books by women, I think the Radcliffe list overcompensates. I really don't think the list needs three books by Tony Morrison or even three by Virginia Wolf, especially at the expense of some of my favorites from the Modern Library list like A Dance to the Music of Time and The Alexandria Quartet.

I'm open to persuasion. Other thoughts?

If anyone is working on wither list, please let me know. I love to read blogs about these lists. And if you would like to be listed on either of my list posts, please leave a comment here or on my list posts with appropriate links and I will add them.

Review: Where Angels Fear to Tread

Where Angels Fear to Tread is a gem with too many facets to appreciate fully at first inspection. E. M. Forster packed so much into his short first novel that it would be a pleasure to read several times.

When Lilia Herriton left for a year in Italy, her in-laws breathed a sigh of relief to have the impetuous, somewhat gauche, widow out of their stodgy hair. But when they discover that Lilia has gone and married the ne’er-do-well son of a provincial Italian dentist, their shocked overreaction leads to a series of misfortunes that eventually crush their prim conventions.

Forster uses the star-crossed lovers, Lilia and Gino, to illustrate the clash between star-crossed cultures and philosophies. In surviving these clashes, Lilia’s brother-in-law, Philip Harriton, and her companion, Caroline Abbott, grow to appreciate a world much bigger than their tedious hometown of Sawston.

Forster is – for the better – a stripped down version of Henry James. The beauty and big ideas are there, but are not swaddled to obscurity with a million extra words. Where Angels Fear to Tread was published in 1905. To readers used to James’s heavy hand (The Wings of the Dove, The Ambassadors, and The Golden Bowl were published in that order in the three years prior to Angels), Forster must have seemed like the breath of life itself.

OTHER REVIEWS

If you would like your review of this or any other Forster novels listed her, please leave a comment with a link and I will add it.

NOTES

This book is on the Radcliffe Top 100 Novels of the 20th Century list. It counts as one of my books for the Typically British Challenge.

Opening Sentence of the Day: Where Angels Fear to Tread

"They were all at Charing Cross to see Lilia off --  Philip, Harriet, Irma, Mrs. Harrington herself."

-- Where Angels Fear to Tread by E. M. Forster

I'm a Forster fan, but I have never read this and I have never seen the movie.  I don't really like movie tie-in covers, but that's the edition I ended up with. I don't even remember where I got it, it has been on my TBR shelf for so long.

WAFtT is on the Radcliffe Top 100 list. I am trying to concentrate on this list more than others because I only have 15 to go (if I count the last two volumes of The Lord of the Rings as two separate items on the list, which I do).

Review: The Naked and the Dead

Norman Mailer's The Naked and the Dead is a mesmerizing look at Army life in WWII. Mailer tells the story of an Intelligence and Reconnaissance platoon on a fictional Pacific Island. There are fewer battle scenes than expected. Most of the story is about the men on daily patrols, guard duty, and a week long patrol behind enemy lines.  The realism of Mailer's descriptions -- particularly, of what it was like to hike for days and days in the jungle carrying 60 pounds of equipment -- are riveting. What those men went through!

Mailer personalizes the characters by interposing flashbacks highlighting the pre-war lives of several of the men. He also switches the point of view among the various characters. Still, the characters are never fully developed, which, oddly, made the story more realistic. The reader gets the kind of impressionistic views of each man in the troop that the men had of each other. These men were all thrown together to serve under horrible conditions, but they had nothing in common to start with and really did not know each other.

All in all, a great book. It is long, but it is a fast read. In Mailer’s introduction to the 50th Anniversary edition he self-deprecatingly explains that the book (his first) was a best seller and was written in the flashy language of all best sellers. But it is not the language that makes the book so good, it is the story.


OTHER REVIEWS

If you would like your review linked her, please leave a link in a comment and I will add it.

NOTES

Mailer's best seller did not win any prizes, but it did make it to the Modern Library's list of Top 100 Novels of the 20th Century, Radcliffe's competing list, The Book of the Month Club's "Well Stocked Bookcase" list, and Anthony Burgess's list of his favorite 99 novels.

Review of the Day: Franny and Zooey

If John Cheever and Paul Coelho had set out to collaborate on The Royal Tenenbaums, the result would have been Franny and Zooey.

