beloved

Much has been written about Nobel Prize-winning author Toni Morrison and Beloved, Morrison’s novel of slavery, family, and community. Along with many others, I think and feel Beloved is among the best novels ever written; the book is hard for me to write about because I have such strong feelings about it. Moreover, I’ve realized that the difficulty is related to why the work is #2 on my most current top 100 novels list.

As I’ve described briefly elsewhere in this blog, the criteria for my top 100 novels include subject matter, emotional impact, intellectual impact, and the ability to work on many levels at the same time. Beloved has it all. It moves me emotionally, spiritually, and intellectually. I am alternately and sometimes simultaneously horrified by the brutality it describes, impressed by its ability to evoke deep senses of human commonality, and stunned by its structural power. It’s a prose poetic masterpiece of rhythm, structure, theme, and symbol. It’s a ghost story cut by enigmatic motivations and profound mysteries of life, love, and death. It’s a powerful indictment of our nation’s history of slavery, of the dehumanizing effects of that institution and the on-going impact of racism and injustice. Structurally, the novel mirrors a consciousness, cycling forward and back, remembering and re-remembering in an associative, flowing logic.

All this in a mere 275 pages—the multifaceted punch and epic sweep catapult Beloved to almost the top of my list (superceded only by Garcia Marquez’s even more epic tale). It is a glorious novel, painful to read, and which, in even my third or fourth reading, continues to yield new gems of connection and understanding.

[Caveat for the first-time reader: get through the first 50 pages, just going along for the ride. You’ll probably be confused. Try to enjoy the images and prose. It gets easier and the work is more than worth your while.]

100 top novels — 11

New additions: Lord Jim (#19), by Joseph Conrad; Huckleberry Finn (#49) by Mark Twain

1 One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
2 Beloved – Toni Morrison
3 To the Lighthouse – Virginia Woolf
4 Mrs. Dalloway – Virginia Woolf
5 Molloy – Samuel Beckett
6 Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov
7 Underworld – Don DeLillo
8 Middle Passage – Charles Johnson
9 White Noise – Don DeLillo
10 Middlemarch – George Eliot

11 Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte
12 Suttree – Cormac McCarthy
13 Housekeeping – Marilyn Robinson
14 Love in the Time of Cholera – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
15 The Brother’s Karamazov – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
16 The Plague – Albert Camus
17 Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad
18 Darkness at Noon – Arthur Koestler
19 Lord Jim – Joseph Conrad
20 The Poisonwood Bible – Barbara Kingsolver

21 The Great Gatsby – F. Scott Fitzgerald
22 Native Son – Richard Wright
23 All Quiet on the Western Front – Erich Maria Remarque
24 Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte
25 On the Road – Jack Kerouac
26 The Invisible Man – Ralph Ellison
27 Ceremony – Leslie Marmon Silko
28 Wolf – Jim Harrison
29 Narcissus and Goldmund – Herman Hesse
30 The Master and Marguerita – Mikhail Bulgakov

31 Blindness – Jose Saramago
32 A House for Mr. Biswas – V. S. Naipaul
33 Written on the Body – Jeanette Winterson
34 The Glass Bead Game (Magister Ludi)- Herman Hesse
35 The Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck
36 Blood Meridian – Cormac McCarthy
37 The Intuitionist – Colson Whitehead
38 The Bone People – Keri Hulme
39 Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck
40 The Tin Drum – Gunter Grass

41 Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen
42 One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich – Alexander Solzhenitzen
43 Gravity’s Rainbow – Thomas Pynchon
44 Motherless Brooklyn – Jonathan Lethem
45 1984 – George Orwell
46 The Fortress of Solitude – Jonathan Lethem
47 To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee
48 The Uncomfortable Dead: (what’s missing is missing) – Paco Ignacio Taibo II & Subcommandante Marcos
49 Huckleberry Finn – Mark Twain
50 Mao II – Don DeLillo

