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You read the books, but not all characters are likable (just like real life). This list will no doubt spark discussion both for who it includes and for who it omits. I won’t tell you who is number one, but you know Scarlet O’Hara is on this list. Melanie made it, too.
4.) Scarlett O’Hara
Gone With the Wind
Author: Margaret Mitchell
For every fan who finds Scarlett O’Hara romantic and admirable, there is another who thinks her a selfish, altogether loathsome figure with few redeeming qualities.
48.) Melanie Hamilton Wilkes
Gone With the Wind
Author: Margaret Mitchell
Along with chief romantic rival Scarlett O’Hara, Melanie Hamilton Wilkes garners quite a bit of hatred as well. Many readers think of her as far too perfect to be relatable, insufferable at worst and boring at best.
Which literary characters do you really dislike? Link -via Interesting Pile
We’re thrilled to announce a new sub-blog we’re launching today, BitLit. Bit, as in binary digits, Lit, as in literature! As far as we know, this is unique to the blogosphere in that we’ll be serializing entire novels and short stories—even some poetry, many published by major publishers like Random House. Every day, a new chapter until the entire story is complete.
Plus, we’ll be interviewing authors and having contests to give away free, autographed copies of their books!
Today, we launch with three stories:
The first is an amazing short story called Nomen Ludi by Rob Beschizza, our pal over at boingboing. If you’re a fan of old computer games, like those created for the Amstrad CPC, if you love that kind of nostalgia, you’re going to love this one. You can read the entire story right here.
Next, we present the critically acclaimed, Frostbite, by David Wellington. Nipped by a wolf during an Arctic camping expedition, Cheyenne Clark suddenly finds herself feeling ferally frisky when the moon is up in Wellington’s far from routine werewolf tale. It turns out that Monty Powell, the loner who gives Chey refuge, is no ordinary guy, but the werewolf who turned her. But then Chey is no ordinary camper: she was sent to draw Monty out by a band of professional hunters who want the oil beneath the vast acreage Monty prowls—and to avenge the death of her father, whom Monty coincidentally slaughtered two decades before. Check out chapter 1 right here.
Finally, a novel that our own David K. Israel co-penned with author Jennifer Byrne called Trivial Pursuits, a novel that follows two protagonists as they try to come to grips with loss. Fareed is a 15-year-old Druze boy living in an RV cruising around Los Angeles with his father and trying to land a spot on the Jeopardy! Teen-tour. His world soon collides with Eos, an older girl who he quickly befriends and who is able to help him accept his mother’s death. Meanwhile Amy, who lives miles away in the Valley, is trying to deal with the loss of her infant-daughter. She relies on the help of an extra-marital lesbian affair that might quite possibly be her undoing. Start with Chapter 1, right here.
There are only so many hours in the day, and if you’re an evil villain, there’s too much dirty work to do.
So you get a henchman. But you can’t just let him out there all alone. It’s a big dark scary world, and he barely even has a name, much less any characterization! He needs a buddy.
Bonus points if the buddy is the physical opposite of the other, skinny where he is fat, or short where he is tall. Extra bonus points if you can use them as stand-ins to personify a much larger fighting force.
Often they are the funniest part of the story, and certainly have more personality than the evil overlord they work for. Revisit some of your favorites in this expandable list from Geekosystem. Link
Etsy artist Chet Phillips has created a set of dogs and cats as famous authors. Or are they famous authors portrayed as cats and dogs? Anyway, these Literary Pets are sold as prints or sets of trading cards. Shown are H.P. Lovecat and Spaniel Defoe. Link
Wouldn’t you love to know someone like the inventors in our movies and books -someone who can come up with gadgets, materials, and machines to solve your problems? Of course, in some stories inventors cause the problem themselves! Gizmodo takes a look at these geniuses from movies, TV, and literature and why we love them. My vote goes to Doc Brown from Back to the Future, who invented
The flux capacitor, the core component of a machine that allowed Brown to travel through time. Brown came up with the idea of the capacitor on November 5, 1955, and worked tirelessly for the next 30 years developing it into a working time machine. The capacitor, which requires 1.21 Gigawatts of electrical power to function, was first implemented in a customized DeLorean and later, or maybe earlier?, in a 19th century train.
1. June 16, 1904. 8:00 a.m. Stephen Dedalus, a young schoolteacher, speaks to his friend, “stately, plump” Buck Mulligan, in the disused watchtower on the Liffey where they live.
