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The Klaw 100, part three.

Part one (#100-81)
Part two (#80-61)
Part four (#40-21)
Part five (#20-1)

60. The Secret Agent, by Josef Conrad. Conrad is highly esteemed within the literary world for both Nostromo and Lord Jim, but I prefer The Secret Agent for its readability and the presence of some real, bona fide narrative greed. It was adapted, loosely, by Alfred Hitchcock for his 1936 film, Sabotage. (Conrad’s best-known work, Heart of Darkness, is too short for this list.)

59. Dead Souls, by Nikolai Gogol. The first third of an unfinished trilogy, usually sold with the surviving fragments of book two (destroyed by the author about ten days before his suicide), Dead Souls is a dark comedy about serfdom in czarist Russia and the buying and selling of the rights to recently deceased serfs. Its publication and success mark the beginning of the Russian novel and one of the most fertile periods of great literature in any culture.

58. The Leopard (Il Gattopardo), by Giuseppe di Lampedusa. Like so many novels on this list, The Leopard is the only novel written by its author. In fact, it was published posthumously by the author’s widow, and eventually became the first best-seller in Italian literature. It tells the story of the decline of a noble family during the unification of Italy, based loosely on the own author’s family history.

57. Treasure Island, by Robert Louis Stevenson. Long John Silver, Captain Flint, Billy Bones, pieces of eight, fifteen men on a dead man’s chest. Yo ho ho!

56. The Small Bachelor, by P.G. Wodehouse. Not part of any series, this one-off book encapsulates the Wodehouse novel’s form perfectly, with two couples kept apart by circumstances, an incompetent artist, an efficiency expert, a policeman bent on becoming a poet, a female pickpocket, and the usual dose of misunderstandings and chases.

55. The Maltese Falcon, by Dashiell Hammett. The book is a must-read; the movie is a must-see. It’s probably considered the best hard-boiled detective novel ever written … but there’s one I rate higher.

54. Housekeeping, by Marilynne Robinson. Full review. Haunting yet beautiful, desolate yet hopeful, Housekeeping shows how much a skilled author can do with just a scarce supply of characters and limited dialogue.

53. 1984, by George Orwell. The ultimate dystopian novel as well as the most scathing attack on totalitarianism in literature, 1984 wins out over Brave New World for me because the polemic is built around a deep study of the main character, Winston Smith. Irrelevant note: The best paper I wrote as a student was a comparison of the way colors and light are described in 1984 and Brave New World. Where Orwell saw “yellow,” Huxley saw “gold,” and so both authors created vastly differing pictures of their dystopian futures.

52. On the Road, by Jack Kerouac. The Great American Novel? Not for me, but certainly a great American novel, featuring thinly-veiled versions of Allen Ginsburg, William S. Burroughs, Neal Cassady, and Kerouac himself, criss-crossing the country, with inventive phrasing and a dialect that defined the Beat Generation and two generations that came after it.

51. The Magnificent Ambersons, by Booth Tarkington. Winner of the 1919 Pulitzer Prize for the Novel, Tarkington’s best-known novel tells of the rise of the United States – both the growth of its economy and the democratization of its society – by depicting the gradual decline and ossification of an aristocratic family. It also became perhaps Orson Welles’ least favorite of his own films, as the studio forced him to change the ending and cut significant chunks of the finished film; the original footage is lost.

50. At Swim-Two-Birds, by Flann O’Brien. A silly novel that was meta before meta existed, with a novel within a novel that sees its characters revolt against their fictional author. It also spawned the greatest endorsement in the history of the novel, from Dylan Thomas: “This is just the book to give your sister … if she’s a loud, dirty, boozy girl.”

49. Lucky Jim, by Kingsley Amis. Full review. A great comic novel about a mostly-normal professor at a small English college who is surrounded by wackos and manages to get himself into increasing quantities of trouble.

48. I, Claudius and Claudius the God, by Robert Graves. A tour de force of historical fiction, told from the perspective of Claudius, the slightly lame and (as we learn) totally insecure man who survived decades of political intrigues and murders to become first Caligula’s consul and later an exalted Emperor of Rome.

