Left of the Dial

100 Greatest Novels

I grabbed this here list of the 100 greatest English-language novels since 1900 from the aptly named List of the Day.

1.     ULYSSES by James Joyce
2.     THE GREAT GATSBY by F. Scott Fitzgerald
3.     A PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS A YOUNG MAN by James Joyce
4.     LOLITA by Vladimir Nabokov
5.     BRAVE NEW WORLD by Aldous Huxley
6.     THE SOUND AND THE FURY by William Faulkner
7.     CATCH-22 by Joseph Heller
8.     DARKNESS AT NOON by Arthur Koestler
9.     SONS AND LOVERS by D.H. Lawrence
10.  THE GRAPES OF WRATH by John Steinbeck

11.  UNDER THE VOLCANO by Malcolm Lowry
12.  THE WAY OF ALL FLESH by Samuel Butler
13.  1984 by George Orwell
14.  I, CLAUDIUS by Robert Graves
15.  TO THE LIGHTHOUSE by Virginia Woolf
16.  AN AMERICAN TRAGEDY by Theodore Dreiser
17.  THE HEART IS A LONELY HUNTER by Carson McCullers
18.  SLAUGHTERHOUSE-FIVE by Kurt Vonnegut
19.  INVISIBLE MAN by Ralph Ellison
20.  NATIVE SON by Richard Wright

21.  HENDERSON THE RAIN KING by Saul Bellow
22.  APPOINTMENT IN SAMARRA by John O'Hara
23.  U.S.A. (trilogy) by John Dos Passos
24.  WINESBURG, OHIO by Sherwood Anderson
25.  A PASSAGE TO INDIA by E.M. Forster
26.  THE WINGS OF THE DOVE by Henry James
27.  THE AMBASSADORS by Henry James
28.  TENDER IS THE NIGHT by F. Scott Fitzgerald
29.  THE STUDS LONIGAN TRILOGY by James T. Farrell

30.  THE GOOD SOLDIER by Ford Madox Ford
31.  ANIMAL FARM by George Orwell
32.  THE GOLDEN BOWL by Henry James
33.  SISTER CARRIE by Theodore Dreiser
34.  A HANDFUL OF DUST by Evelyn Waugh
35.  AS I LAY DYING by William Faulkner
36.  ALL THE KING'S MEN by Robert Penn Warren
37.  THE BRIDGE OF SAN LUIS REY by Thornton Wilder
38.  HOWARDS END by E.M. Forster
39.  GO TELL IT ON THE MOUNTAIN by James Baldwin
40.  THE HEART OF THE MATTER by Graham Greene

41.  LORD OF THE FLIES by William Golding
42.  DELIVERANCE by James Dickey
43.  A DANCE TO THE MUSIC OF TIME (series) by Anthony Powell
44.  POINT COUNTER POINT by Aldous Huxley
45.  THE SUN ALSO RISES by Ernest Hemingway
46.  THE SECRET AGENT by Joseph Conrad
47.  NOSTROMO by Joseph Conrad
48.  THE RAINBOW by D.H. Lawrence
49.  WOMEN IN LOVE by D.H. Lawrence
50.  TROPIC OF CANCER by Henry Miller

51.  THE NAKED AND THE DEAD by Norman Mailer
52.  PORTNOY'S COMPLAINT by Philip Roth
53.  PALE FIRE by Vladimir Nabokov
54.  LIGHT IN AUGUST by William Faulkner
55.  ON THE ROAD by Jack Kerouac
56.  THE MALTESE FALCON by Dashiell Hammett
57.  PARADE'S END by Ford Madox Ford
58.  THE AGE OF INNOCENCE by Edith Wharton
59.  ZULEIKA DOBSON by Max Beerbohm
60.  THE MOVIEGOER by Walker Percy

61.  DEATH COMES FOR THE ARCHBISHOP by Willa Cather
62.  FROM HERE TO ETERNITY by James Jones
63.  THE WAPSHOT CHRONICLES by John Cheever
64.  THE CATCHER IN THE RYE by J.D. Salinger
65.  A CLOCKWORK ORANGE by Anthony Burgess
66.  OF HUMAN BONDAGE by W. Somerset Maugham
67.  HEART OF DARKNESS by Joseph Conrad
68.  MAIN STREET by Sinclair Lewis
69.  THE HOUSE OF MIRTH by Edith Wharton
70.  THE ALEXANDRIA QUARTET by Lawrence Durell