James Joyce’s Ulysses dummified. The convoluted novel is reduced to 18 captioned cartoons.
Link – via Coudal Partners
The flesh-eating reanimated dead exist in ancient writings, in folklore, in news accounts, and in movies. What is it about these creatures that captures our imagination?
Representations of the flesh-hungry undead have been common throughout world mythology. While this includes the deformed and cannibalistic, though still living, ghoul and the blood draining vampire, the zombie in its more common, modern form has appeared in tales dating all the way back to 1000 BC. The Epic of Gilgamesh is one of the earliest known works of literature, which was recorded on twelve clay tablets, written in Mesopotamia, now modern day Iraq. Like most epics it records a struggle between a hero, Gilgamesh, and the Gods, as he undertakes quests which displease his spiritual overlords. It is in the sixth tablet that the zombie is alluded to when the Goddess Ishtar threatens to raise the dead who will outnumber and devour the living. The dead do not actually rise in the epic; however it is the first overt mention in recorded literature of the zombie we know today.
From the Upcoming 
ueue, submitted by vedran84.
I know, it’s that tired old advice your mom has always given you: quitters never prosper; if you fall off the horse, get back on; finish what you started. But these authors are proof that just because you get rejected by a publisher or two (or three or 27) doesn’t mean you don’t have a classic on your hands.
William Golding’s Lord of the Flies is now studied in schools across the world. Time magazine ranked it as one of the top 100 English-language novels ever written. The book has sold more than 14.5 million copies since it was first published in 1954. And Golding won a Nobel Prize for Literature largely based on this particular work. So I bet the guy who read the original manuscript for it and declared it, “An absurd and uninteresting fantasy which was rubbish and dull” spent much of his career regretting his words.
The same could be said about George Orwell’s Animal Farm. It also made Time’s list of best English-language books ever written, ranked in at #31 on the Modern Library’s List of Best 20th-Century Novels, and won retrospective Hugo award in 1996. But not only was Orwell’s classic written off (and completely misunderstood) by a publisher who noted, “It is impossible to sell animal stories in the USA,” Orwell’s peer and good friend T.S. Eliot was also less than impressed. Orwell sent a draft to Eliot, who responded that the writing was good, but the view was “not convincing” and that publishers would only accept the book if they had personal sympathy for the “Trotskyite” viewpoint.
Moving on to a modern classic, Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone. Plenty of publishers took a gander at the Chosen One and decided not to choose him, including bigwigs like Penguin and HarperCollins. Jo Rowling finally decided to try a small London firm called Bloomsbury, who accepted only after the CEO’s eight-year-old daughter read the book and declared it a winner. I’m sure I don’t have to tell you about all of the accolades and great commercial success that followed nearly immediately.
I’m not a big fan of the Chicken Soup for the Soul books myself, but there’s obviously an audience out there – there are now more than 105 titles under the Chicken Soup heading (including Chicken Soup for the Chiropractic Soul), they’ve been translated into 54 languages and there are more than 100 million copies in print. Who would have ever guessed that the book was turned down 33 times in a row before it found a willing publisher? Among the 33 rejections included gems like, “anthologies don’t sell,” and “too positive.”
Some authors like to get their digs in at the publishers who told them they were not marketable. e.e. Cummings, for example, couldn’t find a publisher for 70 Poems, so he borrowed $300 from his mom and printed it himself. But he got his digs in when he wrote a “poem” called “No Thanks,” arranged it to look like a funerary urn, and put it on the dedication page of 70 Poems. The “poem” consisted entirely of the publishers that had rejected him, including Simon & Schuster, Harcourt, Random House, Viking Press and Scribner.
Gone With the Wind – one of the most enduring novels and movies of all time, of course. There aren’t too many people who haven’t heard the phrase, “Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn.” But it was 38 publishers who didn’t give a damn originally. When Margaret Mitchell finally found a publisher in Macmillan (Macmillan also published White Fang and Call of the Wild), the book sold in stores for $3 apiece – quite a sum for 1936. Even at this rather high price point, the book sold more than one million copies by the end of the year. It won the Pulitzer Prize the following year, and of course became an Academy Award-winning film in 1939.
