→ January 3, 2010
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Dominion (board game).

Dominion, the most recent winner of the prestigious Spiel des Jahres (Game of the Year) award, is a card game for two to four players in which players build a deck of cards through which they’ll cycle repeatedly, using money cards to buy new cards that grant the player more actions, more buying power, or the victory points used to win the game. It’s one of the hottest games going right now among fans of German-style games and ranks sixth on boardgamegeek’s master ranking of games, determined by user ratings.

A turn in Dominion comprises three basic steps: play one or more action card from your hand, buy one or more cards from the supply, and clean up the mess you just made in front of you. You end each turn by drawing the top five cards from your deck, and those cards constitute your hand for your next turn; when your deck runs out, you shuffle your discard pile and begin drawing again, so except for a few special cases when you acquire a card it’s yours to keep.

There are three major card types: money, actions, and point cards. You can use money cards to buy any type of card on the table, including more money cards (copper cards have buying power of 1 and cost 0; silver have buying power of 2 and cost 3; gold have buying power of 3 and cost 6). Your total buying power on any turn is determined by which money cards are in your hand, so you can have plenty of money cards yet be unable to buy on a turn because you didn’t draw them, leading to two strategic considerations – the ratio of money cards to other cards in your deck, and whether it’s better to have lots of copper cards or to concentrate your buying power in silver and gold. You need point cards to win the game, but they have no active function during the game and thus drawing one is a wasted spot in your hand.

The action cards, shockingly, are where the action lies in the game, although more action cards is not necessarily better. Dominion comes with 25 different action card types, but in any particular game you only use 10 of these, which may come from a predetermined set or be chosen at random, leaving you – assuming I did the math right – 3.2 million different combinations, meaning that the game need never be the same twice if you so desire. That in turn means that you can’t approach Dominion with a single strategy, because some games will be more skewed toward action cards that provide you with additional buying power when played, while others may be heavy on cards that grant you extra actions (fun, but not always practical unless you have a deck full of action cards), and so on. Some cards’ value is fairly straightforward; for example, the Village card grants you two more actions and the right to draw a card, but since you have the right to play one action card every turn, the net result is just that you get to take an extra action, which might be useless if you’ve got four money cards in your hand. Choosing the right action cards, including the right mix of action cards and then the right mix of action versus non-action cards, is the key to the game, but the variety of setups mean that there’s no single right answer, and even within one specific setup there will usually be multiple ways to win.

The artwork is nice enough, but the names of cards typically have no connection to the benefits each card provides (why would a village allow you to draw a replacement card and take two more actions?), so you’re not building a “dominion” as the game’s description implies – just a deck. There’s less imagination involved in playing this game than there is in Stone Age or The Settlers of Catan, although I’m sure that’s only a drawback for a limited number of players. Setup is simple if you use the tray and guide to put the cards away after each game, but that in itself is a process so you’re going to lose some time in either setup or cleanup whenever you play. Two-player games take us under an hour; having the third player added a little complexity with the small number of “attack” cards in the deck by increasing the incentive to buy and use such cards, but we can also now say with some certainty that it’s a quick game to pick up, since all three of us grasped it quickly.

The lone negative I can see in the game is that there is one very simple attack that works most of the time if you’re the only person executing it – spend the vast majority of your turns buying silver/gold cards and, when you’re able, buying the Province cards (which cost 8 units) that give you 6 Victory Points apiece. When the pile of Province cards is exhausted, the game is over, so if you buy more than half of those, it’s extremely difficult for anyone to beat you through the lower-value point cards. The strategy won’t work if multiple players chase it, and the Gardens action cards throw a wrench in it, as can the Thief action cards, but it’s simple and straightforward enough that it almost felt like a hack. Against experienced players, it would be worthless, but it could really mess up a casual game night. Beyond that objection, I strongly recommend Dominion, especially if you find games like Settlers of Catan or Stone Age intimidating.

Speaking of Settlers of Catan, I came across an article from Wired, written in April of 2009, on the game’s rise in popularity so long after its initial release, unusual in any business but even more so in one as seemingly dormant as boardgames, with notes on the history of the game and why German-style games are becoming more popular. (It also includes a great phrase for deriding older, “classic” board games: “roll the dice, move your mice.”)

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→ December 30, 2009
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Stone Age.

Santa was pretty good to me in the board games department this year, and our favorite so far is Rio Grande’s Stone Age, a 2-4 person game with some shades of Settlers of Catan but without the initial-placement phase that plays such a huge role in determining who wins in Settlers.

In Stone Age, each player has a small civilization and has to use his five “meeples” to gather resources (food, wood, brick, stone, or gold), build tools to improve resource production, develop agriculture so he gets additional food “free” on each turn, or make more people (but you have to deploy two of your people to that space to make another person – dedicated Stone Age players call it the “love shack”). The goal in Stone Age is to accumulate as many “victory points” as possible through constructing buildings, which you buy through the four non-food resources, and through game-end bonuses for the number of people in your civilization (you start with five and can end up with ten), your food production rate, the number of tools you have, or additional bonuses for your buildings. Of course, you have various constraints at work, including the need to feed your people each turn, the limited number of people you have, and other players competing for the same resources. On each turn, only one player can occupy each of the spaces that add to free food production, make a new person, or build a new tool, and later in the game there’s competition for buildings with high point values or “civilization cards” that increase game-end bonuses while also offering immediate benefits like free resources. There are also only seven spaces on each of the four non-food resources, and since each player has five meeples at the start of the game, it’s possible that you’ll end up boxed out of a resource you want to produce on a specific turn.

Because of the game-end bonuses for tools, farming, and meeples – in a 4-person game where 200-250 is a typical winning score, you can earn 96 extra points if you max out on tools and bonus points, 70 points on people, and 70 points on food production – as well as the potential bonus of 9 bonus points per building (we’ve never had a player reach 10 buildings, although it is theoretically possible to do so), there are a few basic strategies for winning at Stone Age, although competition in 3- and 4-player games will usually require each player to adopt a hybrid approach. All strategies require players to collect civilization cards, which can be purchased for 1-4 resources but must be claimed with meeples that can’t be used to produce any resources on that turn, creating an additional arena for competition on the board. Some cards represent civilization “skills” like art, weaving, or transportation that have no function within the game but add bonus points at the game end, with each player receiving points equal to the square of the number of unique skills he has, with a max of 64 points. There is a so-called “starvation” strategy that involves avoiding food and taking point penalties for doing so – you don’t lose any meeple for failing to produce enough food – although it seems to be a the consensus among fans that this is a flaw in the rules rather than a legitimate strategy.

