1. To Kill A Mockingbird by Harper Lee: Race is only one aspect of this wonderful novel, a crucial component, but in service to the overarching story about family, fatherhood, and trying to be a good person. 2. The Magus by John Fowles: one of the most powerful, inventive, and riveting novel of ideas I’ve ever read. See #6. By the time I got to the last few pages, I was pacing the floor. I couldn’t wait to see how it was going to dance itself off the stage, and I dreaded it ending. 3. Catch 22 Joseph Heller: Original in style and attitude. Catch 22 changed the comic style of novels. 4. Little Big Man by Thomas Berger: A great novel that keeps its engrossing pace until the end. I decided not to name two books by the same author; otherwise, I’d include Berger’s Reinhart in Love. 5. The Moviegoer by Walker Percy: Another novel of ideas. It’s about finding meaning in life such that you want to continue living it. 6. The Floating Opera by John Barth: Like Fowles’s masterpiece, this underappreciated novel is a story incorporating an intellectual feast. It’s Barth’s first novel, and it’s not the wild po-mo metafiction ride he became infatuated with. The companion novel, The End of the Road, is likewise a philosophical argument through a fictional narrative. 7. The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins: My one non-fictional book. Dawkins’s passion for his subject and his thesis is downright uplifting. It’s a mind-altering experience, and, no, he doesn’t dwell on religion or atheism here. It’s about the foundation for life and the nature of man. As he quotes someone approvingly, when it comes to what is life, and how do we understand human nature, you can take all the books written before 1859 and throw them away—because they are just wrong. Now, that’s audacity. I would ameliorate and allow a Neo-Darwinian synthesis to old ideas and philosophies. But, without this synthesis, you’re just going around in circles. Nothing in thought and in all of man’s artifices makes sense without an understanding of Darwinian evolution underlying the formation of our character. 8. My Life and Hard Times by James Thurber: From homely incidents, Thurber creates hilarious stories about the eccentric in ordinary people. His streamline effortless prose (along with others at The New Yorker) changed how writers wrote. See his fables, too. 9. Right Ho, Jeeves by P. G. Wodehouse: Wodehouse achieved perfect pitch with his virtuoso performances more times than seems humanly possible. Here’s one at a sublime level. Gussie Fink-Nottle getting snockered and delivering the prizes at the boys’ grammar school has been called the funniest 15 pages in English lit, and that’s hard to argue with. 10. Comfort Me With Apples by Peter De Vries: Unfortunately, De Vries is mostly forgotten. That’s unforgivable. A unique comic sensibility. There are multiple quotable lines on every page. This novel is pre-black humor De Vries. For a darker De Vries, try Let Me Count the Ways or The Vale of Laughter.
Posted on: Fri, 12 Sep 2014 04:22:16 +0000
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