71.  A HIGH WIND IN JAMAICA by Richard Hughes
72.  A HOUSE FOR MR BISWAS by V.S. Naipaul
73.  THE DAY OF THE LOCUST by Nathanael West
74.  A FAREWELL TO ARMS by Ernest Hemingway
75.  SCOOP by Evelyn Waugh
76.  THE PRIME OF MISS JEAN BRODIE by Muriel Spark
77.  FINNEGANS WAKE by James Joyce
78.  KIM by Rudyard Kipling
79.  A ROOM WITH A VIEW by E.M. Forster
80.  BRIDESHEAD REVISITED by Evelyn Waugh

81.  THE ADVENTURES OF AUGIE MARCH by Saul Bellow
82.  ANGLE OF REPOSE by Wallace Stegner
83.  A BEND IN THE RIVER by V.S. Naipaul
84.  THE DEATH OF THE HEART by Elizabeth Bowen
85.  LORD JIM by Joseph Conrad
86.  RAGTIME by E.L. Doctorow
87.  THE OLD WIVES' TALE by Arnold Bennett
88.  THE CALL OF THE WILD by Jack London
89.  LOVING by Henry Green
90.  MIDNIGHT'S CHILDREN by Salman Rushdie

91.  TOBACCO ROAD by Erskine Caldwell
92.  IRONWEED by William Kennedy
93.  THE MAGUS by John Fowles
94.  WIDE SARGASSO SEA by Jean Rhys
95.  UNDER THE NET by Iris Murdoch
96.  SOPHIE'S CHOICE by William Styron
97.  THE SHELTERING SKY by Paul Bowles
98.  THE POSTMAN ALWAYS RINGS TWICE by James M. Cain
99.  THE GINGER MAN by J.P. Donleavy
100. THE MAGNIFICENT AMBERSONS by Booth Tarkington 

I believe I have read nine of these, but there are at least a few more that I started and never finished...and at least half a dozen I was supposed to read in college but didn’t. I would love to have read them all...I think. Looking at it again, I realize how much I disliked several of the ones I did read. I mean, Angle of Repose was brilliant. Just stunning. On the other hand, The Magus? Gimme a break. Sucked. Suh-huh-huh-hucked. 

Not that I’m opinionated or nothin’. 

Out, damn Dore!

Well, this is interesting.

J.K. Rowling has outed one of the main characters of her best-selling Harry Potter series, telling fans in New York that the wizard Albus Dumbledore, head of Hogwarts school, is gay.

Speaking at Carnegie Hall on Friday night in her first U.S. tour in seven years, Rowling confirmed what some fans had always suspected -- that she "always thought Dumbledore was gay," reported entertainment Web site E! Online.

Rowling said Dumbledore fell in love with the charming wizard Gellert Grindelwald but when Grindelwald turned out to be more interested in the dark arts than good, Dumbledore was "terribly let down" and went on to destroy his rival.

That love, she said, was Dumbledore's "great tragedy."

"Falling in love can blind us to an extent," she said.

The audience reportedly fell silent after the admission -- then erupted into applause.

I must say, while the evidence was unmistakably there—it was pretty damn blatant—I didn't really take it into account when thinking about the last two books in the series. And one of my biggest problems was how incredibly out of character the young Dumbledore was revealed to have acted. I felt that was a tremendous mistake on Rowling's part, designed to add depth and complexity but in reality merely tarnishing yet another hero, so that in the end there was no one unambiguously heroic—hell, by the end, I barely thought there was anyone truly likeable. Certainly not Harry and with the revelation that (SPOILER!) Dumbledore had at least temporarily flirted with, essentially, magical Aryanism, not even ol' Albus, greatest wizard of all time and kindly father figure.

Ah, but love? Love can make us out wildly out of character and leads oh so many of us to do things which are incredibly stupid and frankly inexplicable later. Why, just look at the normally quite rational and brilliant Top Management and her one glaring blind spot as regards love.