Although the number of main strategies is finite, each turn presents the player with myriad decisions. The first is where to place the meeples – on production spaces, on any of the three “special” spaces to produce tools/farms/meeples, on buildings, or on cards. The second is the order in which to resolve each of the meeples’ spots – do you roll for gold or wood first, or buy a card that might earn you an extra resource? The third is when to use your tools to round up die rolls on resources, although this becomes easier as the game goes on if you’re accumulating lots of tools as your core strategy. You also have the option to play a limited amount of defense by blocking opponents from resources they might need or buildings/cards they might want, and since one condition for ending the game is the exhaustion of any of the piles of buildings for purchase, you might place a meeple on a building but pass on buying it simply to keep the game going another turn or two.

There’s a modest amount of luck in the game, but it’s still a strategy game at its core. Players roll dice to determine resource production, so it’s possible to place several meeples on a resource (especially stone or gold) and walk away with little to no output, although a player can use more meeples on a resource and/or deploy his tools to smooth that out a little and largely eliminate the risk of a zero-output roll. The order of civilization cards and buildings that appear for purchase is also random, and there are certain cards (especially those that permanently add one farm or one tool) that are more attractive than others. It’s enough randomness to keep the game different each time out, like Settlers of Catan, but the fundamental strategies are always the same and you’re not completely at the mercy of the dice. The main benefit of the random element is preventing a player from having a fixed strategy before the game starts – seeing the first set of cards and what spaces you can occupy in the first few turns helps determine which strategies will be most effective in that particular game.

Stone Age is more family-strategy than hardcore-strategy; what you’re producing is generic, with no purpose to buildings or skills beyond the points they provide at the end of the game. A typical game takes just over an hour once every player knows the rules, and we found that after one game everyone was up to speed on the rules and concepts to play competitively. My wife insists that I mention that the artwork is excellent, with vivid colors and great detail – this will be more relevant after I post one of the upcoming reviews. And outside of Settlers and Ticket to Ride I don’t think we’ve been as into any game right out of the box as we have been with Stone Age.

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→ December 13, 2009
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A Time to Be Born.

Dawn Powell was a commercial failure as a novelist during her lifetime, despite accolades from her peers, including Ernest Hemingway, who called her his favorite living novelist. In fact, according to the Library of America,

At Dawn Powell’s death in 1965, nearly all of her books were out of print. Surveys of American literature failed to mention her. Among well-known critics, only Powell’s friend Edmund Wilson had ever published a lengthy and serious review of her work.

Powell died a pauper and was buried in an unmarked grave in New York’s Potter’s Field after a life riddled with depression, disappointment, and alcoholism. Yet her books have been on a modest thirty-year winning streak, one that the LOA credits Gore Vidal with starting in 1981.

I first heard of Dawn Powell in the introduction to Elaine Dundy’s The Dud Avocado, a book that was successful at its printing but fell out of print more than once after the author’s death. Terry Teachout compared Dundy’s legacy of mild obscurity to Powell’s, citing Powell as similar in style as well. Powell has no acknowledged magnum opus but A Time to Be Born seems to be among the critics’ favorites from her bibliography, and it did not disappoint, as it is a funny, bitter, snarky farce.

Powell chose to build the novel around a real-life power couple of the late 1930s, the Luces, Henry (founder of TIME magazine) and his wife Clare Boothe, who receives an unflattering portrayal in the scheming, selfish Amanda Keeler, who uses her feminine wiles and ability to manipulate others to overcome her humble, unhappy childhood and tear the publisher Julian Evans away from his happy marriage, launching her social career and, simultaneously, her career as a writer and pundit. Amanda’s carefully scripted life is upset, just slightly, when a childhood friend, Vicky Haven, comes to New York and receives a token job in the Evans’ publishing empire, only to find herself used by Amanda to cover up an affair while she unwittingly falls in love with her patron’s paramour.

Vicky is the sympathetic protagonist and is well-rounded, maturing as the book goes on from meek, self-effacing wallflower to determined if clumsy adult, but Amanda is the star of the show, a Becky Sharp of interwar America, batting eyelashes and working rooms, looking down on those who, if they knew her origins, would look down on her, and dominating a husband who is just as dominant on his own turf – the workplace. Amanda’s singleminded pursuit of power and the proxy for happiness it represents is understandable given her upbringing, and Powell shows us enough of this to evoke empathy in the reader until Amanda and Vicky come into inevitable conflict.

Powell’s wit is sharp, with descriptions built on backhanded compliments or outright putdowns, but even her descriptions of ordinary events show a facility with words that amuses for the length of the book:

…Ethel said, attacking her dainty squab with a savagery that might indicate the bird had pulled a knife on her first.

Where Powell shines beyond just raw wit and vitriol is her ability to see through characters and personalities right to the bone, as in her portrayal of the man who broke Vicky’s heart and sent her from her small Ohio town to New York, the shiftless Tom turner, who tries to compensate for his lack of worldliness at a dinner party with Vicky by arguing with everyone in sight:

“You’re quite wrong there, old man,” he stated disagreeably at every remark made by the other two men. He was one of those men who betray their secret frustration in this way: taken into a handsmoe mansion they fall silent, coming slowly to an indignant mental boiling point of “This should be mine!” until out of a clear sky they start to shower insults on the innocent host. Married to a plain wife they take it as a personal grievance when they meet a single beauty, and cannot forbear pecking at the beauty with criticisms of her left thumb, her necklace, her accent, as if destruction by bits will ease the outrage of not being able to have her. Unemployed, they jeer at the stupidity of an envied friend working so hard for so little pay. In the unexpected presence of an admited or celebrated person they are reminded gallingly of their own inferior qualities and humiliate themselves by inadequate sarcasm, showing clearly how impressed they are and how irrevocably inferior they know themselves to be.

A Time to Be Born is driven forward by the question of whether Amanda will get away with her schemes or whether she’ll get what’s coming to her, as well as whether the ingenue Vicky can find at least romantic happiness if not something more in the cold city. Powell’s male characters aren’t as strong or as well-built as her women outside of Amanda’s side dish Ken Saunders, and Julian Evans could have used more depth even if he was to remain an often spineless husband beneath his manipulative wife’s thumb, although his simmering revolt provides another subplot for the increasingly complex second half of the book.

