→ February 8, 2012
→ By

Sherlock, season one.

My annual ranking of the 30 MLB farm systems is up for Insiders. The top 100 follows tomorrow, with chats at noon ET (Spanish) and 1 pm ET (English).

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I admit to some reluctance to watch the BBC series Sherlock, which takes the famed detective character and reimagines him in the present day, solving crimes loosely based on some of the original stories by Arthur Conan Doyle. I didn’t expect to like a series that so dramatically alters the setting of the original, and inevitably changes the character as well, but it’s surprisingly well done and engaging despite the occasional bit of TV-friendly drama to keep the hoi polloi interested. (The first season just aired on PBS’ Masterpiece Mystery last month.)

Rather than directly adapt Conan Doyle’s stories into individual episodes, series creators Steven Moffat and Mark Gatiss chose to write new stories based on one or more of the originals, stretching them out to about 88 minutes apiece, with three episodes per season. Benedict Cumberbatch, who played a significant supporting role in Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, plays the title character, a “consulting detective” who solves crimes the police can’t and keeps a blog on his exploits, infusing Holmes with substantial charisma despite his incredible aloofness and professed disinterest in human connections. Martin Freeman (of the UK version of The Office and the middling film adaptation of Hitchhiker’s Guide) plays Dr. John Watson, an Afghan war veteran paired up with Holmes by chance, forming an uneasy working relationship that’s more balanced than the partnership in Conan Doyle’s works, with Watson actually standing up for himself when he thinks Holmes is merely trying to humiliate him. (It doesn’t work, but at least he tried.)

The first season comprises three episodes, with the final one the tightest all around as the characters had become more developed and the crime (and its solution) was more clever and intricate. The first episode, “A Study in Pink,” has to get the two main characters together and define all manner of relationships within the show, and then has a drawn-out standoff between Sherlock and the killer because the BBC asked the producers to add another 30 minutes to the original hourlong show; the second episode was more focused on the crime, but the denouement was also over the top and involved a character who threatens to throw off the show’s equilibrium. The series does put Sherlock in danger a bit too often – while he did die in one of the original short stories, only to be resurrected by a recalcitrant Conan Doyle due to reader demand – even though we know he has to live till the next episode, making the drama from those scenes seem a little false, although I suppose it would be just as absurd to have the main character never find himself in any jeopardy at all.

Comparing Cumberbatch’s Holmes to the character from Conan Doyle’s stories is an exercise in frustration; I view the new Sherlock as inspired by the original character, rather than a mere adaptation. The series puts Sherlock in more situations that explore his lack of social skills, and Watson is more than just a foil for Holmes’ genius, providing commentary on Holmes’ bizarre behavior and personality. I did find myself regularly comparing this Sherlock Holmes to another TV character inspired by the literary one, Dr. Gregory House.

House is an unlikely protagonist for an American TV series, an antihero who aims for perfect rationality in his life and behavior, who solves cases for their puzzle aspects rather than any human elements, who abhors religion and other forms of authority, an unpleasant character you like because he’s clever, not because you love to hate him. Yet despite his claims of rational thought, he shows a malicious streak under the guise of flouting authority or establishing how much his superiors need him, whereas neither the literary Holmes nor the new BBC version exhibit any such behavior. Cumberbatch’s Holmes can be insulting – his line to Watson and a police officers, “Dear God, what is it like in your funny little brains? It must be so boring,” is brilliantly dismissive – but there’s no malice involved.

In just three episodes so far, we see subtle hints that Sherlock is aware he doesn’t quite fit in and might even be a little sad or ashamed about it, such as the time he lies to a potential client about how he knew the latter had recently traveled around the world. He’s arrogant, while House is misanthropic; Sherlock calls himself a sociopath (in response to the accusation that he’s a psychopath), but despite their shared focus on solving the puzzle for its own sake, Sherlock shows more glimmers of humanity in three episodes than House has in eight seasons. House has to rely on humor to make the show watchable, and with the show becoming less funny and its lead character more spiteful, the show’s quality has declined noticeably. Sherlock has some humor, but the stories and the two lead characters can drive the show on their own because there’s more to see and understand in the title character than there is in Dr. House.

