100 Novels: Reading the Greatest Novels of All Time

One Post for 2011

2011-12-15T23:18:00.000-08:00

I guess I made it right in time to get at least one post in the year 2011. While I have not been posting as diligently as I would like, I can cross a few books off my list this year and have read a few books not on the list as well.

I checked off the classic Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell right before I got my Kindle so unfortunately I was lugging around a giant book that kind of looked like a romance novel. It was an easy, absorbing read, however it's hard to overlook the fact that its treatment of race is just so different from today that it's almost impossible to get over.

I also checked off Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh. A much harder book, at least for me to understand. I read it during the summer of 2011, and I don't know if it was too heavy for summer reading, but a lot of it seemed to fly over my head at least in terms of greater themes and considerations of religion and faith and compatibility.

While not on the list, I also read Count of Monte Cristo. It was slow going at first, but when the revenge dominoes start following there's a lot of gasping, a lot of "oh no he didn't!"'s, and a satisfying, happy ending for the Count. I found it a lot easier to get into than The Three Musketeers which must be why I was able to finish it and not The Three Musketeers. Too bad The Count of Monte Cristo's not on the list and The Three Musketeers is.

The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas

2010-05-11T00:15:00.000-07:00

I never actually got around to reading The Invisible Man. I made two attempts at starting it then gave up and took a hiatus from fun-reading as work-reading took up all my time. Now that my schedule's freed up ever so slightly, I'm making my way through France in The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas.

For ye olde classics, it always takes me a while to get into them. Much like The Invisible Man I made several attempts at beginning this book only to be thwarted by sleepiness. Lucky for me, I took a trip to Houston and spent my entire flight home avoiding the in-flight movie (Leap Year, a romantic comedy even I don't want to watch) and reading The Three Musketeers. One flight and several before bedtime readings later, I'm about 300 pages into this 700 page novel and I really wish I had another prolonged period to just sit and read. Unfortunately for me (or fortunately depending on how you look at it), I've been busy with work, friends, and tv that I haven't been able to sit down and really read. And The Three Musketeers really lends itself to extended periods of reading. Dumas does a great job of building up the action and intrigue and reading the book in 30 minute segments detracts from the flow of the narrative.

So far, I can't really tell the Musketeers apart aside from D'Artagnan and Porthos. I guess that's half the Musketeers so I'm only having trouble telling apart Athos and Aramis. Aramis is the one who wants to be a priest I believe. All the characters are getting fleshed out and there have already been several intrigues, most notably D'Artagnan's trip to London to fetch the diamonds the Queen gave to the British Duke (his name escapes me at the moment and my copy of the book is all the way across the room -- I'm lazy what can I say) before her husband finds out they're missing at a ball he's throwing where he especially requested that she wear these particular diamonds. I'm not even halfway through and I honestly don't really know what's in store next since I haven't seen a Three Musketeers movie since my youth. So no one spoil it for me!

On a side note, apparently Doug Liman (director of the Bourne movies) is directing a new version of the Three Musketeers. What a perfect time to pick up this book!

Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison

2009-11-24T00:00:00.000-08:00

My third book on my book reading journey and I'm very proud of myself for keeping it up this long. Hopefully this doens't end up like my other half-baked blogs and I can see this one through to the end. I picked this book because it's completely different from either Middlemarch or My Antonia and also because it's one of the books on the list that the Borders Express on my way home from work actually carried. That Borders Express in the Westfield Culver City Mall is severely lacking in great literature let me tell you. I couldn't even find any Charles Dickens!

My Antonia Part 2

2009-11-23T23:50:00.000-08:00

I finished My Antonia. Basically, though Antonia has a bright spirit and everyone is quick to love her, misfortune befalls her when she falls in love with a man who promises to marry her, but leaves her pregnant. Antonia is forced to return to her home disgraced. She's contrasted with Lena who becomes a successful dressmaker and businesswoman even though she is thought by the town to be promiscuous and airheaded.

Antonia gets a happy-ish ending. After many years, Jim finds Antonia set up in her own farm with a husband and a bunch of kids. She seems happy and healthy and her connection with Jim is still as strong as ever. Jim never marries and has no children but is happy to see Antonia settled down to a good man and with a good family.