Apropos of nothing, I did get a reward for slogging through Alice Adams a few weeks ago when I came across this allusion to one of the most enduring scenes in that drab book, where Alice, at a dance sans gentleman, sits in a pair of chairs on the veranda and pretends that her beau will be back at any moment:

Her agonized Alice Adams efforts to act as if she were reserving the other seat for a most distinguished but delayed escort, spoiled that evening too for her.

Next up: Ann Patchett’s long-delayed follow-up to her amazing Bel Canto, 2007’s Run.

Filed Under: Literature Tagged With: , , , , ,
→ November 30, 2009
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The BFG.

I read Roald Dahl’s The BFG because it’s on the Guardian‘s list of the 100 greatest novels of the last 300 years. It’s a peculiar choice, as it’s a young adult book and quite short for a novel of any genre, although some of the macabre material makes it unsuitable for the younger part of the YA audience. It’s clever and very funny with a silly plot, and the title character is, for an ugly giant, totally endearing.

The novel begins with the abduction of Sophie, a resident of a London orphanage, by a 24-foot-tall giant who turns out to be one of nine living in a faraway place, and the only one who doesn’t run off every night to snatch people from their beds and eat them. This giant, the Big Friendly Giant of the book’s title, quickly becomes fond of Sophie, but their fast friendship faces a challenge when the BFG learns that the other Giants – including the Fleshlumpeater, the Bloodbottler, and the Childchewer – are planning a run to London to feast on English children during the “witching hour” when all humans are asleep and giants can run amok undetected. Sophie hatches a plan that involves the BFG and the Queen of England, some trickery, and six dozen eggs.

Putting The BFG on their top 100 novels of all time makes the Guardian‘s list look deliberately different or contrarian, but it is still an enjoyable book, mostly for its magical prose. Dahl was an extremely gifted wordplay artist, as the gibberish that comes out of the BFG’s mouth is often inspired, and the book overflows with puns, such as descriptions of how the “human beans” in each country taste (giants like Swedes for the “Sweden sour” taste; people in Panama taste “hatty” while those in Wellington taste of boots; and no one likes Greeks because they taste “greasy”). The explanation of why the giants’ home isn’t in the atlas and the description of the fizzy drink frobscottle are both priceless. It’s maybe a two-hour read and certainly worth the time investment, although I have a feeling I won’t be reading this to my daughter at any time in the next decade.

Next up: Back to friend of the dish Lev Grossman with his novel Codex.

Filed Under: Literature Tagged With: , , , , ,
→ November 25, 2009
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Top 10 boardgames, revised, with lost comments.

It seems to be list-updating time for me, and mental_floss’s rundown of Games magazine’s category winners for new games in 2009 prompted me to finally write this up and post it. Here’s my updated top ten, after which you’ll find the user comments from the original top ten that were lost in the database corruption that happened last December.

Quick notes: I hate Scrabble. I’ve never played Agricola. I dropped Risk, Acquire, and Monopoly from the list.

10. Babel. We bought this game on a trip to Austria in 2003, which meant getting the German rules, which meant I had to translate them … so who knows if we really played it correctly. But it was fun. It’s a fairly simple two-person game where each player is trying to build temples using five “tribes” at his disposal, but at the same time that you’re building, you’re using those tribes to try to slow down your opponent’s building or knock down his temples entirely. Our favorite move was the “Wanderung,” where you can make one of your opponent’s tribes wander off.

9. Taboo. Different type of game entirely from the others here – this is a “party game,” and maybe the only one I really liked. For those of you old enough to remember the TV game show Password, Taboo takes that general format (one person gives clues, the rest of his team has to guess the keyword), but adds the twist that there are five words the clue-giver can’t say. The challenge of trying to describe something without saying the five most obvious words is what makes Taboo fun. Our friend Pete was a whiz at giving clues because he had an endless supply of bad pop songs and commercial jingles on which to rely.

8. Diplomacy. Described by one friend of mine as “Risk for grownups,” Diplomacy requires seven players, but removes the luck element entirely after the initial setup. Players represent the seven “great powers” of Europe, set in 1900 (although there are endless variations), and must scheme, ally, attack, and backstab their way towards control of at least half of the map. The rules are incredibly simple, and there are a few thriving online communities of “Diplo” players, although playing online means that the normal etiquette of live play (such as “don’t stab the guy you just allied with thirty seconds ago”) goes out the window.

7. Wise and Otherwise Board Game. I guess this is part party game, but it’s more clever than most games in that genre. On each turn, one player becomes the “reader” and reads the first half of an incredibly obscure (but real) proverb. The other players have to fabricate plausible or funny second halves, while the reader writes down the real conclusion to the proverb, after which, all players must guess which conclusion is the correct one. You get points for getting it right, and for fooling other players, while the biggest bonus goes to the reader who reads all the completions so convincingly that no one gets the right answer. It’s like Balderdash, but the opportunities for silly answers are greater, and the problem with Balderdash is that you can often guess the definitions by looking at word roots.

6. San Juan. Full review. The card game/two-person adjunct to the board game Puerto Rico (which I haven’t played), San Juan is a hard game to explain but easy and quick to play. Using only cards, each player builds a small settlement of various types of buildings, producing goods using them to build faster and better structures. There’s some luck involved, as in all card games, but the deck is big enough and diverse enough that you’re unlikely to be buried by bad luck; you’re just forced to consider different strategies.

5. Metro. Another German board game – Germany seems to be where all the good games are designed these days – Metro is almost comically simple. Players compete to build the longest subway lines on a grid that represents the city of Paris. There are different types of tiles, some of which include straight tracks, while others include all manner of twists. You can extend your own tracks on your turn, or you can use a tile to screw someone else. The game ends when all tiles are played; the player with the longest total track lengths across all of his lines wins.

4. Carcassonne. Full review. A boardgame without a board, Carcassonne is very easy to play (although learning how to maximize your score takes time) and emphasizes on-the-fly thinking over long-term planning. You draw one land tile each turn and build roads, cities, and farms by adding each tile to the table, creating a different map every time. You can play a solitary style or use an aggressive approach to grab some points from your opponents.

3. Orient Express. This is the only game on this list that is out of print, although the designers have told me they’re considering a reissue. Orient Express takes those logic puzzles you saw on the LSAT or in GAMES magazine and turns it into a murder mystery: You have to walk around the two train cars, interviewing suspects and crew members, searching cabins, and – when possible – sending telegrams for background info on the suspects. You must come up with a suspect and a motive to solve the crime, although you may also glean clues about the weapon or other factors. The original game itself comes with 10 cases., and there are at least 30 expansion cases available through the publisher’s website.

