Since I’ve got this blog thing working so well, I thought I might make a list of my favorite books. I did an exercise on Facebook the other day, “which of these books have you read?” type of thing and I was disappointed in how much Jane Austen there was on the list. So over the next little while, I’ll try to make a list of 100 books that I think are good.
Some early organizing ideas –
1. If an author has a series, and I like them all, I’ll only list one.
2. I’ll try to make comments as I go along.
3. I’ll number them, but it doesn’t mean that number one is the best, just that its what I want to talk about at the time.
1.
I love the entire series of Aubrey and Maturin novels, this one is probably the best, with the best description of a sea battle and great open heart surgery, as well as love, lust and inedible english food.
2.
I’ve gotten a lot of enjoyment over the years with John LeCarre, and I love to be in the world of George Smiley, seemingly ineffectual, nice guy trying to do right, using only the prodigious power of his intellect and his will. Smiley’s People only makes sense if you read Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy first, but both of them are well worth the read.
3.
Nobody does biography like Caro, and this description of Moses and his effect on New York is a wonderful description of American politics, city planning or the lack thereof, and the etiology of poor planning. Many people would say that Master of the Senate, about Lyndon Johnson is a more important work, but I’m not going to give Caro any props for the Johnson series until he completes the fourth and last book.
4.
I know almost nothing about Paul Scott, but his quartet about the end of the Raj in India (the Raj Quartet) is fantastic. I know it by heart, almost, and there was also a good TV adaptation. The themes are the end of colonialism, the problems of race and sectarianism, and at bottom, what is good and what is evil. I picked the last book, because for me its the most heart wrenching, but the whole series is good. There’s a fifth, an after thought called “Staying On” which is also good in a small way.
5.
If I measure how much I liked a book by how many times I read it, Tolkien’s great triology would be at the top. If I measured the greatness of a novel by how throughly I can get immersed in another world, ditto. I’ve got problems with the series. It’s got the seriousness of a ten year old telling you something important, and I think the hobbits are actually weird in some respects. On the other hand, good adventure writing puts ‘normal’ people, people we can identify with, into a foreign and exciting environment, Tolkein does this terrifically. I think the last book is the best.
6.
I don’t write much (or think much for that matter) about addiction in my own history or my life in an alcoholic world. I like much of Russell Banks’ work, including Cloudsplitter, his novel of John Brown, and The Sweet Hereafter, but I read this novel the way a kid watches a horror movie, hands over my eyes, peeking through my fingers.
7.
Cecelia Holland has given me much pleasure over my adult life. This novel of the Mongols is wonderfully written and allows me to see the world through a different set of values. The Mongols were 13th century terrorists, in the same way that aerial bombing of civilians is a terrorist act, but this novel gives a great insight into that world. Also notable by Ms. Holland are her medieval novels — The Earl, and The Kings in Winter (vikings and Ireland, great stuff.).
8.
I”m not sure that an anthology belongs in a ‘best of’ list, but this one wowed me. I read a lot of poetry, and I’m sure that Rumi and Nancy Oliver will make the lower portions of this list, but this collection of good poems was just about right.
9,
If you measure how much I like a book by how many times I reread it, this is at the top of the list. I also think its the “great american novel’ as it considers the matters of individualism, ambition, culture clash and the wilderness. It’s well written, and I particularly like the description of the union organizer in the beginning, complaining that his foot fungus starts to grow as he drives into Oregon from California.
10.
Any list of the best are of course, personal, and personally, there’s nothing I like better than a rollicking war novel. I’ve read this a couple of times, and its got the parts I like, seafaring, the good guys win in the end, and some excellent writing. What gets it into the top 100 is the twist. It’s a war novel written by a Quaker, and it helped me parse out my own pacificism, which makes it rise above its contemporaries.