I still think the series sadly and unnecessarily flawed. But I'm certainly more than willing—happy, in fact—to admit it may not be quite as disappointing as I'd previously thought.

What Kind of Reader Are You?

But what if you've read every book in TWO of the catagories they gave you?

What Kind of Reader Are You? Your Result: Dedicated Reader   You are always trying to find the time to get back to your book. You are convinced that the world would be a much better place if only everyone read more.
Literate Good Citizen
Obsessive-Compulsive Bookworm
Book Snob
Fad Reader
Non-Reader
What Kind of Reader Are You? Create Your Own Quiz

Stranger in a Strange Land

Wow. This I did not expect. Reckon I'll have to read something by him now, huh? [Like a knife to the heart of one loyal Left of the Dial reader was that admission.]

Which Author's Fiction are You?

Robert Heinlein wrote you - you stranger in a strange land, you.
Take this quiz!

H/T: Everybody Knows

Fifth Sentence Meme

From the redoubtable KC at the wonderful Cabbage Patch comes the following meme:

Grab the nearest book.
1. Open it to page 161.
2. Find the fifth full sentence.
3. Post the text of the sentence along with these instructions.
4. Don't search around looking for the coolest book you can find. Do what's actually next to you.

Here's mine:

"He wanted to be noticed."

Sheesh. As if everyone won't immediately know what book that's from…

Them what got blogs and feel like playing, go fer it; either post your answer and/or link in the comments or just post at your own joint. Them what don't but do, leave your answer down in the comments, yo.

It's All About Meme

So. The redoubtable Top Management tagged me with this here meme a while back (as in, about eight damn months ago) and, in my oh speedy way, I finally responded. Aren't you lucky?

1. One book that changed your life?
Batman: The Killing Joke, by Alan Moore and Brian Bolland. The single-greatest Batman story ever (followed by Batman: Year One by Frank Miller and David Mazzucchelli). A relatively straight-forward story about the Batman and the Joker and the way their fates are inextricably intertwined, yet with incredibly sophisticated but crystal-clear storytelling, perfect characterization, immaculate pacing and phenomenal dialogue, all brought to life by the finest art any Batman book has ever had (although Mazzucchelli’s art for Batman: Year One comes damn close).

The Killing Joke led me to other—honestly, superior—works, such (in order of discovery) Swamp Thing, Watchmen, V for Vendetta and Miracleman (as well as, much later, after they’d been written, From Hell, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen and so many others). He is not only one of the finest writers of the past thirty years, he’s one of the most important, something which will, I suspect, be blindingly obvious in another thirty years.

2. One book you have read more than once?
One? In honor of his passing, I'll go with Welcome to the Monkey House, my favorite Kurt Vonnegut book, which I’d guess I've read a half-dozen times at least—and a few stories from it as recently as yesterday. In fact, I read stories from it out loud to Top Management while she rocked Max to sleep as a newborn. Because what says familial bliss and romance like a Vonnegut story?

I've also read the books in Fred Chappell's series of novels about Joe Robert Kirkman and his family—I Am One of You Forever, Brighten the Corner Where You Are, Farewell, I'm Bound to Leave You and Look Back All the Green Valley I don't know how many times, and each time they get more magnificent than the last...and they're magnificent from the first; I've actually read a few of the chapters to the girls as bedtime stories, and did so just last night. His tales are as accessible as any pulp writer’s, but as befits North Carolina’s poet laureate, his prose is luminous. Innerestingly, actually, his first chapters tend to be much more challenging, often quite dense, in stark contrast to each novel’s subsequent chapters, almost as though he’s testing the reader, making sure they’re up to the task, a sort of “you want to play, you gotta pay” thang. It is well worth the effort, to put it mildly. Gorgeous, hysterical, haunting works of art.

3. One book you would want on a desert island?
Oh, what the hell. I'll cheat and go the easy (but truthful) route and say the collected works of William Shakespeare. Either that or some sort of survivalist’s guide since, let’s be honest, it’s obvious I wouldn’t last two weeks otherwise.

