Entertainment Weekly proposes a list of the 100 best reads of the past 25 years. We at Common Sense Dancing love lists like this.
The Road is a worthy #1 selection, and it is difficult to argue with Beloved at #3, but I would include The Remains of the Day, Rabbit At Rest, Atonement, The Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, The Corrections in my top ten. One book I would have seriously considered for my top ten, Don DeLillo's Mao II, didn't even make the list.
I was a little surprised to see that Susana Clarke's Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell didn't make the list, David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest, or Michael Lewis' Moneyball, or Tony Horwitz's Confederates in the Attic, or Bill Bryson's "A Walk In the Woods," but then the list is heavily tilted towards fiction, so I guess that was probably to be expected.
What are your thoughts on the list? How many have you read? What would you add, and what would be in your top ten?
1. The Road , Cormac McCarthy (2006)
2. Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, J.K. Rowling (2000)
3. Beloved, Toni Morrison (1987)
4. The Liars' Club, Mary Karr (1995)
5. American Pastoral, Philip Roth (1997)
6. Mystic River, Dennis Lehane (2001)
7. Maus, Art Spiegelman (1986/1991)
8. Selected Stories, Alice Munro (1996)
9. Cold Mountain, Charles Frazier (1997)
10. The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, Haruki Murakami (1997)
11. Into Thin Air, Jon Krakauer (1997)
12. Blindness, José Saramago (1998)
13. Watchmen, Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons (1986-87)
14. Black Water, Joyce Carol Oates (1992)
15. A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, Dave Eggers (2000)
16. The Handmaid's Tale, Margaret Atwood (1986)
17. Love in the Time of Cholera, Gabriel García Márquez (1988)
18. Rabbit at Rest, John Updike (1990)
19. On Beauty, Zadie Smith (2005)
20. Bridget Jones's Diary, Helen Fielding (1998)
21. On Writing, Stephen King (2000)
22. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Junot Díaz (2007)
23. The Ghost Road, Pat Barker (1996)
24. Lonesome Dove, Larry McMurtry (1985)
25. The Joy Luck Club, Amy Tan (1989)
26. Neuromancer, William Gibson (1984)
27. Possession, A.S. Byatt (1990)
28. Naked, David Sedaris (1997)
29. Bel Canto, Anne Patchett (2001)
30. Case Histories, Kate Atkinson (2004)
31. The Things They Carried, Tim O'Brien (1990)
32. Parting the Waters, Taylor Branch (1988)
33. The Year of Magical Thinking, Joan Didion (2005)
34. The Lovely Bones, Alice Sebold (2002)
35. The Line of Beauty, Alan Hollinghurst (2004)
36. Angela's Ashes, Frank McCourt (1996)
37. Persepolis, Marjane Satrapi (2003)
38. Birds of America, Lorrie Moore (1998)
39. Interpreter of Maladies, Jhumpa Lahiri (2000)
40. His Dark Materials, Philip Pullman (1995-2000)
41. The House on Mango Street, Sandra Cisneros (1984)
42. LaBrava, Elmore Leonard (1983)
43. Borrowed Time, Paul Monette (1988)
44. Praying for Sheetrock, Melissa Fay Greene (1991)
45. Eva Luna, Isabel Allende (1988)
46. Sandman, Neil Gaiman (1988-1996)
47. World's Fair, E.L. Doctorow (1985)
48. The Poisonwood Bible, Barbara Kingsolver (1998)
49. Clockers, Richard Price (1992)
50. The Corrections, Jonathan Franzen (2001)
51. The Journalist and the Murderer, Janet Malcom (1990)
52. Waiting to Exhale, Terry McMillan (1992)
53. The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, Michael Chabon (2000)
54. Jimmy Corrigan, Chris Ware (2000)
55. The Glass Castle, Jeannette Walls (2006)
56. The Night Manager, John le Carré (1993)
57. The Bonfire of the Vanities, Tom Wolfe (1987)
58. Drop City, TC Boyle (2003)
59. Krik? Krak! Edwidge Danticat (1995)
60. Nickel & Dimed, Barbara Ehrenreich (2001)
61. Money, Martin Amis (1985)
62. Last Train To Memphis, Peter Guralnick (1994)
63. Pastoralia, George Saunders (2000)
64. Underworld, Don DeLillo (1997)
65. The Giver, Lois Lowry (1993)
66. A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again, David Foster Wallace (1997)
67. The Kite Runner, Khaled Hosseini (2003)
68. Fun Home, Alison Bechdel (2006)
69. Secret History, Donna Tartt (1992)
70. Cloud Atlas, David Mitchell (2004)
71. The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down, Ann Fadiman (1997)
72. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, Mark Haddon (2003)
73. A Prayer for Owen Meany, John Irving (1989)
