Disclaimers

It's time for disclaimers! I consider myself to be fairly well-read, but I wouldn't hold myself out as an expert in literature. I'm not a deconstructionist, and I often scoffed at my teachers and professors who forced us to spend months analyzing a novel, searching for symbolism and hidden meanings. (I've only read two books in recent memory that merit that level of scrutiny: one is on "The List," and the other is not.)

For me, at least, novels are meant to make us step outside of our lives and share the author's view of the world for a while; a truly great novel may make us question or examine our fundamental beliefs about the world around us, but if we try to strip it down, something is lost. I love reading a novel for the story, the characters, and (hopefully) the beautiful language. Relatedly, I'm a gluttonous reader; I devour books by the paragraph. I read quickly, but I often read a book two or three times back-to-back, because I'm disappointed that it's over and go back to the beginning hoping for more the second time.

Luckily, I've chosen a great partner in my quest; as a literature professor, Amy throws around words like "phenomenology" and is a true expert on deconstruction and scholarly appreciation of a work. She says she's not going to do that for our Novel Throw-Down, but I assure you, she's much more likely to do it than I am. My goal for this blog is to stick to an analysis of major themes, characters and plots, and the author's use of language. That's it. Now that you've been warned, in the next week or so I hope to start posting about the books I've already read.

The Throwing of the Gauntlet

Earlier this year, a good friend from college (and a fellow reader - more about her to follow) forwarded a list of what was purportedly the "Greatest Novels of All Time" in a Facebook link. I was supposed to indicate which ones I'd read, which ones I loved/hated, and which ones I'd seen in movie form. While I disagreed with the novels that were included in the list (as did she), I was surprised and disappointed to learn that I'd already read a little more than half of them. Now, I am rarely found without a book in hand. I'm not ashamed to admit that I enjoy reading the last thriller or adventure novel, but I also try to read at least one "serious" work of literature every six months. But certainly that doesn't make me an expert in literature, so the fact that I'd already read more than half of the "Greatest Novels of All Time" was disappointing. Was that really all there is?

Being a lawyer, I decided to use my research skills to find out if this was true. Using my powerful search-fu, I located several more novel lists. Finally, I found one where I'd only read 18 of the purported "top 100 novels." It was Time's All-Time 100 Novels. To be candid, even this list has several flaws. First, it only covers novels written from 1923 (the year that Time was first published) through 2005 (the year the list was made). Second, it only includes English-language novels. Third, no one is ever going to agree about the top 100 novels of all-time or even the system used for selecting them (e.g., popularity, literary genius, relevance).

Nevertheless, it posed an interesting challenge: could I read the remaining 82 books? Not wanting to take on such a daunting contest by myself, I contacted my dear friend who had first brought this quest to my attention. Since she has a Ph.D. in French literature, I knew that Amy would love a reading challenge, and thankfully, she was willing to overlook the absence of non-English (ok, French) novels from the list. Conveniently, we'd also read almost the same number of books on the list - although different ones - so no one would feel like they were playing catch-up! Then, in late April or early May of this year, we set out on our pilgrimage through the last (almost) one hundred years of English-language novels.

Luckily (since we live in different time-zones), Amy was able to come up with some very creative technological solutions to help us organize and share information. We maintain a shared spreadsheet online with the entire list with columns for each of us to indicate whether we've read a book. Since we hadn't read all of the same books to begin with, we decided we would read one book that the other hadn't read, as well as reading a book neither of us had read together. After we finish a book, we arrange a phone call to talk about the book and what we thought of it.

That brings us to today. I've now read 29 of the books, and Amy and I are currently reading American Pastoral by Philip Roth. Amy has just started her own blog about our challenge, so I thought I'd throw my hat in the ring and publish this companion blog.

Without further ado, here's the list!

P.S. I haven't seen Julie & Julia.

The List

Books I've Read (Red) = 30
Current Throw-Down Book is The Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon.

