Posted on 02/17/2006 8:31:22 AM PST by Borges
Nope,
I'd look silly in a toga and I have no patience with students :)
http://www.people.virginia.edu/~rjh9u/apporang.html
:^)
Seriously, though, Billy Budd showed Melville at the top of his game, an absolute master of the craft. Not that there's anything wrong with Moby Dick, but IMO Melville only improved with age and experience.
Definitely should be - it's sublime.
I know that. I don't think Babbit should be in the running.
But it's still a sucky story. IMHO. I remember being wowed by some short pieces Fitzgerald wrote. I was really not happy by TGG when I got to it.
Good writing only goes so far to cover up characters not worth spending time with (again, IMHO).
I keep thinking: What would I nominate for greatest 20th century American story, and I keep flashing to plays instead of novels. O perversity of memory!
I love Faulkner. I didn't mention him as the writer of the Great American Novel because I think, perhaps, he's too rooted in the experience of the deep South. I have ancestral roots in the same general part of Mississippi he came from, so perhaps he speaks more to my background.
I enjoyed reading the Sound and the Fury. I read it for pleasure and not for a class, and when I realized that the first section is being told by a person with no time sense, and the story was out of sequential order, I thought, Wow...now neat. Then when I got to the next section, I was slightly disapointed.
America is such a big place, still marked by regionalism. For me, probably, the most moving novels by 20th century American authors with stories set in America were by Ayn Rand, Faulkner, Ray Bradbury, Steinbeck, Ernest Gaines, Norman Spinrad, John Irving, Mitchner, Rice, John Crowley.
An eclectic bunch of writers if I ever saw one. A little bias towards the South, I admit.
Subject matter, I think. And location.
What is so interesting is that the ten year difference between "The Demons" and "Fathers..." actually seems like it could have been fifty years where the styles and quality are concerned. At present I am re-reading The Idiot.
Which book do you question? I've read over 30 and liked them all.
No one has mentioned James Jones, and I'm not saying "From Here to Eternity" should even be in the top 100, but I read that book in 1951 when I had been in the Army about one month, and I saw those characters all around me. The young regular Army guy who bunked across the aisle from me was one of them. Years later I was astounded to learn by accident that he had been executed for murder. He had killed three law officers during a domestic disturbance. If I ever write a book, I'll put him in it.
Here are the books I've read. An incomplete education to be sure but I read for pleasure, not for torture. And I read all of these prior to 'The Oprah' telling me what to read, LOL!
The only books I remember from High School are "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn," "Anna Karenina" and "The Scarlet Letter," all of which I enjoyed, mainly because I had such an awesome English teacher.
7. Madame Bovay - Flaubert
11. Emma - Austen
12. Bleak House - Dickens
13. Anna Karenina - Tolstoy
14. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn - Twain
16. Great Expectations - Dickens
19. One Hundred Years of Solitude - Marquez
20. The Great Gatsby- Fitzgerald
21. To the Lighthouse - Woolf
24. Vanity Fair - Thackeray
29. The Portrait of a Lady - Henry James
30. Women in Love - Lawrence
34. Tess of the D'Urbevilles - Hardy
38. Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
41. Pride and Prejudice - Austen
42. The Scarlet Letter - Hawthorne
45. Beloved - Morrison
47. Lolita - Nabokov
48. The Golden Notebook - Lessing
52. Jane Erye - Charlotte Bronte
53. The Red Badge of Courage - Crane
54. The Grapes of Wrath - Steinbeck
59. My Antonia - Cather
61. The Age of Innocence - Wharton
64. A Passage to India - Forster
83. Their eyes Were Watching God - Hurston
86. 1984 - Orwell
90. Les Miserables - Hugo
92. Frankenstien - Shelley
94. The Catcher in the Rye - Salinger
95. The Woman in the White - Collins
97. Dracula - Stoker
But I'm sad to read that there's no Shirley Jackson on this list! I love her books; I read "We Have Always Lived in the Castle" every few years. It's like candy to me, for some reason. (Jackson also wrote "The Lottery" and "The Haunting of Hill House," which is another book I've read a number of times...I normally don't do that.)
For a while there I was obsessed with John O'Hara, "Butterfield 8" and "Appointment in Samara" being favorites. In High School (in the 70's) I read a lot of Vonnegut and John Irving.
There are some really good first person experience (or based on it) stories from WW2...I've enjoyed reading them because they ring true.
At the very least, this makes the list suspect.
For example, "Foundation" by Asimov.
interesting...
He said in the intro that he defines the novel as a mix of realism and Romance. So outright fantasy doesn't count. Therefore no Gulliver's Travels or Gargantua and Pantagruel or Lord of the Rings...which take place in complete fantasy worlds.
Easily....I find the Russian authors BOOOOOOOOOOOOORING and that includes Tolstoy!
Where is "Edna the Whip Lady" by Anonymous????
parsy, who has a wide reading range.
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