So, I was just visiting over at John's place (now called The Zeray Gazette, formerly Locusts and Honey) where he has posted a copy of the Random House 100 Greatest English Language Novels of the 20th Century that came out a few years ago and it got me to thinking...
Now is the time of the year for making resolutions and this seems to be a good one for me: To try to read some classic literature that I have not gotten around to reading yet. There are a good many on the Random House list that I haven't read (the great majority, actually), but I'm not sure that list is the one for me.
For one thing, it's heavily weighted towards the first half of the century and also because it's towards white males. Which is not to say that's bad, but there were certainly many good female authors last century, where are they?? And the authors of color? Furthermore, Tolkien is missing from this list, what's up with that? I know Adventure and Fantasy often equal lesser quality, but not always. This list seems a bit dry and stuffy for my tastes.
So, I thought I'd turn to you for ideas. Do you have a better list than Random House? What novels do you consider classic that really ought to be read?
For my part, I would suggest right off the top of my head that this list is missing Wendell Berry, Barbara Kingsolver and Alice Walker, for starters. How about you? What novels are on your modern classics list and would recommend that I read this year?
12 comments:
The list is full of stuff teachers assign in school and college, for the most part. James Joyce? Who reads him just for relaxation?
Hemingway used to be a favorite of mine - I was blown away when I read "The Snows of Kilimanjaro" in HS. Approaching him when I was older I was less impressed, because I no longer was in a place where I felt connected to a man who needed, all his life, to prove his manhood.
Faulkner's Sound and Fury is almost as unreadable as Finnegan's Wake, because the first section is written from the perspective of a mentally challenged member of the family. I struggled and finally surrendered when I tried to read it.
I would recommend A Suitable Boy, a Victorian/Edwardian epic set in India in 1952. It is so marvelous. If you want a fantasy novel, try Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, another contemporary take on the Victorian serial novel, about magicians during the Napoleanic Wars in Great Britain.
I'm not a huge fan of what others consider "great literature", so I don't spend my time worrying about it that much. I do love Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and his A Hundred Years of Solitude and Love in the Time of Cholera are just, well, there aren't words. Find them, read them, and you will know how wonderful they are.
Ray Bradbury!
You're right on the bias. The only author of color I saw was James Baldwin. Where was Tony Morrison (first African-American woman to win the Nobel Prize for Lit, for cryin' out loud!)? Alice Walker? Richard Wright?
I have a collection of Ralph Ellison's essays - on literature, on jazz, on race, autobiographical sketches - that deserve to be read.
James Baldwin's "The Fire Next Time", an essay published in The New Yorker is also wonderful.
There is also a small but important American Indian literature community that needs attention.
Ray Bradbury is a good place to start, as is, I think, Isaac Asimov's Foundation Trilogy, which is an interesting take on the decline and fall of the Roman Empire.
Thanks fellas, for the recommendations.
Ray Bradbury and Asimov, huh? I'll have to admit only glancing at those two when I was younger. I read I, Robot and that's about it.
I've heard good things about Love in the Time of Cholera, I'll have to add that to my list.
Geoffrey, I'm looking at novels specifically right now. You have any native people's novels you'd recommend?
Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 and The Martian Chronicles are both MUST reads, as well as the short story Icarus Montgolfier Wright.
Another incredible story by Gabriel Garcia Marquez is a short entitled, A Very Old Man With Enormous Wings."
Siddhartha by Herman Hesse.
Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian sits very high on my list of "best of the best."
I'll second (or third) the Ray Bradbury recommendation, but I think he's far better with short stories than novels. Asimov, of course, and what about the late, great Arthur C. Clarke?
How they missed Tolkien is a mystery, but then neither scifi nor fantasy are generally considered "lit-rah-tchah".
American Indian Lit:
House Made of Dawn, N. Scott Momaday
Love Medicine and The Plague of Doves, Louise Erdrich
Ceremony, Leslie Marmo Silk
Reservation Blues, Sherman Alexie
I find anything by Edwidge Danticat fascinating in a long slow burn kind of way.
Zadie Smith's White Teeth is the opposite: a wild explosion of electric newness. A LOT of fun.
Jonathan Franzen's Corrections was both. One of the best novels of the new century.
