Read Radcliffe Publishing Course's 100 Best Novels of the 20th Century

The Wind in the Willows is as daffy and charming as it must have seemed when it was first published in 1908. Kenneth Grahame’s classic children’s novel follows the anthropomorphic adventures of several woodland creatures, primarily Mole, Rat, Badger, and Toad.

They enjoy many pastimes, including “messing about in boats,” Christmas caroling, and driving motor cars. This last becomes Mr. Toad’s passion, landing him in all sorts of trouble and, eventually, a dungeon. The animals have many adventures along the river and in the Wild Wood, but they all love home best, where they like to cozy up in front of a fireplace and enjoy simple meals with friends.

Full review posted on Rose City Reader.

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.

Full review posted on Rose City Reader.

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.

21 to go on this list. I will be double dipping with the Modern Library’s Top 100 list until I finish that one. So, A Farewell to Arms will be the next one I get to.

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.

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.

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

1) The moody, languid prose captured the tropical setting: I longed for a more direct narrative.
2) 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.
3) 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.
4) 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.

These are the books on the list that I have NOT read. It looks like Lord of the Rings is the only multi-volume work. So, counting that one as three books, I have 25 books to read to finish the list.

A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway
Portrait of a Lady by Henry James
The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien
Schindler’s List by Thomas Keneally
Franny and Zooey by J.D. Salinger
The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie
Absalom, Absalom! by William Faulkner
Orlando by Virginia Woolf
Cat’s Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut
Light in August by William Faulkner
Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier
Naked Lunch by William S. Burroughs
Look Homeward, Angel by Thomas Wolfe
In Our Time by Ernest Hemingway
The Autobiography of Alice B. Tokias by Gertrude Stein
Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys
White Noise by Don DeLillo
O Pioneers! by Willa Cather
The War of the Worlds by H.G. Wells
The Bostonians by Henry James
The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame
Where Angels Fear to Tread by E.M. Forster
Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie

Having finally gotten around to reading The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, I have a better understanding of why it is so popular and why I do not like science fiction. Stories about other planets and other kinds of creatures, with lots of whiz-bang gimmicks are just not interesting to me. This one in particular had some appealing sophomoric humor, but overall it was too cheeky for my taste.