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

A third tally, roughly a year after I did the second one, to see how things have stacked up with what I’ve read so far:

LOVED: Naipaul, Bowen, Steinbeck, Huxley, Lawrence, Koestler, Graves, Faulkner, Wilder, Dickey, Conrad (Secret Agent), Beerbohm, Cather, Wharton (Age of Innocence), Burgess, Hughes, Kennedy, Bowles, Cain.

LIKED: Woolf, Farrell, Ford, Dreiser, Fowles, Conrad (Lord Jim), Lawrence (there were two books, but I kind of love/liked both of them), Joyce, Waugh (A Handful of Dust), Greene (The Heart of the Matter), Golding, Miller, Nabokov, Hammett, Percy, Cheever, Spark, Caldwell.

DISSED: Donleavy, Bellow (Henderson the Rain King), O’Hara, Fitzgerald (Tender is the Night), Hemingway (The Sun Also Rises), Waugh (Scoop), Murdoch, Tarkington.

Read much less from the list this year. The only writer who blew the top of my head off was Naipaul. The other stuff I liked. I didn’t hate anything. I have three Henry James books ahead of me. Maybe I’ll tackle them next. I have slowed down on this but am determined to finish. But, oh god, Finnegan’s Wake? Help.

I wasn’t crazy about this. I mean, I looked online after reading and saw that it’s a modernist masterpiece and revolutionary in technique and all that, but I just found it irritatingly vague in places. Woolf writes in these long, loopy, undulating sentences, with lots of subclauses and I just got lost. I would go back and work over the sentence and not find a whole lot there when I was done. Why can’t she, I complained, write a simple declarative sentence? I believe she is trying to represent the movement of the human mind in a more accurate way than had previously been done in fiction (one prof online scoffed at this and said that if Woolf’s writing was a representation of the average human mind there would be no need for English teachers; but of course Woolf’s is an artistic representation, a distillation) and I think she largely succeeds at this. But the mind is a woolly thing and people appear out of nowhere in the middle of scenes and we move from brain to brain and I had trouble locating myself often. The book is divided into three parts. In the first, The Window, the Ramsay family is shown on vacation with guests, among them Lily Briscoe, an unmarried woman who likes to paint, and Augustus Carmichael, a poet, both of whom turn up again in the last section. The family argues about whether or not the weather will allow them to go to the lighthouse across from their cottage, a trip Mrs. Ramsay wishes to take to bring supplies to the keepers. The centre of the book is Mrs. Ramsay, a sort of earth mother who tries to arrange people off in couples, knits like one of the Fates, looks after her family, and tries to imagine herself into the mind of her petulant, needy husband. The second section, Time Passes, is more abstract, dealing with the effect of the passage of years on the cottage. In the third section, The Lighthouse, the family sans Mrs. Ramsay, who has died, returns with Lily and Augustus to the cottage, approximately ten years later, and goes to the lighthouse. Lily re-does a painting she was working on during the last visit and achieves her vision with it. I was very interested in the character of Mrs. Ramsay and the relationship between her and her husband. Woolf seemed to me to have created a very warm and loving relationship in spite of the fact that Mrs. Ramsay often bows to her somewhat tyrannical husband’s wishes. Then I read online that the Ramsays are believed to be a portrait of Woolf’s parents, Leslie and Julia Stephen. This shifted my understanding of the book profoundly; it made more sense that the story was that of a child looking at adults, even though a child’s is never the narrative voice. I often ask where the love is in a book when trying to see it clearly. Aside from the love between the Ramsays and the Ramsay’s children for their mother and that of the young couple who are matched up during the course of the story, the most pronounced love in the story is that of Lily Briscoe for Mrs. Ramsay. In the last section, Lily sighs her name out loud a number of times, just out of (or within) earshot of Carmichael. Woolf said she wrote the book to exorcise her mother (or words to that effect) and that she achieved precisely that by writing it. Critics have identified Woolf with Lily Briscoe, the painter, whose artistic musings take up a good portion of the book. From the horribly reductive biographical viewpoint, Lily Briscoe then represents Woolf’s love for her mother, in all its troubled complexity, the old Oedipal first love story, and, in line with this, her love of women. I didn’t hate the book, I just found it a bit impenetrable. Of course, my search online revealed academic footprints all over the novel, explications of its complicated symbolism, treatises on why Woolf wrote in such a convoluted fashion. I don’t believe that artists are working nearly so consciously when they are creating – I think they are simply trying to figure out how best and most effectively tell the story they wish to tell. To The Lighthouse is now judged to be one of Woolf’s greatest novels. Perhaps another reading would help me get closer to it. I think that her stylistic tics were a barrier for me. I previously read Orlando and really enjoyed its wildness.

