Review: Scavenger Reef

Scavenger Reef by Laurence Shames is more than a typical "Florida noir" mystery. In addition to a clever "whodunit?" plot, the requisite host of quirky characters, and plenty of colorful descriptions of hot weather and tropical vegetation, it explores bigger issues like the nature of friendship and the meaning of art. It gets you thinking about more than the next umbrella drink.

Cookbook Library: The Cafe Brenda Cookbook

While not really a list, one of my book-related goals is to make one new recipe from each of the cookbooks on my shelves. Since it has been freezing cold in Portland (snow at the end of March!), I made soup.

Friends from Minneapolis gave me this cookbook from their favorite restaurant, Cafe Brenda -- a "seafood and vegetarian cuisine" restaurant. I made the White Bean and Squash soup, which was not bad, but a little bland. It benefited from doubling the herbs and adding a healthy dose of hot sauce and a little butter melted on top (what wouldn't?). Then it was pretty yummy.

The paraphrased version of the recipe is:

Soak 1 cup of dried navy beans eight hours or overnight. To make the soup, bring beans to boil in 5 cups water. Reduce heat, simmer for about an hour or until tender. Drain.

Sauté in olive oil for about 5 minutes: 4 garlic cloves, chopped; one large shallot, chopped; one medium onion, chopped. Add 3 ½ cups peeled, cubed (1”) winter squash (butternut).

Combine squash/onion mix with cooked beans, 4 cups vegetable stock, ½ teaspoon dried basil, ½ teaspoon dried oregano, and ¼ teaspoon dried thyme. Bring to boil, reduce heat and simmer, covered until squash is tender (about 20 minutes).

Puree soup in batches in blender or food processor. Return to pot and add ¾ cup half and half; salt and pepper to taste.

Serves 6.

Review: How to Find Morels

Milan Pelouch is a 78 year old mushroom hunter who, in his charming guide, How to Find Morels (subtitled Even as Others are Coming Back Empty Handed) teaches how to identify and locate his favorite morels.

This slim volume is packed with practical information such as photographs identifying “true” and “false” morels, when to expect morels in different regions, and how to locate elusive morels by finding specific types of trees on which the mushrooms thrive. It is also full of folksy advice like the best way to carry morels while hunting (in a cloth bag) and the best way to store them (sauté in butter and freeze in plastic bags). He even includes several of his wife’s best morel recipes.

The book is a refreshing exhortation to enjoy the healthy, educational, and tasty pastime of mushroom hunting. Even for an armchair forager, How to Find Morels is a delight. As Pelouch says, “In less than an hour you can gain the needed know-how and will be flashing a big smile on the way home from a successful hunt instead of stewing in frustration after being skunked once again.” You can’t beat that!

Review: The Bone People

The latest of the Booker Prize winners that I've read is The Bone People by Keri Hulme. It is a difficult book about identity, love, and belonging. Hume tells the story of three tough-as-nails characters: Kerewin, an isolated artist who can no longer paint; Joe, a Maori workman struggling to raise his adopted son alone; and Simon, the mute little boy Joe found washed up on the seashore.

The style is difficult because the point of view switches around among the three main characters without warning; Hulme uses Joycean made-up words as well as Maori words; and it is hard to tell when the adults are speaking their own words or thinking out loud what they think the mute little Simon is trying to communicate.

The story is difficult because of the child abuse at the center of the plot. The ambivalence with which Hulme treats the topic makes the story incredibly interesting, but absolutely distressing.

The characters are difficult because none of them are likable. Simon is sympathetic, for sure. But even he has his moments of maliciousness, although these are less convincing than Hulme may have intended. Joe, on the other hand, does not deserve the sympathy Hulme seems to want the reader to give him. Yes, he gets his comeuppance in the end, but it does not seem sufficient punishment. His role is key to the story because he is the hinge between Simon and Kerewin, but the ultimate resolution seems a little unrealistic, given the prior conflict.

Kerwin is particularly prickly and seething with anger. She is quick to lash out verbally, and if angry enough or drunk enough, physically. She has cut herself off from her family and her community, preferring to live in an isolated tower by the ocean. She has even isolated herself from her own sex, considering herself to be a third gender – a “neuter.” But Kerwin’s story makes the book worth reading. She is one of the most complex and intriguing characters in contemporary literature.


OTHER REVIEWS

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List: The Man Booker Prize

The Booker Prize is awarded each year for a "full-length novel, written by a citizen of the Commonwealth or the Republic of Ireland . . . . The novel must be an original work in English (not a translation) and must not be self-published."