74. Friday Night Lights, H.G. Bissinger (1990)
75. Cathedral, Raymond Carver (1983)
76. A Sight for Sore Eyes, Ruth Rendell (1998)
77. The Remains of the Day, Kazuo Ishiguro (1989)
78. Eat, Pray, Love, Elizabeth Gilbert (2006)
79. The Tipping Point, Malcolm Gladwell (2000)
80. Bright Lights, Big City, Jay McInerney (1984)
81. Backlash, Susan Faludi (1991)
82. Atonement, Ian McEwan (2002)
83. The Stone Diaries, Carol Shields (1994)
84. Holes, Louis Sachar (1998)
85. Gilead, Marilynne Robinson (2004)
86. And the Band Played On, Randy Shilts (1987)
87. The Ruins, Scott Smith (2006)
88. High Fidelity, Nick Hornby (1995)
89. Close Range, Annie Proulx (1999)
90. Comfort Me With Apples, Ruth Reichl (2001)
91. Random Family, Adrian Nicole LeBlanc (2003)
92. Presumed Innocent, Scott Turow (1987)
93. A Thousand Acres, Jane Smiley (1991)
94. Fast Food Nation, Eric Schlosser (2001)
95. Kaaterskill Falls, Allegra Goodman (1998)
96. The Da Vinci Code, Dan Brown (2003)
97. Jesus’ Son, Denis Johnson (1992)
98. The Predators' Ball, Connie Bruck (1988)
99. Practical Magic, Alice Hoffman (1995)
100. America (the Book), Jon Stewart/Daily Show (2004)
Tuesday, July 8, 2008
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6 comments:
You haven't read the Harry Potter books? Are you not sure if enough people enjoy them?
Do they really think there have been thirty books better than The Things They Carried?
ok: so "america: the book" & "eat, pray, love" are on there, which I think creates a serious credibility gap.
"on beauty" isn't even in the same league as "white teeth."
we seem to be playing "one per author", but even then I chose white noise.
I could continue bitching, but I think that dignifies this concept too much.
also: J. strang e & Mr. Norrell was long and tedious.
It looks like this list is based on the enjoyability of the read, rather than the pure literary quality. Thus Scott Turow, Da Vinci Code, etc.
Some scattered thoughts:
1) The Remains of the Day is one of my all-time shortlist favorite books. I would have put it in the top five, if not #1.
2) 8yearoldsdude's observation regarding the unspoken 'one book per author' rule is astute. Blood Meridian should be on this list, as well as the border trilogy. Any number of Philip Roth's novels could have made the list, particularly The Plot Against America. And for Don DeLillo, Mao II (which I've already mentioned) and Falling Man are both top-25 books in my opinion.
3) The 'one book per author' rule is annoying in regards to, for instance, the Harry Potter and the His Dark Materials books. This list would have us believe that one of the Harry Potter books is the second-best novel written in the past twenty-five years, but none of the other books in the series crack the top 100? That doesn't make sense to me. The New York Times list from a couple of years ago counted multi-volume sets as single books, so that John Updike's Rabbit Angstrom series and Cormac McCarthy's Border Trilogy only take up one space apiece. I prefer that system to Entertainment Weekly's.
4) Some books are 'just' good books, others fundamentally change the way I relate to people, or the way I read, or the way I think about some important aspect of life. Some of the books that have had such an effect on me are The Things They Carried, The Remains of the Day, The Road, The Corrections, Blood Meridian, and Mao II. On the other hand, the Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, Libra, and Bonfires of the Vanities and Lonesome Dove have many admirable qualities - they are all enormously entertaining and significantly artistic - but they didn't have the lasting effect on me that those other novels had. For that reason I would rank them slightly lower on my personal list.
5) This list makes me want to go back and re-read The Remains of the Day and The Things They Carried. This is a good thing, and part of what the list is for.
6) Lists like this always get me to read some of those books that I've always meant to read, but for some reason just haven't gotten around to. This particular list makes me want to read The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, The Liars Club, and the His Dark Materials books. Which other books should I read? I'm open to suggestions.
For what its worth, I enjoyed Presumed Innocent, but Blood Meridian is better than any book on this list.
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