We sat down and looked at these two lists:
100 Best Novels (of the Twentieth Century) from Modern Library (ML) and Radcliffe’s Rival 100 Best Novels (RR) and decided to come up with our own lists. The links again: http://www.modernlibrary.com/top-100/100-best-novels/ and http://www.modernlibrary.com/top-100/radcliffes-rival-100-best-novels-list/
We were not interested in making a list of 100 because that didn't sound realistic. We started by eliminating the books on the lists we had already read:
Sandra: The Great Gatsby, Brave New World, An American Tragedy, The Catcher in the Rye, The House of Mirth, The Day of the Locust, Ragtime, Beloved, Charlotte's Web, Gone with the Wind, Portrait of a Lady, In Cold Blood, Ethan Frome, A Good Man is Hard to Find, and Rebecca
Ernie: Slaughterhouse-Five, All the King's Men, Deliverance, The Maltese Falcon, The Call of the Wild, The Old Man and the Sea, and A Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
Already we were feeling pretty good! Then we sat down and compiled the list of books that we would be willing to give a try reading. There was a book or two I had read that Ernie wanted to read and vice versa. There were several we were curious to know something about but didn’t have the least bit of interest in trying to read. One of us agreed to take it on, not necessarily enthusiastically, but we would try it. Also, there were one or two we had read before but that we liked so well we thought we’d go around again.
Sandra: The Great Gatsby, Brave New World, An American Tragedy, The Catcher in the Rye, The House of Mirth, The Day of the Locust, Ragtime, Beloved, Charlotte's Web, Gone with the Wind, Portrait of a Lady, In Cold Blood, Ethan Frome, A Good Man is Hard to Find, and Rebecca
Ernie: Slaughterhouse-Five, All the King's Men, Deliverance, The Maltese Falcon, The Call of the Wild, The Old Man and the Sea, and A Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
Already we were feeling pretty good! Then we sat down and compiled the list of books that we would be willing to give a try reading. There was a book or two I had read that Ernie wanted to read and vice versa. There were several we were curious to know something about but didn’t have the least bit of interest in trying to read. One of us agreed to take it on, not necessarily enthusiastically, but we would try it. Also, there were one or two we had read before but that we liked so well we thought we’d go around again.
We took into consideration the books that were on both lists first and then books that were on one or the other of the lists next. Several authors were represented on the lists multiple times. Did we really need to read all five books by Henry James or all four by Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Faulkner or Conrad? We thought not and tried to pick something from each. Then we factored in the rankings of the books. My first choice Catch-22 would have a score of 22 (#7 on ML, #15 on RR) - I'm not making this up - a pretty good recommendation for including it on my list. Also, in the case of authors with multiple entries we took into consideration their score. To decide which Faulkner for example, The Sound and the Fury was on both lists for a collective score of 16 (#6 on ML, # 10 on RR) while As I Lay Dying scored 54 (#35 on ML, #19 on RR) so we went with the former.
There were books on this list we had never heard of! There were also authors we had never heard of, so to fill out our list to a round 25 on each we picked titles that sounded intriguing. We think it will be a different experience to read those books versus those we already have some knowledge and preconceived notions about. Either way we are excited about the prospects of both.
We compiled three lists – one for Sandra, one for Ernie, and one for books we both would read. They are as follows:
Sandra’s list:
1. Catch-22/Joseph Heller
2. Of Human Bondage/W. Somerset Maugham
3. To the Lighthouse/Virginia Woolf
4. Tender is the Night/F. Scott Fitzgerald
5. A Clockwork Orange/Anthony Burgess
6. Winnie the Pooh/A. A. Milne
7. Darkness at Noon/Arthur Koestler
8. Animal Farm/George Orwell
9. The Way of All Flesh/Samuel Butler
10. A Room with a View/ E. M. Forster
11. Go Tell it on the Mountain/James Baldwin
11. Go Tell it on the Mountain/James Baldwin
12. Sophie’s Choice/William Styron
13. The Awakening/Kate Chopin
14. Cat’s Cradle/Kurt Vonnegut
15. Women in Love/D.H. Lawrence
16. The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas/Gertrude Stein
17. Things Fall Apart/Chinua Achebe
18. Parade’s End/Ford Madox Ford
19. The Heart is a Lonely Hunter/Carson McCullers
20. The Adventures of Augie March/Saul Bellow
21. Ulysses/James Joyce
22. The French Lieutenant’s Woman/John Fowles
23. The Sheltering Sky/Paul Bowles
24. The Postman Always Rings Twice/James M. Cain
25. Under the Net/Iris Murdoch
Ernie’s List:
1. To Kill a Mockingbird/Harper Lee
2. Finnegans Wake/James Joyce
3. Winesburg, Ohio/Sherwood Anderson
4. The Great Gatsby/F. Scott Fitzgerald
5. 1984/George Orwell
6. The Catcher in the Rye/J. D. Salinger
7. Bonfire of the Vanities/Tom Wolfe
8. Brave New World/Aldous Huxley
9. The Grapes of Wrath/John Steinbeck
10. A Passage to India/E. M. Forster
11. For Whom the Bell Tolls/Ernest Hemingway
12. Schindler’s List/Thomas Keneally
13. In Cold Blood/Truman Capote
14. Ethan Frome/Edith Wharton
15. Rebecca/Daphne Du Maurier
16. A Bend in the River/V.S. Naipaul
17. O Pioneers!/Willa Cather
18. The War of the Worlds/H.G. Wells
19. Babbit/Sinclair Lewis
20. Under the Volcano/Malcolm Lowery
21. I, Claudius/Robert Graves
22. Sister Carrie/Theodore Dreiser
23. The Heart of the Matter/Graham Greene
24. A High Wind in Jamaica/Richard Hughes
25. The Magnificent Ambersons/Booth Tarkington
Sandra and Ernie’s list:
1. Lord of the Flies/William Golding
2. The Age of Innocence/Edith Wharton
3. The Wind in the Willows/Kenneth Grahame
4. Heart of Darkness/Joseph Conrad
5. Death Comes for the Archbishop/Willa Cather
6. The Maltese Falcon/Dashiell Hammett
7. The Sound and the Fury/William Faulkner
8. Lolita/Vladimir Nabokov
9. Invisible Man/Ralph Ellison
10. The Wings of the Dove/Henry James
11. Brideshead Revisited/Evelyn Waugh
12. Kim/Rudyard Kipling
13. Look Homeward Angel/Thomas Wolfe
14. On the Road/Jack Kerouac
15. All the King’s Men/Robert Penn Warren
16. The Bridge of San Luis Rey/Thornton Wilder
17. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man/James Joyce
18. Main Street/Sinclair Lewis
19. A Farewell to Arms/Ernest Hemingway
20. The Naked and the Dead/Norman Mailer
21. Wide Sargasso Sea/Jean Rhys
22. The Fountainhead/Ayn Rand
23. A Separate Peace/John Knowles
24. Lord Jim/Joseph Conrad
25. Midnight’s Children/Salman Rushdie
Trivia note for you Jeopardy! watchers: Three of these books factored in clues this week. There was a question about "this author" starting a novel called Catch-18, quotes "Cleanliness is next to Fordliness" and "whatever goes on 4 legs, or has wings, is a friend". Do you know which author and books were the correct question?
Next week Ernie will share his thoughts on “To Kill a Mockingbird”
I read to Kill a Mockingbird again last year. It is my number one favorite. lmh
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