If anyone else working on this list would like me to post a link to your progress report(s), please leave a comment with a link and I will add it below.

Here is the list, with those I have finished reading in red; those on my TBR shelf in blue:

1969: Percy Howard Newby, Something to Answer For

1970: Bernice Rubens, The Elected Member

1971: V.S. Naipaul, In a Free State

1972: John Berger, G (reviewed here)

1973: James Gordon Farrell, The Siege of Krishnapur

1974: Nadine Gordimer, The Conservationist, and Stanley Middleton, Holiday

1975: Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, Heat and Dust

1976: David Storey, Saville

1977: Paul Scott, Staying On

1978: Iris Murdoch, The Sea, the Sea (reviewed here)

1979: Penelope Fitzgerald, Offshore

1980: William Golding, Rites of Passage

1981: Salman Rushdie, Midnight's Children (reviewed here)

1982: Thomas Keneally, Schindler's List

1983: J. M. Coetzee, The Life and Times of Michael K(reviewed here)

1984: Anita Brookner, Hotel du Lac

1985: Keri Hulme, The Bone People(reviewed here)

1986: Kingsley Amis, The Old Devils

1987: Penelope Lively, Moon Tiger

1988: Peter Carey, Oscar and Lucinda

1989: Kazuo Ishiguro, The Remains of the Day

1990: A.S. Byatt, Possession

1991: Ben Okri, The Famished Road

1992: Michael Ondaatje, The English Patient, and Barry Unsworth, Sacred Hunger

1993: Roddy Doyle, Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha

1994: James Kelman, How Late it Was, How Late

1995: Pat Barker, The Ghost Road

1996: Graham Swift, Last Orders

1997: Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things

1998: Ian McEwan, Amsterdam

1999: J. M. Coetzee, Disgrace

2000: Margaret Atwood, The Blind Assassin


2001: Peter Carey, True History of the Kelly Gang

2002: Yann Martel, Life of Pi

2003: DBC Pierre, Vernon God Little

2004: Alan Hollinghurst, The Line of Beauty

2005: John Banville, The Sea (reviewed here)

2006: Kiran Desai, The Inheritance of Loss

2007: Anne Enright, The Gathering

2008: Aravind Adiga, The White Tiger

2009: Hilary Mantel, Wolf Hall (reviewed here)


2010: Howard Jacobson, The Finkler Question (reviewed here)

2011: Julian Barnes, The Sense of an Ending

NOTE

Last updated on June 24, 2012.

OTHERS READING BOOKER WINNERS

Farm Lane Books
Fresh Ink Books
Hotch Pot Cafe

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Wonderful Toy: Follow Up

The What’s Next? is even more fun than I thought. I emailed them yesterday when I couldn't find a list of Sir Arther Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes books. The gal emailed me back this morning to say she had added the list herself and if there were any other series missing, to let them know and they would try to add them. Interactive fun!

Modern Library's Top 100 List: Dislikes

The Magus by John Fowles was my least favorite book on the Modern Library's Top 100 Novels list. I could not stand The Magus! It may be the only book that I actually hate. Those pompous nitwits running around that stupid island playing games with each other! And all the time spouting humanistic gobblygook about the death of God, or whatever they were prattling on about. It has a cult following, but I thought it was overwrought nonsense.

Wonderful Toy for List Readers

The Kent District Library in Kent County, Michigan has a super on-line tool called What's Next? that provides lists of all the books in various series. For example, you can search for author Lee Child, and pull up the entire list of his Jack Reacher novels. Best for popular fiction, like mysteries.

Review of the Day: Foreigners

Foreigners by Caryl Phillips presents three profiles of black men in England: Francis Barber, the servant and companion of dictionary creator Dr. Johnson; boxer Randy Turpin, who beat Sugar Ray Robinson for the world middleweight title in 1951; and David Oluwale, who’s 1968 racially-motivated killing by police scandalized Britain.

Although technically novellas, the main characters were real people and the profiles combine fiction with biography and journalism. The three pieces are united by the theme of “foreignness,” examining how each of the three men were outsiders in their worlds, but vary in their style and impact.

“Dr. Johnson’s Watch,” about Barber, is a formal, first person account. “Made in Wales,” about Turpin, is straightforwardly biographical. The final piece, “Northern Lights,” about Oluwale, entwines multiple narrative voices with excerpts from public records.

