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The Klaw 100, part five.

Part one (#100-81)
Part two (#80-61)
Part three (#60-41)
Part four (#40-21)

I doubt there will be too many surprises here, as I’ve discussed most of these last twenty books somewhere before. The complete list of 100 is available as a spreadsheet at Google Spreadsheets. But don’t click now or you’ll spoil the top 20…

20. Red Harvest, by Dashiell Hammett. Dark and violent and completely gripping, Red Harvest was Hammett’s first novel and established the format of the hard-boiled detective novel with its sparse style and unblinking descriptions of bloodshed. It may have been the basis for Kurosawa’s Yojimbo as well.

19. Wuthering Heights, by Emily Brontë. Perhaps the archetype of the brooding male hero, although I kind of felt Heathcliff was just an asshole. It’s a tremendous story of anger, vengeance, and cruelty, unfolding in layers as one might peel back an onion. Also available in a much-beloved semaphore version.

18. If on a winter’s night a traveler, by Italo Calvino. If you love inventive or just plain weird books, this is for you. The subject of the novel is the reading of a novel. Alternating chapters show a dialogue between the Author and the Reader, interlaced with opening chapters from various fictional novels. Calvino, one of the great fabulists of the twentieth century, takes his inspired silliness to a new level.

17. The Great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzgerald. It’s all about the green light. Jay Gatsby’s ill-fated chase of the American Dream, set in the Jazz Age as the automobile begins to make its presence felt on our culture. It ranked first on the Radcliffe Publishing Course’s list of the top 100 novels of the 20th century, and second on the Modern Library’s own list.

16. The Good Soldier, by Ford Madox Ford. A classic English novel of betrayal, The Good Soldier describes a web of infidelities that destroys the lives of five people, with incredible dialogue and the powerful, recurring symbol of the human heart. I’m pretty sure that at $2.50 it’s the cheapest book on this list.

15. The Heart is a Lonely Hunter , by Carson McCullers. Full review. An amazing achievement of prose and of literary introspection. McCullers looks into the human soul and finds a lot of dusk, if not dark night.

14. The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, by Haruki Murakami. Like stepping into a lucid dream, and indeed, the protagonist finds the line between reality and dreams blurring while searching for his wife, who has either left him or is being held against her will. You’ll have a hard time putting it down, although there is one scene of graphic torture that was tough to get through.

13. A Confederacy of Dunces, by John Kennedy Toole. Ignatius J. Reilly with his dyspeptic valve is one of the great hero-antiheroes in American literature as he’s forced to get his lazy ass a job. The book was published posthumously after Toole’s suicide through the persistence of his mother, who is portrayed in an unflattering light in the book, and novelist Walker Percy; twelve years after Toole’s death, Confederacy won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction.

12. Tess of the d’Urbervilles, by Thomas Hardy. Hated it in high school … okay, that’s not fair, I hated the first twenty pages and rented the movie. I went back for a re-read 16 years later and saw what I’d missed: One of the greatest ironic novels I’ve ever read. It’s bleak in its portraits of English society and its strictures, of human emotions, and of fate, but Hardy (who also was a noted poet) writes beautifully and slips numerous bits of wordplay into the text.

11. The Woman in White, by Wilkie Collins. Collins, a protégé of Charles Dickens, believed that nothing in the novel was more important than the plot, and he wrote perhaps the first suspense novel in this story of mistaken identities, ghost sightings, and the unctuous, nefarious villain Count Fosco. Its use of multiple narrators was revolutionary for the time, and while it has the potential to be confusing, it’s critical for the way Collins wants to unfold the plot before the reader

10. Scoop, by Evelyn Waugh. Full review. A hilarious and absurd satire of the news media that was written in the 1930s but is just as relevant today, as a man who wants no part of the job becomes a foreign correspondent to an African state on the brink of civil war.

9. The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling, by Henry Fielding. Fielding made his bones as a novelist by parodying Samuel Richardson’s Pamela with his own work, Shamela, and then moved to a broader satire with Joseph Andrews before stepping out with an entirely original work, the comic picaresque Tom Jones. The story is built around Jones’ romantic pursuit of the daughter of Squire Western, who is constantly trying to pair his daughter up with the villainous son of Jones’ foster parents. Along the way Jones is arrested, accosted, consorts with prostitutes, and runs into no end of conniving, selfish secondary characters.

8. One Hundred Years of Solitude, by Gabriel García Márquez. The history of Colombia told as the history of one family, with a heavy dose of magical realism and the sweeping feel of an epic despite the focus on individual characters. The Buendía family plays a role in the rise of the fictional town of Macondo until a banana plantation, owned by foreigners, arrives and triggers a lengthy and ultimately complete collapse.