2. Ticket to Ride. Full review. An outstanding marriage between two styles – the German strategy board game and the American family game. You start Ticket to Ride with 45 train cars and several routes each connecting two U.S. cities; you get points for completing these routes and for connecting any two cities on the map, but other players are also trying to cross the map and you can end up blocked out of a specific city pair or unable to complete a route entirely. We play the U.S. version with the 1910 expansion; the Europe version is also excellent but I wouldn’t recommend the Swiss expansion.

1. Settlers of Catan. It’s not the simplest game on the list, but it’s the smartest, and it’s simple and quick enough to teach someone by playing a game with them, after which they’ll probably be hooked. Three or four players compete to settle the island of Catan, which involves tough decisions about placing settlements, trading for resources, developing units or towns, and overall strategy. There’s not much confrontation, and players are never eliminated. The first player to reach 10 “victory points” – achieved through a combination of building towns or cities, building the longest road, raising the largest army, or special one-point cards – wins. The game was such a success that there are multiple add-ons, including 5-6 player expansion, as well as a very good two-person card game (since the board game requires three players).

[Read more…]

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→ November 24, 2009
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And a Bottle of Rum.

Wayne Curtis tries to downplay the ambitions set in the title of his book And a Bottle of Rum: A History of the New World in Ten Cocktails, implying that he’s not going to credit human existence or history to rum the way other authors have to cod or salt or other mundane foodstuffs. That’s all to the good in my opinion, as he sticks mostly to the history of rum and various people and products associated with its rise from “the distilled essence of industrial waste” to a top-shelf liquor commanding premium prices for aged varieties as you might pay for whiskey or brandy. (It’s also available on iBooks.)

Rum is, of course, distilled from molasses (or, rarely, sugar cane juice), which was originally discarded by plantation owners as the unwanted, unsaleable waste product of sugar production and refining. It gained popularity among sailors, even becoming part of a daily grog ration for members of the Royal Navy (a practice that was only discontinued in 1970), and then became the main liquor in colonial America, first as an import from the Caribbean and later as a homemade product, playing a role along the way in the Sugar and Stamp Acts. (Curtis also attempts to dispel the myth of the triangle trade, with a few references, saying that there’s no evidence any ship actually sailed those three legs or that the trade was as simple as the middle-school story indicates.) Rum faded from view in the U.S. only to regain popularity during and after Prohibition through Cuba tourism, the song “Rum and Coca-Cola,” and the rise of the tiki bar. It is a tumultuous history with plenty of associations with major world events, even if rum itself wasn’t always the cause of them.

Along the way, Curtis provides digressions about the real Captain Morgan and his namesake rum (which wasn’t always spiced), the American temperance movement against “demon rum” even though rum was rarely consumed at the time, the history of the mai tai and the tiki bar trend, Coca-Cola (and the Andrews Sisters’ song about the two), and Paul Revere’s ride with its possibly-apocryphal stop for a dram of rum. He weaves these stories into ten chapters, each covering a specific drink, including planter’s punch, the daiquiri – not the frozen sickly-sweet concoction, but the original rum-lime-sugar-crushed ice beverage that was the libation of choice of Ernest Hemingway – and the mojito. To his credit, he has proper scorn for flavored rums, pina coladas, and Coca-Cola, since all of the three take the focus of the drink off rum by inserting a dominant alternate flavor.*

*Curtis hits on a distinction I’ve been thinking about between cocktails and mixed drinks. If you read about the history of alcoholic drinks, you’ll come across two kinds – those that try to enhance the flavor of the central liquor or push it to the front of the drink, and those that cover it up because the liquor is of low quality or because the drinker can’t abide the taste of alcohol. The former group, what I think of as cocktails, comprised drinks that were seen as masculine, like you might find a Bertie Wooster drinking at the club, while the latter, simply mixed drinks, were seen as either girly or just déclassé. Curtis even mentions the rise of vodka, a liquor devoid of character and nearly devoid of taste, and its rise as younger male drinkers in the 1950s refused to acquire the taste for strong drink. A true daiquiri remains an acceptable drink in this dichotomy, as the rum is the star ingredient with the rum and sugar as supporting players. A pina colada isn’t, as Curtis explains, because “pineapple and coconut are the linebackers of the taste world,” obliterating any indication that there’s rum in the beverage. A dark-and-stormy (dark rum and ginger beer) works because ginger and rum are complementary flavors, much like mushrooms and onions or haricots verts and almonds, but a Cuba Libre doesn’t work because it’s just a Coke with a higher proof content. I’m not quite sure how a mai tai passes muster with Curtis – I think that’s only an acceptable drink if you’re on a tropical island, and even so, there are likely better options – but in general he’s pretty consistent.

Curtis also includes recipes for modern drinks as well as brief recipes for ten classic (or just old) drinks that lead into the ten chapters. One of them, just called “punch,” looked familiar, and after making it I realized it’s the drink called “planter’s punch” in Bermuda, where my wife and I honeymooned and to which we returned for our fifth and tenth anniversaries. It’s strong and the predominant flavor is rum (Gosling’s Black Seal in Bermuda), and while you can garnish it with all manner of garbage, at its heart it’s a daiquiri with some water and maybe a pinch of nutmeg, the latter a nod to the classic punches of Britain. And it’s very easy to assemble:

Juice half a lime into a glass. Add one tablespoon of sugar, simple syrup, or agave nectar; 1 1/2 ounces of rum; and two ounces of water. Mix well and add ice.

The end of the book has a brief selection listing Curtis’ favorite rums from a cross-section of countries and multiple price ranges. I found most of them at a nearby liquor store (the one at Fresh Pond next to Whole Foods, for those of you who live around here). They’re sipping rums rather than mixing rums, for more serious drinkers than myself.

Next up: Booth Tarkington’s 1921 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, Alice Adams.

Filed Under: Food, Nonfiction Tagged With: , , , , , , ,
→ November 20, 2009
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The Klaw 101; or, the Klaw 100, version 2.

EDIT: I’ve set up an amazon aStore that will eventually include all of these books in one place, as well as future additions when I update this list.

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I did promise an update to my ranking of the top 100 novels I’ve read, but I kept pushing it off to read one more book that I thought might make the list. I’ve finally reached the point where I think I can publish it without having to rework it with the next book I read, so here you have the Klaw 100, part two: This one goes to 101!