The lack of stylistic continuity – especially the radically different style of the last story – is distracting and weakens the thematic coherence of the book. I preferred the second piece. Turpin's rags-to-riches-to-rags story really dragged me in. On the other hand, the final story about Oluwale was too disjointed and abstract for my taste.

None of the profiles is fully sympathetic. The main characters are shown with all their faults and weaknesses, and from a historic perspective that distances the reader. While this adds to the idea that the three men are foreign from those around them, it lessens the reader’s ability to fully engage with the book.

Review: The Stories of John Cheever

The Stories of John Cheever, which won the National Book Critics Circle award in 1978 and the Pulitzer in 1979, is a chronological collection that spans Cheever’s short story career, from pre-WWII up to 1973. To read this collection – just shy of 700 pages – is to live in Cheever’s head, tracking his artistic and personal development in a way that a single novel or volume of stories doesn’t allow.

These are not happy stories. The earlier pieces are particularly bleak and raw. While the later stories are deeper and more nuanced, they are still pretty dark. Precious few have cheerful resolutions. The best Cheever’s characters seem to achieve is contentment despite imperfect circumstances.

Cheever’s is a world of commuter trains and cocktail parties, where everyone wears hats, has a cook, drinks martinis at lunch, summers, sails, and commits adultery. Not everyone is rich; in fact, money problems are a continuing theme. But the trappings, however tarnished, of a mid-century, Northeast corridor, upper crust way of life hang on all the stories. And that is Cheever at his best. He can bring us so deep into that world that it feels like living it.

Review: The Shack

It's Easter Sunday, so a review of a religious book seems in order. The Shack by William P. Young is a novel about a father who, devastated by the death of his daughter, spends a weekend with God (literally) and re-learns about God's love. The theology didn't strike me as radical, but the presentation really shakes things up and gets you thinking.

Interestingly enough, this book was No. 9 on Powell's Book's local best sellers shelf when I was poking around there on Friday. That may have more to do with Young being an Oregonian than the subject matter. 

OTHER REVIEWS

Troutbirder II

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Radcliffe's Top 100 Novels of the 20th Century

At the request of the Modern Library editorial board, the students in Radcliffe's Publishing Course compiled and released its own list of the century’s top 100 novels to counter the Modern Library’s Top 100 novels list. Like the Modern Library judges, the Radcliffe students chose from among 400 pre-selected titles.

There is a lot of overlap between the two lists, but this one seems weighted a little more towards American authors, works by women, and books assigned in high school.

I have only two books to go. I should really make a push! Although the two I have left are going to be difficult because one, Look Homeward, Angel, is a slow chunkster, and the other, White Noise, does not appeal to me. But I would like to finish this list!

Those I have read are in red.

1. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald

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

3. Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck

4. To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee

5. The Color Purple by Alice Walker

6. Ulysses by James Joyce

7. Beloved by Toni Morrison

8. The Lord of the Flies by William Golding

9. 1984 by George Orwell

10. The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner (reviewed here)

11. Lolita by Vladmir Nabokov

12. Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck

13. Charlotte's Web by E.B. White

14. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce (reivewed here)

15. Catch-22 by Joseph Heller

16. Brave New World by Aldous Huxley

17. Animal Farm by George Orwell

18. The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway

19. As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner

20. A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway

21. Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad

22. Winnie-the-Pooh by A.A. Milne

23. Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston

24. Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison

25. Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison

26. Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell

27. Native Son by Richard Wright

28. One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest by Ken Kesey

29. Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut (reviewed here)

30. For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway

31. On the Road by Jack Kerouac

32. The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway

33. The Call of the Wild by Jack London

34. To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf

35. The Portrait of a Lady by Henry James

36. Go Tell it on the Mountain by James Baldwin

37. The World According to Garp by John Irving

38. All the King's Men by Robert Penn Warren

39. A Room with a View by E.M. Forster

40. The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien

41. Schindler's List by Thomas Keneally

42. The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton

43. The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand

44. Finnegans Wake by James Joyce (discussed here)

45. The Jungle by Upton Sinclair

46. Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf

47. The Wonderful Wizard of Oz by L. Frank Baum

48. Lady Chatterley's Lover by D.H. Lawrence

49. A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess

50. The Awakening by Kate Chopin

51. My Antonia by Willa Cather

52. Howards End by E.M. Forster

53. In Cold Blood by Truman Capote

54. Franny and Zooey by J.D. Salinger (reviewed here)

55. The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie

56. Jazz by Toni Morrison

57. Sophie's Choice by William Styron (reviewed here)

58. Absalom, Absalom! by William Faulkner

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

60. Ethan Frome by Edith Wharton

61. A Good Man Is Hard to Find by Flannery O'Connor

62. Tender Is the Night by F. Scott Fitzgerald

63. Orlando by Virginia Woolf

64. Sons and Lovers by D.H. Lawrence

65. Bonfire of the Vanities by Tom Wolfe

66. Cat's Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut

67. A Separate Peace by John Knowles

68. Light in August by William Faulkner

69. The Wings of the Dove by Henry James

70. Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe

71. Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier (reviewed here)