J.D. Salinger’s short, two-part novel is the story of sister and brother, Franny and Zooey Glass, the youngest of seven precocious whiz kids who grew up on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. Ostensibly, Zooey is trying to help Franny, who is in the midst of a breakdown. It soon becomes clear, however, that both have been unmoored by the suicide of their oldest brother Seymour and the related, self-imposed academic exile of their next-oldest brother Buddy.

The problem lies in the supplemental religious education Seymour and Buddy sought fit to bestow on their youngest siblings. Frightened “at the statistics on child pedants and academic weisenheimers who grow up into faculty-recreation-room savants,” Seymour and Buddy decide to set the youngest two on a Zen-like quest for “no-knowledge” – a quest to be with God in a state of pure consciousness, or satori. As Buddy later explains in a letter to Zooey:

We thought it would be wonderfully constructive to at least . . . tell you as much as we knew about the men – the saints, the arhats, the bodhisattvas, the jivanmuktas – who knew something or everything about this state of being. That is, we wanted both of you to know who and what Jesus and Gautama and Lao-tse and Shankaracharya and Hui-neng and Sri Ramakrishna, etc., were before you knew too much or anything about Homer or Shakespeare or even Blake or Whitman, let alone George Washington and his cherry tree or the definition of a peninsula or how to parse a sentence. That, anyway, was the big idea.

All this mystic education, or “religious mystification” as Salinger describes it, estranges Franny and Zooey from their childhood and college compatriots, leaving them lonely and angry. Zooey insists that they are both “freaks” incapable of being around other people as they both cling to their intellectual superiority.

When Seymour’s suicide demonstrates that the supposed wisdom that comes from the quest for pure consciousness is not enough to make life worth living, the metaphysical rug gets yanked from under Franny and Zooey’s feet, precipitating their mutual breakdown.

Salinger’s book is clever, heartfelt, and sad. The value of its final lesson lies, not in understanding the details of Franny and Zooey’s existential arguments, but in appreciating the emotional crisis the siblings face. The idea that we should strive to be our best for God’s sake – and not our own satisfaction in acquiring wealth, knowledge, prestige, or even wisdom – may not be original, but it is an idea worth contemplating.

OTHER REVIEWS

(Please leave a comment with a link if you would like your review posted here.)


NOTES

Franny and Zooey appears on Radcliffe's Top 100 and Boxall's 1001 Books.

Review: Wide Sargasso Sea

I am perfectly ambivalent about Wide Sargasso Sea. Every reaction I had to the book is balanced by its opposite reaction:

• The moody, languid prose captured the tropical setting: I longed for a more direct narrative. 
• The switches in perspective deepened the relationships among the characters: it was frustratingly difficult to track who was saying what and when they were saying it. 
• The themes of madness, alcoholism, cruelty, and love were fascinating: the characters were all horrible and it was awful to watch them destroy themselves and each other. 
• The connection between the heroine and the insane wife in Jane Eyre is an inspired literary device; the tie-in with Jane Eyre is a manipulative gimmick. 

See what I mean? Everything I like about the book, I dislike about the book. Equipoise. But it made it to both the Modern Library and Radcliffe lists of best novels of the 20th century, so the half of me that disliked the book is at least pleased to have accomplished two tasks.

OTHER REVIEWS

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Review: Sophie's Choice

In Sophie’s Choice, William Styron does as masterful job of telling a horrific tale in bearable way. Sophie is a Polish Christian who survived 18 months in Auschwitz before the camp was liberated by the Allies. Of course her story is heartbreaking. But Styron unfolds the tale in a way that allows the reader to take it all in without being crushed by the sadness of it.

First, instead of marching out the story of Sophie’s capture and imprisonment in chronological order, Styron layers it on, each layer building on the next. When the 22-year-old narrator, Stingo (a Southerner moved to Brooklyn to write novels), first meets Sophie in the summer of 1947, she gives him only the briefest version of her experience in the war. It is only as they grow closer as friends that Sophie, through a series of drunken encounters, provides more details to Stingo, each time admitting that she had lied to him before in earlier versions of her tale.

By presenting the horrifying particulars bit by bit, Styron seems mindful of the warning, and even quotes Stalin as saying, that a “single death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic.” The reader sees the tragedy of Sophie’s experience because, by offering just a little at a time, Styron allows the reader to digest her story, along with a great deal of information about the Holocaust in general. If Styron had presented her story in full from the beginning, the awfulness would be numbing.