Finally, it wouldn’t be a Klaw review of a British series without a mention of Foyle’s War, tied to Sherlock by (at least) a significant guest-starring role by Andrew Scott (who also appeared in The Hour). DCS Foyle is nothing like Holmes, of course; he has a normal range of emotions, but keeps them inside, producing a brooding, melancholy exterior that has become sharper with age. But what the two detectives do share is an attention to detail that characterizes most great literary detectives as well – crimes are solved when the investigator identifies some tiny inconsistency that exposes a wider range of evidence against the guilty party. Holmes solves his crimes through research, Foyle through interrogation, but both solve via deduction. The shows particularly differ in pacing, however – the London-based Sherlock moves quickly, not just in editing, but in dialogue and action, while Foyle’s War is almost leisurely and methodical, reflecting its bucolic setting and the illusion of peace while a war rages mere miles away. So if you’re a Sherlock fan looking for another British mystery series while you wait for season two to arrive here, give Foyle’s War a try.

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→ February 6, 2012
→ By

Shadow of the Wind.

I read Carlos Ruiz Zafón’s best-selling novel The Shadow of the Wind last week between vacation and the long trip to Bristol (during which I also watched the first half of season 4 of The Wire) after a reader recommended it and I discovered my wife wanted to read it as well. It’s quick-moving with some interesting subtexts, but with a lot of silly, predictable plot elements and some least-common-denominator writing that drags the book down to a pulpier level.

The novel starts promisingly enough as the narrator/protagonist, Daniel, is introduced by his bookseller father to the Cemetery of Forgotten Books, a slightly mystical edifice in Barcelona where the keepers attempt to obtain a copy of every book ever written so that they may never be permanently forgotten. Daniel’s father tells him to find one book and become its champion, of sorts, and Daniel is drawn to a book called Shadow of the Wind, by an unknown author named Julián Carax. Daniel’s attempts to learn more about the book and Carax then drive the remainder of the novel’s plot, which has almost nothing to do with books or literature but instead revolves more around the history of Spain from its civil war forward, and around the city of Barcelona itself, which is the book’s real center and its main character.

It turns out that some madman is running around burning every copy of Carax’s books that he can find, and when that madman finds Daniel as a result of the boy’s inquiries about the book and its author, it plunges Daniel into the story he’s chasing, one that dates back to Carax’s boyhood and features a doomed romance and childhood grudges that have become deadly in time, while paralleling developments in Daniel’s own life, including a forbidden romance of his own that almost (but, fortunately, not completely) mirrors Julián’s.

Ruiz Zafón’s best passages have little to do with the plot, or with dialogue (it may be the translation, which was done by Lucia Graves, the daughter of I, Claudius author Robert Graves, but Zafón’s language comes off as stilted), but with Barcelona itself. His prose is most evocative when he’s describing street scenes from what is a very scenic, memorable city, a city that mixes architectural styles and landscapes and features the kind of old buildings required for the novel’s gothic-horror-lite elements.

Unfortunately, I could never fully buy into the story’s plot, not the madman’s actions, not the acts of the violent policeman who also stalks Daniel, not the romance between Julián and his intended, nor her father’s actions when their affair is discovered. The madman’s identity was easy to figure out, and while I didn’t see the twist with Julián and Penelope coming, it’s not remotely original and I thought it was played more for shock value than anything else, a trick Ruiz Zafón also uses when Daniel pronounces, American Beauty-style, that in seven days, he will be dead. (Spoiler, which I think anyone could guess, but you should avert your eyes if you really don’t want to know: He ends up dead for a few seconds before he’s revived. Cheap.) I kept looking for a deeper meaning in the book relating to the dark period of fascism in Spain that lasted four decades, but either I’m not familiar enough with Spanish history to find it, or it just wasn’t there.

If you want a real page-turner with gothic horror elements, go for the longer but far more enjoyable Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell. If you like the idea of a novel revolving around books, I’d recommend the tremendously fun The Eyre Affair (which I recommend all the time) or the clever if not entirely plot-driven City of Dreaming Books.