72. A Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams (reviewed here)

73. Naked Lunch by William S. Burroughs

74. Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh

75. Women in Love by D.H. Lawrence

76. Look Homeward, Angel by Thomas Wolfe

77. In Our Time by Ernest Hemingway (reviewed here)

78. The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas by Gertrude Stein

79. The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett

80. The Naked and the Dead by Norman Mailer (reviewed here)

81. Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys (reviewed here)

82. White Noise by Don DeLillo ON OVERDRIVE

83. O Pioneers! by Willa Cather

84. Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller

85. The War of the Worlds by H.G. Wells (reviewed here)

86. Lord Jim by Joseph Conrad

87. The Bostonians by Henry James

88. An American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser

89. Death Comes for the Archbishop by Willa Cather

90. The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame (reviewed here)

91. This Side of Paradise by F. Scott Fitzgerald

92. Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand

93. The French Lieutenant's Woman by John Fowles

94. Babbitt by Sinclair Lewis

95. Kim by Rudyard Kipling

96. The Beautiful and the Damned by F. Scott Fitzgerald

97. Rabbit, Run by John Updike

98. Where Angels Fear to Tread by E.M. Forster (reviewed here)

99. Main Street by Sinclair Lewis

100. Midnight's Children by Salman Rushdie (reviewed here)

NOTE

Last updated on December 28, 2022.

OTHER PEOPLE READING THESE BOOKS

(If you are reading the books on this list and would like to be included here, please leave a comment with a list to your progress report and I will post it.)

Review: On Chesil Beach

On Chesil Beach by Ian McEwan is a perfectly crafted tragedy that describes the way a life can go so easily astray. Through the eyes of the omniscient narrator, we watch the excruciating, awkward wedding night of Florence and Edward who, in 1962, are too freighted with history to breach the cusp of the sexual revolution. The consequences are heartbreaking.

OTHER REVIEWS

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Modern Library's Top 100 List: Favorites

Hands down, my favorite "book" on the Modern Library's Top 100 Novels of the 20th Century list was A Dance to the Music of Time by Anthony Powell.  Although commonly listed as one work, Dance is actually 12 novels, originally published separately but commonly published in four volumes of three novels each, called "The 1st Movement," "The 2nd Movement," etc.

Dance follows a group of characters in England from 1914 through WWII and up to 1971. The plots of the individual novels are less important than the entwining of these characters as they move in and out of each others lives over the years.

It is definitely on my Desert Island list (10 books I'd want with me if stranded on a desert island) -- especially if I can count it as one book, like the Modern Library did.

Here is a list of the 12 books of Dance to the Music of Time, in publication order.

Favorite Author: Jim Harrison

 

There was a time in my late 20s when I gobbled up Jim Harrison's novels like his characters go through brook trout and whiskey. The Road Home is in my permanent Top 10 Favorite Novels list and Harrison will always be high on my list of favorite authors -- probably at the top of a list of Favorite Under-appreciated Authors if I ever made one.

A few of his later books, such as True North and Returning to Earth, didn't "rattle my brainpan" (to use a Harrison expression) like the earlier books did. They were repetitive and a little tired. Still, I enjoyed them the way I enjoy music from a favorite band even if some of the songs sound the same. Variations on a theme can still sound sweet. And his two recent "faux mysteries," The Great Leader and The Big Seven, were much more lively.

Here is the list of Harrison's prose books, from most recent to oldest. I have read them all and am now making my way through a very big book of his collected poetry.

A Really Big Lunch: The Roving Gourmand on Food and Life
The Ancient Minstrel
The Big Seven
The River Swimmer 
The Great Leader
The Farmer's Daughter (reviewed here)
The English Major (reviewed here)
Returning to Earth
The Summer He Didn't Die
True North
Off to the Side: A Memoir
The Beast God Forgot to Invent
The Road Home
Julip
The Raw and the Cooked: Adventures of a Roving Gourmand
Just Before Dark
The Woman Lit By Fireflies
Dalva
Sundog
Warlock
Legends of the Fall
Farmer
A Good Day to Die
Wolf


NOTE

Last updated February 2016.