51 Catcher in the Rye – J. D. Salinger
52 A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole
53 The Scarlet Letter – Nathaniel Hawthorne
54 Frankenstein – Mary Shelley
55 Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy
56 As I Lay Dying – William Faulkner
57 The Red Badge of Courage – Stephen Crane
58 A Tale of Two Cities – Charles Dickens
59 Neuromancer – William Gibson
60 For Whom the Bell Tolls – Earnest Hemingway

61 Generation X – Douglass Copeland
62 Brave New World – Aldus Huxley
63 The Chosen – Chaim Potok
64 Doomsday Book – Connie Willis
65 Corelli’s Mandolin – Louis De Berniere
66 Fall on Your Knees – Ann-Marie MacDonald
67 Middlesex – Jeffrey Eugenides
68 The Dog of the South – Charles Portis
69 All the Pretty Horses – Cormac McCarthy
70 Dr. Zhivago – Boris Pasternak

71 The Crying of Lot 49 – Thomas Pynchon
72 Fahrenheit 451 – Ray Bradbury
73 Gorky Park – Martin Cruz Smith
74 White Teeth – Zadie Smith
75 The Stone Canal – Ken MacLeod
76 Schizmatrix – Bruce Sterling
77 The Left Hand of Darkness – Ursula K. LeGuin
78 The Loved One – Evelyn Waugh
79 The Metamorphosis – Franz Kafka
80 The Fall – Albert Camus

81 Vineland – Thomas Pynchon
82 Straight Man – Richard Russo
83 A Small Death in Lisbon – Robert Wilson
84 Disgrace – J. M. Coetzee
85 Kindred – Octavia Butler
86 The Road – Cormac McCarthy
87 The Street – Ann Petry
88 The Feast of Love – Charles Baxter
89 Fear of Flying – Erica Jong
90 Clockwork Orange – Anthony Burgess

91 The Old Man and the Sea – Earnest Hemingway
92 The Star Fraction – Ken MacLeod
93 He, She, and It – Marge Piercy
94 The Dispossessed – Ursula K. LeGuin
95 The Shipping News – E. Annie Proulx
96 The Parable of the Sower – Octavia Butler

lord jim

Heart of Darkness, by Joseph Conrad in 1902, is a well-known classic of English literature and is #17 on my current 100 top novels list. Lord Jim (1900), one of Conrad’s lesser-known works, is its equal in message and prose—so much so that rating one over the other is difficult; I may need to reread the later novel, which I last read over 20 years ago, in order to properly place the earlier one on my list.

Below, I outline most, but not all, of the plot of Lord Jim in a sort of parable form. These spoilers do not ruin the book because the careful unfolding of the story is a joy whether you know the story or not. I do not believe the book’s ability to touch its reader, its moral significance, or any of its other powers are diminished by foreknowledge of the plot.

Consider the story or a man whose reputation and word is worth more than anything else to him. The man is part of the small crew of ship with thousands of passengers. There are not enough lifeboats for all the people on board. The ship is old and a freak accident creates a situation in which a thin bulkhead is all the stands between life and death. The bulkhead’s steal creaks, bulging inward with the force of the sea behind it. Any reasonable person would believe the ship will go down at any moment. A storm is approaching, making the chances even worse for the boat and its inhabitants.

The man does not know what to do. He is frozen in fear and uncertainty. When his captain and two other shipmates escape their impending doom in a lifeboat, he, at the last minute, jumps to the boat without thinking, an automatic survival response. The ship disappears in the storm, apparently sinking without a trace, and they believe themselves lucky to have got out when they did. However, the man is immediately ashamed of his actions and wishes to be on the ship, despite the fact that he would be dead. Death seems preferable to life knowing that he deserted the thousands of people who trusted in the crew to carry them safely to their destination.

Fortunately for its passengers, the ship did not sink; by morning it is found and then towed to a nearby port. Because the other men in the lifeboat run away, the man stands trial alone during the inquiry into the affair. The public disgrace he suffers is surpassed only by the disgrace he feels within himself. Once the trial is over, he tries to escape his reputation, but it always finds him—or at least he imagines it finds him. Eventually he flees the “civilized world” altogether. Even there, in a colonially privileged status that sets him apart from the people around him, his fate is determined by his need to live up to the standard he sets for himself.