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I should also mention Dorothy Sayers’ mystery Whose Body?, which introduced the amateur detective Lord Peter Wimsey with a clever device involving the discovery of an unknown victim’s naked body in the tub of a working-class house in London. I like a good mystery, having read twenty-odd Agatha Christie novels, but Sayers’ writing and the resolution of the story both left me cold, particularly since the killer’s identity is revealed with about ten percent of the novel remaining, after which we get a long, drawn-out monologue (in epistolary form) from him explaining why he did what he did. Sayers also has Lord Wimsey speaking a very common vernacular that doesn’t gel with what we learn of his upbringing and seems like affect, and not the charming affect of, say, M. Poirot. The series has a devoted following but I don’t feel any need to go on to the next title.

Next up: Graham Greene’s Travels with My Aunt.

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→ August 30, 2011
→ By

Behold, Here’s Poison.

Author Georgette Heyer is best known – or so I’m told by Wikipedia, which is never wrong – as the creator of the literary subgenre known as the “Regency romance,” historical novels set among the English upper class in the early 19th century (that is, the time of Jane Austen’s books) but written in the 20th century. I had no idea who Heyer was when my wife gave me one of her non-romance novels, the mystery Behold, Here’s Poison, for Christmas last year. I can see the connection to those Regency romances, which Wikipedia describes as featuring “intelligent, fast-paced dialog between the protagonists,” as this book was fast and witty, but I’d be hard-pressed to call it a detective novel and it fell a little short as a mystery. It’s more of a fun thriller built around a country-house murder.

Gregory Matthews is the head of household at the Poplars and holds all the keys, literal and metaphorical, to the lives of the family members around him. When he’s found poisoned (by nicotine) in his bed one morning, everyone in the house is revealed to have a motive – his sister, sisters-in-law, niece, two nephews, the family doctor, and so on – while no one has a clear alibi except the one man, the intelligent, sardonic Randall Matthews, who had the most to gain directly from Matthews’ death: nearly his entire liquid fortune. Superintendent Hannasyde and Inspector Hemingway, who appear together in three other Heyer novels, arrive on the scene to piece together the mystery of Matthews’ death, a story complicated by the eventual death of one of the many other suspects.

Randall is by far the most interesting character in the book, as he’s a few levels above everyone else in brainpower and isn’t afraid to show it, tweaking his relations (especially his nosy aunts) for his own enjoyment. His arrival after the elder Matthews’ murder leaves no doubt about his role in the rest of the book – he’s there for dry wit, as when he first appears, entering a room filled with his relations after they’ve all learned of Gregory’s death:

“And which of you,” he inquired, looking amiably round, “is responsible for dear uncle’s death? Or don’t you know?”
This airy question produced a feeling of tension, which was possibly Randall’s object. Mrs. Lupton said: “that is not amusing nor is this a time for jokes in bad taste.”
Randall opened his eyes at her. “Dear aunt, did you think I was joking?”

Just about every family member has some humorous aspect to his or her character, and putting them all in a room brings the worst out in them, making the family scenes – and there are many – the real highlight of the novel.

While I enjoyed the book for the dry humor and quick prose, I can’t call it a proper detective story – more of an old-fashioned thriller. A true detective story stars the detective; he can be any sort of detective, a police inspector or a PI, a sharp investigator or a drunken hack, but his personality drives the story and he becomes the hero (or antihero, as the case may be) through which the reader experiences the investigation and solution of the crime. Hannasyde’s character is bland – I wouldn’t even call him “vanilla,” which is rather an unfortunate synonym for “bland” since real vanilla flavor is anything but – with no distinguishing characteristics other than the natural suspicion you’d expect to see in any detective character, and the conversations between Hannasyde and Hemingway are merely explanations of where they stand in the investigation. Hannasyde’s best role is as a foil for Randall, who admires the detective’s intelligence but also plays him for his own benefit.