The top 10 remain unchanged. I’ve deleted 12 titles, and inserted new books at 101, 98, 95, 93, 91, 90, 86, 84, 62, 34, 25, 17, and 11. I changed the order of the books already on the list only slightly and the descriptions are the same as they were last time around.

The guidelines, from the original post:

My criteria are wholly subjective. The primary criterion is how much I enjoyed the book, accounting for more than half of the “score” I might give each book if I was inclined to go to that degree. I also considered the book’s literary value, and its significance in the annals of literature, whether by its influence, critical reception, or the modern perspective on the book. There is nothing on here I don’t like.

There are only three items on this list that run beyond 1000 pages, one of which is a series, and another is two books that I combined into a single entry. The third is the longest single book I’ve ever read, although that was originally published as two volumes itself. By and large, the one hundred books listed here are highly readable, accessible even to the casual reader.

I did omit works of primarily popular fiction, even ones I enjoyed, so there is no Harry Potter and no Jasper Fforde. I slipped P.G. Wodehouse in there, since his works have influenced at least two generations of writers and performers, and there are four or five works on there that might straddle the line between popular fiction and literature. You’ll also notice the absence of some works of undeniable literary importance that I either haven’t read or just flat-out didn’t like. I make no apologies for these omissions.

The bottom line: My list, my call.

Kind of like my NL Cy Young ballot!

101. Decline and Fall, by Evelyn Waugh. Full review. His one pre-Catholic novel, a funny, wicked satire of prep school culture without the morality play that underlies some of his later works.

100. The Reivers, by William Faulkner. Criminally overlooked today by most Faulkner readers, The Reivers won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1963 and is Faulkner’s most accessible and light-hearted work. It’s a comedy set, as always, in Yoknapatawpha County, focusing on three ne’er-do-wells who steal a car, consort with prostitutes, race a horse, and try to get ahead by any means.

99. Nervous Conditions, by Tsitsi Dangarembga. The debut novel by a Zimbabwean playwright, Nervous Conditions might be the best work ever written about the plight of women in even the “developed” parts of Africa, as they have to deal simultaneously with traditional and modern pressures in their lives.

98. Lonesome Dove , by Larry McMurtry. Full review. Just an incredible read, a long, meandering epic of the old West, a meditation on existence and our need to move. A highly American novel. Oh, and it’s an early example of the art form now known as the “bromance.”

97. The Hound of the Baskervilles, by Arthur Conan Doyle. The grand-daddy of all mysteries, and the only full-length novel featuring Sherlock Holmes, Hound is as good a mystery as you’ll find, with Holmes at his brilliant and smarmy best.

96. Never Let Me Go, by Kazuo Ishiguro. Full review. Ishiguro’s romantic tragedy within a dystopian alternate reality is imperfect, but the societal aspect is powerful and incredibly disturbing.

95. The Risk Pool, by Richard Russo. Full review. The funniest of the three Russo novels I’ve read, with a completely unforgettable secondary character in the narrator’s itinerant father.

94. Native Son, by Richard Wright. Perhaps the American equivalent to Germinal for its sheer anger and social commentary, Native Son is the story of a black man who is hemmed in by white society and whose culpability for his crimes may not entirely be his own.

93. Embers, by Sandor Marai. Full review. A haunting novel recounting the meeting of two estranged friends, the events that led to their estrangement, and the tension that fills the room when the novel reaches its climax. Slow, pensive, and gripping.

92. Kafka on the Shore, by Haruki Murakami. Full review. Not Murakami’s best, but still strong, with the same immersive, dream-like atmosphere as The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. It’s a story of a search for identity and meaning, told through two narratives headed for an inevitable intersection.

91. The Greatest Thing Since Sliced Bread, by Don Robertson. Full review. A bit of a sentimental pick – a young boy sets off across Cleveland with his sister in a toy wagon and ends up becoming a hero in the face of a horrible industrial disaster.

90. The Quiet American, by Graham Greene. Full review. A cynical work, surprising for Greene, that offers a severe criticism of the Vietnam War from a worm’s-eye view.

89. Right Ho, Jeeves, by P.G. Wodehouse. I’m not sure how to choose any single Wodehouse novel, or where to rank them on this list. I’ve read nearly all of the Jeeves novels and am hard-pressed to pick a favorite, so I’ve chosen this one, which also made the Bloomsbury 100. Describing the plot is pointless; the joy is in the telling.

88. Huckleberry Finn, by Mark Twain. Not really my favorite Twain book – that would be The Prince and the Pauper, a late cut from this list – but Huckleberry Finn is one of the few legitimate contenders for the appellation of The Great American Novel, a comedy, a drama, and a stinging social commentary all rolled up into an adventure story to appeal to the kid in every reader.

87. The Spy Who Came in From the Cold, by John Le Carré. A seminal spy novel, but also a character-driven drama, one in which loyalties are uncertain, and so are fates. Impossible to put down, and not laden with all kinds of technobabble to try to distract the reader from a thin or implausible plot.

86. The City and the Mountains, by José Maria de Eça de Queirós. Full review. A beautiful fable by one of Portugal’s greatest novelists.

85. Ragtime, by E. L. Doctorow. An extremely easy read, despite the references to some characters by roles (“Mother’s Younger Brother”) rather than names, with rolling, twisting plot lines and text that takes you into another era.

84. The Dud Avocado, by Elaine Dundy. Full review. A comedy about an American girl in Paris whose cluelessness lands her in one mess after another. Brilliant and, for the moment, back in print.

83. Rebecca, by Daphne Du Maurier. Full review. A classic gothic mystery, which also led to Alfred Hitchcock’s only non-honorary Oscar.

82. The Scarlet Pimpernel, by Baroness Orczy. Overlooked now, probably because of the rather unflattering depiction of a Jewish character, it’s a fast-paced and tense adventure story that deserves to be read by readers who understand its historical context. (And it’s hardly the only book on this list to take its shots at Jews.)

81. Song of Solomon, by Toni Morrison. Full review. Morrison’s second-best novel, the story of a black family divided through two generations and of one of the sons, Milkman Dead, who is searching for his own identity in the world.

80. A Grain of Wheat, by Ngugi wa’Thiongo. One of the best and most important novels written by an African author, Grain depicts a Kenyan village divided by the white colonial authorities, who use their power to split and oppress the people whose land they rule.