Also, Styron balances Sophie’s tragic past with her tragic present in Brooklyn. In love with Nathan, a brilliant drug addict subject to violent fits of jealousy, Sophie has no chance of building a “normal” life in America. But, given her experiences in the concentration camp, it is impossible to imagine how she could. Rather than present an unbelievable fairy tale of survival, Styron uses the tortured relationship between Nathan and Sophie as the catalyst for her revelations to Stingo, as well as the vehicle of her ultimate, and well-foreshadowed, undoing.

Finally, for all its sadness, there is plenty of humor in the book. Some of Stingo’s failed romantic adventures are downright funny, as are his self-deprecating descriptions of his writing efforts. Again, without these side stories offering a respite from the main narrative, Sophie’s story would be unbearable.


OTHER REVIEWS

Chaotic Compendiums

If you would like your review of this book listed here, please leave a comment with a link and I will add it.

NOTES

Sophie’s Choice is one of my Top 10 favorite novels of all times. It won the National Book Award in 1980.  It is on Anthony Burgess's list of his favorite 99 novels.  It is on the Modern Library list of Top 100 Novels of the 20th Century and Radcliffe's rival list. 

Review: Midnight's Children

Midnight’s Children is the pseudo-autobiography of Saleem Sinai, the first baby born in independent India. Saleem tells the story of his life, as enmeshed in the history of the first 31 years of post-colonial India and entwined in the lives of the other 1,000 children born between midnight and 1:00 a.m. on the first day of the new country. Saleem describes this complicated, vivid, magical, funny, and disturbing mix as the "chutnification of history."

This was the first novel Salman Rushdie wrote and the first of his that I have read. I could kick myself for waiting so long. This book is a delight. There is a reason it show up on so many lists, including: Booker Prize Winners Modern Library's Top 100 Novels of the 20th Century Radcliffe's Top 100 Novels of the 20th Century

OTHER REVIEWS

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Review: The Sound and the Fury

The Sound and the Fury is much easier to understand if you realize that it cannot be understood from the get go, but only when it is complete. To borrow a line from The Big Chill, sometimes you have to let art flow over you.

The book is divided into four parts, the first three of which are told in first-person, stream of conscious narrative from the perspective of three Compson brothers: Benjy, Quentin, and Jason.  Benjy’s section is particularly difficult to follow because he is mentally retarded and does not talk, but only narrates what he hears, in no particular chronological order.  Quentin’s and Jason’s sections are progressively more comprehensible as pieces of the story develop.  The final section is told by an omniscient third-person narrator, ties the loose ends together, and brings the story to its exciting close.

The first-person accounts are made even more confusing by the multiplicity of names.  Because this is the story of a large Southern family, many family members share first names.  There are two Moreys, although the younger of the two is renamed Benjamin, the first narrator.  The two Jasons, father and son, can usually be told apart, but the two Quentins, uncle and niece, are particularly confusing when introduced in Benjy’s section because the absence of chronological consistency brings both Quentins into the story at the same time, although the niece was born after the uncle’s death.

Reading The Sound and the Fury is like watching a masterpiece being painted.  Each brushstroke brings out more of the picture until the whole, beautiful composition is revealed.

OTHER REVIEWS

If you would like your review of this book listed here, please leave a comment with a link and I will add it.

NOTES

Reading The Sound and the Fury is also particularly satisfying for compulsive "list" readers, since it shows up on so many "best of" lists, including the following:

Books by Nobel Prize winners
The Modern Library's Top 100 Novels of the 20th Century
Radcliffe's competing list of Top 100 Novels of the 20th Century
Time Magazine's All-Time Best 100 Novels (1923 to the Present)
The Well-Stocked Bookcase (Book of the Month Club)

Radcliffe's Top 100 Novels of the 20th Century

At the request of the Modern Library editorial board, the students in Radcliffe's Publishing Course compiled and released its own list of the century’s top 100 novels to counter the Modern Library’s Top 100 novels list. Like the Modern Library judges, the Radcliffe students chose from among 400 pre-selected titles.

There is a lot of overlap between the two lists, but this one seems weighted a little more towards American authors, works by women, and books assigned in high school.