Told by a narrator sympathetic to the man, the story is full of regret for a life destroyed by a moment’s indiscretion, of respect for the impossible standard to which the man holds himself, and of quiet, resigned disdain for a world that does not acknowledge the virtue and beauty of the man or, for that matter, of any person: “What I had to tell her was that in the whole world there was no one who would ever need his heart, his mind, his hand. It was a common fate, and yet it seemed an awful thing to say of any man. . . . He was great—invincible—and the world did not want him, it had forgotten him, it would not even know him.” “Nobody, nobody is good enough” for a world that gossips about our flaws and never celebrates our successes, even though we all have our share of both.

A complex story of human pathos and principle, told in brilliant, stylistic prose, Lord Jim stands with Heart of Darkness as a classic and deeply thoughtful novel.

My thanks to Michael for calling my attention to this book.

100 top novels — 10

New addition: The Intuitionist (#36), by Colson Whitehead

1 One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
2 Beloved – Toni Morrison
3 To the Lighthouse – Virginia Woolf
4 Mrs. Dalloway – Virginia Woolf
5 Molloy – Samuel Beckett
6 Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov
7 Underworld – Don DeLillo
8 Middle Passage – Charles Johnson
9 White Noise – Don DeLillo
10 Middlemarch – George Eliot

11 Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte
12 Suttree – Cormac McCarthy
13 Housekeeping – Marilyn Robinson
14 Love in the Time of Cholera – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
15 The Brother’s Karamazov – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
16 The Plague – Albert Camus
17 Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad
18 Darkness at Noon – Arthur Koestler
19 The Poisonwood Bible – Barbara Kingsolver
20 The Great Gatsby – F. Scott Fitzgerald

21 Native Son – Richard Wright
22 All Quiet on the Western Front – Erich Maria Remarque
23 Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte
24 On the Road – Jack Kerouac
25 The Invisible Man – Ralph Ellison
26 Ceremony – Leslie Marmon Silko
27 Wolf – Jim Harrison
28 Narcissus and Goldmund – Herman Hesse
29 The Master and Marguerita – Michael Bulgakov
30 Blindness – Jose Saramago

31 A House for Mr. Biswas – V. S. Naipaul
32 Written on the Body – Jeanette Winterson
33 The Glass Bead Game (Magister Ludi)- Herman Hesse
34 The Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck
35 Blood Meridian – Cormac McCarthy
36 The Intuitionist – Colson Whitehead
37 The Bone People – Keri Hulme
38 Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck
39 The Tin Drum – Gunter Grass
40 Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen

41 One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich – Alexander Solzhenitzen
42 Gravity’s Rainbow – Thomas Pynchon
43 Motherless Brooklyn – Jonathan Lethem
44 1984 – George Orwell
45 The Fortress of Solitude – Jonathan Lethem
46 To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee
47 The Uncomfortable Dead: (what’s missing is missing) – Paco Ignacio Taibo II & Subcommandante Marcos
48 Mao II – Don DeLillo
49 Catcher in the Rye – J. D. Salinger
50 A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole

51 The Scarlet Letter – Nathaniel Hawthorne
52 Frankenstein – Mary Shelley
53 Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy
54 As I Lay Dying – William Faulkner
55 The Red Badge of Courage – Stephen Crane
56 A Tale of Two Cities – Charles Dickens
57 Neuromancer – William Gibson
58 For Whom the Bell Tolls – Earnest Hemingway
59 Generation X – Douglass Copeland
60 Brave New World – Aldus Huxley

61 The Chosen – Chaim Potok
62 Doomsday Book – Connie Willis
63 Corelli’s Mandolin – Louis De Berniere
64 Fall on Your Knees – Ann-Marie MacDonald
65 Middlesex – Jeffrey Eugenides
66 The Dog of the South – Charles Portis
67 All the Pretty Horses – Cormac McCarthy
68 Dr. Zhivago – Boris Pasternak
69 The Crying of Lot 49 – Thomas Pynchon
70 Fahrenheit 451 – Ray Bradbury