Not exactly my cup of tea but entertaining enough, I suppose. Didn’t make me want to dive right away into the second book of the trilogy, so that’s something I’ll have to get back to.

Such a strange combination of tedium and thrills, this book. I had to start it about four times, once because my copy of it was stolen and the others partly because I got interrupted but also because it was impossible for me to keep track of what was going on, and because I found the first 20-30 pages of the novel very hard going. The narrator is at pains at the beginning to convince us of the normalcy of everything he is describing; the book only becomes interesting when he starts to let us see behind the facade. The story concerns two couples, the narrator and his wife Florence and the Ashburnams, Edward (the good soldier of the title) and his wife Leonora. The narrator is an odd sexless creature; it is impossible for us to believe him when he says he loves Nancy, the young ward of the Ashburnams. We are slightly more inclined to believe him when he tells us that he loved Edward, but he is such a cold fish that he seems incapable of love – and impossibly dim: how could he not be aware his wife was having an affair with his friend? The book is a story of passion, of adultery and miscommunication, and cruelty. As Ford writes near the end of the book: ‘Is there any terrestrial paradise where … people can be with whom they like and have what they like and take their ease in shadows and in coolness?’ That the characters end up with the wrong people, that they are deceitful, unhappy and confused, is the focus of the book. Some of the writing is quite beautiful, and some is turgid and labyrinthine. First book I have read by Ford, there’s another on the list. Didn’t love it, but once the story got going, it was like a car accident, you couldn’t take your eyes away. There’s just some dry patches along the way. And the narrator is at great pains to tell us that he doesn’t know what the story he is telling means. The truth would seem to be otherwise.

The titles in blue are the the ones I had read prior to starting to work on the list. Items in red are books read since starting. Items in green are books I possess.

1. Ulysses by James Joyce

2. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald

3. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce

4. Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov

5. Brave New World by Aldous Huxley

6. The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner

7. Catch-22 by Joseph Heller

8. Darkness at Noon by Arthur Koestler

9. Sons and Lovers by D. H. Lawrence

10. The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck

11. Under the Volcano by Malcolm Lowry

12. The Way of All Flesh by Samuel Butler

13. 1984 by George Orwell

14. I, Claudius by Robert Graves

15. To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf

16. An American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser

17. The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers

18. Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut

19. Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison

20. Native Son by Richard Wright

21. Henderson the Rain King by Saul Bellow

22. Appointment in Samarra by John O?Hara

23. U.S.A. (trilogy) by John Dos Passos

The 42nd Parallel (1930)

Nineteen Nineteen (1932)

The Big Money (1936)

24. Winesburg, Ohio by Sherwood Anderson

25. A Passage to India by E. M. Forster

26. The Wings of the Dove by Henry James

27. The Ambassadors by Henry James

28. Tender Is the Night by F. Scott Fitzgerald

29. The Studs Lonigan Trilogy by James T. Farrell

Young Lonigan (1932)

The Young Manhood of Studs Lonigan (1934)

Judgement Day (1935)

30. The Good Soldier by Ford Madox Ford

31. Animal Farm by George Orwell

32. The Golden Bowl by Henry James

33. Sister Carrie by Theodore Dreiser

34. A Handful of Dust by Evelyn Waugh

35. As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner

36. All the King’s Men by Robert Penn Warren

37. The Bridge of San Luis Rey by Thornton Wilder

38. Howards End by E. M. Forster

39. Go Tell It on the Mountain by James Baldwin

40. The Heart of the Matter by Graham Greene

41. Lord of the Flies by William Golding

42. Deliverance by James Dickey

43. A Dance to the Music of Time (series) by Anthony Powell

A Question of Upbringing (1951)

A Buyer’s Market (1952)

The Acceptance World (1955)

At Lady Molly’s (1957)

Casanova’s Chinese Restaurant (1960)

The Kindly Ones (1962)

The Valley of Bones (1964)

The Soldier’s Art (1966)

The Military Philosophers (1968)

Books Do Furnish a Room (1971)

Temporary Kings (1973)

Hearing Secret Harmonies (1975)

44. Point Counter Point by Aldous Huxley

45. The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway

46. The Secret Agent by Joseph Conrad

47. Nostromo by Joseph Conrad

48. The Rainbow by D. H. Lawrence

49. Women in Love by D. H. Lawrence

50. Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller

51. The Naked and the Dead by Norman Mailer

52. Portnoy’s Complaint by Philip Roth

53. Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov

54. Light in August by William Faulkner

55. On the Road by Jack Kerouac

56. The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett

57. Parade’s End by Ford Madox Ford

58. The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton

59. Zuleika Dobson by Max Beerbohm

60. The Moviegoer by Walker Percy

61. Death Comes for the Archbishop by Willa Cather

62. From Here to Eternity by James Jones

63. The Wapshot Chronicles by John Cheever

64. The Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger

65. A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess

66. Of Human Bondage by W. Somerset Maugham

67. Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad

68. Main Street by Sinclair Lewis

69. The House of Mirth by Edith Wharton

70. The Alexandria Quartet by Lawrence Durrell

Justine (1957)