79. Blood Meridian, by Cormac McCarthy. Full review. Beautifully written tale of good and evil with an uncomfortably high level of violence.

78. The Awakening, by Kate Chopin. A novella in the ruined-woman genre, The Awakening takes the story of Anna Karenina, transfers it to New Orleans, and condenses it to focus strictly on the woman, her choices, and the society that boxes her into a corner.

77. Fathers and Sons, by Ivan Turgenev. An under-read Russian novel, like Goncharov’s Oblomov, Fathers and Sons captures a generational clash that threatens the traditional way of life in Russia, while introducing the then-chic philosophy of nihilism to the broader public.

76. A Thousand Splendid Suns, by Khaled Hosseini. Full review. Hosseini’s second book wasn’t quite the tear-jerker that his first was, but still had power in its subtlety, with the occasional burst of drama to keep you alert.

75. Moll Flanders, by Daniel Defoe. A straight narrative without breaks, Moll is a picaresque novel and a twisted morality tale that follows a woman of uncertain scruples through her entire life, from her birth in a prison to her life as a prostitute to her eventual rise to wealth.

74. Watership Down, by Richard Adams. I struggled a little bit with this one; it’s a children’s novel, but it’s not. It’s more of a modern epic, a fable about a warren of rabbits who find their home threatened by human development, with one rabbit emerging as a hero through his own wiles and personal growth. The book is so good that it violates two of my core rules, that a book with a map or with a glossary should be avoided.

73. Their Eyes Were Watching God, by Zora Neale Hurston. Criminally overlooked for decades, Eyes has become a classic in the growing canon of African-American literature. Its use of dialect cleared the path for Alice Walker and the grandmaster of the genre, Toni Morrison.

72. Brave New World, by Aldous Huxley. One of the leading dystopian novels with Orwell’s 1984, which is coming up on this list. Huxley’s depiction of a world overrun by technology was both prescient and paranoid, and perhaps rings more true than Orwell’s work given subsequent developments.

71. Monarch of the Glen, by Compton Mackenzie. Full review. Brilliantly funny. Currently out of print in the U.S., although it remains in print in England.

70. The Big Sleep, by Raymond Chandler. Chandler is half of the pair of leading lights of the hard-boiled detective genre, and The Big Sleep was his best work, with sleuth Philip Marlowe as the pensive star, with dry wit and filled glass and a very clear moral compass.

69. All the King’s Men, by Robert Penn Warren.Full review. The fictionalized story of the rise and fall of Huey “Kingfish” Long, told almost as the backdrop for the story of the narrator, political crony Jack Burden.

68. The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, by Muriel Spark. Full review. A novel of feminism, of religious ideologies (and fascism!), told with an unusual and effective back-and-forth narrative style and a dose of humor.

67. The Day of the Locust, by Nathanael West. A scathing indictment of early Hollywood culture and its pernicious effects on those who chase its rainbows.

66. Henderson the Rain King, by Saul Bellow. Far more enjoyable than the self-loathing of Herzog, Henderson employs humor and a touch of the absurd to explore the meaning of life and one über-successful yet spiritually unfulfilled man’s search for it in the hinterlands of Africa.

65. 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.)

64. 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.

63. 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.

62. The Remains of the Day, by Kazuo Ishiguro. Full review. A career butler looks back on his thirty years of service and discovers a host of opportunities lost to a singular pursuit of “dignity.” A sad yet witty novel that draws great emotion from words despite a near-total lack of action.

61. 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!

60. 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.

59. 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.

58. 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.

57. 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.

56. 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.

54. 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.

54. 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.

53. 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.”

52. 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.

51. 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.

50. 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.

49. 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.

48. 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.

47. 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.

46. 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.

45. The Kite Runner, by Khaled Hosseini. Full review. The history of Afghanistan, told as the tragic story of two childhood friends separated not by war, but by a child’s severe error of judgment. Whether he finds redemption as an adult is left to the reader, but unlike, say, Ian McEwan’s Atonement, Hosseini’s work at least opens the door.

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

43. Lolita, by Vladimir Nabokov. I’m not sure I buy into Vanity Fair‘s oft-quoted review (“The only convincing love story of our century”), but as a study of obsession, arrested development, and rationalization, it’s powerful and cheerfully unapologetic.

42. Brideshead Revisited, by Evelyn Waugh. One of the strangest books on this list, as it starts out as a story of drunken revelry at an English prep school and ends up as a story of a romance torn asunder by theological disagreements (also explored in Graham Greene’s The End of the Affair). Think of it as a fictional memoir that intertwines nostalgia for a bygone era of English culture with a re-examination of the narrator’s spiritual emptiness.

41. Catch-22, by Joseph Heller. Major Major, Nately’s whore, Milo’s cotton schemes … and the flying missions that never end in a serious war with some very un-serious behavior. A sharp satire full of madcap laughs.

40. Don Quixote, by Miguel de Cervantes. The first novel in the Western canon, and the first comic novel, Don Quixote is actually two novels now published as one; Cervantes wrote a sequel in response to the flood of knockoffs and unauthorized sequels that followed the enormous success of the first volume of his work. If you’ve read it, check out Julian Branston’s The Eternal Quest, a funny homage that includes Cervantes and an unnamed “errant knight” as major characters.

39. My Ántonia, by Willa Cather. Never mentioned in discussions of the Great American Novel, but isn’t a tale about immigrant families working to create better lives for themselves and their children an integral part of the American story?

38. Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Brontë. The consummate Gothic romance, with a little magical realism (although it was written a century before the term existed) and a couple of absurd coincidences, still captivates readers and, of course, gave us Thursday Next and The Eyre Affair.

37. The Trial, by Franz Kafka. Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not after you.

36. The Charterhouse of Parma, by Stendhal. Sort of a French picaresque novel, but with a heavy dose of the realism that characterizes most great French 19th-century literature. The protagonist, Fabrizio del Dongo, is a slightly dim young nobleman who sets off on a Quixotic quest to fight with Napoleon’s army (even though Fabrizio is Italian) and become a hero.

35. The Sound and the Fury, by William Faulkner. The toughest read on the list, because Faulkner – never an easy read – wrote the first fourth of the book from the perspective of the severely developmentally disabled Benji, whose senses all time as now and drifts in his rambling narrative from the past to the present without warning. The four parts describe the decline of a Southern family – and of an entire stratum of Southern society – from four different perspectives. And by the way, the book’s title comes from Macbeth: “It is a tale/Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury/Signifying nothing.”

