The 100 Best books...

[fajrdrako]

A friend send me this link to the Time Magazine list of the 100 best books published in English since 1923. (Why 1923? I didn't read the fine print. Seems a funny date to choose. Is that when Time was founded?)

Interesting list. I counted: I've read 35 of the books on the list, a third, not counting one book that I can't remember whether I read it or not - Red Harvest by Dashiel Hammett. I read a bunch of Hammett novels, can't be sure about that one. I'm not sure if 35 is a high percentage, or low. The list seems very loaded towards American authors, to my mind, but I guess that's fair, considering it's Time that compiled it. Some of the books on the list are favourites of mine: To Kill a Mockingbird, Catcher in the Rye, The Big Sleep, Lolita, The Sun Also Rises. And some are books I hated, like Cheever's Falconer and The Sound and the Fury by Faulkner and Portnoy's Complaint. And a fair number I'd call "disappointing" or "overrated" or "what's the fuss about there, anyway?" There are a bunch I've never heard of, like Loving and The Moviegoer and At Swim-Two-Birds. This surprises me, not because I think I've read everything there is, but because I browse bookstores a lot, and I read about books a lot, and I'm enough of a literary snob to believe that I know a fair amount about books. This list makes a nice addition to my 'things I plan to read' list. And of course, a lot of the books there were already on that list.

The only real surprise (to my mind) was Alan Moore's and Dave Gibbon's Watchmen. And while I agree that Watchmen is semiotically brilliant in many ways, it's far from my favourite graphic novel since 1923 - that date maybe disqualifies the work of Winsor McCay, but there are numerous comics I think are better. For instance, I prefer, on many grounds, including literary ones, the better story arcs in Neil Gaiman's The Sandman.

My own list of 100 books, though somewhat out of date now, is (unsurprisingly) quite different, and not just because I didn't start at 1923. I wonder how many of the books on my list were written before then?

I really should rewrite my list, and move it to another website. I know I have additions to make. That means deciding what to take off - not so easy.

Comments

[sartorias.livejournal.com]

At Swim Two-Birds is Irish, and quite experimental.

The only one on the list I hadn't heard of is White Teeth; a lot of predictable and overrrated onces, as you said. I did like seeing Anthony Powell on there. Makes up for Philip Roth and some other clankers.

[fajrdrako.livejournal.com]

Yes, exactly. There are a few interesting highlights. But on the whole... it isn't really a very sophisticated list, in my opinion. It might have been put together by a board of High School trustees. No offence intended towards High School trustees, you understand.

[sartorias.livejournal.com]

I totally agree--I think of a bunch of those as dated standards, not really great. (Like To Kill a Mockingbird is great.)

[fajrdrako.livejournal.com]

I just learned last week that To Kill A Mockingbird has been made into a play. I'd love to see it.

[sartorias.livejournal.com]

There are a couple of versions around--though there might be a new one.

I love, love, love the movie w/Gregory Peck.

[fajrdrako.livejournal.com]

I just saw that movie for the first time a few months ago. Loved it, of course. It was beautifully done - one of those rare times a movie is worthy of the book it was based on. Though I do slightly prefer it as a novel.

[brashley46.livejournal.com]

I like your list better than theirs. Hee.

IIRC "Time" was started in 1923.

My own would probably include Hobbes' Leviathan, as the best written political theory of the early modern period; but that's WAY before 1923. (I'd probably toss in Trotsky's Moya Zhizn' too; as an autobiography it works almost as well as Ben Franklin's.) Other than those, what can I tell you?

[fajrdrako.livejournal.com]

I like your list better than theirs.

Thanks, so do I. (g) More eclectic, more varied and quirky. But then, I'm not a committee.

I think they were just including fiction in their list. I've always meant to read the autobiographies of Franklin and Trotsky, but haven't ... yet. The autobiographies I've read aren't so intellectual. I've read the autobiographies of Benvenuto Cellini and Casanova - must be the Italophile in me - and Arthur Miller and Anne Linbergh (hasn't everbody?) and some of Anais Nin and - I'm not sure who else. There are probably more cases where I've read people's letters - now, that's fun. Especially when they were good letter-writers, which tends to put them in the 17th to 19th centuries - Byron, Chesterfield, Nelson and so on.

I should probably make a separate list of 'the ten best biographies' or something like that.