71 Gorky Park – Martin Cruz Smith
72 White Teeth – Zadie Smith
73 The Stone Canal – Ken MacLeod
74 Schizmatrix – Bruce Sterling
75 The Left Hand of Darkness – Ursula K. LeGuin
76 The Loved One – Evelyn Waugh
77 The Metamorphosis – Franz Kafka
78 The Fall – Albert Camus
79 Vineland – Thomas Pynchon
80 Straight Man – Richard Russo

81 A Small Death in Lisbon – Robert Wilson
82 Disgrace – J. M. Coetzee
83 Kindred – Octavia Butler
84 The Road – Cormac McCarthy
85 The Street – Ann Petry
86 The Feast of Love – Charles Baxter
87 Fear of Flying – Erica Jong
88 Clockwork Orange – Anthony Burgess
89 The Old Man and the Sea – Earnest Hemingway
90 The Star Fraction – Ken MacLeod

91 He, She, and It – Marge Piercy
92 The Dispossessed – Ursula K. LeGuin
93 The Shipping News – E. Annie Proulx
94 The Parable of the Sower – Octavia Butler

the intuitionist

Colson Whitehead came out of nowhere. A friend passed me The Intuitionist; I read a page and was immediately drawn in by the beauty of the phrases and the audacity of the ideas. Here’s a guy and a book I’d never heard of that just blew me away. It’s a wonderful experience that I get too infrequently.

With sentences redolent of dank atmosphere and cranky attitude, Whitehead shows us a beautifully feral cynicism that speaks of the world’s injustice and the ultimate reasons things happen in our society—money mostly, but there is still room for the random individual act based on principle or feeling or whatever you would like to call that amorphous energy that moves us. Aside from any message, I reveled in the pleasure of his well-wrought images, crafted in just a few words. For example, “a freelance poltergeist of metropolitan disquiet” or “her potted plant depotted, an akimbo regret of roots and soil.” Every act is steeped in murky, grim mystery—even eating:

She picks up a can of tinned meat from the kitchen floor. She digs out some of the gray material onto a piece of bread and mashes the meat into a lumpy layer with the underside of her spoon. The meat and bread are of the same consistency. The hunger dizziness in her head drains away down some inner sluice.

The novel is set in a city that feels like a sort of 1950s New York, though it is never explicitly named, yet the city is enough “every city” to be a parable, not a documentary. The ostensible subject, elevators, a.k.a. “short range vertical transport”—escalators also fit in this category, but they are the poor step-child to the higher status elevators—is also a metaphor for a deeper message. This book can be read as a detective novel with a twist and Whitehead nods explicitly to the genre on several occasions, most notably by creating explanatory conversations toward the end of the story. But to read it only this way would ignore the multiple layers waiting quietly in lightless elevator shafts, smoky union offices, and stale barrooms. This is a relatively small novel (255 pages) of big ideas: race, philosophy, art, irony.

And Whitehead’s not afraid to cut sharply into the substance of our world. He knows that ideas are dangerous, that the right idea at the right time can change the world: “They will have to destroy this city once we deliver the black box. The current bones will not accommodate the marrow of the device.” In particular, he knows that white people live in a made up world of privilege: “White people’s reality is built on what things appear to be . . . . They judge them on how they appear when held up to the light” But, “there is another world beyond this one. . . . Don’t believe your eyes.” And while he also talks about internalized oppression, he understands the ways that external oppression creates and reinforces that system. For example, women of color are not seen as agents of their own destiny, with dreams and the ability to make them happen: “these white men see her as a threat but refuse to make her a threat, cunning, duplicitous. They see her as a mule, ferrying information back and forth, not clever or curious enough to explore the contents. Brute. Black.”

The world Whitehead describes is not pretty. For individuals, he ascribes little chance of escape. “There was no hope for him . . . . He knows the other world he describes does not exist. There will be no redemption because the men who run this place do not want redemption. They want to be as near to hell as they can.” Nevertheless, the ending speaks of the next volume in this history, of the opportunity for progress, even as he sees that the opportunity is likely to be squandered, squashed. This does not mean we don’t continue to try.