34. The Grapes of Wrath, by John Steinbeck. Full review. Another contender for the Great American Novel, driven by unbelievable prose that brought Cormac McCarthy to my mind. The social criticism aspect of the novel has been dulled by time and history, but the story of a family driven to the edge of ruin still resonates.

33. Empire Falls, by Richard Russo. Full review. A bit rich for such a recent book? I won’t deny it, but despite being set in contemporary America, Empire Falls harkens back to the storytelling of American literature from the first half of the last century, following a cast of ne’er-do-wells around a failing Maine mill town as they wait for something good to happen.

32. A Dance to the Music of Time (series), by Anthony Powell. Full review. Powell’s twelve-part sequence follows Nick Jenkins as he moves from boarding school to college to the army to the publishing world, with him serving as our wry tour guide through the follies and life events of a wide-ranging cast of characters.

31. A Clockwork Orange, by Anthony Burgess. Full review. A dystopian novel about the simple things in life, like free will.

30. Pride and Prejudice, by Jane Austen. A great romance and a commentary on first impressions and, of course, how our pride can get in the way. Mr. and Mrs. Bennet and the unctuous William Collins rank among Austen’s best comic creations.

29. Appointment in Samarra, by John O’Hara. Full review. A Fitzgerald-esque novel about one man’s self-destruction through alcohol as he rebels against the confines of the small town where he and his status-conscious wife live.

28. Something Wicked This Way Comes, by Ray Bradbury. Bradbury is better known for his science fiction – the dystopian masterpiece Fahrenheit 451 just missed the cut for this list – but this old-fashioned gothic horror story uses fear to drive the narrative forward as a sinister circus comes to a small Southern town and two kids find that their curiosity may do more than kill a cat.

27. Our Man in Havana, by Graham Greene. Although it doesn’t have the gravitas of Greene’s serious novels (like The Heart of the Matter and The End of the Affair), Our Man in Havana is the most serious of his “entertainments” that I’ve read. It’s a rich satire about a vacuum cleaner salesman who is recruited as a British spy and fulfills his duties by sending in blueprints of vacuums and passing them off as new Cuban weapons systems.

26. The Pickwick Papers, by Charles Dickens. Full review. Dickens’ first novel and perhaps the first true best-seller in English literature, Pickwick is a classic picaresque novel that showcases the sense of humor Dickens apparently lost somewhere on the way to two of the banes of my high school years, Great Expectations and Tale of Two Cities.

25. The Road, by Cormac McCarthy. Full review. My view on this book has changed dramatically since I read it. I was shocked by the bleak setting and gruesome details of McCarthy’s post-apocalyptic world, but the raw power of the Man’s love for the Boy and willingness to do anything, brave anything, believe anything to give his son a chance, however slim, at a future … well, if you have a child, you will understand. But I still don’t want to see the cellar scene on film, because I won’t be able to un-see it.

24. The Age of Innocence, by Edith Wharton. Full review. Another Pulitzer Prize winner, two years after The Magnificent Ambersons won, Age combines a love triangle, biting but hilarious commentary, and the stifling social norms of the Gilded Age for one of the greatest American novels ever written.

23. Persuasion, by Jane Austen. Anne Elliott was persuaded by her father and Lady Russell to decline an “unfavorable” match with a poor sailor when she was nineteen. Now twenty-seven and apparently headed for spinsterhood, she learns that her suitor has returned to England a wealthy captain. Austen’s last novel is the tightest and brings the most tension without skimping on the wit provided by, among others, Anne’s complete fathead of a father.

22. 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.

21. 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.

20. 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.

19. 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.

18. 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.

17. Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell: A Novel, by Susanna Clarke. Full review.The fastest thousand pages you’ll ever read – a slow-building story that burns the fantasy genre down and builds it back up into a story of power, corruption, greed, jealousy, and mania.

16. 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.

15. 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.

14. 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.

13. 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.

12. 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.

11. Cold Comfort Farm, by Stella Gibbons. Full review. A short satire with layers and layers of humor, from wordplay to stereotypes turned inside out. The story is thin but readable, although the story is hardly the point. It’s just a joyous, hilarious read.

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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The Remains of the Day.

I’ll be on ESPNEWS on Monday afternoon right after the Rookies of the Year are announced at 2 pm EST, and then again at 2:40 pm to talk more about those winners and the awards to come over the next week-plus.

I’ve got a short take on Dan Uggla on Rumor Central.

I’m doing a daily wrap-up/links column each weekday this week in Buster Olney’s absence, so if you see any news story, rumor, or blog item that you think is worthy of a comment, please throw a link in a comment on this or any post this week, or shoot me an email.

Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day is a stunning novel, powerful and moving despite being understated at almost every turn – a quintessential English novel written by a man who was actually born in Japan but who has become one of the greatest English novelists of the last half-century. Very few books can contain so little action and yet carry such emotional weight, even with an inevitable finish that brings the curtain down on the protagonist/narrator in crushing fashion.

Mr. Stevens has been a butler for 30 years at Darlington Hall, most of that time serving Lord Darlington, a well-meaning nobleman who indulges his liberal worldview by dabbling in international politics between the world wars. Darlington is dead for three years at the novel’s start, but Stevens takes the reader through a series of flashbacks that gradually expose the nature and effects of his master’s efforts as well as his relationship with Miss Kenton, who oversees the female staff in the house and occasionally shocks Stevens with the strength of her will and with actions and words he can’t quite interpret. As the flashbacks deepen, helped along by some chance events on a six-day sojourn Stevens takes to visit the now-married Miss Kenton in her village, Stevens becomes more aware of what the last thirty years have truly entailed for him.

Although regret is, to my reading, the overwhelming theme of the novel, work/life balance also seems to play heavily in Ishiguro’s rendering of Stevens’ life and character. Through extraordinarily dedicated service and loyalty both to his master and to an independent ideal of “dignity” in work, Stevens has spent all of his energy on his vocation, letting it subdue or crowd out any person underneath his work-oriented exterior. This leads to the questions of regret which hang over the novel and come to the fore in the final section, but on its own, Stevens’ almost obsessive pursuit of dignity and the butlering ideal leave him out of touch with the people and actions taking place around him – sometimes deliberately, but other times inadvertently, and much to his loss in the long run.

