Author: Jay Ruud

I had deliberately avoided this book for forty years. Sure, it was  a huge bestseller in 1979 and won the National Book Award for Fiction in 1980, and yes, it was honored with a spot on Modern Library’s famous “100 Greatest English Language Novels of the 20th Century” (not to mention ranking 57th on Radcliffe’s “100 Best… Continue reading William Styron’s “Sophie’s Choice”

I hadn’t read John Steinbeck’s magnum opus since high school until rereading it while compiling my current list. What I found is that The Grapes of Wrath still packs a punch: a realist novel intended as a kind of exposé of the trials and hardships of the hundreds of thousands of “Okies”—poor farmers from the Great Plains… Continue reading John Steinbeck’s “The Grapes of Wrath”

Treasure Island is a novel almost everyone knows something about: a sea yarn about pirates and a hunt for buried treasure on a tropical island, with a heroic young lad as narrator and protagonist. Published in 1883, it was Scottish author Robert Louis Stevenson’s first big success and his most popular and best-selling novel. Yet it may be… Continue reading Robert Louis Stevenson’s “Treasure Island”

Reading Laurence Sterne’s 18th-century novel Tristram Shandy (more properly The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman) is an experience like no other. You open it up expecting it to be what it purports to be: a Bildungsroman along the lines of, say, David Copperfield, or its close contemporary, Fielding’s History of Tom Jones, a Foundling. What you get instead is something completely unprecedented, which appears… Continue reading Laurence Sterne’s “Tristram Shandy”