4. One book that made you laugh?
The Restaurant at the End of the Universe. I don’t think I've ever laughed that hard at a book. Although I do recall reading some Paul Zindel book in eighth grade (during geography, which may explain why I failed geography) and being unable to keep from laughing hysterically at one point, which kinda blew my cover of Assiduously Studying the Major Exports of Guatemala.

5. One book that made you cry?
Across the Puddingstone Dam. I've read it five times and it’s made me cry every damn time. Also All the Places to Love, which is sheer poetry.

But Puddingstone's even better.

6. One book you wish had been written?
A final chapter to the His Dark Materials trilogy that was remotely worthy of the first installment. And, of course, anything else by J.R.R. Tolkien, especially, say, a huge collection of short stories featuring our beloved characters; the scene he wrote which was collected…in the Silmarillion maybe?...showing Gandalf in an inn talking to Thorin, and first broaching the idea of employing a hobbit as a thief was magical. Would that we had an enormous book of such.

7. One book you wish had never been written?
I'll go along with Top Management and say that I’m not comfortable with this question. But I will say that one of my major problems with so much speculative fiction—the hoity-toity name for sci-fi, horror, fantasy, alternate histories and the like—is that authors spend so much time creating these amazing worlds that they’re loathe to leave them. And the result, alas, is often novel after novel which fail to match the initial offerings and instead simply provide diminishing returns. So I guess I'm not going to name names, but I do wish some authors knew when to leave well enough alone, rather than tarnish the reputation of the original works by cranking out such substandard sequels. As Miles said, "Take the horn out of your mouth, [friend]."

8. One book you are currently reading?
1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die. Apparently, I must live a long, long life. S’okay with me. And I'm currently reading The Horse and His Boy to the girls at bedtime.

9. One book you have been meaning to read?
The Adventures of Augie March by Saul Bellow. Got it. It’s been sitting on the night stand since…well, since Virginia. It made the westward trek, it just hasn’t gotten quite as far as mine eyeballs yet.

10. Now tag five people:
I shall not. But if any of my regular Left of the Dialians who are sans blog wanna chime in down in the comments, that’d be awesome. Bring it, yo.

Man o' Steel

So I got a wicked groovy present this week. Well, two, actually, but Top Management says I’m not allowed to talk about one of ‘em.

The other one is this:

How gorgeous is that? It is not only one of my favorite pieces of art ever, it is probably my single-favorite Superman shot of all-time. The juxtaposition of the photorealistic background with the cartoony, European-with-just-a-hint-of-Japanese Superman figure is incredibly powerful.

Not to mention that Superman just plain looks freakin’ cool.

This piece was done by Dave Taylor about a dozen years ago and is, in fact, the first time I ever encountered his artwork; I was so stunned that I hired him on the spot. We went on to do an awful lot of work together, much of which I'm as proud of as anything I've ever worked on, and I’m delighted to be working with him again after a gap of about eight years. And apparently the poor sod’s pleased enough to be working with me that he felt compelled to give me a pretty. I suspect it’s my smooth moves on the dance floor. Gets ‘em every time.

(Actually, he said he sent it to me so I’d finally shut up about the damn thing. Artistes.)

Nietzsche's Family Circus

Left of the Dialian Tom E pointed me to this site. It’s…it’s…you know, just describing it doesn’t really do it justice. It’s two great tastes that taste great together, but that’s not quite right either. It’s as though you combined, say, filet mignon and, I dunno, whipped cream. And it somehow tastes good.

Not that I actually like filet mignon. But you get the point.

Anyhoo, that’s this: random quotes from Nietzsche paired with random Family Circus art.

And it works. Every single time.

Just Us and the Cat

“The fish is not wrong.” Words of wisdom. And one of my favorite phrases ever.

This article is nearly four years old now, but I found myself thinking of it when pal Karen mentioned that she stolen two of the pieces from Left of the Dial, the thief, for classroom use. My rage was mitigated ever so slightly by the fact that I was therefore further influencing yet another young and malleable generation, even if it was in a secondhand sort o’ way. You’d think such brainmolding would get old and yet it really doesn’t. Also soothing me somewhat was the fact that I'd previously stolen both of them for Left of the Dial. Whatever. Shut up.

