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Bookchat: My Favorite Books For Giving [1]
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Date: 2023-01-04
The Novel 100
This is the book I have given away the most, to siblings and nieces and friends. It is a marvelous gift for someone who devours books, especially novels. For others, not so much.
Daniel Burt revised his list, and the second edition outlines 125 novels (though it still says 100 on the cover). At the end of the book are his list of the next 100 “honorable mentions” novels. I have a few shelves of books about books — this one is my favorite, and the one I look into the most often. I have long been fascinated by lists of great novels and, since you may well be too, I’ll show you Burt’s list in a moment.
Lists of great novels usually lean one way or another: backwards, toward the dead white males who ruled Victorian bookshelves; or forwards, toward every other kind of writer — women, LGBTQ, writers of other countries and colors, writers of genres that Victorians sneered at. Overall, Burt judiciously weaves together the Western Canon and traditionally excluded new voices, and chooses the latter with taste and discrimination. He still shortchanges genre fiction, but he ends up with a semi-progressive Literature 101 reading list. If you know a teen who’s reading beyond their age group, this guide will open their eyes to many of the richest novels and writers to explore, going forward.
Here are Burt’s 125 greatest novels:
1 Don Quixote
2 War and Peace
3 Ulysses
4 In Search of Lost Time
5 The Brothers Karamazov
6 Moby-Dick
7 Madame Bovary
8 Middlemarch
9 The Magic Mountain
10 The Tale of Genji
11 Emma
12 Bleak House
13 Anna Karenina
14 Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
15 Tom Jones
16 Great Expectations
17 Absalom, Absalom!
18 The Ambassadors
19 One Hundred Years of Solitude
20 The Great Gatsby
21 To the Lighthouse
22 Crime and Punishment
23 The Sound and the Fury
24 Vanity Fair
25 Dead Souls
26 Le Père Goriot
27 The Portrait of a Lady
28 Women in Love
29 The Red and the Black
30 Tristram Shandy
31 Finnegans Wake
32 Tess of the D'Urbervilles
33 Buddenbrooks
34 Invisible Man
35 The Man Without Qualities
36 A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
37 Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable
38 The Tin Drum
39 Wuthering Heights
40 Pride and Prejudice
41 The Scarlet Letter
42 Gravity's Rainbow
43 Beloved
44 Nostromo
45 Fathers and Sons
46 The Trial
47 Lolita
48 Mrs. Dalloway
49 Dream of the Red Chamber
50 Clarissa
51 Persuasion
52 Jane Eyre
53 David Copperfield
54 Petersburg
55 Things Fall Apart
56 The Princess of Cleves
57 The Stranger
58 The Red Badge of Courage
59 The Counterfeiters
60 The Grapes of Wrath
61 The Golden Notebook
62 Sons and Lovers
63 The Good Soldier
64 A Passage to India
65 Daniel Deronda
66 Germinal
67 My Ántonia
68 An American Tragedy
69 Hunger
70 Berlin Alexanderplatz
71 Midnight's Children
72 U.S.A. Trilogy
73 Les Liaisons Dangereuses
74 The Charterhouse of Parma
75 The Sufferings of Young Werther
76 Cities of Salt
77 A Farewell to Arms
78 The Death of Artemio Cruz
79 Herzog
80 Candide
81 The Sleepwalkers
82 The Last Chronicle of Barset
83 The Awakening
84 Robinson Crusoe
85 Call it Sleep
86 Waverley
87 Oblomov
88 Their Eyes Were Watching God
89 Under the Volcano
90 Snow Country
91 Nineteen Eighty-Four
92 As I Lay Dying
93 The Pickwick Papers
94 The Betrothed
95 Pale Fire
96 Last of the Mohicans
97 Les Misérables
98 Uncle Tom's Cabin
99 Doctor Zhivago
100 Native Son
101 On the Road
102 Frankenstein
103 The Leopard
104 The Age of Innocence
105 Dom Casmurro
106 A Hero of Our Time
107 Catcher in the Rye
108 Moll Flanders
109 The Good Soldier Švejk
110 The Master and Margarita
111 Brideshead Revisited
112 The Unbearable Lightness of Being
113 American Pastoral
114 The Handmaid's Tale
115 Manon Lescaut
116 The Woman in White
117 Some Prefer Nettles
118 A Bend in the River
119 Cold Nights
120 Dracula
121 The Woman in the Dunes
122 Gone with the Wind
123 The Three Musketeers
124 The Hound of the Baskervilles
125 Treasure Island
Each entry is about four pages long. The first two or so pages discuss the author, and details about the novel's creation, critical reception, and contribution to literary history; the last two summarize the plot, and delve into the novel’s style, craft and meaning. This turns out to be the best possible format, for my taste. I have a peeve against spoilers — but I can read the first half of each entry, before I get to any spoilers. Sometimes I realize, halfway through an entry, that I’ll probably never read the novel Burt is discussing. So then I finish the last two pages, and have a much fuller sense of what that novel is and signifies, than I had before. Other times, the first half of an entry convinces me to read the novel in question. And whenever I do finish a novel from the list, I come back to Burt’s book to see what he wrote in the second half of his entry about it.