7. Absalom, Absalom!, by William Faulkner. The history of the American South told as the history of one family, mostly limited to the decline of the region after the Civil War. Patriarch Thomas Sutpen builds his fortune, but sets the seeds for his family’s downfall through his greed and racism. Told in Faulkner’s usual style of multiple perspectives and winding prose.

6. Cry, the Beloved Country, by Alan Paton. The best book ever written about Africa was written by a white South African, decrying the country’s apartheid system while offering threads of hope for its future once the system is dismantled. Preacher Stephen Kumalo leaves his rural village to go to the city to help his dissolute sister, Gertrude, and find his son, named Absalom, who went to help Gertrude earlier but never returned and ends up in jail.

5. Beloved, by Toni Morrison. And here we have African-American history, dating back to their emancipation from slavery. Sethe and her daughter Denver are trying to establish a live for themselves as free women when a young woman, known simply as “Beloved,” arrives at the house. Is she the reincarnation of the child Sethe killed to keep her out of slavery? Sethe’s obsession with Beloved opens the door to a host of questions – are African-Americans held down by the weight of their past, or are they complicit in allowing their past to weigh them down? No one writing today does so with prose like Morrison’s or with as much literary depth.

4. To Kill a Mockingbird, by Harper Lee. The greatest one-hit wonder in literature and perhaps in the arts. The story alone makes it a classic, but Lee’s use of language, combining a Southern dialect with the unmistakable voice of a child, elevates it to its legendary status.

3. Emma, by Jane Austen. Austen herself wrote that she didn’t expect anyone to like her meddling, imperious protagonist, but nearly two hundred years after publication the book remains extremely popular, and the title character is a major reason. Character development was never Austen’s strength, but Emma grows up across the book’s 400-odd pages, with the usual cast of comic-relief supporting characters, including her worrywart father and the garrulous Miss Bates.

2. Tender is the Night, by F. Scott Fitzgerald. To the reviewer who called Lolita “the only convincing love story of our century,” I submit Tender is the Night, the story of the gradual, inexorable breakdown of the seemingly perfect marriage between two beautiful people by way of infidelity, drink, and mental illness. If Fitzgerald had to go out early, he could not have gone out on a higher note.

1. The Master and Margarita, by Mikhail Bulgakov. An absolute masterpiece, banned by the Soviets for decades for its subtle yet severe indictment of communism’s many, many failures. The Devil comes to Moscow and exposes its society for all its vapidity, running into the frustrated author The Master and his faithful girlfriend Margarita, a story intertwined with a dialogue between Pontius Pilate and Jesus, all stacked with allusions to the Bible and major works of 19th century Russian literature. It is a work of unbridled genius, of acrimonious dissent, and most of all, of hope and faith in humanity.

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Comments

  1. Mike J
    Jun, 27 2008 / 9:41 am

    Keith, have you ever read the Grapes of Wrath? I had to read it for school, and I thought it was pretty good. A bit boring at the beginning but once the Joads hit the road I felt the story really took off.

  2. Jonathan (Tampa, FL)
    Jun, 27 2008 / 10:22 am

    Ever read Oscar Wilde’s “The Picture of Dorian Gray”? What’d you think of it?

  3. wcw
    Jun, 27 2008 / 10:56 am

    If you must rank — which pursuit in the arts oddly fascinates me, because it seems sincere but deeply misspecified — you picked a good #1, and you found room for Hammett in your top quintile. All great stuff here, not a clunker in the lot. Fun.

    I was a little surprised at some of your omissions in the overall hundred, but probably most by Dos Passos’s ‘USA’. It’s far from perfect, but if you inserted Kite Runner, of which the main (I argue only, but to each his own) virtue is documentary, you might forgive Dos Passos his failings as a novelist and poet in favor of his successes as a journalist.

  4. Desmond
    Jun, 27 2008 / 10:59 am

    no Harry Potter on your top 100???

  5. Andrew
    Jun, 27 2008 / 11:01 am

    hey Keith, do you like the work of Stephen King? the Dark Tower series is amazing.

  6. Andy
    Jun, 27 2008 / 11:36 am

    Keith, I really appreciate your recommendations, and I have recently finished Master and Margarita and Tender is the Night based on your earlier praise, but I have to disagree with you on A Confederacy of Dunces. Maybe the author did too good a job in making Ignatius such an unlikable nitwit, because I just couldn’t bear him anymore after the first 100 pages or so. One of the only books I have ever stopped reading halfway through.