I’m also reluctant to categorize Behold, Here’s Poison as a true mystery because of how few clues there were to the killer’s identity. I rarely figure out who the killer is in better mysteries, but can always see how I should have figured it out once I reach the conclusion. In this case, however, Heyer’s explanation fit the story to date but was based on awfully scant evidence, some of which wasn’t even clear to me as I read it because Hannasyde didn’t discover it – in fact, he only solves the crime when another character fills in the missing blanks in the final chapter.

Those two complaints do undersell the book a little; it’s a good read because it’s full of witty dialogue and most of the Matthews clan are humorously drawn caricatures – a group of slightly batty would-be members of the gentry whose dialogue will elicit more smirks than laughs, but still plenty to run you through the book towards the conclusion of the murder. I would just urge you not to look at this as a detective story or as a mystery, but more along the lines of what might happen if P.G. Wodehouse decided to try to satirize those genres.

Next up: Alan Bradley’s The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie, a cute mystery that made Bradley a first-time novelist at age 70.

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→ January 12, 2011
→ By

The Billionaire’s Vinegar.

Benjamin Wallace’s The Billionaire’s Vinegar: The Mystery of the World’s Most Expensive Bottle of Wine is the best nonfiction book I’ve read in almost two years, since reading The Ballad of the Whiskey Robber in February of 2009. Vinegar is a bit of literary pinot noir, starting with the auction of a bottle of wine allegedly owned by Thomas Jefferson and left in Paris when he fled the Revolution, a sale that smashed the previous record for a single bottle and helped accelerate the trend of high sale prices for ultra-rare wines. Of course, we wouldn’t have a book about it if there wasn’t an underlying controversy. Was the wine legitimate, or was Hardy Rodenstock, the German who purportedly discovered the cache of wines, a fraud and a forger of the highest order?

The ability to make money through doctored wines wouldn’t exist with a market willing to pay top dollar for what those wines purported to be, and Wallace documents the role of auction houses, particularly Christie’s, in marketing and selling rare wines and troves to a changing market, one that saw collectors bidding up bottles as investments or trophies rather than as libations. The man who built Christie’s wine-selling business over a period of four decades, Michael Broadbent, is a central character in the book for his role in selling the Rodenstock/Jefferson wines and impact on the rare-wine industry. (Michael’s son, Bartholomew, makes a few cameos, and has become a successful importer of fine wines.) The rich men who chase these wines also become significant characters in the book, including millionaire scion and America’s Cup winner Bill Koch, fellow scion Kip Forbes, and wine merchant Bill Sokolin, who bought one of the Jefferson bottles only to damage it and have most of the wine leak out on a restauarant floor as he carried the bottle to show off during a tasting.

The is-it-real storyline is paramount in Billionaire’s Vinegar, but, as an oeneophyte, I found the lay descriptions of wine chemistry fascinating, particularly explanations of how wine’s character changes over time, which also ties into how someone might alter a wine to make it seem older than it is – and how difficult it was until very recently to test a wine to determine, even within a narrow range, its age. The book also dabbles in the politics of wine manufacturing, culture, marketing, and the culture of wine connoisseurs, including massive tastings like “verticals” (many different vintages of a single wine) or “horizontals” (many wines, one year).

But at heart, the book is a mystery, starring Rodenstock and Broadbent, both eccentrics given to showmanship and bravado, one a dealer, the other an auctioneer, one a German of unknown background, the other a Brit of impeccable credentials. (Other eminent authorities on wine also gave their imprimatur to Rodenstock’s Jefferson wines, including Robert Parker, the most influential American wine critic of the past three decades and creator of the now-ubiquitous 100-point scale for rating wines.) The answer to the question of the wines’ provenance isn’t that hard to figure out, but Wallace plays it straight, only gradually revealing more information as the people involved the story themselves would have learned it, giving the book that mystery/detective feel – not to mention a surfeit of narrative greed – that sets it apart from most nonfiction books I read. I needed to put this book down so I could do other things, but found myself picking it back up repeatedly, finishing it inside of 72 hours.