• Achebe, Chinua - Things Fall Apart
• Agee, James - A Death in the Family
• Amis, Kingsley - Lucky Jim
• Amis, Martin - Money
• Atwood, Margaret - The Blind Assassin
• Baldwin, James - Go Tell It on the Mountain
• Barth, John - The Sot-Weed Factor
• Bellow, Saul - The Adventures of Augie March
• Bellow, Saul - Herzog
• Blume, Judy - Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret
• Bowen, Elizabeth - The Death of the Heart
• Bowles, Paul - The Sheltering Sky
• Burgess, Anthony - A Clockwork Orange
• Burroughs, William - Naked Lunch
• Byatt, A.S. - Possession
• Cather, Willa - Death Comes for the Archbishop
• Chandler, Raymond - The Big Sleep
• Cheever, John - Falconer
• DeLillo, Don - White Noise
• Dick, Philip K. - Ubik
• Dickey, James - Deliverance
• Didion, Joan - Play It As It Lays
• Doctorow, E.L. - Ragtime
• Dreiser, Theodore - An American Tragedy
• Ellison, Ralph - Invisible Man
• Faulkner, William - The Sound and the Fury
• Faulkner, William - Light in August
• Fitzgerald, F. Scott - The Great Gatsby
• Ford, Richard - The Sportswriter
• Forster, E.M. - A Passage to India
• Fowles, John - The French Lieutenant's Woman
• Franzen, Jonathan - The Corrections
• Gaddis, William - The Recognitions
• Gibson, William - Neuromancer
• Golding, William - Lord of the Flies
• Graves, Robert- I, Claudius
• Green, Henry - Loving
• Greene, Graham - The Heart of the Matter
• Greene, Graham - The Power and the Glory
• Hammett, Dashiell - Red Harvest
• Heller, Joseph - Catch-22
• Hemingway, Ernest - The Sun Also Rises
• Hurston, Zora Neale - Their Eyes Were Watching God
• Isherwood, Christopher - The Berlin Stories
• Ishiguro, Kazuo - Never Let Me Go
• Kerouac, Jack - On the Road
• Kesey, Ken - One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
• Kosinski, Jerzy - The Painted Bird
• le Carre, John - The Spy Who Came in from the Cold
• Lee, Harper - To Kill a Mockingbird
• Lessing, Doris - The Golden Notebook
• Lewis, C.S. - The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe
• Lowry, Malcolm - Under the Volcano
• Malamud, Bernard - The Assistant
• McCarthy, Cormac - Blood Meridian
• McCullers, Carson - The Heart is a Lonely Hunter
• McEwan, Ian - Atonement
• Miller, Henry - Tropic of Cancer
• Mitchell, Margaret - Gone With the Wind
• Moore, Alan & Gibbons, Dave - Watchmen
• Morrison, Toni - Beloved
• Murdoch, Iris - Under the Net
• Nabokov, Vladimir - Lolita
• Nabokov, Vladimir - Pale Fire
• Naipaul, V.S. - A House for Mr. Biswas
• O'Brien, Flann - At Swim - Two Birds
• O'Hara, John - Appointment in Samarra
• Orwell, George - 1984
• Orwell, George - Animal Farm
• Percy, Walker - The Moviegoer
• Powell, Anthony - A Dance to the Music of Time
• Pynchon, Thomas - The Crying of Lot 49
• Pynchon, Thomas - Gravity's Rainbow
• Rhys, Jean - Wide Sargasso Sea
• Robinson, Marilynne - Housekeeping
• Roth, Henry - Call It Sleep
• Roth, Philip - American Pastoral
• Roth, Philip - Portnoy's Complaint
• Rushdie, Salman - Midnight's Children
• Salinger, J.D. - The Catcher in the Rye
• Smith, Zadie - White Teeth
• Spark, Muriel - The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie
• Stead, Christian - The Man Who Loved Children
• Steinbeck, John - The Grapes of Wrath
• Stephenson, Neal - Snow Crash
• Stone, Robert - Dog Soldiers
• Styron, William - The Confessions of Nat Turner
• Tolkien, J.R.R. - The Lord of the Rings
• Updike, John - Rabbit, Run
• Vonnegut, Kurt - Slaughterhouse-Five
• Wallace, David Foster - Infinite Jest
• Warren, Robert Penn - All the King's Men
• Waugh, Evelyn - Brideshead Revisited
• Waugh, Evelyn - A Handful of Dust
• West, Nathanael - The Day of the Locust
• Wilder, Thorton - The Bridge of San Luis Rey
• Woolf, Virginia - To the Lighthouse
• Woolf, Virginia - Mrs. Dalloway
• Wright, Richard - Native Son
• Yates, Richard - Revolutionary Road