This book really captured the pioneer spirit of a strong, spirited, and loving woman, Antonia. It also gives the reader a perfect glimpse into the time period. I felt transported to this era and this way of life and how it was all so much simpler. It became difficult to put down and kept me up many nights way past my bedtime. I'm happy Antonia and Jim got endings that suited them. Since Antonia's father died so early in the novel, I thought something tragic was going to befall her like Tess in Tess of the D'Ubervilles, but thankfully Cather allowed the heroine to have a life that suited her. I enjoyed this book and I can completely see why President Sample is so enamored with Willa Cather.

My Antonia

2009-11-16T16:32:00.001-08:00

After a slow start, I've finally started tearing through My Antonia. I realize this book will be over soon! I'm about halfway through the ~250 page novel and I'm really enjoying the change of pace from Middlemarch.

My Antonia is basically the memories of a boy, Jim Burden, as he grows up in the farm lands with his neighbor Antonia Shimerda. The Shimerdas are Bohemians who've recently come to America to start their own farm. The father has a difficult time adjusting to his new life in America and, during his first winter in America, shoots himself in the Burden's barn. From there, Antonia's older brother assumes the role of patriarch in her family. He uses Antonia as a farm hand while Jim, a few years younger, goes to school.

Right now, Jim's going to school in the town and Antonia is working as a helper to his neighbors, the Harlings. Antonia just exudes a good vibe in the novel and I don't quite know how Cather is able to do that since we really don't know much about her. She's passionate and childlike despite her hard life. She loves her family and the Burdens and isn't frivolous. Look at that. I guess that's how Cather got us to love Antonia.

The farmland, middle America setting is interesting as well. I've never really read many books that take place in this part of the world. I'm enjoying it. There's a sense of camaraderie and neighborliness in this book that's not stifled and overly polite like it is in Middlemarch. Everything about My Antonia feels so vast even though it focuses on so narrow a subset of people.

My Antonia by Willa Cather

2009-11-02T23:49:00.001-08:00

Bought the next book on my list, My Antonia by Willa Cather. I was inspired to read this book by an article I read in the LA Times about USC's president, Steven Sample, stepping down this summer. According to the article, he wants to continue teaching at USC by doing a leadership class that he's done for a number of years during his presidency and also a literature class about Willa Cather, his favorite author. So in honor of one of my alma mater's greatest presidents, I'm reading My Antonia by Willa Cather.

I will also say that I got a great deal on this book. With my Borders membership 40% coupon, I got this brand new paperback edition for $3.26.

Middlemarch - finished

2009-11-02T23:33:00.000-08:00

Finally finished Middlemarch last night and I found myself surprised at its relevancy today. Obviously we don't really have the same social situations as we do now, but some of Elliot's ideas regarding marriage and idealism still ring very true today.

The quick summary: Dorothea and Ladislaw end up married, impoverished, but happy. Mary and Fred end up together (yay!) and live a modest life. Lydgate and Rosamond eventually end up financially secure but Lydgate dies at the age of 50 and gave up all the ideals he came to Middlemarch with. Bulstrode goes into exile but his wife stands by him.

Idealism plays a huge part in the novel. Dorothea and Lydgate are the characters with the best intentions. Dorothea only wants to do good in the world. She's really a great character on the border of insufferable if she weren't written as someone with such a pure heart and a desire to help others. Lydgate wanted to make great strides in medicine through his experimentation but ended up getting a small fortune treating rich patients of gout. This is what we find out in Eliot's epilogue and it's very sad. I had conflicting emotions. I appreciated Lydgate's attempt to make it work with Rosamond and his realization that he held both their happinesses in his hands. In the end, however, neither of them was ever really truly happy. And really Rosamond is so awful you want her to get her comeuppance at the end but it never comes.

Marriage and compatibility are also large themes in the novel. Dorothea's marriage to Cassaboun is doomed b/c he's old and crappy and she's young and wonderful. In her attempt to do what she thinks is for the greater good, she ties herself to a man whose work amounts to nothing and who's definitely not as good a person as she is. She finds a better match in Ladislaw who shares her idealism and with her support is able to make something of his life in politics.