Colson Whitehead is a brilliant, original prose artist. In The Intuitionist, his first novel, he displays a painfully bleak, stylistically gorgeous sensibility, together with a complex grasp of the realities in which we live. It’s the kind of pain I could go back to again and again.

100 top novels — 9

With certain exceptions, when choosing a new novel to read I am always hoping it will make the top 100—why waste my time with anything else? So, when I write my little review of a new book that does make the top 100 (such as the new edition to the list: Middlesex – #64), I’m always already reading the next book that might also make the top 100. Therefore, in the interest of being concise, I often wait to see if I can post a new top 100 list with two (or more!) new books. I hope at the beginning of each book that it might make it and then, somewhere along the way, it doesn’t live up to its potential for me. I’m sure most of you know what I’m talking about. This process has, sadly, occurred once again. And here, without further delay, is my new top 100 novels list:

1 One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
2 Beloved – Toni Morrison
3 To the Lighthouse – Virginia Woolf
4 Mrs. Dalloway – Virginia Woolf
5 Molloy – Samuel Beckett
6 Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov
7 Underworld – Don DeLillo
8 Middle Passage – Charles Johnson
9 White Noise – Don DeLillo
10 Middlemarch – George Eliot

11 Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte
12 Suttree – Cormac McCarthy
13 Housekeeping – Marilyn Robinson
14 Love in the Time of Cholera – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
15 The Brother’s Karamazov – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
16 The Plague – Albert Camus
17 Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad
18 Darkness at Noon – Arthur Koestler
19 The Poisonwood Bible – Barbara Kingsolver
20 The Great Gatsby – F. Scott Fitzgerald

21 Native Son – Richard Wright
22 All Quiet on the Western Front – Erich Maria Remarque
23 Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte
24 On the Road – Jack Kerouac
25 The Invisible Man – Ralph Ellison
26 Ceremony – Leslie Marmon Silko
27 Wolf – Jim Harrison
28 Narcissus and Goldmund – Herman Hesse
29 The Master and Marguerita – Michael Bulgakov
30 Blindness – Jose Saramago

31 A House for Mr. Biswas – V. S. Naipaul
32 Written on the Body – Jeanette Winterson
33 The Glass Bead Game (Magister Ludi)- Herman Hesse
34 The Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck
35 Blood Meridian – Cormac McCarthy
36 The Bone People – Keri Hulme
37 Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck
38 The Tin Drum – Gunter Grass
39 Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen
40 One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich – Alexander Solzhenitzen

41 Gravity’s Rainbow – Thomas Pynchon
42 Motherless Brooklyn – Jonathan Lethem
43 1984 – George Orwell
44 The Fortress of Solitude – Jonathan Lethem
45 To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee
46 The Uncomfortable Dead: (what’s missing is missing) – Paco Ignacio Taibo II & Subcommandante Marcos
47 Mao II – Don DeLillo
48 Catcher in the Rye – J. D. Salinger
49 A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole
50 The Scarlet Letter – Nathaniel Hawthorne

51 Frankenstein – Mary Shelley
52 Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy
53 As I Lay Dying – William Faulkner
54 The Red Badge of Courage – Stephen Crane
55 A Tale of Two Cities – Charles Dickens
56 Neuromancer – William Gibson
57 For Whom the Bell Tolls – Earnest Hemingway
58 Generation X – Douglass Copeland
59 Brave New World – Aldus Huxley
60 The Chosen – Chaim Potok

61 Doomsday Book – Connie Willis
62 Corelli’s Mandolin – Louis De Berniere
63 Fall on Your Knees – Ann-Marie MacDonald
64 Middlesex – Jeffrey Eugenides
65 The Dog of the South – Charles Portis
66 All the Pretty Horses – Cormac McCarthy
67 Dr. Zhivago – Boris Pasternak
68 The Crying of Lot 49 – Thomas Pynchon
69 Fahrenheit 451 – Ray Bradbury
70 Gorky Park – Martin Cruz Smith