Let’s look at one entry, or at least the first half of it. I’m such a fan of Their Eyes Were Watching God that I wrote my own review of it, nine years ago. Here is a sampling of what Burt tells us about Zora Neale Hurston’s masterpiece.
Reading Their Eyes Were Watching God for perhaps the eleventh time, I am still amazed that Hurston wrote it in seven weeks; that it speaks to me as no novel, past or present, has ever done; and that the language of the characters, that “comical nigger ‘dialect’ ” that has been laughed at, denied, ignored or “improved” so that white folks and educated black folks can understand it, is simply beautiful. There is enough self-love in that one book—love of community, culture, traditions—to restore a world. Or create a new one. —Alice Walker, I Love Myself When I Am Laughing . . . And Then Again When I Am Looking Mean And Impressive: A Zora Neale Hurston Reader . Janie Crawford is the first great black woman protagonist in American literature, and her story, along with the techniques used in its telling, would prove to be a fountainhead for subsequent novelists such as Alice Walker, Toni Morrison, and many others who have followed Hurston’s example in giving voice to African-American experience from the long-overlooked woman’s perspective. A central figure of the Harlem Renaissance, Zora Neale Hurston was an innovator, a provocateur, and a contrarian. She was a pioneer in recording and incorporating black folktales and traditions into her work, invigorating American writing, as Twain had done earlier, with the power and expressiveness of the vernacular. Hurston was born in Eatonville, Florida, the first incorporated all-black community in the United States. Her father was the town’s mayor and a Baptist preacher. The town’s vibrant folk tradition with its frequent “lying” sessions of tall tales stimulated Hurston’s anthropological and creative interests . . . A complex woman, Hurston is described by Hemenway as “flamboyant yet vulnerable, self-centered yet kind, a Republican conservative and an early black nationalist.” Some African-American critics reacted to her ideological independence and contrariness by complaining that the folk elements in her work were demeaning and one-dimensional. Seeking acceptance by mainstream literary standards, other writers feared that Hurston’s evocation of rural black experience marginalized and diminished wider acceptance of African Americans. Richard Wright dismissed her work as outside the central protest tradition that he insisted serious black literature should embrace. Reviewing Their Eyes Were Watching God, Wright ridiculed the novel as a “minstrel-show turn that makes the ‘white folks’ laugh” and could detect in Hurston “no desire whatever to move in the direction of serious fiction.” Even Ralph Ellison, in whom many subsequent critics have detected influences from Hurston in the expressionistic, folk-rich, black-comic makeup of Invisible Man, complained about Hurston’s “blight of calculated burlesque.” Few initially credited Hurston’s work as a major source of poetic and intellectual strength. However, as critic Judith Wilson has observed, Hurston “had figured out something that no other black author of her time seems to have known or appreciated so well—that our homespun vernacular and street-corner cosmology are as valuable as the grammar and philosophy of white, Western culture.” It would take the women’s movement of the 1970s and the particular advocacy of writer Alice Walker to cause readers and critics to look again at Hurston’s achievement in Their Eyes Were Watching God, and to recognize it finally as a complex and controversial, groundbreaking work combining central issues of race, gender, and class in ways that had never previously been attempted in American literature. It is a novel that continues to stir controversy and has successfully resisted relegation to a narrow critical niche, whether as an exclusively feminist or racial text.