Review: The Pirate's Daughter

The Pirate's Daughter by Margaret Cezair-Thompson spans generations of a Jamaican family, focusing first on Ida Joseph who, as a teenager, has an affair with aging movie star Errol Flynn and bears his daughter May Flynn, the focus of the second half. Usually, I find novels using real people as characters to be irritating, and I am not a big fan of mother/daughter novels, so I had trepidations about reading Cezair-Thompson' s hefty novel.

My worries were put to rest within the first couple of chapters. The Pirate’s Daughter turned out to be a surprisingly delightful read. It has an elegantly constructed plot, complex characters, steady pacing, and a satisfying resolution. The book is about the story, not the writing, which is clean and unobtrusive. Even the author’s use of Jamaican dialect is so natural it blends right into the narrative.

At one point, May is talking with her would-be lover, a character based on novelist and ex-pat Jamaica resident, Ian Fleming, about writing books. He tells her he is thinking of writing a book that would be “Lolita, Lady Chatterley’s Lover, and Rebecca all mixed together and set in Jamaica.” Cezair-Thompson may not have accomplished such a lofty goal, but she made a respectable effort. The Pirate’s Daughter is a good book.

OTHER REVIEWS

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They Had Me With "Ulysses"

The Modern Library’s list of Top 100 Novels of the 20th Century was the trigger of my book list obsession. When I encountered this list in 1999, I had read about 25 of the books on it, mostly in high school and college. Thanks to a Great Books class my freshman year, I had already finished Ulysses, so I figured I had a head start. I decided to read them all.

I finished reading all the books on the list in September 2007. This was before I started Rose City Reader, so I did not review many of them.

I wasn’t a nut about it. It took me seven years to finish the list, which is about a book a month or so. It was a little daunting to realize that there are 121 books on this “Top 100” list because some listed as one book, are really sets, trilogies, etc. But I kept plugging along.

Reading through the list required me to read some classics I had never read (An American Tragedy, Studs Lonigan, and The Secret Agent, for example) and introduced me to some authors I had not encountered before (such as John O’Hara and Lawrence Durell). I certainly did not like every book I read, but I am glad that I have now read them all.


Here’s the list:

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 (reviewed here)

4. Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov

5. Brave New World by Aldous Huxley

6. The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner (reviewed here)

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 (reviewed here)

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

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 (reviewed here)

28. Tender is the Night by F. Scott Fitzgerald

29. The Studs Lonigan Trilogy by James T. Farrell (reviewed here)

30. The Good Solidier by Ford Madox Ford

31. Animal Farm by George Orwell

32. The Golden Bowl by Henry James (reviewed here)

33. Sister Carrie by Theodore Dreiser (reviewed here)

34. A Handful of Dust by Evelyn Waugh (notes here)

35. As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner

36. All the King's Men by Robert Penn Warren (reviewed here)

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  (discussed here)

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 Cancerby Henry Miller

51. The Naked and the Dead by Norman Mailer (reviewed here)

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 Durell

71. A High Wind in Jamaica by Richard Hughes

72. A House for Mr. Biswasby V.S. Naipaul

73. The Day of the Locustby 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 (discussed here)

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 (short review here)

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 (reviewed here)

91. Tobacco Road by Erskine Caldwell

92. Ironweed by William Kennedy

93. The Magus by John Fowles

94. Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys (reviewed here)

95. Under the Net by Iris Murdoch

96. Sophie's Choice by William Styron (reviewed here)

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 (reviewed here)


OTHERS READING THE BOOKS ON THIS LIST

100 Books in 100 Weeks
The Modern Library List
Doug Reviews the Top 100 Novels
The Treacle Well

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The Power of the List

When I say I am a compulsive "list" reader, I mean I keep lists of the books I've read and am currently reading; make lists of books I plan to read next; and take excessive pleasure in keeping track of which "must read," "best of," and prize-winning books I've polished off. And I've recently started making bibliography lists of the works of my favorite authors. If a book is on one of my lists, it will eventually percolate up to the top of my TBR pile. That is the power of the list. I keep track of all these lists on Lists of Bests. I comment on my progress on several lists on All Consuming and 43 Things. I have my whole library on LibraryThing. My plan is to use this blog to corral all these reading and book related jottings in one place. Because a big part of the pleasure of reading a book is getting to cross it off the list.