71 White Teeth – Zadie Smith
72 The Stone Canal – Ken MacLeod
73 Schizmatrix – Bruce Sterling
74 The Left Hand of Darkness – Ursula K. LeGuin
75 The Loved One – Evelyn Waugh
76 The Metamorphosis – Franz Kafka
77 The Fall – Albert Camus
78 Vineland – Thomas Pynchon
79 Straight Man – Richard Russo
80 A Small Death in Lisbon – Robert Wilson

81 Disgrace – J. M. Coetzee
82 Kindred – Octavia Butler
83 The Road – Cormac McCarthy
84 The Street – Ann Petry
85 The Feast of Love – Charles Baxter
86 Fear of Flying – Erica Jong
87 Clockwork Orange – Anthony Burgess
88 The Old Man and the Sea – Earnest Hemingway
89 The Star Fraction – Ken MacLeod
90 He, She, and It – Marge Piercy

91 The Dispossessed – Ursula K. LeGuin
92 The Shipping News – E. Annie Proulx
93 The Parable of the Sower – Octavia Butler

intersexuality isn’t the point

The idea that Middlesex (by Jeffrey Eugenides) is about a person who is somewhere in the middle ground between what we call female and male is a bit of a ruse. It is true to some degree: the narrator is genetically male and has a rare condition that caused, among other things, the development of what appears to be female genitalia. As a result, she is raised as a girl named Calliope. At age 14, with the onset of puberty, things become less clear and by 15, Calliope begins to live as Cal, a boy no matter what his genitals look like. Eugenides also gives some time to the nascent intersex movement during the 1970s and 1908s, but all this is not the main point.

Instead, the novel is a multigenerational epic of immigration to the U.S. from Smyrna, in what we currently call Turkey but what was once part of Greece. It is a story of survival, of assimilation, of living the American Dream and losing the community and culture of the old world. In fact, the whole thing can be seen as a morality tale, because if Cal’s grandparents hadn’t been forced by the Greco/Turkish war to leave their small village, they wouldn’t have been able to marry and have kids. In their village everyone knew they were brother and sister, not husband and wife. It is only in the U.S., that cultural eraser, that this could happen. In an explicitly metaphorical sequence of remaking their identities during the passage across the Atlantic, the siblings ignore each other, enacting their courtship and marriage before the shipboard audience, none of whom knew them before the trip. It is the new world for them in more ways than one. The consequences multiply when their son unknowingly marries his cousin, and Calliope is born from this second union.

But it’s only a morality tale if we think of Calliope as a bad ending to the story. It is not clear that Eugenides wants to say that. On the contrary, you get the sense—or at least the hope—that the intersexual is the future, a new brand of humans not bound by old dichotomies. Furthermore, Calliope is concerned with all the same things any person is: family history, injustice in the world, parental approval, sibling relationships, first love—not necessarily in that order. Her genitalia are a factor in all this, but only one and ultimately not the most important one. And so, by not making his narrator’s physical being the primary focus of the book, Eugenides normalizes it.

Middlesex weaves mythology, history, political and social upheaval, intersexuality, and teen angst into whole cloth. Turning the morality tale on it’s end, Eugenides creates a new hybrid novel that is more interesting, more compelling, and just plain better. It’s a stunning achievement.

100 top novels — 8

New addition: The Road (#82)

1 One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
2 Beloved – Toni Morrison
3 To the Lighthouse – Virginia Woolf
4 Mrs. Dalloway – Virginia Woolf
5 Molloy – Samuel Beckett
6 Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov
7 Underworld – Don DeLillo
8 Middle Passage – Charles Johnson
9 White Noise – Don DeLillo
10 Middlemarch – George Eliot

11 Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte
12 Suttree – Cormac McCarthy
13 Housekeeping – Marilyn Robinson
14 Love in the Time of Cholera – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
15 The Brother’s Karamazov – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
16 The Plague – Albert Camus
17 Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad
18 Darkness at Noon – Arthur Koestler
19 The Poisonwood Bible – Barbara Kingsolver
20 The Great Gatsby – F. Scott Fitzgerald