  7. malcolm
    Jun, 27 2008 / 11:42 am

    I’m a pretty voracious reader, but reading this list reminds me how lucky I am that I’m still only 24, and therefore have many more years of reading ahead of me. Here’s to hoping that Keith finally reads War & Peace, and updates this list to the Klaw 101, so I can see where he ranks it; my guess is top 10. But I digress…

  8. malcolm
    Jun, 27 2008 / 11:43 am

    Keith, that reminds me: have you read Toole’s Neon Bible? I loved Confederacy, and I’m wondering if it’s worthwhile.

  9. Ken Dynamo
    Jun, 27 2008 / 12:29 pm

    with all due respect to ms harper lee, i think it’s obvious that the greatest one hit wonder in the artistic universe is ‘You Get What You Give’ by New Radicals.

    I mean, come on. Really.

  10. Ralph W
    Jun, 27 2008 / 12:39 pm

    Apparently, Ken, you aren’t familiar with the modern classic “Ditty” by the esteemed artist Paperboy.

  11. MattR
    Jun, 27 2008 / 12:56 pm

    Keith-

    Thanks for compiling this list. I’ve enjoyed many of the books you mentioned, and it’s going to be a great resource for me going forward. I hope you have stock in Amazon.com.

  12. keith
    Jun, 27 2008 / 1:03 pm

    I haven’t read any of the books asked about above. Grapes and USA are both on the Novel 100, and Dorian Gray is on at least one of my other lists, so I’ll get to those.

    Desmond: I wrote up top that I deliberately excluded the Harry Potter series and other similar works of popular fiction.

    Andrew: Never had any interest in King’s works.

  13. Eli
    Jun, 27 2008 / 1:17 pm

    Ever read The Universal Baseball Association, Inc., J. Henry Waugh, Prop. by Robert Coover? Think you would enjoy it.

    And once you finish off your top 100 lists you might want to give Bruno Schulz (Polish circa 1930’s) a try if you haven’t already (Street of Crocodiles or Sanatorium under the Sign of the Hourglass) Great, odd stories. Very hard to define.

    thanks for the list – have a few new titles to try.

  14. Brandon
    Jun, 27 2008 / 1:21 pm

    Keith, have you read Steinbeck’s other classic, East of Eden? I actually thought it was better than Grapes of Wrath.

    Also, have you read anything by Herman Wouk?

    Thanks for the list, I enjoyed it.

  15. Andrew
    Jun, 27 2008 / 2:07 pm

    Come on man, Stephen King is the best, i recommend you to read the dark tower series, the whole seven books, you won’t be dissapointed. I bet you it would make your top 10.

  16. Frosty Raptor
    Jun, 27 2008 / 2:10 pm

    Interesting, I thought for certain The Divine Comedy or Paradise Lost would be in the top 20.

    Thanks for the list, I have a lot of reading to do.

  17. Bob
    Jun, 27 2008 / 2:22 pm

    I thought the Divine Comedy might be there as well. And while I like Stephen King, he does not belong on this list. And the Stand was his best book.

  18. Stephen
    Jun, 27 2008 / 2:26 pm

    Top 100 novels, Frosty. Fun list, Klaw. Some omitted authors I must mention: Melville (yeah, I know, but I still have to mention him), Borges, Ellison, Pynchon, Saramago, DeLillo, Roth. Not sure if they’re top 100 worthy, but have you ever read Jim Crace or J.M. Coetzee? Both very fine. Try Continent and Foe for starters.

  19. Rob
    Jun, 27 2008 / 2:28 pm

    No Bret Easton Ellis?

  20. Jeremy
    Jun, 27 2008 / 2:38 pm

    I was surprised to see John Irving’s name missing from the list; I expected The World According to Garp or possibly A Prayer for Owen Meany to be in the 75-100 range. Have you not read them, did you not enjoy them when you did, or did you merely feel Irving has not written anything quite worthy of your top 100? Thanks for writing the list, it was quite interesting, and, like most other people here, it gives me a whole new set of books I’m going to go pick up.

  21. Jeff
    Jun, 27 2008 / 3:04 pm

    Just curious – how do you draw the line for popular fiction?

  22. Vlad
    Jun, 27 2008 / 4:18 pm

    Keith,
    thank you for the list.
    Still going over it and slowly absorbing it…

    Stephen,
    I was going to ask a similar question, though instead of Saramago and Ellison, I was going to bring up Remarque, Beckett, Borges and maybe Hesse and Mishima… On the second thought, all such lists are subjective, at the very list to the degree of which specific criteria was used (though personal preference, surely plays a role as well)…
    Btw, speaking of Coetzee, I would guess that Keith might enjoy Master of Peterburg as much if not more than Foe…

  23. Dave
    Jun, 27 2008 / 5:33 pm

    As an unabashed fan of Murakami’s work in general, I really wanted to love The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. But ultimately, I find that I like his shorter work better, and that his amiable meandering wears a bit thin for me over this length. In particular, I found the long sequence down the well in the middle of this book nearly interminable, and actually put it down a couple of times during that section. On the other hand, I really enjoyed South of the Border, West of the Sun, which I think most critics found to be slight.