47. Uncle Tom’s Cabin, by Harriet Beecher Stowe. A protest novel and an affectionate portrait of the title character, whose name has sadly been misused as an intra-racial insult by people who do not appear to have read the book.

46. Slaughterhouse-Five, by Kurt Vonnegut. I often vacillate on the question of my favorite Vonnegut novel, so I’ve punted and gone with the experts’ pick. Although I can almost certainly say that this wasn’t my favorite, it is one of his most coherent, and at the same time has enough wackiness and weirdness and Kilgore Trout to be undeniably Vonnegut.

45. The Three Musketeers, by Alexandre Dumas père. Filled with a chewy nougat center … um, and lots of adventure, with a pair of villains, plenty of treachery, a young man seeking to become the fourth musketeer … and a smooth milk chocolate exterior.

44. Things Fall Apart, by Chinua Achebe. So simple in style that it reads like a fable meant to be told through the generations, with an unflinching message about the effects of colonialism on Africa’s culture and its people. Its sequel, No Longer at Ease, is also worth your time, even though it runs over similar ground.

43. One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, by Ken Kesey. A comic novel in a serious setting, Cuckoo’s Nest always struck me as the dissection of a power struggle between two people and a statement on how leaders, and perhaps governments, attempt to sway the hearts of men. The pickup basketball game remains a personal favorite scene of mine.

42. Crime and Punishment, by Fyodor Dostoevsky. A novel of serious moral questions, of Dostoevsky’s own philosophy blending Christianity with existentialism, of redemption, and most of all of the power of rationalization.

41. The Lord of the Rings trilogy, by J. R. R. Tolkien. One ring to rule them all.

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Comments

  1. Shaun P.
    Jun, 25 2008 / 9:03 am

    Keith, I’m glad to see you broke your map rule to include LOTR. Still my favorite book of all time.

    If Heart of Darkness wasn’t too short for the Klaw 100, where would it have placed, roughly? Top 40? Top 20? Top 10?

  2. Bill
    Jun, 25 2008 / 9:35 am

    When I was in college, Ward Connerly (the African-American activist behind California’s 1990s effort to ban affirmative action) came to speak on my bleeding-hearted Pacific Northwest liberal arts campus, where he was about as popular as you’d expect. Anyway, during Q&A time one of the professors gave a long-winded prelude about what a noble character Uncle Tom was and how misunderstood and misused that name was, and finally ended by asking “do you know why that name has come to have such a negative connotation?” or something like that. Connelly got very serious and said, “Yes, I do. Next question.” I have no idea what the story behind that is or possibly could be, and I wonder if there even is one or if he just didn’t feel like he had anything interesting to say about it. It’s been bugging me for almost 10 years now.

  3. Bill
    Jun, 25 2008 / 9:36 am

    Um. *Connerly*. Jennifer Connelly was nowhere to be found, sadly.

  4. wcw
    Jun, 25 2008 / 9:46 am

    How is ‘Heart of Darkness’ too short, but not ‘Maltese Falcon’? Hammett’s original four classic novellas fit into a single book, they’re so short. I love ’em all, but they’re no more full novels than ‘Heart of Darkness’.

  5. Bob
    Jun, 25 2008 / 10:40 am

    Well, I was wrong about 1984. Perhaps Empire Falls.

  6. SKates
    Jun, 25 2008 / 11:14 am

    Two different thoughts (though not mutually exclusive) on Uncle Tom as a slur. First, it most likely stems from the traveling shows that people put on based on the novel, in which Tom was no longer the caring and upright soul portrayed in the book, but a bastardized/demonized “house slave” (and now a far more incendiary slur, as well).
    Second, Uncle Tom is one of those characters in literature (or real people in real life) whose name gets associated with something that is either directly inapposite to what they stood for, or at least something quite different. “Frankenstein” is a convoluted one, with it now mostly being used to describe Dr. Frankenstein’s monster, who for all intents and purposes, is the most human character in the book, while the doctor (the true Frankenstein) is the most monstrous.