Anyhoo, here's a very long excerpt, but the entire piece is worth your time.

CAT PEOPLE
by LOUIS MENAND
What Dr. Seuss really taught us
December 16, 2002

The Cat in the Hat was a Cold War invention. His value as an analyst of the psychology of his time, the late nineteen-fifties, is readily appreciated: transgression and hypocrisy are the principal themes of his little story. But he also stands in an intimate and paradoxical relation to national-security policy. He was both its creature and its nemesis—”the unraveller of the very culture that produced him and that made him a star. This is less surprising than it may seem. He was, after all, a cat.

Every reader of "The Cat in the Hat" will feel that the story revolves around a piece of withheld information: what private demons or desires compelled this mother to leave two young children at home all day, with the front door unlocked, under the supervision of a fish? Terrible as the cat is, the woman is lucky that her children do not fall prey to some more insidious intruder. The mother's abandonment is the psychic wound for which the antics of the cat make so useless a palliative. The children hate the cat. They take no joy in his stupid pet tricks, and they resent his attempt to distract them from what they really want to be doing, which is staring out the window for a sign of their mother's return. Next to that consummation, a cake on a rake is a pretty feeble entertainment.

This is the fish's continually iterated point, and the fish is not wrong. The cat's pursuit of its peculiar idea of fun only cranks up the children's anxiety. It raises our anxiety level as well, since it keeps us from doing what we really want to be doing, which is accompanying the mother on her murderous or erotic errand. Possibly the mother has engaged the cat herself, in order to throw the burden of suspicion onto the children. "What did you do?" she asks them when she returns home, knowing that the children cannot put the same question to her without disclosing their own violation of domestic taboos. They are each other's alibi. When you cheat, you lie.

[snip]

The cat's improvisations with the objets trouvés in the home he has invaded are obviously an allegory for his creator's performance with the two hundred and twenty arbitrary words he has been assigned by his publisher. The cat is a bricoleur. He has no system—or, rather, his system is to have no system. He is compelled to make meaning from whatever is there. He fails, the bricolage topples, the fish ends up in a teapot; and this hint of semantic instability is expanded on in Dr. Seuss's most difficult work (No. 26 all-time), "The Cat in the Hat Comes Back," published in 1958.

"The Cat in the Hat Comes Back" is the "Grammatology" of Dr. Seuss. It is a book about language and structure, those Cold War obsessions. That the "Cat" books' appearance coincided with the publication of Noam Chomsky's "Syntactic Structures" (1957) and Lévi-Strauss's "Structural Anthropology" (1958) is, as they used to say during the Cold War, no accident. Chomsky's work in linguistics, it might be noted, was supported in part by the U.S. Army Signal Corps, the Air Force's Office of Scientific Research and Air Research and Development Command, and the Office of Naval Research. Not all of the increase in military spending went into missile research.

Synopsis of "The Cat in the Hat Comes Back" is easy enough. Abandoned again by their feckless mother, those two sad sacks, Sally and me, are consigned to shovelling snow from a recent blizzard. The cat chooses the moment to make his return. Sally urges her brother to bar his entrance ("Don't you talk to that cat. / That cat is a bad one"). The cat brushes off the brushoff and enters the house, where he is discovered soon afterward in the tub, eating a cake. He is banished from the tub by the boy ("I have no time for tricks. / I must go back and dig"), but when the water is drained a pink stain is left. The rest of the action concerns the problem of getting rid of the stain. It is first transferred, by the cat, to a series of household items, some plainly off limits to the children, including the mother's dress, the father's shoes, and the bed in what is described as "Dad's bedroom" (no doubt a response to the mother's extramarital adventures). Unable to erase the stain, the cat reveals, under his hat, various little cats named for the letters of the alphabet ("He helps me a lot. / This is Little Cat A").