  24. TC
    Jun, 27 2008 / 6:46 pm

    What translation of tM&M do you have? I have Ginnsburg’s, with mixed feelings.

  25. JS
    Jun, 27 2008 / 7:11 pm

    I recently started A Confederacy of Dunces – stop making me read, Klaw!

  26. Brian
    Jun, 27 2008 / 8:34 pm

    The Universal Baseball Association, Inc is one of the great books that no one’s ever read!

    Keith, was surprised Snow Crash didn’t make the cut.

  27. andrewk
    Jun, 27 2008 / 11:21 pm

    Keith:

    Obviously you’re a fan of Fitzgerald, as you’ve stated before and as evidenced by two of his works making the Top 20, but I was surprised to not find This Side of Paradise anywhere on your list. As someone from an analogous-enough background to the main character (and a similar age), perhaps I may have an excessive appreciation of it on that basis, but I was curious as to your thoughts?

  28. Mike
    Jun, 28 2008 / 12:38 am

    No Ayn Rand? Atlas Shrugged and Fountainhead couldn’t crack your list?

  29. Dan
    Jun, 28 2008 / 4:22 am

    Keith-never read Tess of the d’Urbervilles, but I did read Jude the Obscure, and I thought it was amazing. You read that one yet?

  30. Grant
    Jun, 28 2008 / 10:45 am

    I have always maintained, and will always maintain, that Tender is the Night is far superior to The Great Gatsby. I’m glad to see that you agree.

    Also, your dislike of Hemingway gives your list a pretty serious flaw. I think The Sun Also Rises definitely belongs in the top 40 or so.

    But it’s your list, so that’s cool.

  31. Ed
    Jun, 28 2008 / 11:33 am

    I’ll just add my thank you. I’ve added over a dozen things to my reading list that I never would have otherwise.

    Curious- do you have a Kindle yet? My wife is an avid reader and loves hers. Downloading books anywhere is nice, but she really likes the free preview that lets you download a few chapters before buying. It just sounds like something you would enjoy.

  32. keith
    Jun, 28 2008 / 2:20 pm

    Of all of the books thrown at me, I’ve only read the following: Invisible Man, This Side of Paradise, Portnoy’s Complaint, and Siddhartha. I liked the first two, but not enough to put them on the list. I didn’t like the latter two.

    I have zero interest in Rand or King, and I think Beckett will/would bore me to tears.

    Snow Crash and The House of the Spirits would certainly be in a “just missed” or honorable mentions list. I’ll probably revise this list in a year or two, and at that point I’ll reconsider both of those.

    TC: I read M&M about 15 years ago, and my copy of the book fell apart, so I don’t know who the translator was.

    Ah, I see someone asked about Pynchon – Crying of Lot 49 did nothing for me, and I read two pages of Gravity’s Rainbow in a bookstore once and decided it was more work than it could possibly be worth.

    No Kindle, not at the current price, although I’m certainly intrigued by it. My book collection is out of control.

  33. Bob
    Jun, 28 2008 / 2:29 pm

    What about Dr.Zhivago?

  34. Dan
    Jun, 28 2008 / 6:01 pm

    You should definitely put Jude the Obscure on your to-read list.

  35. Fran
    Jun, 28 2008 / 6:09 pm

    Fantastic finish to your list. It gives me some more books to read after I finish my interminably long book-list. I am reading the magnum opus of each Nobel literature laureate from the beginning of the prize to the present, in no particular order. Recent authors have been Lessing, Kipling, Oe, and Coetzee. There are a couple recommendations on your list that will even aid me in this list. Thanks for the effort.

  36. Eric J
    Jun, 28 2008 / 10:18 pm

    Been waiting for this list thanks! Any chance you can put together a top recipes list for a single like me trying to get to first base (with an impressed date) on a Tuesday night?

  37. Ignatius J. Reilly
    Jun, 28 2008 / 10:41 pm

    Who says 13 is unlucky? P.S. Natty Bumppo should be somewhere on the list, not to mention Pillars of the Earth and Trinity.

  38. Eric J
    Jun, 28 2008 / 10:48 pm

    Post Script: Not sure how two of Faulkner’s books make it and “As I Lay Dying” misses. Also “The Good Earth” seems to have been misplaces somewhere.