I agree that Toni Morrison is the best living novelist. Especially the planned three of Beloved, Paradise, and Jazz. There is nothing better than ending the first page tossed completely out of one's life into a thickly realized aural world. The first word in Jazz is a sound not a word, hissed by the narrator: "Sth, I know that woman."
John Edgar Wideman is difficult and rewarding in the end. Two Cities, Philadelphia Fire, Fanon. A lot of interior monologue.
And I can't recommend Roberto Bolaño's 2666 enough. But one has to be willing.
It is not an easy thing to be controlled by someone else. Great literature does that. Faulkner, Morrison, the trilogy by Corman McCarthy, Jean Rhys (Sargasso Sea is so disturbingly good), D.H. Lawrence (the Rainbow is still the most affecting novel I've read as it confronts me as a white Christian lapsed Protestant).
Tolkien and Asimov, Bradbury and Clarke, they do it, too, but they lead that part of ourselves that is patterned by fantasy literature to allow to be led. We don't resist because it it fantasy and not threatening to merge with our own real worlds. Realist literature is a threat, and a promise of new, unsettled realizations.
Most people resist the best literature because there is a way in which we have to surrender the agenda to someone else. It's hard work, reading great things. Why should we expect great art to be easy?
But if we give up to it, gaze at the Twombly, the Rothko, the Miro, we are taken places that are new and not controllable.
Same with the "classics." Sound and Fury shows what is possible in literature that few can achieve and most resist. People hated Impressionism and Pointilism because it was outside of expectations and narrative logic.
Put the effort in in a concentrated way and new worlds open up, unsettling ones, though.
I would certainly suggest you take a look at any James Michener. Not the stuff of reading lists but enjoyable.
The list by Feodor is a good 'un, and I think Reservation Blues is as good a place to start as any.
Many meas culpa for forgetting Tolkein. Lord, lord how could I forget the Lord of the Rings and the Hobbit?
Arthur C. Clarke, IMHO, is, like Bradbury, better at the short story than the novel, but what do I know? I'm not a huge sci-fi fan.
Some genre fiction - Walter Moseley's Easy Rawlins mysteries are excellent. Stephen King is often laughed at, but It and The Stand are great novels, with the latter being a great commentary on America, and American religion. The former is an ode to baby boomers, their hopes and fears. His two related novels, Gerald's Game and Delores Claiborne, are wonderful portrayals of strong women in desperate situations (especially the latter).
Grendel by John Gardner is an interesting take on that old English lit chestnut, Beowulf (far better than The Eaters of the Dead).
I read Corrections and found it to be a wonderful obituary to baby-boomers, but it just didn't seem to have a center. But, again, what do I know?
In spite of Geoffrey's opinion, I was about to suggest James Joyce. Beautiful, beautiful prose. Try out Dubliners for a start. The last short story, 'The Dead', is really a little novella.
Meanwhile, I like many of the Feodor suggestions.
Native American: I liked Sherman Alexie's 'Flight'.
African-American: Morrison's 'Beloved' is probably my top choice of best American novel of the late 20th century. Jazz is wonderful too!
Recent: Cormac McCarthy's 'The Road'
Last April I did a personal survey of folks, asking what they thought was the great American novel. The top answers were these:
Huckleberry Finn
Moby Dick
To Kill a Mockingbird
Scarlett Letter
Grapes of Wrath
Their Eyes were Watching God
(One commenter noted that Hemingway once said that all American literature comes from Huck Finn.)
Southern Lit: Faulkner is not too accessible, but necessary, I suppose--'Absalom, Absalom'. However, Walker Percy's 'The Last Gentleman' is both accessible and has one of the most poignant scenes related to faith and death in all of literature.
British: George Eliot's Middlemarch
French: The Plague by Camus
Morrocan: The Sand Child by Tahar Ben Jelloun is not accessible, but it is amazing.
Sci fi: How about 'The Left Hand of Darkness' by Ursula LeGuin
Modern library has a dual list of 100 bests. One is by the critics and one by the folks. An interesting comparison. The critics say Joyce's 'Ulysses' is the best. The folks say its Rand's 'Atlas Shrugged'. I go with the critics.
Lest we forget, and while we're talking about Russian/Americans,
Nabokov. His Lolita is truly great, if topically very hard, but his 'Invitation to a Beheading' tops my list of novels of psychological nature.
I recommend Ayn Rand's Anthem. It's just over a hundred pages and is a triumphant call for human freedom.
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