Of note: the book is actually not available for sale in the U.K. because Michael Broadbent sued and wrangled a settlement from Random House, although he didn’t name Wallace in the suit and, having read the book, I’m hard-pressed to understand Broadbent’s complaint from a my non-lawyerly perspective. Wallace himself stated that U.K. libel laws are “notoriously plaintiff-friendly,” and I have to say that Broadbent might only have brought more bad publicity for himself by drawing attention to the book. He hardly comes off worst of the many shady characters populating the book’s pages.

Next up: Humorist and erstwhile sportswriter Roy Blount Jr.’s Alphabet Juice, a compendium of mini-essays on various words and their etymologies.

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→ June 27, 2010
→ By

Taken at the Flood.

I don’t normally write up Agatha Christie books because while each story is different, the general structure is the same, and it’s not like there’s anything new to say about Hercule Poirot or Miss Marple, or even Colonel Hastings or Inspector Japp, for that matter. Taken at the Flood had two characteristics that set it apart from the other Christie novels I’ve read so far, so it’s worth a brief post on a Sunday morning.

One is that despite the fact that the book – also published as There is a Tide, both titles coming from a speech by Brutus in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar – is a Hercule Poirot novel, the man we all know and love doesn’t appear until past the halfway point, outside of a very brief cameo in the prologue. Christie spends the first 60% of the book setting the scene for the first murder, walking us through all the key characters, showing us their motives (in whole or in part), and then following the initial investigation before Poirot finally makes his entrance. I can understand Dame Christie wanting to change it up a little bit, but I happen to like the pompous little Belgian, and I thought his absence took something away from the book, which had a clever plot and a twist in the resolution that I haven’t seen in another Christie novel.

The other unusual facet of Taken at the Flood was what seemed to me to be some sort of political commentary, something I don’t normally associate with Christie’s novels. The plot revolves around the family of a wealthy man who, as a lifelong bachelor, had supported most of them and made grand promises of future support for their own professional endeavors, like expanding the family farm or conducting clinical research instead of working as a family physician. The uncle, Gordon, married while abroad on a trip, only to be killed shortly thereafter in an air raid on London, leaving his young wife a widow in control of his entire fortune, and his expectant heirs out of luck and often in dire straits. I could be reading too much into it, but I thought Gordon was a metaphor for the government and his heirs stood in for people who lived on the dole or otherwise expected to the government to bail them out of their difficulties or, in one character’s case, make working for a living unnecessary. Christie also included several shots at the British government’s taxation schemes during World War II that first gave me the idea that she might be offering a broader comment. Your mileage may vary.

I was pleased to have, for a change, caught two of the most significant clues and pieced together about half of the solution, but once again was far from getting the whole thing. The fun’s in the reading for me, although I do try to form something more than a wild guess as to the killer’s identity and motive. The twist in this one made that quite a bit more difficult than normal.

This marked the 500th novel I’ve read so far, sixteen of which were by Dame Christie.

Next review: Dawn Powell’s The Wicked Pavilion. I’m still about three behind my actual reading, but I’m catching up.

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→ March 15, 2010
→ By

Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy.

John Le Carré’s Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy is one of his two best-known novels, and even placed at #74 on the Guardian‘s list of the 100 greatest novels of all time, a ranking I have to say I find rather dubious even though I thought it was an excellent read and a smart, realistic antidote to the standard spy novel featuring a dashing hero who’s always in great peril when he’s not in bed with a gorgeous double agent.

The protagonist at the heart of TTSS couldn’t be further from the James Bond mold, as George Smiley begins the novel in disgrace both at work, where he’s been forced out after a putsch, and at home, where his wife Ann has left him after years of infidelity. When a former agent, presumed defected, resurfaces with a story of a Soviet mole in The Circus (the top tier of what was then known as MI-6), Smiley and a few other folks on the outs at the Circus begin an effort to root out the mole, who appears to have been intimately involved in the palace coup that also resulted in a British agent getting arrested and shot in Brno and in several networks in Eastern Europe blowing up.