  39. Matt
    Jun, 29 2008 / 12:25 am

    Your number one book may have been even better if the original version wansn’t thrown into a stove.

  40. wcw
    Jun, 29 2008 / 3:19 pm

    Wait — what’s wrong with Melville? I love Melville. I can see others disagreeing, but his name always deserves mention.

    As for Rand, nothing personal, but please crawl back into whatever cave you call home. Rand — as a novelist, not as the propagandist who helped birth Alan Greenspan and the soak-the-poor wing of the GOP — is awful.

  41. keith
    Jun, 29 2008 / 7:48 pm

    I tend to agree with wcw – the literary value of Rand’s work is pretty limited.

    Moby Dick was excruciating. It was like a 500-page encyclopedia entry on whales.

    I’ve read two of the Leatherstocking tales, both of which were extremely hard to get through. Cooper’s prose is leaden.

    Never read Zhivago. If I’m going to tackle an overlong Russian novel, I’ll do Karamazov next.

    I hated The Good Earth. Granted, I was probably 11 or 12, but I remember the plot very well. As I Lay Dying was good, but it’s my least favorite of the four Faulkner novels I’ve read.

    And wcw, no one wants to soak the poor. They don’t have any money!

  42. Kevin
    Jun, 29 2008 / 11:03 pm

    Gatsby is a really intriguing novel, to me…other kids always complain about whatever books we read in English class (to be fair, we did read some really boring books…Scarlet Letter and the Crucible aren’t very interesting to us), like always…but when we read Gatsby, everyone seemed to actually be interested and care about reading the book. It’s the only novel that anyone has actually cared about in any of my high school English classes. Just thought that was interesting…

  43. Pat
    Jun, 30 2008 / 1:01 pm

    Keith, are you a Pat Conroy fan at all? Lords of Discipline is one of my favorite books. Ever read it?

  44. sweat
    Jun, 30 2008 / 2:03 pm

    I’ve refused to read anything to do with Harry Potter, because of how many people think it was the first book ever written worth reading. As far as Stephen King goes, I think reading the book Different Seasons is the best way to start reading his stuff.
    2 of the stories have been made into very popular movies(#2 and #154 on IMDB.com)
    As far as my favourite King book, it’s The Stand. I used to love the Dark Tower Series, but then the series jumped the shark. And not just once.

  45. Dan
    Jun, 30 2008 / 11:22 pm

    Thanks for the list Keith. With yours and all the other 100 lists I have plenty of reading to do. Also I picked up The Master and Margarita today, because you always speak so highly of it. It’s the next book after I finish The Brothers Karamazov.

  46. John
    Jul, 1 2008 / 4:14 pm

    Kieth, enough people have given you reading lists already so I figure it can’t hurt to add a few more (assuming you haven’t tackled these already): The God Of Small Things- Arundhati Roy, Motherless Brooklyn- Jonathen Lethem, The New York Trilogy- Paul Auster, and John Henry Days Colson Whitehead.

  47. Aaron
    Jul, 1 2008 / 4:52 pm

    Do you have a profile on goodreads.com?

  48. keith
    Jul, 1 2008 / 4:55 pm

    I do it via Facebook but I should be on goodreads.com. I don’t update it as often as I should, though – haven’t found it to be a compelling app.

  49. Preston
    Jul, 4 2008 / 8:34 pm

    I apologize for being late to the conversation, but I’ve been on vacation (random recommendations: Belhaven Scottish Ale, anywhere you can find it on tap, and Saumur Champigny for red wine – from the Loire Valley of France – if you can find it or convince a local wine shop to import it). Anyway, Keith, just wondering if you’ve read Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose – highly recommended if you haven’t. Independent of the list, I’m just starting Tom Jones, and enjoying it so far, and on your suggestion finished (and loved) The Eyre Affair this trip. And I’ve suggested it before, but once again I’ll also recommend Terry Pratchett for a quick and highly enjoyable (and stimulating) read, especially after seeing The Lord of the Rings on your list – it’s really almost like applying Wodehouse’s wit to make a fantasy parody. He’s got 36 Discworld books out (by far his best stuff), but Guards, Guards! is a very good place to start, as would be Small Gods, Pyramids, or The Truth. I admit that I would be skeptical of most authors who cranked out 36 books in a series, but I promise these are worth it, and are far better than the annual John Patterson et al. best sellers. Thanks for the list!

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  1. The dish » Blog Archive » The Klaw 100, part four. says:
    June 27, 2008 at 8:49 am

    […] Part one (#100-81) Part two (#80-61) Part three (#60-41) Part five (#20-1) […]