Balthazar (1958)

Mountolive (1958)

Clea (1960)

71. A High Wind in Jamaica by Richard Hughes

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

73. The Day of the Locust by Nathanael West

74. A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway

75. Scoop by Evelyn Waugh

76. The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Spark

77. Finnegans Wake by James Joyce

78. Kim by Rudyard Kipling

79. A Room With a View by E. M. Forster

80. Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh

81. The Adventures of Augie March by Saul Bellow

82. Angle of Repose by Wallace Stegner

83. A Bend in the River by V. S. Naipaul

84. The Death of the Heart by Elizabeth Bowen

85. Lord Jim by Joseph Conrad

86. Ragtime by E. L. Doctorow

87. The Old Wives’ Tale by Arnold Bennett

88. The Call of the Wild by Jack London

89. Loving by Henry Green

90. Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie

91. Tobacco Road by Erskine Caldwell

92. Ironweed by William Kennedy

93. The Magus by John Fowles

94. Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys

95. Under the Net by Iris Murdoch

96. Sophie’s Choice by William Styron

97. The Sheltering Sky by Paul Bowles

98. The Postman Always Rings Twice by James M. Cain

99. The Ginger Man by J. P. Donleavy

100. The Magnificent Ambersons by Booth Tarkington

So I started reading Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier last night and today at work some guy thiefed it. Unbelievable.

Utterly masterful. Mr. Biswas is a great creation.

Sister Carrie is about money. But Dreiser simply describes the effects of money on people’s lives in an industrializing society, unlike Steinbeck, who gets angry. The characters see no reason why they should be without money so they prostitute themselves in various ways to get it. Carrie doesn’t want to work in a factory so she attaches herself to a variety of lovers who take care of her, finally finding independence as an actress. Hurstwood destroys his life by robbing his employer. Money is an irresistible force and one people don’t feel they should necessarily have to work for. Prophetic, in terms of the modern worship of Mammon.