These semiotic felines do exactly what a deconstructionist would predict: rather than containing the stain, they disseminate it. Everything turns pink. The chain of signification is interminable and, being interminable, indeterminate. The semantic hygiene fetishized by the children is rudely violated; the "system" they imagined is revealed to have no inside and no outside. It is revealed to be, in fact, just another bricolage. The only way to end the spreading stain of semiosis is to unleash what, since it cannot be named, must be termed "that which is not a sign." This is the Voom, the final agent in the cat's arsenal. The Voom eradicates the pink queerness of a textuality without boundaries; whiteness is back, though it is now the purity of absence—one wants to say (and, at this point, why not?) of abstinence. The association with nuclear holocaust and its sterilizing fallout, wiping the planet clean of pinkness and pinkos, is impossible to ignore. It is a strange story for teaching people how to read.

When you look through the secondary literature on "The Cat in the Hat," you read that children instinctively respond to the cat's sense of mischief. I wonder how many children really do react that way. My own identification, as a child, was entirely with the fish. I didn't admire his hysteria, of course (very uncool). But I understood what he was trying, with his limited vocabulary, to say, which is that "fun" is only a distraction from the reality of separation and abandonment. Pink snow, and those personified genitalia, Thing One and Thing Two, are no substitute for what we have lost. We don't want to be amused; we don't even want to amuse ourselves. We want to be taken care of.

Later on, in the nineteen-sixties, I, along with many other Americans born around 1952, began to understand the cat's appeal—in particular, the whole Thing One and Thing Two business. The fish, let's face it, was an uptight little dude, a tin-pot Puritan, and the domestic sphere in which he served as resident superego proved, on closer examination, to be a site of exclusion and oppression. New combinations seemed possible—seemed necessary. Maybe bricolage and différance were the way, after all. Misrule became the new rule, and the cat was its cockeyed lord. Having learned to read, we learned to misread. Phonics, which was supposed to make us into superscientists, cooking up formulas for landing those ICBMs right in Khrushchev's kitchen, had unleashed instead the spirit of "anything goes." It was Pinkisme partout.

Dr. Seuss, too, flush with the wealth his contributions to the national security had brought him, fell prey to the countercultural forces that his own cat, one of the Cold War's most potent unguided missiles, had helped set in motion. In 1971, he published "The Lorax," a book about the environment that was much despised by the patriotic timber industry, and in 1984 he brought out "The Butter Battle Book," a work criticizing (of all things) the arms race. "The Butter Battle Book" was attacked in The New Republic for being soft on Communism. That's not the kind of thing people used to say about "The Pokey Little Puppy." Dr. Seuss took the same course as that other doctor who hitched a ride on the baby boom and the government gravy train it rode through school and into college: Dr. Spock. They went pink. (We won't get into the later career of Noam Chomsky.)

But that was then, a long time gone. Now we have something different: we have "anything goes" without the spirit. "Transgression," "subversion," "deconstruction" are praise words bestowed as solemnly as "structure" and "order" once were, little gold stars awarded to rappers and television comics. Cakes on rakes are everywhere. A million cats cavort frantically for our attention. Even the fish has been co-opted (though what choice did he have?). "Enjoy!" cries the fish. "Consume! Everything will be fine when your mother gets home." But the fish is whistling into the wind. The mother has left, and she's never coming back. It's just us and that goddam cat.

Two additional notes:

1) Thing One and Thing Two are not personified genitalia, they’re personified bodily fluids and
B) the stain on the mother’s dress predates Monica and yet could not more clearly be the same thing, unless of course it’s entirely a metaphorical stain which I suppose is possible.

So Ted Geisel was either a Freudian or a pre-cog—take your pick. Either way, it’s just another indication of his underappreciated genius.

Wonder Girls

So I’m sitting on the couch in the living room and I suddenly realize that The Rose is right next to me, having materialized in that way she has, like a cat with a transporter.

She’s looking at me with a small smile, so I say, in my oh so benevolent fatherly way, “Yes?”

She tilts her head. “Does Wonder Girl have a daddy?”

“Uh…” I say, searching my decrepit memory banks for the little I've ever known of Wonder Girl’s twisted continuity. “No. No, I don’t think she does.”

Her small smile because a triumphant grin. “Yes! I knew it!” she hisses, and runs off down the hall.

I am left with a feeling of vague uneasiness the rest of the night.