My favorite couple, Fred and Mary, end up happily married in a relationship that seems to resemble Mary's parent's marriage. They are well-matched and have similar temperaments, but balance each other out as well. There's a cute part that Eliot puts in where Fred publishes a farming book but everyone thinks Mary did it and Mary publishes a children's book but everyone thinks Fred did it. So they're perfect for one another!

In the end, a good novel. I'm glad I read it and I'll definitely keep it in mind for future courtships.

Middlemarch part 3

2009-10-26T23:05:00.000-07:00

Another couple of hundred pages in and Mary and Fred are still my favorite couple though it's been rough going for the two of them. Fred didn't get the land he was hoping to get in his uncle's will and also had Mary's dad pay off one of his debts that Mr. Garth vouched for. Things are looking up thought as Fred has begun working for Mr. Garth instead of becoming a clergyman while Mary's acknowledged her feelings to Fred through Mr. Farebrother. Poor Mr. Farebrother, though, wanted to ask Mary to marry him since he just received a new living at Lowick Parish since Mr. Cassaboun died.

Yay Mr. Cassaboun died! Is that wrong that I'm so relieved that he's finally gone. He and Dorothea's marriage was just awful. And then Ladislaw comes along and falls in love with Dorothea and she with him. BUT Mr. Cassaboun, in his will, writes that Dorothea will lose her inheritance if she ever marries Ladislaw! Which is really spiteful of Mr. Cassaboun since Dorothea didn't even really think of him that way yet and now everyone thinks that Dorothea's led Ladislaw on into thinking she wants to marry him. So much drama!

And then there's the old people. I'm happy Mr. Garth got a new job that will provide for his family. The Garths are the best family in Middlemarch. They have a wonderful give and take where it's described as Mrs. Garth getting her way 95% of the time but knowing when Mr. Garth has his mind set and relents the other 5%. It's much better described in the book than what I have written, but they are delightful and I can only hope to have as happy a marriage as they have one day.

The biggest revelation, though, is Mr. Raffles. Mr. Raffles has come to blackmail Bulstrode (the big honcho in Middlemarch who is uber-religious and uber-critical of everyone). Apparently Bulstrode did some not very nice things back in the day and Mr. Raffles is trying to extort a pretty penny out of Bulstrode for Raffles' silence. Raffles, apparently, is also the stepfather to Mr. Riggins, the bastard son of Fred's uncle, the one who gave all his property to Riggins when everyone expected it to go to Fred. Middlemarch is basically Melrose Place right now except wihtout Ashlee Simpson. (Thank God!)

I'm thinking Dorothea and Ladislaw will meet again in the future, but Dorothea is too principled to marry him. I'm also hoping that Fred doesn't screw up his apprenticeship under Mr. Garth. However, so far it doesn't seem to be going too well for Fred. I still have my fingers crossed though. I want Mary, the sensible quick-witted girl, to get the guy she always wanted. Am I projecting much?

Middlemarch continued

2009-10-15T00:27:00.000-07:00

After spending a day in jury duty, I burned through almost a quarter of the book. Considering it's 838 pages, I'd say that's not too shabby.

I've really gotten into the book. Whereas it used to be the book on my nightstand that put me to sleep at night, it is now the book that keeps me up way past my bedtime. I've avoided reading the introduction because I didn't want to spoil the plot. It's hard when I could so easily wikipedia this sucker and find out what happens, but I think that would hinder the joy in reading it since I would be paying far more attention to finding foreshadowing than to what's actually happening in the novel.

So far, Dorothea's married Cassaboun. I don't know why Eliot opened the book with the relationship between these two. They are the most tiresome. Cassaboun marries Dorothea because he feels he should get married and Dorothea marries Cassaboun because she wants to be the woman behind the great man and his ideas. Then they go on a disastrous honeymoon to Italy where Cassaboun ignores her the whole time and Dorothea realizes that marriage to him isn't what she thinks it's going to be. However, Eliot does introduce Cassaboun's more interesting cousin, Ladislaw, who's taken an interest in Dorothea. We'll see how that pans out since he's come to Lowick to visit with Dorothea's uncle, Mr. Brooke, much to Cassaboun's dismay. But not really dismay since Cassaboun's too boring to be dismayed.

