Author: Jay Ruud

Gatsby is indeed another no-brainer for sure. It’s hard to imagine a list of the 100 best novels in English that does not include Fitzgerald’s magnum opus. As many readers will remember, it came in as number one on Time magazine’s famous list of the 100 best English-language novels since 1923 (the year Time premiered). And it was #2 on the Modern Library… Continue reading F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “The Great Gatsby”

Seldom does one reach the end of a 900-page novel and wish it had been longer, but that was my experience on first reading Henry Fielding’s classic from the early days of the novel, officially entitled The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling, though generally known simply as Tom Jones. The book, originally published in 1749, was what… Continue reading Henry Fielding’s “Tom Jones”

The titanic figure of William Faulkner looms above American modernism like his contemporary Babe Ruth towered over the ballplayers of his era. There is no question that Faulkner must appear on any list of the best books in English, even though, truth be told, it wasn’t until his Nobel Prize in 1949 that he began… Continue reading William Faulkner’s “Light in August”

One of the most important writers of what’s generally considered the “second wave” of the Native American Renaissance, Louise Erdrich has been one of my favorite writers for more than forty years. Her first novel, Love Medicine, was an instant classic, winning the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1984—the only first novel ever to win that… Continue reading Louise Erdrich’s “The Night Watchman”

One of the most significant novels of the 20th century, among the first widely read novels by a Black American author, Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, seemed too important a book not to consider for my list of the “100 Most Lovable Novels in the English Language.” The book has an impressive pedigree: It won the National… Continue reading Ralph Ellison’s “Invisible Man”