“His frenetic and scrambled prose perfectly express the feverish travels of the Beat Generation. But is that enough? I don’t think so,” is what one publisher said about Jack Kerouac’s On the Road. After it came out in 1957, The New York Times wrote a review that basically stated the exact opposite opinion: “The most beautifully executed, the clearest and most important utterance” of the generation. At least one author agreed with the rejector’s assessment of the novel, though: Truman Capote, who said of Kerouac’s work, “That’s not writing, that’s typing.”
It was actually thanks to a critic that Norman Bridwell finally got published. The author of Clifford the Big Red Dog had tried multiple publishers and was told repeatedly that his dog pictures were boring and unoriginal. One editor finally told him to create a story to go along with his illustrations in hopes that the story might spark a little more interest. So he did, and less than a month later, Scholastic Books sent Bridwell a contract to publish everyone’s favorite house-sized dog.
There aren’t many teenage girls who haven’t read at least one or two Judy Blume books. But according to Blume herself, she received nothing but rejections for about two years straight. Remember Highlights for Children magazine? She repeatedly tried to get pieces published with them; they liked to send back a form letter with all of the reasons checked as to why she was rejected. “Does not win in competition with others,” was always one of the reasons. Blume says she still can’t look at Highlights without wincing.
There have always been movies that put a clever spin on a fairy tale to make it creepy and dark. But most of the famous fairy tales we all know were fairly horrifying in their original versions. One of the seven tales is Little Red Riding Hood.
This classic went through a few revisions before it became the staple of bedtime stories around the world. In the bloodiest version, there is no hunter that saves the day and the evil wolf is actually a werewolf (but not the type to fall in love with.) After killing and dressing himself up as grandmother, the werewolf feeds bits and pieces of the deceased to Red Riding Hood. Eventually she sees through the disguise and finds a way to escape. But it’s pretty safe to say that Red Riding Hood probably had some issues to deal with after that incident.
From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by bohchris.
In 1931, a schoolboy wrote a fan letter to his favorite author, Edgar Rice Burroughs. It said, in part:
I am a fourteen year old boy and am a low Junior in High School. Today at school our teacher was discussing “good literature.” I asked if Edgar Rice Burroughs was all right for a book report. I knew she’d say “no” (teachers always do) but I didn’t expect her to lecture to the class for the whole period about how terrible your books were!
The author of the Tarzan novels wrote back, in part:
My stories will do you no harm. If they have helped to inculcate in you a love of books, they have done you much good. No fiction is worth reading except for entertainment. If it entertains and is clean, it is good literature, or its kind. If it forms the habit of reading, in people who might not read otherwise, it is the best literature.
Which explains why I bought the Twilight books for my youngest daughter. The 14-year-old boy who wrote the letter was Forrest J. Ackerman, {wiki} who grew up to coin the term “sci-fi”. Ackerman was a film producer, actor, and the editor of the magazine Famous Monsters of Filmland, and made a name as the biggest science fiction fan ever. Read both letters in full at Letters of Note. Link
It’s no real surprise that Wikipedia has a thorough list of these, but it’s interesting to parse through the many, and find a neat collection of songs and albums that were based on, or influenced by books. Led Zeppelin has a scatological lyric library referencing JRR Tolkien, but let’s see what else is out there.
13. Alan Parson’s Project – The album is called Tales of Mystery and Imagination, and includes interpretations of Edgar Allen Poe’s best, like “The Raven”, “Dr. Tar and Professor Feather”, and “The Cask of Amontillado.” Here’s the awesome “Dream Within A Dream” video. Also by Parsons: “I, Robot” (Isaac Asimov).
12. Rivendell (Rush) – A quiet, thematic representation of the Elf version of a Bed & Breakfast. (Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, of course.)
11. 2112 (Rush) - Side one* is loosely based on Anthem by Ayn Rand.
10. For Whom the Bell Tolls (Metallica) - Based on the classic by Ernest Hemingway.
9. The Thing That Should Not Be and The Call of Cthulu (Metallica) - These guys really let good classic fiction influence their songwriting. We get not one, but two songs in honor of H.P. Lovecraft’s best character. Also by Metallica: “One”, based on the book Johnny Got His Gun by Dalton Trumbo.
8. The Small Print (Muse) - “clearly alluding to Goethe’s Faust, being sung from the point of view of the Devil to someone selling their soul to him in exchange for, presumably, musical prowess and fame…” source
7. Anthrax Loves Stephen King - As do a lot of bands like Pennywise (It). But Anthrax named one of their best albums Among the Living after King’s character Randall Flagg in The Stand. They also penned a song called “Skeleton in the Closet” based on King’s “Apt Pupil”.