More interesting are the romances between Lydgate and Rosamond and Fred Vincy and Mary Garth. Lydgate and Rosamond are interesting in that he was a reluctant suitor to her, leading her on when he knew he didn't want to get married yet and she thought that they were basically engaged. Lydgate realized, however, that he wanted to marry Rosamond when he came to run some errand at her house and he realized he hurt her feelings by ignoring her. I guess this the 19th century equivalent of putting a ring on it. I'm excited to see how their marriage turns out considering that he's an orphan country doctor and she's the mayor's daughter. Something tells me she won't take too well to having much less to live on.

Fred and Mary, so far, are my favorite couple. I'm right at the part where Fred's uncle Featherstone dies. Featherstone has a large fortune and it seems as if he's going to leave it to Fred, which would allow him the means to marry. But if he doesn't give his fortune to Fred, then he's without a living and will have to find some occupation. Mary is the girl next door who Fred's always known, but now comes to love. These are always my favorite couples. Mary's sensible and she's basically told Fred that she won't marry him unless he becomes a responsible man. I hope these two end up together.

First book: Middlemarch by George Eliot

2009-10-05T23:13:00.000-07:00

I thought I'd ease into my new project by picking a book that fits into a genre I already know and love. Middlemarch is an English novel set in the 1830s about provincial life, marriage, class, etc. Basically it's very suited to me.

I don't really know much about the book. I didn't read the introduction so I don't know any spoilers going into it. I'm about 3 chapters in and so far we've been introduced to the Brooke sisters, Dorothea and Cecilia, young women who've come to live with their bachelor uncle after their parents die. I'll have to get through more before I can really discuss the book, but so far I'm enjoying it.

The List

2009-09-26T21:37:00.000-07:00

Here is the list I'll be working from, courtesy of Daniel S. Burt's The Novel 100: A Ranking of the Greatest Novels of All Time. I've read 22 of them already. I reserve the right to either re-read or skip. The ones I've already read are marked with an * and bold and will updated as I read them.

1. Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes
2. War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
3. Ulysses by James Joyce
4. In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust
5. The Brothers Karamazov by Feodor Dostoevsky
6. Moby Dick by Herman Melville
7. Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert*
8. Middlemarch by George Eliot* (finished 11/1/2009)
9. The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann
10. The Tale of Genji by Murasaki Shikibu
11. Emma by Jane Austen*
12. Bleak House by Charles Dickens
13. Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy*
14. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain*
15. Tom Jones by Henry Fielding
16. Great Expectations by Charles Dickens*
17. Absalom, Absalom! by William Faulkner
18. The Ambassadors by Henry James
19. One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
20. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald*
21. To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf
22. Crime and Punishment Feodor Dostoevesky
23. The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner
24. Vanity Fair by William Makepeace Thackeray*
25. Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
26. Finnegans Wake by James Joyce
27. The Man without Qualities by Robert Musil
28. Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon
29. The Portrait of a Lady by Henry James
30. Women in Love by D.H. Lawrence
31. The Red and the Black by Stendhal
32. Tristram Shandy by Laurence Sterne
33. Dead Souls by Nikolai Gogol
34. Tess of the D'Ubervilles by Thomas Hardy*
35. Buddenbrooks by Thomas Mann
36. Le Pere Goriot by Honore de Balzac
37. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce*
38. Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte*
39. The Tin Drum by Gunter Grass
40. Mollow; Malone Dies; The Unnamable by Samuel Beckett
41. Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen*
42. The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne*
43. Fathers and Sons by Ivan Turgenev
44. Nostromo by Joseph Conrad
45. Beloved by Toni Morrison
46. An American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser
47. Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov*
48. The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing
49. Clarissa by Samuel Richardson
50. Dream of the Red Chamber by Cao Xuequin
51. The Trial by Franz Kafka
52. Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte*
53. The Red Badge of Courage by Stephen Crane
54. The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
55. Petersburg by Andrey Bely
56. Things Fall Apart by Chinue Achebe
57. The Princess of Cleves by Madame de Lafayette
58. The Stranger by Albert Camus
59. My Antonia by Willa Cather (finished 11/23/09)
60. The Counterfeiters by Andre Gide
61. The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton*
62. The Good Soldier by Ford Madox Ford
63. The Awakening by Kate Chopin*
64. A Passage to India by E.M. Forster
65. Herzog by Saul Bellow
66. Germinal by Emile Zola
67. Call it Sleep by Henry Roth
68. U.S.A. Trilogy by John Dos Passos
69. Hunger by Knut Hamsun
70. Berlin Alexanderplatz by Alfred Doblin
71. Cities of Salt by Abd al-Rahman Munif
72. The Death of Artemio Cruz by Carloes Fuentes
73. A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway
74. Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh* (finished summer 2010)
75. The Last Chronicle of Barset by Anthony Trollope
76. The Pickwick Papers by Charles Dickens
77. Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe
78. The Sorrows of Young Werther by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
79. Candide by Voltaire
80. Native Son by Richard Wright
81. Under the Volcano by Malcolm Lowry
82. Oblomov by Ivan Goncharov
83. Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston*
84. Waverley by Sir Walter Scott
85. Snow Country by Kawabata Yasunari
86. Nineteen Eight-Four by George Orwell*
87. The Betrothed by Alessandro Manzoni
88. The Last of the Mohicans by James Fenimore Cooper
89. Uncle Tom's Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe
90. Les Miserables by Victor Hugo*
91. On the Road by Jack Keurouac
92. Frankenstein by Mary Shelley*
93. The Leopard by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa
94. The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger*
95. The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins
96. The Good Soldier Svejk by Jaroslav Hasek
97. Dracula by Bram Stoker*
98. The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas
99. The Hound of Baskervilles by Arthur Conan Doyle
100. Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell* (finished 2010)

The Beginning

2009-09-26T21:10:00.000-07:00

My new project.

I started the old 9 to 5 a few weeks ago. My first foray into full-time employment has come with a number of consequences. These include being too tired to cook after work, too tired to go out after work, too tired to go to the gym after work...you get the picture. What I'm not too tired to do, however, is sit. Sit and read. The two go hand in hand.

I'm a big reader. When I was younger, I'd spend hours and hours reading books while my sisters played with their Barbies. In high school, I read every book assigned in English class. No Cliff's Notes for me. In college I was an English major, much to my Mom's chagrin, and I got to read a little bit of everything from Chaucer to Dickens to Austen to Shakespeare to Amy Tan to T.C. Boyle to Nathaniel Hawthorne to Neil LaBute. When I started law school, you're welcome Mom, the fiction fell to the wayside and was replaced by casebooks and outlines. Now that I'm starting my career at a relatively low pressure firm which lets me work normal working hours I have time again to go back to my old favorite pasttime.

Loving to read doesn't mean I'm good at picking out books to read. I read the fun stuff (Twilights, Harry Potters, The Southern Vampire novels). I read the old stuff (Age of Innocence, Persuasion, Les Miserables). Now I'm trying to read the good stuff. So in an attempt to get a well-rounded selection of books that are worth reading, I'm looking to Daniel S. Burt's The Novel 100: A Ranking of the Greatest Novels of All Time to give it to me.

I decided I'm going to read my way through The Novel 100 because I realize that even though I'm an avid reader many of the classics, both old and new, have eluded me. I tend to read Victorian literature, novels about girls looking to marry and the men who take advantage of them. Lacking in my reading history are the great adventure novels, the novels about war and morality, the novels I just haven't heard of. So this is me remedying these omissions.

I picked this particular list because it seems to be the most well-rounded. Times list of Top 100 Novels only goes back to 1923. The Guardian's list is too British. This list contains most of the books on these lists and other top 100 novels lists I've perused.

I won't go in order and I won't give myself a set time period to accomplish this. Realistically, I know I can't read 100 books in one year, so I'll give myself however long it takes. Here I go. Read along with or read my thoughts or do both. I'll just be here, reading and thinking.