The brilliance of TTSS is that the novel is gripping with very little action, and no action in the novel’s present day until the final sequence where Smiley and his group set a trap for the mole. Apprised of the possible existence of the mole – the source for that info is dodgy at best – Smiley sets to work like an old-school detective, unraveling the story by talking to others ousted in the putsch and going after documents related to the compromised operation in Czechoslovakia as well as the Soviet leak who may in fact have been handling the double agent at the Circus. Le Carré carries it off through an intense dedication to realistic dialogue and actions – if there was a false note it fell below my detection threshold – and with flourishes of clever writing:

“Pulling the rug out when we’re all but home and dry.” His circulars read that way, too, thought Guillam. Metaphors chasing each other off the page.

He interlaces personal and professional issues for several of his characters, including Smiley and Peter Guillam, Smiley’s main accomplice in the investigation, the emotional counterpoint to the ironically-named Smiley’s stoicism, yet the book never drags as so many pensive novels do, where the characters’ inner thoughts overwhelm the story at the novel’s heart. There is no question that Smiley and company are detectives solving a mystery and that we are ultimately headed for some sort of denouement – a capture, a confrontation, an attack, whatever, you know that you’re driving towards a finish line, and even those asides into the minds of Smiley or Guillam or another character are just fuel for the engine that’s taking us there.

The Spy Who Came In from the Cold, which Le Carré wrote before TTSS, relies on more traditional sources of tension, with the spy of the book’s title finding himself behind enemy lines and eventually in some jeopardy, although it is still relatively light on action. It’s a better place to start than Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, but if you’ve read and enjoyed it I’d recommend coming here next.

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One thing that struck me while reading TTSS: Out of the seven main characters, three bear the names George, Percy, and Bill. And on the penultimate page of the book is the line: He wished he had brought her fur boots from the cupboard under the stairs. Anyone else think J.K. Rowling read a little Le Carré when she wasn’t reading Anthony Powell?

Next up: Something current, The Dolphin People by the author writing under the pseudonym Torsten Krol.

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→ December 6, 2009
→ By

Codex.

I’ve got a few new pieces up on the Four-Letter, including reactions to the Noel Argüelles signing, the Chone Figgins signing, and James Paxton’s lawsuit against the University of Kentucky.

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Pseudo-intellectual thrillers have thrived in recent years as a literary genre, particularly in mass-market paperbacks, with Dan Brown’s Da Vinci Code leading the charge, although I think the style dates back to Michael Crichton’s preachy, predictable, very fast-paced novels from the early-to-mid-1990s. They’re potboilers in fancy dress, usually with lots of explanatory text so that you’ll understand the motive of the core crime or why everyone is running very fast. The technique of putting the protagonist in jeopardy and having various suspects and witnesses killed off over the course of a book works well in the spare writing of hard-boiled detective novels, but married with …

Lev Grossman, whose The Magicians was one of the best books I read in 2009, wrote a book in that genre that dispenses with the conventions of body counts, crazy chase scenes, and character cliches (like the beautiful yet brilliant female researcher). Codex, which came out in 2004, creates tension from the core mystery around the titular Codex (a medieval book that may hide a coded message, if it can be found, assuming it even exists) rather than the artificial tension that characterizes the more ponderous entries in the genre.

In Codex, investment banker Edward Wozny finds himself employed to catalog the rare book collection of one of his best clients, an English duke and his wife, and despite his instinctive indignation at the menial task, he takes it on and finds himself gradually sucked into the search for the missing codex, even when he realizes that not everyone involved wants the book to be found. At the same time, Wozny’s friends introduce him to a time-sucking computer game called MOMUS that seems to Edward to offer unexplained parallels and connections to the search for the codex. In both quests, he ends up hopelessly lost and has to enlist the help of others, including a not-beautiful yet brilliant female researcher who specializes in the alleged author of the missing tome.

