Read Modern Library's 100 Best Novels of the 20th Century

Finishing Augie March means I have read every book on this list. Every single one! YEAH! Goal met!

When this list came out in 1999, I had read about 20 of the books on it. I started reading them in earnest then—about one every month or two. There are 121 books on the list (because some listed as one book, are really sets, trilogies, etc.), so at that rate, it took my until now to finish.

Reading through the list required me to read some classics (Studs Lonigan, Nostromo, others) I had never read and introduced me to some authors I had not encountered before (John O’Hara, Lawrence Durell, for example). I certainly didn’t like every book I read, but I am glad to have read them all.

Augie March follows the life of the hero from childhood in Chicago, through a sojourn in Mexico with a zany huntress, to life on the seas in the Merchant Marines. Full of Bellow’s over-the-top characters and riddled with discourses on Big Ideas, Augie is a great American hero. Bellow is a treasure.

Reading Hemingway always puts me in the mood to drink during the day.

Only one left—Augie March.

Only Henry James can take a beguiling idea like quasi-incestuous adultery, add an Italian prince, a billionaire art collector, and exotic foreign travel, and make a story so tedious that it is a true chore to read.

James writes in wisps of ideas, continually layering these wisps until there is a shimmery, translucent image that gives an idea of what he is trying to get at. These literary holograms are sometimes pretty, often interesting up to a point, but there is no substance to them. By the time the image emerges from the wisps, all I can think is, “So what?”

I can appreciate the talent it took to write an entire novel without saying anything directly. James definitely had a skill that he developed to the utmost. But while I admire the talent, I have no desire to make it a part of my life. I appreciate James’s talent the way I appreciate that of the artists who can paint the face of Jesus on a grain of rice. Impressive, but I’m not going to collect a gallery of rice portraits.

Portrait is certainly more accessible than Ulysses or Finnegans Wake, but it lacks the delightful wordplay and zany, ambitious flights that leave the reader in wonderment. It has its obscure parts, but for the most part chronicles Stephen Dedalus’s life from young childhood through college, recording everything that influenced him.

Some of these influences were recorded in more meticulous detail than makes for entertainment. For instance, the long, long passage giving the priest’s sermon on sin and Hell was a flawless rendition of a classic fire and brimstone harangue. To describe it is to describe the problem with it.

I thought I had read this in college, but listening to the audio version made me wonder. If I did read it, I deserved a very bad grade for comprehension and retention.

. . . is killing me. I am 130 pages into it and it so typically Henry James obtuse fluffy layers of moving around and around and around an issue without ever JUST SAYING THE WORDS. It takes me an hour to get through ten pages.

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.

The Magnificent Ambersons is one of those books that I enjoyed more than I thought I would. I was afraid it was going to be heavy and dull, and it certainly wasn’t. Still, it was not a favorite of mine.

It moved right along through the story of the demise of the once-prominent Amberson family and the growth of their Midwestern town into an industrial city. However, it moved along at such a clip, and with so little thematic subtlety, that it seemed like a book for young adults. I’m not saying that Tarkington should have handled his themes with the heavy hand of Henry James, but a little of Edith Wharton’s nuance or F. Scott Fitzgerald’s precision would have added depth to the tale.

I enjoyed Light in August much more than As I Lay Dying and The Sound and the Fury, both of which I read in college. I do not know if that is because Light in August is the more accessible of these three Faulkner novels, or if I am just a better reader than I was 20 years ago.

Great! I am down to my last six books, which I think I will read in the following order:

Light in August
The Magnificent Ambersons
The Golden Bowl
Midnight’s Children
The Adventures of Augie March
A Farewell to Arms

The end is in sight.