6. Tom Sawyer (Rush) - Wow, Rush. Even “Red Barchetta” is based on a vague book called A Nice Morning Drive by Richard S. Foster. At least Tom Sawyer is pretty well known both as a song and a book. Who can resist the urge to sing along when Geddy Lee croons, “The River!”
5. Tales of Brave Ulysses (Cream) - Psychedelically sums up all you need to know about all the ins and outs of Homer’s The Odyssey. And I quote, “Tiny purple fishes run laughing through your fingers…” (This was actually a lyric inspired by lyricist Martin Sharp’s travels in Ibiza.) But the Sirens are there, so that’s cool.
4. The Ghost of Tom Joad (Bruce Springsteen) - Based on The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck. Henry Fonda and Bruce Springsteen would have had some cool conversations, I bet.
3. White Rabbit (Jefferson Airplane) -Based on Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland. Here’s a nice rendition of that song.
2. Animals (Pink Floyd) - It never actually occurred to me before, but an argument can be made that the Animals album, with it’s corrupt pigs (be they on the wing, or three different ones), dogs and sheep, political overtones… Yeah, it’s definitely based on George Orwell’s Animal Farm.
1. Iron Maiden (Pretty much every song of theirs, ever) - At least a heavy handful. These Brit bad boys of metal must have had some scratched up library cards. Their adaptations include:
On second thought, an honorable mention should be made for Led Zeppelin’s “The Battle of Evermore”, as it pretty much describes the Battle of Pellennor Fields in The Return of the King.
(Iron Maiden illustration by Ado Cedric & Tio Julio.)
*For help with determining what this means, ask a grownup.
Technically, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy should probably be The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Universe, as the book most certainly explores multiple galaxies, regardless of semantics though, the story is undoubtedly a worldwide phenomenon. As a book, it has been translated into 30 languages and was voted the fourth most loved book in all of Britain.
In honor of the book’s 30th anniversary, which took place earlier this month, Neatorama is presenting you a collection of facts related to The Hitchhiker’s Guide to The Galaxy. Whether you’ve read the book, heard the radio broadcasts, seen the movie or seen the TV show, there’s certainly something here you don’t know yet.
Fans often abbreviate The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy as HHGTTG, but Adams uses the abbreviation of H2G2, which is also used on the official BBC online guide. Other nicknames can include “The Hitchhiker’s Guide,” “The Guide” or “Hitchhiker’s.” To make matters more confusing, when people use the full name, they are sometimes referring to the series and sometimes referring to the fictional book the series was named after. Just to ensure you’re entirely confused I plan to use all of the names in this article.
Image Via Nicholas “Lord Gordon” [Flickr]
Fans of the series might know that the Guide started as a radio series (which technically makes H2G2 31 years old, since the first broadcast was 1978), which quickly spawned a series of 5 books, a TV show and a movie, but you may not know there were also a number of stage shows, a comic book adaptation and a computer game based on Hitchhiker’s. There was even a series of towels released with towel part of the first novel, which some fans consider to be the “official version” of the book (if you aren’t familiar with the works, then you may not know how important towels can be).
In other works, these adaptations would end up being watered-down, mediocre versions of the original that don’t reflect the artist’s actual vision. Fortunately, most of the adaptations involved with the HHGTTG were done by Douglas Adams himself.
The H2G2 has even spawned its own holiday. May 25 in Towel Day. Towels are, after all, one of the most important things an interstellar traveler can have with them at any time. If you’re wondering how to celebrate Towel Day – why, just bring a towel with you all day, of course! There are even two sites dedicated to Towel Day, the countdown site, IsItTowelDay.com, and the informational site, TowelDay.org. Here at Neatorama, we’ve even covered towel day twice before.
Image Via JenT [Flickr]
As mentioned above, the first incarnations of the Guide were in radio form. The first series actually was originally going to be called “The Ends of the Earth,” which was to be a six-part radio series. In each of the episodes, the story would end when the world ended – each time in a different way.
When Adams started writing the first episode, he realized he needed an alien there to provide context and the alien needed a reason to be on Earth. In coming up with this reason, he finally decided to have the alien be a researcher for a “wholly remarkable book,” which would be known as The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Eventually, the story ended up focusing on the book, which started up the whole crazy phenomenon.