The stakes are high for the characters in the book, but Grossman ignores the trend of raising the stakes to fate-of-the-world status, recognizing that something as small as a battle between two members of the same family can be serious enough to cause people to throw around large sums of money and throw wrenches in the works of another person’s plans. I found that the pace of Codex accelerated as it went simply because I wanted to know where the codex was, what it meant, and why the person who employs Edward wanted to find it. Grossman also avoids the pat ending, concluding the book on an appropriately ambiguous note, although he does rely on one error of judgment by a main character to get us to the finish line.

Next up: Dawn Powell’s satire of the publishing circles of late 1930s New York (particularly Claire Boothe Luce), a somewhat forgotten novel called A Time to Be Born.

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→ June 23, 2008
→ By

The Klaw 100, part one.

Part two (#80-61)
Part three (#60-41)
Part four (#40-21)
Part five (#20-1)

I’ve pointed you to many lists of great books – the Novel 100, the Modern Library 100, the Radcliffe 100, the Bloomsbury 100, and the TIME 100, all of which have become reading lists for me. I thought it would be fun to put together my own greatest books list. This is the Klaw 100.

My qualifications for assembling such a list are scant. I estimate that I’ve read somewhere between 400 and 500 novels in my life, but can’t say I’ve even reached 70 out of 100 on any of the greatest-books lists I cited above. I’ve never read War and Peace, Ulysses, or The Grapes of Wrath. I hated Moby Dick and A Farewell to Arms. I started The Ambassadors and sold it after fifty fruitless pages. I can’t say this is a greatest books list. It is, however, my greatest books list.

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.

I’ll post a spreadsheet with the entire list after the last post in this series on Friday. For now, we start with the first twenty, #100-81.

100. A Hero of Our Time, by Mikhail Lermontov. Lermontov’s only novel – he was killed in a duel shortly afterwards – follows its antihero, Pechorin, on several pseudo-adventures in his quest to avoid boredom. One of the earliest nihilists in literature, Pechorin was a controversial character in his time, and his loose moral compass remains shocking.

99. Silas Marner, by George Eliot. Eliot, the pseudonym of Mary Ann Evans, wasn’t known for her brevity, but this work is both brief and beautiful. Marner is a religious dissident who is ostracized from his community and retreats into a hermit-like existence until a foundling appears at his door. He takes her in and raises her, rediscovering his own humanity in the bargain.

98. The Man Who Was Thursday, by G.K. Chesterton. A suspense story with strong Catholic overtones, Thursday tells of a government agent’s attempt to infiltrate a ring of anarchists, only to find that no one is quite what he seems.

97. The Life of Pi, by Yann Martel. A brilliant book with a bit of a twist at the end. Is it allegory? Magical realism? A comment on the human ability to cope with unspeakable tragedy? A testament of faith? All of the above?

96. A Room with a View, by E.M. Forster. The only Forster novel I’ve read and enjoyed, probably because it’s not such a complete downer as his other novels. It’s a straight romance, but also a commentary on the dated mores that still ruled the Edwardian era in England.

95. The Man in the High Castle, by Philip Dick. I’m no expert on science fiction; my knowledge of that genre is limited to Asimov, Dune, one or two books by Heinlein, and Philip Dick. I doubt anyone could top this work, however – an alternate history where the United States has lost World War II and been occupied by the victorious Axis powers. The novel’s structure is unusual, without a single, defining plot thread, but is worth the extra effort required to decipher it.

94. Germinal, by Émile Zola. Full review. An angry novel of social outrage and individual tragedy.

93. The Conformist, by Alberto Moravia. A dark psychological novel that’s not well known in the U.S., The Conformist tells the story of a man pushed along by forces beyond his control, all while struggling with his own lack of emotional responses to major events.

92. 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.

91. 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.

90. 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.

89. 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.

88. Anna Karenina, by Leo Tolstoy. Too long by half, but it’s still the archetype of the ruined-woman genre that became a frequent theme in literature later in the 19th century.

87. 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.

86. The Riddle of the Sands, by Erskine Childers. In writing the first spy novel in 1903, Childers was also calling for Britain to ramp up her naval presence to prevent a potential invasion by Germany, which seems prescient given later events. Childers himself was executed during an Irish uprising in 1922, leaving Riddle as his only novel.

