Booking it

TIME has a list of what it calls the 100 best English-language novels from 1923 to now. (Via Kottke.)

Here are the ones I've read:

• "An American Tragedy." (and Rob's uncle Mike was in the movie made from it, "A Place in the Sun." He plays the motorcycle cop who pulls over Liz Taylor for speeding. "Third time this summer, Miss Vickers.")
• "Animal Farm." I read this for school, and loved it. I distinctly remember writing an alternate ending in which Boxer kicks his way out of the truck taking him to the glue factory. Uh, did I need a spoiler warning there?
• "Are You There God, It's Me, Margaret?" My mom didn't explain periods to me, Judy Blume did.
• "Beloved." Like "Roots," it seared the horrors of slavery into the minds of those who never knew them.
• "Catch-22." It's a book, it's an expression, it's a classic.
• "Gone With the Wind." Because there's so much more to it than the movie, as sweeping and grand as it was, could ever show. I still think of Scarlett remembering her mother whenever she caught the aroma of lemon verbena on the air, and of her mother keeping her own secret love hidden till the day she died.
• "The Grapes of Wrath." Rob and I were just in Salinas for the first time recently, and I felt kind of hushed by the place because of this amazing book.
• "Gravity's Rainbow." Ha, no, I'm just kidding. I was an English major but I still don't have the guts to tackle this puppy.
• "The Great Gatsby." St. Paul's own F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote it. Bill Gates reportedly has the last line engraved around the ceiling of his library. Rob and I once used a quote from it for a party invitation. This book has it all.
• "Light in August." When I started college, the whole freshman class had to read this. I think I was way too young to appreciate it.
• "The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe." Not a kid's book, really, but often presented as one. And soon to be a movie. Wow, that'll be ... weird.
• "Lolita." It's 50 this year, and probably couldn't be written today. Recently a publicist for the book's 50th anniversary re-release called me to promote it, but it drove me nuts that he didn't know how to pronounce "Nabokov." (He said "Na-BOK-ov." Didn't he ever hear the Police song?)
• "Lord of the Flies." And if you haven't read it, at least watch the genius "Simpsons" parody of it.
• "Lord of the Rings." I am slowly finishing the third book now, after a year or more of having left it on the shelf halfway finished. I can appreciate what people see in fantasy, but I'll never be a cultie.
• "Never Let Me Go." Whoa, a 2005 book on the list, and one I read so recently it's still incredibly fresh in my mind. I loved this, though it did remind me a tad of "Clonus," a "Mystery Science" movie.
• "1984." Sometimes I feel like I am still living it today. We have always been at war with Eurasia.
• "On The Road." Of this book Capote supposedly said: "it's not writing, it's typing?" To them I say this: "So in America when the sun goes down and I sit on the old broken-down river pier watching the long, long skies over New Jersey and sense all that raw land that rolls in one unbelievable huge bulge over to the West Coast, and all that road going, all the people dreaming in the immensity of it, and in Iowa I know by now the children must be crying in the land where they let the children cry, and tonight the stars'll be out, and don't you know that God is Pooh Bear? The evening star must be drooping and shedding her sparkler dims on the prairie, which is just before the coming of complete night that blesses the earth, darkens all rivers, cups the peaks and folds the final shore in, and nobody, nobody knows what's going to happen to anybody besides the forlorn rags of growing old…”
• "Portnoy's Complaint." Read this in Literature of Judaism in college. Never looked at liver the same way again.
• "Rabbit, Run." I have mercilessly mocked Updike in the past, maybe because I'm not a white male growing up in 1960, but I'm almost interested enough to re-read it now, as a period piece.
• "Slaughterhouse Five." And anyone who knows me from Minnesota days knows that I have Dave W. to thank for this one. Dave who carries a copy with him, who dressed as a Tralfamadorian for Halloween, who regularly exchanges letters with Kurt Vonnegut.
• "The Spy Who Came in from the Cold." One of the few books my mom kept in the bathroom, for some reason, along with a biography of Jonas Salk. Over the years, I read both a zillion times. You spend a lot of time in the bathroom of your childhood house. Why I was too stupid to ever figure out that I could store other books in there I cannot say. But I sure know a lot about the polio vaccine.