Read The Daily Telegraph's Top 100 Books of the 20th Century

Busy since getting back to Toronto and no time to read. Had to read this book for other reasons and then realized it was on this list. But not on the Modern Library list which is what I’m supposed to be concentrating on. From the price sticker on the cover of my copy, I can deduce that I bought it over 26 years ago. Bizarre. I’ve been toting this and other books around for 26 years unread. Kafka has always struck me as sort of a one gag writer: you wake up in the morning, the world has gone insane and there’s nothing you can do about it. His work is often seen as prescient: the twentieth century saw both the Holocaust – Kafka’s work has been read as exemplifying the incomprehensible history of oppression of Jewish people – and the growth of bureaucracies to labyrinthine complexity and impenetrability. His writing is dream-like: in dreams one find the leaps of surreal logic, the nameless sense of dread, the haunting tone of Kafka’s writing. It is interesting that the changes often occur in the morning for Kafka’s characters, just after dreaming: Joseph K. in The Trial wakes up to find that he is under arrest; Gregor Samsa in Metamorphosis wakes up to find that he is a bug. The story of The Trial doesn’t really progress, however. We are treated to a series of incidents, arranged by his friend Max Brod after Kafka’s death and later editors in varying order, which lead to Joseph K.’s death. He makes absolutely no progress in his attempts to understand why he has been arrested and, often, seems to make things worse by his bungling interference. In Kafka’s world, man is absolutely powerless: against the State, against God, Fate, however you care to interpret it. Part of me always resists this. I don’t want to believe that Kafka is right. Even if I’m as deluded as Joseph K., I refuse to accept that I am powerless. And I find the origins of his work in what we know of his relationship with his father (the majority of it from Kafka’s Letter to His Father), whom he viewed as larger than life, oppressive and impossible to understand – although the analysis of his father’s character and of their relationship in the Letter is masterful. Somehow, the Letter is more interesting to me than Kafka’s fiction. Here, at least, we get a more human, psychological picture of why Kafka was compelled to write his paranoid fictions – fictions about the publication of which he was very ambivalent. I will read The Castle (I lost my copy 26 years ago (again!) on a trip, mid-read) and Amerika. Kafka certainly had his finger on the zeitgeist. But it’s a geist that every fibre of me wants to resist.

Okay, I know this is insane, and no more lists. First thing: I only get a total of 95 books. So both Telegraph lists are skewed. The idea was that they would compare the 1899 list and this one, which was done in 1999. The titles were chosen by contemporary writers; each writer got one choice; some books ended up being chosen more than once. I will never get to this but I love these lists. I guess I love lists. And books. Blue ones I’ve read, green ones I own. Some overlap with the Modern Library List.

1. J. R. Ackerley My Father and Myself

2. W. H. Auden Collected Poems
3. J. G. Ballard The Atrocity Exhibition
4. Gregory Bateson Steps to an Ecology of Mind
5. Samuel Beckett Waiting for Godot

6. Saul Bellow Humboldt’s Gift

7. Brigid Brophy Flesh

8. Mikhail Bulgakov The Master and Margarita

9. Rachel Carson Silent Spring
10. C. P. Cavafy Collected Poems
11. Apsley Cherry-Garrard The Worst Journey in the World

12. John Stewart Collis The Worm Forgives the Plough

13. Cyril Connolly The Unquiet Grave
14. Jim Corbett Man-Eaters of Kumaon
15. Charles Doughty Travels in Arabia Deserta
16. T. S. Eliot The Waste Land

17. William Faulkner The Sound and the Fury

18. F. Scott Fitzgerald The Great Gatsby

19. Ford Madox Ford The Good Soldier

20. E. M. Forster A Passage to India
21-22. Robert Frost Mountain Interval; North of Boston
23. Kenneth Grahame The Wind in the Willows

24-25. Gabriel García Márquez Love in the Time of Cholera; One Hundred Years of Solitude
26. Henry Green Pack My Bag: a Self-Portrait
27. Vasily Grossman Life and Fate
28. Thomas Hardy Collected Poems
29. Ernest Hemingway In Our Time
30. Christopher Hibbert Cavaliers & Roundheads
31. Adolf Hitler Mein Kampf
32. Gerard Manley Hopkins Poems

33. A. E. Housman Last Poems

34. Aldous Huxley Brave New World

35. Henry James The Golden Bowl

36. Sebastian Junger The Perfect Storm

37. James Joyce Ulysses

38. Franz Kafka The Trial

39. Jack Kerouac On the Road
40. J. M. Keynes The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money
41. Rudyard Kipling Kim

42. Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa The Leopard

43. D. H. Lawrence Sons and Lovers

44. Halldór Laxness Independent People
45. Munro Leaf The Story of Ferdinand
46. Primo Levi If This Is a Man

47. Sinclair Lewis Babbitt
48. Wyndham Lewis Blasting and Bombadiering: an Autobiography 1914-1926
49. Hendrik Willem Van Loon Van Loon’s Lives

50. Rose Macaulay The Towers of Trebizond

51. Robert McAlmon and Kay Boyle Being Geniuses Together: 1920-1930

52. Claudio Magris Danube
53. William Manchester The Last Lion: Winston Spencer Churchill – Alone 1932-1940
54. Thomas Mann Joseph and His Brothers
55. Daphne du Maurier Rebecca
56. Michael Moorcock Jerusalem Commands
57-59. Vladimir Nabokov Pale Fire; Speak, Memory; Lolita

60. Flann O’Brien The Third Policeman
61. F. S. Oliver The Endless Adventure
62-64. George Orwell Animal Farm; Homage to Catalonia; Nineteen Eighty-four
65. Frances Partridge Good Company: Diaries
66. Boris Pasternak Doctor Zhivago

67. Anthony Powell A Dance to the Music of Time
68. John Cowper Powys A Glastonbury Romance
69. Marcel Proust A la recherche du temps perdu
70. Erich Maria Remarque All Quiet on the Western Front

71. Henry Handel Richardson The Getting of Wisdom

72. Salman Rushdie Midnight’s Children

73. Bertrand Russell The Problems of Philosophy; History of Western Philosophy

74. J. D. Salinger The Catcher in the Rye

75. André Schwarz-Bart The Last of the Just

76. W. C. Sellar and R. J. Yeatman 1066 and All That
77. Vikram Seth A Suitable Boy
78. Mikhail Sholokov Quiet Flows the Don

79. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn The Gulag Archipelago

80. W. Olaf Stapledon Last and First Men
81. Edward Thomas Poems
82. William Trevor The Collected Stories

83. Barbara Tuchman The Proud Tower

84. John Updike Pigeon Feathers

85. Kurt Vonnegut Breakfast of Champions

86. Sylvia Townsend Warner Mr Fortune’s Maggot

87. Evelyn Waugh The Loved One

88. H. G. Wells The History of Mr Polly

89. Geoffrey Willans Down with Skool
90. Tennessee Williams A Streetcar Named Desire
91. Chester Wilmot The Struggle for Europe
92. Ludwig Wittgenstein Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus
93. P. G. Wodehouse The Inimitable Jeeves
94. Virginia Woolf The Diary of Virginia Woolf
95. W. B. Yeats The Tower