  7. Glen L
    Jun, 25 2008 / 12:14 pm

    Sirens of Titan >>> Slaughterhouse 5

  8. keith
    Jun, 25 2008 / 12:48 pm

    I didn’t like Sirens of Titan at all.

    Heart of Darkness is under 40K words and I’ve never seen it sold solo – it’s always bundled with another story, usually The Secret Sharer. Daniel Burt explicitly excluded Heart from the Novel 100 on length, but included The Sorrows of Young Werther, which is only about 5000 words longer, and Candide, which is actually shorter than Heart! (All counts are from the free texts at Project Gutenberg.) I don’t have a word count on Maltese Falcon, but based on its page count I’m guessing it clocks in over 50K words.

    If Heart qualified … it would be in the lower half, probably below The Secret Agent.

  9. Jason
    Jun, 25 2008 / 2:09 pm

    Klaw, just wanted to get your opinion on jerry manuel getting bumped and tossed by paul runge last night, after runge showed up beltran at the plate. thanks.

  10. Ace
    Jun, 25 2008 / 2:27 pm

    I’m a big fan of Lucky Jim – one of my top 10-20 books in terms of pure enjoyment.

  11. Jeff
    Jun, 25 2008 / 2:28 pm

    Keith – Is LOTR on the list solely for its impact? I’m a fantasy fan and I recongize the impact that it had on the genre, but LOTR itself is incedibly tedious and full of boring, one-dimensional characters. Tolkien is definitely someone who could have used a good editor.

  12. Paul R.
    Jun, 25 2008 / 3:22 pm

    Keith, what’s your opinion on Kesey’s Sometimes a Great Notion? It’s one of my personal favorites, and most consider it better than Cuckoo’s Nest.

  13. DP
    Jun, 25 2008 / 4:46 pm

    I am enjoying this list, and especially the inclusion of The Maltese Falcon. No doubt The Big Sleep will be closer to the top as Chandler was just that much more of a stylist than Dash was. That said, Elmore Leonard may well be eye to eye with Chandler, especially Rum Punch and Kill Shot, with Pronto running a close third.

  14. Ryan V.
    Jun, 25 2008 / 4:52 pm

    When it comes to Vonnegut, I’m going to have to go with “Cat’s Cradle” or “Mother Night.” Though I did love “Slaughterhouse-Five.”

  15. Dave
    Jun, 25 2008 / 6:08 pm

    Paul R, I agree on Sometimes a Great Notion…a very enjoyable read.

  16. TC
    Jun, 25 2008 / 9:21 pm

    One better detective novel? Is it The Long Goodbye? That’s my favorite Chandler, at least.

  17. Michael
    Jun, 25 2008 / 10:33 pm

    The Big Sleep was already rated: it came in at 65.

  18. keith
    Jun, 26 2008 / 9:13 am

    Paul R: Never read it, but I’ll check it out.

    Jeff: I genuinely enjoyed LotR, although I agree that they were a little verbose. Nothing is on here just for impact – if I didn’t like it, it’s out.

  19. Dan
    Jun, 28 2008 / 2:01 pm

    Housekeeping but no Gilead? It’s Robinson’s second book, and it’s an incredibly moving tale that explores spirituality and the history of America in the second half of the 19th century through three generations of preachers in a small town in Iowa. Even if you’re not religious, like me, you can’t help but notice that your room keeps getting dusty as the narrator, John Ames, expounds on his warm, embracing view of God and the world:

    “I can’t believe that, when we have all been changed and put on incorruptibility, we will forget our fantastic condition of mortality and impermanence, the great bright dream of procreating and perishing that meant the whole world to us. In eternity this world will be Troy, I believe, and all that has passed here will be the epic of the universe, the ballad they sing in the streets.”

  20. Justin
    Dec, 18 2008 / 4:07 pm

    KLaw, I lost a lot of respect for you today……you put the Lord of the Rings Trology in front of the most influential books in American History: On The Road. This is a masterpiece for the human mind and soul.

    Read Big Sur and Dharma Bums (my personal favorite)

    Big Sur is maddening

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