Later on, Adams claimed that he had already came up with the idea of “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” while hitchhiking through Europe in his youth.
Image Via Adam Foster Codefor [Flickr]
The series is notable for being the first BBC radio program to be produced in stereo and later in Dolby surround sound. Adams claimed he wanted the program’s production to be comparable to that of a rock album, and as a result, a lot of the program’s budget went towards sound effects.
Speaking of rock music, the tune used on the radio, television, LP and film versions was “Journey of the Sorcerer,” an instrumental Eagles’ song from the album One of These Nights.
The novels were originally released as a trilogy, but then Adams came out with So Long, And Thanks for All The Fish, making the books “a trilogy in four parts.” Then he released Mostly Harmless and the series became “a trilogy in five parts,” the cover of which advertised itself as “The fifth book in the increasingly inaccurately named Hitchhiker’s Trilogy.” The blurb on the book went on to say, “the book that gives a whole new meaning to the word ‘trilogy.’”
At this point, fans continued to be hopeful that the series would eventually become “a trilogy in six parts,” but Adams died of a heart attack in 2001 before a sixth book was finished. Before he passed though, he had hinted that the newest novel he was working on, The Salmon of Doubt, may have been this sixth book. He said in an interview that Mostly Harmless was “very bleak” and that he would love to finish the “trilogy” on a “slightly more upbeat note.”
Image Via Jenbooks [Flickr]
It’s only natural that any phenomenon as big as the Guide would have inspired some other works – of course, these works are particularly off-the-wall, just like the work that inspired them. Monty Python member Terry Jones actually wrote a novel, Douglas Adams’s Starship Titanic, based on Adam’s computer game, “Starship Titanic,” which was based on an idea in Life, the Universe and Everything.
In 2005, Michael Hanlon published The Science of The Hitchhiker’s Guide To the Galaxy, which covered important topics such as the Babel fish, parallel universes and space tourism.
There was tons of merchandise made for Hitchhiker’s over the years. Some of the favorite memorabilia items, as mentioned above, were towels with the Guide’s entry for towels. Then there were the singles released by Stephen Moore sung in the character of Marvin, the Paranoid Android, “Marvin,” Metal Man,” Reasons To Be Miserable,” and “Marvin I Love You.” My favorite though, was the “Beeblebear,” a teddy bear with an extra arm and head like Zaphod Beeblebox.
Image Via ZoeARP [Flickr]
That’s the opinion of the Trustees of Pooh Properties, which manages the estates of author A. A. Milne and illustrator E.H. Shepard. They have authorized a new sequel in the Pooh series. Return to the Hundred Acre Wood has generated some controversy among Pooh purists, who argue that the original books were about growing up and moving on, and that if the creators had wanted sequels they would have generated them…
“The whole point is that the boy has to go away from his childhood, from this very idyllic pastoral world of his childhood,” she said. “This is an absolutely perfect ending, and doing anything beyond this is pointless.”
The trustees of the estate believe the sequel will be true to the original…
“The good professor and other great lovers of Pooh will have to form their own conclusions,” Brown said. “And they may say, ‘oh, it’s not quite as good, it’s not quite the same.’ I can’t help that. All I can say is we tried very hard to do something that’s not offensive, shall we say.”
Jennifer Quinn of the AP has more details at the StarTribune. The BBC has a writeup on a new character – Lottie the Otter – created for the sequel. And The Guardian makes note in passing of the possibility that Pooh may have had OCD.
Image credit: Wikipedia.
Artists use sketchbooks to store ideas for future use. Bloggers have folders of bookmarks. And some authors keep notebooks or “commonplace” books.
One well-known author recorded “ideas, images, & quotations hastily jotted down for possible future use… for the most part they are merely suggestions or random impressions designed to set the memory or imagination working. Their sources are various—dreams, things read, casual incidents, idle conceptions, & so on…”
In order to keep his/her identity secret for the few moments it will take you to peruse this post, we’ll use for a photo the family grouping at left without saying which one he/she is.
In 1934 the author presented the notebook to an R.H. Barlow “in exchange for an admirably neat typed copy from his skilled hand.” Several hundred selections from this commonplace book have been assembled at La Petite Claudine. I’ve winnowed the list down to just a dozen. Aficionados will recognize the writer immediately and can access the rest of the material at the link.
