Opening Sentence of the Day: Water the Bamboo

"Water the Bamboo is a metaphor for success."

-- Water the Bamboo by Greg Bell

There are the 2009 Books!

Finally! There is finally a book over there on the right side because I finally finished a book in 2009. Not that I set out to start off 2009 with the incredibly grim All Quiet on the Western Front. I actually started the year reading Sometimes a Great Notion and The Mists of Avalon, both very long and slow (SAGN in an intense, involved, good way; TMOA in an overwrought, fantasy/romance kind of way). I still have both of them to finish before their covers will pop up on my 2009 list. All Quiet is the second book I finished this year. I finished Water the Bamboo by Greg Bell two days ago, but there is some kind of gremlin in my LibraryThing widget that prevents the cover from appearing.

Award of the Day: The Premios Dardo Award

The Premios Dardo Award! I do not know who started this award, but I thank No BS Book Reviews for recognizing my blog by "awarding" it to me. I will now pass along the good fortune. (I confess that I am artistically challenged -- it took me quite a while to figure out that the cool picture is a typewriter with words coming out.) This award "acknowledges the values that every blogger shows in his or her effort to transmit cultural, ethical, literary, and personal values every day." The rules to follow are: 1) Accept the award, post it on your blog together with the name of the person who granted the award and his or her blog link. 2) Pass the award to 15 other blogs that are worthy of this acknowledgment. Remember to contact the bloggers to let them know they have been chosen for this award. Here are the blogs that I would like to acknowledge (if you have already received this award, sorry for making extra work, but be thankful you are so well regarded): Art Scatter Bookoholic's Boklista Books 'N' Border Collies BurmudaOnion ChainReading Fluttering Butterflies Fresh Ink Books Hotch Pot Cafe The Internet Review of Books Blog J. Kaye's Book Blog Julia Hedge's Laces Letters on Pages Linus's Blanket Rebecca Reads Tip of the Iceberg Great blogs -- I encourage you to visit them all.

Review: Sister Carrie

Although Theodore Dreiser finished Sister Carrie in 1900, years of stutter steps on the part of various publishing companies delayed its full American publication until 1908. Even then, as Dreiser describes, “the outraged protests far outnumbered the plaudits.” Dreiser’s new “realism” was shocking to readers.

While Sister Carrie may not pack the same punch 100 years later, the story is sprightly and still relevant. It moves right along, with plenty of dialog and even some exciting adventures. The period details of Carrie’s life may be particular to fin de siècle New York, but the story of Carrie’s efforts to rise above her situation, in contrast to the pathos of Hurstwood’s decline, is still compelling.

The only off-note was the last minute “moral of the story” message that seemed tacked on in the last two pages. That money cannot buy happiness is a common message, but a little hard to go along with when weighed against the alternative presented by Hurstwood’s fate. Compared to the pages and pages of sermonizing that wrap up Dreiser’s American Tragedy, however, the final homily is blessedly short.

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.

NOTE

Sister Carries made it to the Modern Library Top 100 list.  I am particularly fond of my Modern Library edition because it has the funky dust jacket image.

List: All-TIME 100 Novels

In 2005, TIME Magazine critics Lev Grossman and Richard Lacayo picked the 100 best English-language novels from 1923, the year TIME began publishing. Lacayo offers a thorough explanation of their process on the magazine's website, which is also a good resource because the official list includes links to the original TIME reviews.

This list differs from the Modern Library Top 100and Radcliffe Top 100lists in a couple of ways, mostly because of the date range covered. Because it includes only novels published from 1923, it leaves off many significant earlier novels, for better (Henry James) or worse (Ford Madox Ford, James Joyce).

Likewise, it includes several books published after 1999, the cut off for the other lists. Some of these, such as Never Let Me Go and Atonement, I think are worthy of the distinction. But I wonder if some of the more recent books will stand the test of time (pardon the pun).

Finally, not necessarily related to the date range, this list is heavy on science fiction, which will probably prevent me from finishing it any time soon.

This is the complete list in alphabetical order. Those in red are the ones I have read. Those in blue are on my TBR shelf.

The Adventures of Augie March by Saul Bellow (reviewed here)

All the King's Men by Robert Penn Warren (reviewed here)

American Pastoral by Philip Roth

An American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser

Animal Farm by George Orwell

Appointment in Samarra by John O'Hara

Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret by Judy Blume

The Assistant by Bernard Malamud (reviewed here)

At Swim-Two-Birds by Flann O'Brien

Atonement by Ian McEwan

Beloved by Toni Morrison

The Berlin Stories by Christopher Isherwood

The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler

The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood

Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy

Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh

The Bridge of San Luis Rey by Thornton Wilder

Call It Sleep by Henry Roth

Catch-22 by Joseph Heller

The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger

A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess

The Confessions of Nat Turner by William Styron

The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen

The Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon

A Dance to the Music of Time by Anthony Powell (discussed here)

The Day of the Locust by Nathanael West

Death Comes for the Archbishop by Willa Cather

A Death in the Family by James Agee

The Death of the Heart by Elizabeth Bowen

Deliverance by James Dickey

Dog Soldiers by Robert Stone

Falconer by John Cheever

The French Lieutenant's Woman by John Fowles

The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing

Go Tell it on the Mountain by James Baldwin

Gone With the Wind by Margaret Mitchell

The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck

Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon

The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald

A Handful of Dust by Evelyn Waugh

The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers

The Heart of the Matter by Graham Greene

Herzog by Saul Bellow

Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson

A House for Mr. Biswas by V.S. Naipaul

I, Claudius by Robert Graves

Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace

Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison

Light in August by William Faulkner

The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe by C.S. Lewis

Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov

Lord of the Flies by William Golding

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

Loving by Henry Green

Lucky Jim by Kingsley Amis

The Man Who Loved Children by Christina Stead

Midnight's Children by Salman Rushdie (reviewed here)

Money by Martin Amis (reviewed here)

The Moviegoer by Walker Percy

Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf

Naked Lunch by William Burroughs

Native Son by Richard Wright

Neuromancer by William Gibson

Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro

1984 by George Orwell

On the Road by Jack Kerouac

One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest by Ken Kesey

The Painted Bird by Jerzy Kosinski (I finished as much as I could stand)

Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov

A Passage to India by E.M. Forster

Play It As It Lays by Joan Didion (reviewed here)

Portnoy's Complaint by Philip Roth

Possession by A.S. Byatt

The Power and the Glory by Graham Greene

The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Spark

Rabbit, Run by John Updike

Ragtime by E.L. Doctorow

The Recognitions by William Gaddis

Red Harvest by Dashiell Hammett

Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates

The Sheltering Sky by Paul Bowles

Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut (reviewed here)

Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson

The Sot-Weed Factor by John Barth

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

The Sportswriter by Richard Ford

The Spy Who Came in From the Cold by John le Carre

The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway

Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston

Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe

To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee

To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf

Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller

Ubik by Philip K. Dick

Under the Net by Iris Murdoch

Under the Volcano by Malcolm Lowry

Watchmen by Alan Moore & Dave Gibbons

White Noise by Don DeLillo

White Teeth by Zadie Smith

Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys (reviewed here)

NOTES

Updated June 26, 2021.

OTHERS READING THESE BOOKS

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