21 Native Son – Richard Wright
22 All Quiet on the Western Front – Erich Maria Remarque
23 Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte
24 On the Road – Jack Kerouac
25 The Invisible Man – Ralph Ellison
26 Ceremony – Leslie Marmon Silko
27 Wolf – Jim Harrison
28 Narcissus and Goldmund – Herman Hesse
29 The Master and Marguerita – Michael Bulgakov
30 Blindness – Jose Saramago

31 A House for Mr. Biswas – V. S. Naipaul
32 Written on the Body – Jeanette Winterson
33 The Glass Bead Game (Magister Ludi)- Herman Hesse
34 The Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck
35 Blood Meridian – Cormac McCarthy
36 The Bone People – Keri Hulme
37 Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck
38 The Tin Drum – Gunter Grass
39 Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen
40 One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich – Alexander Solzhenitzen

41 Gravity’s Rainbow – Thomas Pynchon
42 Motherless Brooklyn – Jonathan Lethem
43 1984 – George Orwell
44 The Fortress of Solitude – Jonathan Lethem
45 To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee
46 The Uncomfortable Dead: (what’s missing is missing) – Paco Ignacio Taibo II & Subcommandante Marcos
47 Mao II – Don DeLillo
48 Catcher in the Rye – J. D. Salinger
49 A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole
50 The Scarlet Letter – Nathaniel Hawthorne

51 Frankenstein – Mary Shelley
52 Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy
53 As I Lay Dying – William Faulkner
54 The Red Badge of Courage – Stephen Crane
55 A Tale of Two Cities – Charles Dickens
56 Neuromancer – William Gibson
57 For Whom the Bell Tolls – Earnest Hemingway
58 Generation X – Douglass Copeland
59 Brave New World – Aldus Huxley
60 The Chosen – Chaim Potok

61 Doomsday Book – Connie Willis
62 Corelli’s Mandolin – Louis De Berniere
63 Fall on Your Knees – Ann-Marie MacDonald
64 The Dog of the South – Charles Portis
65 All the Pretty Horses – Cormac McCarthy
66 Dr. Zhivago – Boris Pasternak
67 The Crying of Lot 49 – Thomas Pynchon
68 Fahrenheit 451 – Ray Bradbury
69 Gorky Park – Martin Cruz Smith
70 White Teeth – Zadie Smith

71 The Stone Canal – Ken MacLeod
72 Schizmatrix – Bruce Sterling
73 The Left Hand of Darkness – Ursula K. LeGuin
74 The Loved One – Evelyn Waugh
75 The Metamorphosis – Franz Kafka
76 The Fall – Albert Camus
77 Vineland – Thomas Pynchon
78 Straight Man – Richard Russo
79 A Small Death in Lisbon – Robert Wilson
80 Disgrace – J. M. Coetzee

81 Kindred – Octavia Butler
82 The Road – Cormac McCarthy
83 The Street – Ann Petry
84 The Feast of Love – Charles Baxter
85 Fear of Flying – Erica Jong
86 Clockwork Orange – Anthony Burgess
87 The Old Man and the Sea – Earnest Hemingway
88 The Star Fraction – Ken MacLeod
89 He, She, and It – Marge Piercy
90 The Dispossessed – Ursula K. LeGuin

91 The Shipping News – E. Annie Proulx
92 The Parable of the Sower – Octavia Butler

the futile and tender road

The quiet crushing futility of Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea has always seemed to me an appropriate symbol of life’s pointlessness. You work hard to make something good for yourself and for the people you love, perhaps with the hope that something you do will be larger than yourself and live beyond your short years—it comes to nothing. My (not-at-all-unique) answer to this is that you struggle through your life anyway, not because you expect reward—even as simple and as grand as happiness or goodness—but because you want to, because the doing is good in itself, because to do otherwise is to give up; you live and work and love because you must.