8 Hor. Sto. – Man makes appt. with old enemy. Dies—body keeps appt.
31 Prehistoric man preserved in Siberian ice. (See Winchell—Walks and Talks in the Geological field—p. 156 et seq.)
34 Moving away from earth more swiftly than light—past gradually unfolded—horrible revelation.
76 Ancient cathedral—hideous gargoyle—man seeks to rob—found dead—gargoyle’s jaw bloody.
88 Lonely philosopher fond of cat. Hypnotises it—as it were—by repeatedly talking to it and looking at it. After his death the cat evinces signs of possessing his personality. N.B. He has trained cat, and leaves it to a friend, with instructions as to fitting a pen to its right fore paw by means of a harness. Later writes with deceased’s own handwriting.
106 A thing that sat on a sleeper’s chest. Gone in morning, but something left behind.
112 Man lives near graveyard—how does he live? Eats no food.
131 Phosphorescence of decaying wood—called in New England “fox-fire”.
142 Members of witch-cult were buried face downward. Man investigates ancestor in family tomb and finds disquieting condition.
182 In ancient buried city a man finds a mouldering prehistoric document in English and in his own handwriting, telling an incredible tale. Voyage from present into past implied. Possible actualisation of this.
190 Primal mummy in museum—awakes and changes place with visitor.
217 Ancient (Roman? prehistoric?) stone bridge washed away by a (sudden and curious?) storm. Something liberated which had been sealed up in the masonry of years ago. Things happen.
Link. Photo via Chepachit.com.
A little-known leaflet by Upton Uxbridge Underwood circulated in 1913 judges men in a different way, not by their works, but by their fabulous facial hair.
His masterpiece, The Language of the Beard, an epicurean treat confected for the delectation of fellow bon vivants, vaunts the premise that the texture, contours, and growth patterns of a man’s beard indicate personality traits, aptitudes, and strengths and weaknesses of character. A spade beard, according to Underwood’s theories, may denote audacity and resolution, for example, while a forked, finely-downed beard signifies creativity and the gift of intuition, a bushy beard suggests generosity, and so on.
See 15 poets and their beards described and rated. Pictured is the highly-rated beard of Sidney Lanier. Link -Thanks, peacay!
From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by whitespace.
Yes, that’s right, just what you always wanted… apocalyptic horror in your Austen.
I know I’ll be ordering one for every middle school student I know.
Pride and Prejudice and Zombies features the original text of Jane Austen’s beloved novel with all-new scenes of bone-crunching zombie action. As our story opens, a mysterious plague has fallen upon the quiet English village of Meryton—and the dead are returning to life! Feisty heroine Elizabeth Bennet is determined to wipe out the zombie menace, but she’s soon distracted by the arrival of the haughty and arrogant Mr. Darcy. What ensues is a delightful comedy of manners with plenty of civilized sparring between the two young lovers—and even more violent sparring on the blood-soaked battlefield as Elizabeth wages war against hordes of flesh-eating undead. Complete with 20 illustrations in the style of C. E. Brock (the original illustrator of Pride and Prejudice), this insanely funny expanded edition will introduce Jane Austen’s classic novel to new legions of fans.
Link Updated Link
From the Upcoming Queue, submitted by knitmeapony.
Update 1/26/09 – Pride and Prejudice and Zombies is written by Seth Grahame-Smith (and of course, Jane Austen) and published by Quirk Books (not Chronicle Books). By Quirk Book’s request, here is the book’s Amazon page: Pride and Prejudice and Zombies
In 2000, the publishing giant Random House assembled a board of authors and literary critics to list the 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century.
The Zeray Gazette blog has the list (of which I reprinted the top 10) and I’m sad to say that I’ve only read 4 of these:
1. (1922) Ulysses James Joyce
2. (1925) The Great Gatsby F. Scott Fitzgerald
3. (1916) A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man James Joyce
4. (1955) Lolita Vladimir Nabokov
5. (1932) Brave New World Aldous Huxley
6. (1929) The Sound and the Fury William Faulkner
7. (1961) Catch-22 Joseph Heller
8. (1940) Darkness at Noon Arthur Koestler
9. (1913) Sons and Lovers D. H. Lawrence
10. (1939) The Grapes of Wrath John Steinbeck
How many of the 10 (and 100) have you read? And what’s missing from the list? Link
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