I have only two books to go. I should really make a push! Although the two I have left are going to be difficult because one, Look Homeward, Angel, is a slow chunkster, and the other, White Noise, does not appeal to me. But I would like to finish this list!

Those I have read are in red.

1. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald

2. The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger

3. Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck

4. To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee

5. The Color Purple by Alice Walker

6. Ulysses by James Joyce

7. Beloved by Toni Morrison

8. The Lord of the Flies by William Golding

9. 1984 by George Orwell

10. The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner (reviewed here)

11. Lolita by Vladmir Nabokov

12. Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck

13. Charlotte's Web by E.B. White

14. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce (reivewed here)

15. Catch-22 by Joseph Heller

16. Brave New World by Aldous Huxley

17. Animal Farm by George Orwell

18. The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway

19. As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner

20. A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway

21. Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad

22. Winnie-the-Pooh by A.A. Milne

23. Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston

24. Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison

25. Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison

26. Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell

27. Native Son by Richard Wright

28. One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest by Ken Kesey

29. Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut (reviewed here)

30. For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway

31. On the Road by Jack Kerouac

32. The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway

33. The Call of the Wild by Jack London

34. To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf

35. The Portrait of a Lady by Henry James

36. Go Tell it on the Mountain by James Baldwin

37. The World According to Garp by John Irving

38. All the King's Men by Robert Penn Warren

39. A Room with a View by E.M. Forster

40. The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien

41. Schindler's List by Thomas Keneally

42. The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton

43. The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand

44. Finnegans Wake by James Joyce (discussed here)

45. The Jungle by Upton Sinclair

46. Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf

47. The Wonderful Wizard of Oz by L. Frank Baum

48. Lady Chatterley's Lover by D.H. Lawrence

49. A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess

50. The Awakening by Kate Chopin

51. My Antonia by Willa Cather

52. Howards End by E.M. Forster

53. In Cold Blood by Truman Capote

54. Franny and Zooey by J.D. Salinger (reviewed here)

55. The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie

56. Jazz by Toni Morrison

57. Sophie's Choice by William Styron (reviewed here)

58. Absalom, Absalom! by William Faulkner

59. A Passage to India by E.M. Forster

60. Ethan Frome by Edith Wharton

61. A Good Man Is Hard to Find by Flannery O'Connor

62. Tender Is the Night by F. Scott Fitzgerald

63. Orlando by Virginia Woolf

64. Sons and Lovers by D.H. Lawrence

65. Bonfire of the Vanities by Tom Wolfe

66. Cat's Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut

67. A Separate Peace by John Knowles

68. Light in August by William Faulkner

69. The Wings of the Dove by Henry James

70. Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe

71. Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier (reviewed here)

72. A Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams (reviewed here)

73. Naked Lunch by William S. Burroughs

74. Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh

75. Women in Love by D.H. Lawrence

76. Look Homeward, Angel by Thomas Wolfe

77. In Our Time by Ernest Hemingway (reviewed here)

78. The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas by Gertrude Stein

79. The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett

80. The Naked and the Dead by Norman Mailer (reviewed here)

81. Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys (reviewed here)

82. White Noise by Don DeLillo ON OVERDRIVE

83. O Pioneers! by Willa Cather

84. Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller

85. The War of the Worlds by H.G. Wells (reviewed here)

86. Lord Jim by Joseph Conrad

87. The Bostonians by Henry James

88. An American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser

89. Death Comes for the Archbishop by Willa Cather

90. The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame (reviewed here)

91. This Side of Paradise by F. Scott Fitzgerald

92. Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand

93. The French Lieutenant's Woman by John Fowles

94. Babbitt by Sinclair Lewis

95. Kim by Rudyard Kipling

96. The Beautiful and the Damned by F. Scott Fitzgerald

97. Rabbit, Run by John Updike

98. Where Angels Fear to Tread by E.M. Forster (reviewed here)

99. Main Street by Sinclair Lewis

100. Midnight's Children by Salman Rushdie (reviewed here)

NOTE

Last updated on December 28, 2022.

OTHER PEOPLE READING THESE BOOKS

(If you are reading the books on this list and would like to be included here, please leave a comment with a list to your progress report and I will post it.)