There is a lot of this sensibility in The Road, Cormac McCarthy’s almost unrelentingly grim novel of a father and son trying to survive as they travel a post-apocalyptic highway in some unnamed part of the U.S. (I’m guessing it’s mostly in what we currently call Tennesee and North Carolina.) Witness this passage:

The days sloughed past uncounted and uncalendared. Along the interstate in the distance long lines of charred and rusting cars. The raw rims of the wheels sitting in a stiff gray sludge of melted rubber, in blackened rings of wire. The incinerate corpses shrunk to the size of a child and propped on the bare springs of the seats. Ten thousand dreams ensepulchred within their crozzled hearts. They went on. Treading the dead world under like rats on a wheel. The nights dead still and deader black. So cold. They talked hardly at all. He coughed all the time and the boy watched him spitting blood. Slumping along. Filthy, ragged, hopeless. He’d stop and lean on the cart and the boy would go on and then stop and look back and he would raise his weeping eyes and see him standing there in the road looking back at him from some unimaginable future, glowing like a tabernacle.

Perhaps McCarthy is flashier and more graphically violent than Hemingway because he is writing in this time rather than Hemingway’s. Nevertheless, McCarthy displays his usual and powerful command of the language. Gritty details and metaphorical flights evoke feelings well past despair for the future of humanity. The story pretty much can’t have a happy ending; we read it to see how bad it gets, to see if the life conjured could really be as bad or worse than the one we see around us all the time.

And yet, I think McCarthy retains hope. To call the basis of that hope “love” would overstretch credulity. His hope does seem founded in the relationships between people, but these relationships are formed in the crucible of pain and suffering; they are made of perseverance, habit, trust, flashes of courage, and tenderness in still shorter instants. Thus, and somewhat surprisingly, we discover that McCarthy likes people. Love or no, a pointless second of tenderness is still a tenderness. I’ll take it every time.

re-reading neuromancer

In spite of the fact that I believe rereading books is a good thing, I rarely do it. I’ve read maybe 20 or 30 books more than once. I can’t exactly explain why I don’t reread more. Maybe it’s that I have a reasonably good memory and sometimes I’m just plain old bored when I start a book the second time; I stop reading at that point. Or maybe I’m addicted to new. Some people in my life have suggested as much.

Whatever the case, William Gibson’s Neuromancer is among those books I’ve read more than once; I believe this was the third time through. I wanted something reasonably light but that I would also enjoy—a book that would engage some of the pleasure centers in my brain and few of those responsible for pain. I think I also wanted to read about a down and out loser who likes his vices, does a couple of things well, and manages to survive despite his contempt for life. My motivation was similar to why I rented a series of Eastwood westerns. At this particular moment in my life, loners are appealing and the resigned taking of the shit that life dishes out seems an important theme on which to dwell.

That was all by way of saying what has been said before more succinctly: context is everything. In this case, I think I was much more patient than I was during the first two readings of the book, readings through which I raced, inhaling the text like some kind of champion hot dog eater; the flavor and texture of the dogs tend to get lost in the rush to get them down the throat.

This time, for the first time, I see that Neuromancer is noir. It’s got: an anti-hero; a dead girl friend; multiple dark, dangerous cities populated by shady characters in bars and alleys in which you could lose your wallet or your life in equally fast moments; drugs; cigarettes; alcohol; a dangerous woman; some sex; a potentially life-threatening, but intriguing job to do with ambiguous moral consequences; and some bizarrely messed up rich people. All this and written in abrupt, cruel sentences that leave the reader feeling some of the words were razor-bladed out. Why didn’t I see it the first time?

However the book is classified, I love it; on my list, it’s still the best science fiction book I’ve read and I don’t think Gibson has ever regained that level of clarity and focus. Elsewhere, I have commented on his more recent development and speculated about some of the reasons. Again, it’s all about context and I think Gibson is now in such a different place in his life than he was back in the early 80s when he wrote Neuromancer that it is ridiculous to expect him to go back there, even metaphorically. Therefore, though I’m looking forward to reading his most recent offering, Spook Country, I’m not expecting it will be a return to his first book’s wonderfully, re-readably dark oeuvre.