If you are a voracious reader, I highly recommend The Novel 100. It will lead you to many other books you will love, and describe other classic novels that you’re curious to know something about, but not enough to read entirely. The Novel 100 is a treasure trove, and a map of the history of the Novel.
Bridge of Birds
This is the book I have given away the second most often. I’ve read a thousand books, and I find this one of the ten most delightful. Everyone I’ve given it to has loved it; or at least, that’s what they told me.
I first read Bridge of Birds twenty years ago. Looking at it again, I am reminded that Barry Hughart is a quirky individual, who simply adores Chinese folk tales. Bridge of Birds has the flavor of those tales, and their gorgeous lyricism, filtered through Hughart’s peculiar wit and esthetics. This book feels light to me, a swiftly flowing easy read — but there is a lot in it. There is a central mystery, with riddles and puzzles along the way. The tale is an adventure, and a love letter to an Ancient China That Never Was, full of odd characters, magical scenes, rudeness and etiquette and keen insight into all the wayward aspects of human nature. So, though I found it as refreshing as a mountain stream, it might be too rich and densely ornamented for casual readers. On Goodreads, some reviewers said that they found it confusing, that the story didn’t come into focus for quite awhile. I found none of that, I just trusted Hughart to lead me where his intricate plot wanted to go.
Luckily for you, I found this book for free on the internet. Go to the online text of BRIDGE OF BIRDS, click the “Next Page” button below as needed, and read the first several pages for yourself. I also clicked a button further down, which said “Without Images”, and then the text grew larger and clearer. If you soon start to feel the enchantment, as I did on the very first page, then go buy yourself a copy, or check it out of your library, or finish it online. And if you don’t, then don’t.
Then again, who am I kidding? I already noted in my third paragraph that “readers don’t click most links”. So here is a page I particularly enjoyed, which shows us Hughart’s sly wit and vivid characters. Pawnbroker Fang and Ma the Grub are so thrifty that, even while proposing a merger, they don’t offer each other actual gifts, but only representations of them.
When Pawnbroker Fang approached Ma the Grub with the idea of joining forces he opened negotiations by presenting Ma’s wife with the picture of a small fish drawn upon a piece of cheap paper. Ma’s wife accepted the magnificent gift, and in return she extended her right hand and made a circle with the thumb and forefinger. At that point the door crashed open and Ma the Grub charged inside and screamed: “Woman, would you ruin me? Half of a pie would have been enough!” That may not be literally true, but the abbot of our monastery always said that fable has strong shoulders that carry far more truth than fact can. Pawnbroker Fang’s ability to guess the lowest possible amount that a person would accept for a pawned item was so unerring that I had concluded that it was supernatural, but then the abbot took me aside and explained that Fang wasn’t guessing at all. There was always some smooth shiny object lying on top of his desk in the front room of Ma the Grub’s warehouse, and it was used as a mirror that would reflect the eyes of the victim. “Cheap, very cheap,” Fang would sneer, turning the object in his hands. “No more than two hundred cash.” His eyes would drop to the shiny object, and if the pupils of the reflected eyes constricted too sharply he would try again. “Well, the workmanship isn’t too bad, in a crude peasant fashion. Make it two-fifty.” The reflected pupils would dilate, but perhaps not quite far enough. “It is the anniversary of my poor wife’s untimely demise, the thought of which always destroys my business judgment,” Fang would whimper, in a voice clotted with tears. “Three hundred cash, but not one penny more!” Actually no money would change hands because ours is a barter economy. The victim would take a credit slip through the door to the warehouse, and Ma the Grub would stare at it in disbelief and scream out to Fang: “Madman! Your lunatic generosity will drive us into bankruptcy! Who will feed your starving brats when we are reduced to tattered cloaks and begging bowls?” Then he would honor the credit slip with goods that had been marked up by 600 percent.
Good Omens
And now for something completely different.
This one is also, of course, one of my favorite books, for recommending or giving to friends, and also to reread for myself. I wrote a review of this one too, which regular Brecht readers will recall, as it was only just over a year ago — Bookchat: Terry Pratchett & Neil Gaiman's ‘Good Omens’
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