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. 

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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.)