I wasn’t totally crazy about this book even though I really enjoyed it. Sound conflicted? On one level, it’s a real page turner, a thriller, and I couldn’t put it down at times. But Fowles is clearly interested in writing something more than a thriller and it is with the ‘philosophy’ in the novel that I feel discomfited. Fowles himself had his doubts about the novel. It was the first book he began. He worked on it for years and then published his second novel, The Collector (1963), first. Its success gave him the confidence to complete The Magus. He was dissatisfied with the book after its publication, though, and in 1977 he published a revised version. I read the 1966 version. I found The Collector, which I read prior to The Magus, completely creepy but well-written. I discovered, on reading Fowles’ comments about it in his book of reflections, The Aristos (1964), that I had completely misread the book. It tells the story of Fred Clegg who kidnaps a student named Miranda and imprisons her in his basement. Fowles says ‘history – not least in the twentieth century – shows that society has persistently seen life in terms of a struggle between the Few and the Many [a notion he borrows from the ancient Greek philosopher Heraclitus], between “Them” and “Us”. My purpose in The Collector was to attempt to analyse, through a parable, some of the results of this confrontation.’ Fowles, with lots of compassion for Clegg’s ‘bad education’, ‘mean environment, being orphaned’, still can’t help framing the story as one in which Clegg represents the Many and Miranda, who dies in Clegg’s basement, the Few, one who ‘might have become something better, the kind of being humanity so desperately needs.’ I certainly wanted Miranda to escape and Clegg to be foiled, but I didn’t realize I was reading an apology for a sort of theoretical aristocracy of the biologically favoured. According to Fowles, we need to ‘admit that we are not, and never will be, born equal …’. Now, I suppose this is true: some of us are born poor and disadvantaged and some of us are born with silver spoons in our mouths and wonderful educations. Fowles, a self-described democratic socialist, would like to rectify the inequalities the world thrusts upon us. But he retains, even though he claims that ultimately this split occurs inside each of us, the distinction between the ‘aristoi, the good ones’ and the ‘hoi polloi, the many’. In The Magus, the representative of the Many (or a sub-par example of the Few) who must be educated out of his ignorance is a not terribly likeable young man named Nicholas Urfe, a recent Oxford graduate. He is callow and arrogant, priding himself on his intellect, insensitive to women, self-absorbed. He is wavering in his relationship with a young woman named Alison, who he finds sexually exciting, but to whom he can’t commit. He decides to take a teaching job on the island of Phraxos. There he meets a recluse named Conchis. The novel is taken up with the elaborate process of education that Conchis, the Magus of the title, takes Nicholas through to awaken the better person within him. I found all this horribly confusing. I never was clear on what Conchis’ philosophy was. It seemed very muddle-headed to me. Even though Nicholas appeared to be a willing participant in the elaborate games that Conchis and his many accomplices involved him in, the episodes where he was drugged, held captive and psychologically tortured seemed dangerously close to Fred’s treatment of Miranda in The Collector to me, except here the positions are reversed: Conchis represents the aristoi and Nicholas is, if not hoi polloi, certainly an inferior specimen of the Few. Fowles was accused of being fascist in sympathies after his first two books were published, which he takes pains to deny in introduction to The Aristos, but Conchis’ behaviour towards Nicholas seems distinctly fascist although, we are led to believe, it was clearly for his own good. I also didn’t find the characters in the book particularly flesh and blood. It’s filled with brilliant conversation and stimulating ideas, Fowles was clearly an intelligent and highly cultured man, but all the long, unfamiliar words and references to art and music and literature that an educated man, a true aristoi, should immediately understand (and shame on us if we don’t), seemed a bit like Fowles grandstanding for the masses. But, in spite of, or perhaps because of this intellectual predilection, the characters remained only talking heads for me. Nicholas never attained a real interior life. Fowles, as author, seemed to be a bit of a collector, using the characters in his story, especially Nicholas, like pieces of a puzzle. Conchis is a collector, too. Fowles admitted in an interview to being one. I have no doubt that he was a passionate man, but this book left me cold and creeped out. They say one should trust the tale not the teller. I didn’t divine in The Magus what Fowles described as his intentions in writing the book. I find it hard to accept that Conchis’ program for Nicholas was justified, that the hoi polloiness of us all needs to be cauterized in just such an oppressive, violent fashion. Fowles said ‘unless the Many can be educated out of their false assumption of inferiority and the Few out of their equally false assumption that biological superiority is a state of existence instead of what it really is, a state of responsibility – then we shall never arrive at a more just and happier world’. In one sense, I know this is true: with great gifts, come great responsibilities. It’s also, however, the old aristocratic argument, but socially democratized: ‘I’m sitting here in the manor house because I have all the money and privilege, but I feed the peasants and arbitrate their legal disputes and I look after their spiritual lives, and I am fulfilling my responsibilites. No matter how much I believe they should be assisted out of their lower depths by anything I can do to even out the score, I will always be favoured and generous and they, therefore, will always be needy and grateful, even after they join me as enlightened. For we will both always know who pulled who out of the muck.’

A second tally, roughly a year after I did the first one, to see how things have stacked up with what I’ve read so far:

LOVED: Bowen, Steinbeck, Huxley, Naipaul, Lawrence, Koestler, Graves, Faulkner, Wilder, Dickey, Conrad (Secret Agent), Beerbohm, Cather, Wharton (Age of Innocence), Burgess, Hughes, Kennedy, Bowles, Cain.

LIKED: Fowles, Conrad (Lord Jim), Lawrence (there were two books, but I kind of love/liked both of them), Joyce, Waugh (A Handful of Dust), Greene (The Heart of the Matter), Golding, Miller, Nabokov, Hammett, Percy, Cheever, Spark, Caldwell.

DISSED: Donleavy, Bellow (Henderson the Rain King), O’Hara, Fitzgerald (Tender is the Night), Hemingway (The Sun Also Rises), Waugh (Scoop), Murdoch, Tarkington.

Added a male Irish writer to the male American writers I previously disliked (that list also included Waugh and Iris Murdoch, the only book by a woman that I disliked). But I really hated the Irish writer. Added one American writer to my eight previous faves (Steinbeck), but added a greater number of British writers, and one more woman (Bowen). Added all British writers to my likes, including John Fowles, whose The Magus I am presently reading. That list was previously pretty evenly split between American and British writers. Continued to like more that I read than dislike, Donleavy was the only disaster this time out. My tenuous linking of the books I had liked last time by grouping them as by ‘mythic’ writers (Faulkner, Wilder, Dickey, Conrad, Cather, Hughes, Kennedy, Bowles) doesn’t apply so much this time, although one could add Lawrence and Fowles to that tenuous list. Instead, the writers I loved this year are distinguished by the elegance of their writing rather than their desire to paint on some kind of larger than naturalistic canvas: Bowen, Naipaul, Huxley, Steinbeck, for the most part, and sometimes Lawrence, all write very beautifully and individually, being associated somewhat more with my leftover list last year (Beerbolm, Cain, Burgess) which I identified as un-natural in style. Like those three, this years faves are all elegant, precise prose stylists, and that was what I seemed to have enjoyed most in the books I read. Also noticed that I read far more last year than this year.