85. 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.

84. 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.

83. 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.

82. 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.

81. Robinson Crusoe, by Daniel Defoe. In praise of economic man. Crusoe finds himself stranded on a Caribbean island and must find a way to survive, never giving up and in fact finding God during his time in solitary. One caveat: Defoe wrote without chapter breaks, which makes finding stopping points a little tricky.

Tomorrow: #80-61.

Filed Under: Literature, Sports Tagged With: , , , , , , , , ,
→ July 20, 2007
→ By

Conrad, Le Carré, Greene, and Shelley.

Jospeh Conrad’s Nostromo represents his lone appearance in the The Novel 100, and it’s apparently considered his best novel. It is an intensely political and psychological work, a comment on the inherent and perhaps inevitable corruptibility of man when confronted with temptations of power or money. Set in the Sulaco province of the fictional South American nation of Costaguana, which sits on the brink of revolution at the novel’s start, the novel’s plot centers around the re-opening of the San Tomé silver mine, owned by an Englishman who has become a full-time resident of Costaguana, and that mine’s relationship to the ensuing power struggle.

The plot weaves several storylines together on top of this structure, including a doomed romance, several independent searches for redemption, and the shadowy presence of the folk hero and reluctant revolutionary Nostromo. (Although I don’t believe it’s ever spelled out, “Nostromo” is a contraction of the Italian phrase nostro uomo, meaning “our man.” In spoken Italian this would sound very much like “nostromo.”) Nostromo barely appears in the first section of the book, but his own corruption as he feels the betrayal of the people of Sulaco becomes the central theme and driving plot element of the novel’s final half.

Conrad’s stories are always strong, and his characters are well-developed, but his prose is a little slow, so I don’t think it makes sense for a reader new to Conrad to start with a complex novel that runs a little over 400 pages. Either the novella Heart of Darkness (the book that became the movie Apocalypse Now) or the more straightforward intrigue The Secret Agent would be better introductions to Conrad’s work.

John Le Carré’s The Spy Who Came in from the Cold is one of the better spy novels I’ve read, built around a simple deceit that folds back on itself repeatedly, leaving the reader to try to figure out who’s lying and which characters are the “good guys.” It revolves around a British spook who’s out on one last mission, ostensibly to try to eliminate one of the top men in the East German intelligence service. The spook, Alec Leamas, goes through an elaborate charade to make it appear that he’s lost his marbles and is ready to turn traitor, only to find himself embroiled in a power struggle between his target and that man’s top lieutenant, with accusations of treason flying in both directions. Leamas’s situation is complicated by his brief fling with a girl, Liz Gold, who ends up folded into the drama as well. I won’t spoil the end, but the entire meaning of the book hinges on what happens in the last five or six paragraphs, which also reveal just how deep the deception runs. Great airplane reading.

I’m a big Graham Greene fan, and Orient Express was the ninth of his works that I’ve read, and probably my least favorite. ( Our Man in Havana remains my favorite, the perfect blend of the styles of his serious works and of his “entertainments.”) Orient Express revolves around a group of people on the famous train, headed for Constantinople but largely sidetracked in Yugoslavia when one of them, a Communist returning from exile to face trumped-up charges and certain execution in Belgrade, is pulled from the train by the authorities. Each character is flawed, some more deeply than others, and while every character has a goal or set of goals, none of them is remotely admirable. I understood the novel’s themes of alienation and the fungibility of many of the relationship types we employ in our lives, but the lack of a compelling character and the somewhat awkward way the novel ends (failing to really wrap up the plot line of Carol Musker, perhaps the most sympathetic of the characters) overshadowed the novel’s depth.

And I finally read Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein … I’m not sure there’s much I can add here, other than to say that I was surprised to find that it’s not a horror story at all, but a morality play that’s built on a horror story, and a generally sad and bleak book at that. Anyway, that brings my tally of Novel 100 books read to 61, which is about the best I can say about this particular book.

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows review to come Sunday or more likely Monday…

Filed Under: Literature, TIME 100 Tagged With: , , , , ,