The Remains of the Day isn’t all heaviness and sorrow, however; an English novel of manners should at least have a dose of comedy, and this one does, particularly Stevens’ inability to gel with his new American master, who expects a bit of a repartee with his head man but finds Stevens unequal to the task. Stevens recognizes that his boss wants a bit of “bantering” and applies himself to the task as if he were trying to learn to cook or to speak French, with comic effect.

I’ve previously reviewed (and loved) Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go.

Next up: I’ve got about 120 pages to go in Stieg Larsson’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (now 50% off at amazon), a pretty fast-moving detective novel that has become an international best-seller.

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→ November 12, 2009
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Cold Comfort Farm.

Klawchat today at 1 pm EST.

Stella Gibbons’ Cold Comfort Farm is the funniest book I’ve read this year and one of the funniest I’ve ever read. It combines the dry wit of vintage Wodehouse with the social commentary of Waugh and the literary satire of Henry Fielding. It is hard to believe it was Gibbons’ first novel, written when she was just 23, when it is so note-perfect.

Cold Comfort Farm tells the story of recently orphaned Flora Poste, whose parents were scarcely part of her life anyway, and who ends up staying with some distant relations in the south of England on the farm of the book’s title. Said farm is populated by a cast of ridiculous (and ridiculously named) characters, led by the mysterious Aunt Ada Doom, who stays in her room all but two days of each year and refers ad nauseum to the time when she was a little girl and “saw something nasty in the woodshed!” Aunt Ada keeps all her relations tied to the farm, threatening to go mad if any should leave, so everyone on the farm is horribly repressed in some way – most romantically or sexually, but some in other ways.

Gibbons was parodying the romantic rural novels of the time period, most of which have been forgotten even as her novel has remained popular, with Flora herself referring to them and joking about fearing finding two cousins with names like Seth and Reuben when she gets to the farm, which, of course, turns out to be the case. Gibbons even took aim at one of the leading lights of the literary establishment: the simpering, sex-obsessed Mr. Mybug stands in for D.H. Lawrence, seeing phallic symbols everywhere he looks and, of course, falling hopelessly for Flora without any provocation on her part.

The introduction to the current edition of Cold Comfort Farm features an introduction by Lynne Truss that does an excellent job of breaking down the novel’s power to amaze even readers who aren’t familiar with the saccharine novels Gibbons was satirizing:

Flora finds at Cold Comfort Farm a group of people who have been reduced to novelistic clichés – rather like the curvy cartoon-figure Jessica Rabbit in the film Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, who famously drawled her existential plight, “I’m not bad, I’m just drawn that way.”Flora helps each character out of his or her difficulties and they quickly find happiness. She is a character in a novel who reads the other characters as characters and rewrites them as people. It’s the ultimate narrative miracle

Think of it as a precursor to Jasper Fforde*, where, instead of the protagonist ‘jumping’ into a novel, she simply lives it, and takes the stock characters she meets and gives them each a third dimension (or, in the case of Seth, simply discovers it and opens it up to the world), working as an extension of the novelist within the book.

*Gibbons even dabbles a little in Ffordian futurism (if you’ll excuse the chronological error) in the book, continuing the parallel with Fforde, setting the book about 15-20 years after the year in which it was published, mentioning video-phones and air mail and and an Anglo-Nicaraguan war in 1946.

As Flora fixes or fills out each character, Gibbons exposes the stereotypes or just flimsy drawings through humor. The ancient Adam Lambsbreath is supposed to be simple and rustic, cleaning (“clettering”) dishes with a twig, and yet Flora wins him over by treating him as more than a prop. Even the farm’s bull, Big Business, is just looking for a bit of a release, and gets it in a passage where Gibbons seems to be having fun with us by channeling her own inner Mybug/Lawrence. And when someone finally replies to Aunt Ada’s cries of “I saw something nasty in the woodshed!” … well, I won’t spoil the book’s funniest line, a brilliant four-word riposte that turns the old bat’s story on its head.

Next up: Almost done with Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day, a book good enough that I’m holding off on the revised Klaw 100 until I finish it.

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→ October 22, 2009
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The Greatest Thing Since Sliced Bread.

The title of Don Robertson’s The Greatest Thing Since Sliced Bread may make you think it’s the story of Matt Wieters, but it’s actually a remarkable coming-of-age novel set in Cleveland in 1944 on the day of the Cleveland East Ohio Gas Explosion.

The protagonist, nine-year-old Morris Bird III, decides to break with his quiet, slightly nerdy childhood routine one day to go visit a former schoolmate of his who moved to the other side of town. He comes up with a rather sophisticated plan to walk there, unwillingly taking his six-year-old sister with him, only to run into one of the largest industrial disasters in American history. What happens next, in maybe the last quarter or fifth of the book, is absolutely amazing, a brilliantly rendered portrait of heroism writ small against an unspeakably large tragedy. Robertson focuses on the little details – what Morris does, while heroic, isn’t huge or unrealistic, but still important, and Robertson imbues him with just one “super” power: the ability to think clearly in a crisis.

Robertson switches back and forth between narrative styles, from a straightforward prose/dialogue format to an almost modernist style where he shifts scenes and characters without so much as a paragraph break. These latter digressions are short, short enough that they didn’t drive me nuts, and the way he works in the creeping gas leak – as if the gas itself is just another character, wending its way through the gutters on its daily rounds – mimics the insidious nature of the threat, to which all the actors in the drama are oblivious until the explosion occurs.

Anyway, I know a few of you read this along with me, so rather than monopolize the topic, I’ll offer some discussion points. Feel free to add your own.

* Morris’ parents are little more than ciphers in the book; his father really only appears as a disembodied voice (a God symbol?) and his mother appears rather ineffectual in her brief cameos. Why?

* I thought of the red wagon as a symbol of Morris’ innocence, both for how it’s destroyed and, although this might be a bit cynical, how it’s obtained (or hard-earned).

* What’s the significance of Morris’s name? Morris, without a diminutive, is certainly a “grown-up” name. Does “Bird” just symbolize his flight across town, or is there more to it? And why would Robertson make him a “the third?”

* Am I the only one who found it odd that Edna Frost couldn’t think of an alternate spelling of Morris’ last name? It was the one off note in the book for me.

* Stephen King has apparently called Robertson one of his three greatest influences. For those of you who’ve read King’s work, did you see echoes of King in Sliced Bread?

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Up next: I finished Revolutionary Road today, and I’m starting Denis Johnson’s Tree of Smoke (on sale for $6.40 at amazon.com) tonight.

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