Category: Review

Margaret Atwood may be the most significant author in world literature who has not yet won the Nobel Prize. Two of her novels (The Blind Assassin and The Testaments) have won the Booker Prize—the elite annual British award for the best novel written in English and published in the UK or Ireland. And four other novels have been… Continue reading Margaret Atwood’s “The Handmaid’s Tale”

A lot of people would put Kingsley Amis’s modern classic Lucky Jim in this slot, and I did find that novel to be an impressive sendup of academic life and a withering lampooning of pretentiousness—and, truth to say, if I were to do a second list of “The Next 100 Most Lovable Novels in the English Language,”… Continue reading Martin Amis’s “Money: A Suicide Note”

Louisa May Alcott’s coming-of-age novel has never been out of print in the hundred and fifty years since its first publication in two parts in 1868-69. Generations of women have grown up and been inspired by the four March sisters Meg, Beth, Amy, and especially by the independent spirited and passionately ambitious Jo. Helen Keller… Continue reading Louisa May Alcott’s “Little Women”

Watership Down is another novel that doesn’t often appear on these kinds of lists, probably because it’s thought of essentially as a children’s book, or at least YA. But the book won the Library Association’s  Carnegie Medal in 1972, recognizing it as the best children’s book of the year. It also won the Guardian Prize in the… Continue reading Richard Adams’ “Watership Down”

The second book (alphabetically) on “The Ruud List of the 100 Best Books to Love in the English Language” is Douglas Adams’ sci-fi romp The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, in which I am counting the entire five-book “trilogy” including the original Hitchhiker’s Guide (1979) and its sequels: The Restaurant at the End of the Universe (1980), Life, the Universe, and… Continue reading Douglas Adams’ “Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy”

JAY RUUD’S “100 ALL-TIME BEST BOOKS TO LOVE IN THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE” Nigerian author Chinua Achebe’s acclaimed 1958 novel Things Fall Apart is alphabetically first on my list of Best Books to Love in English. It was the first book by a native African writer to receive worldwide fame, and a staple of post-colonial literature. It is… Continue reading Chinua Achebe’s “Things Fall Apart”

Anthony Doerr’s Cloud Cuckoo Land, his 2021 follow-up to his 2015 Pulitzer Prize-winning All the Light We Cannot See, is a spectacularly wide-ranging novel that alternates between contemporary thriller, historical novel, and speculative science fiction, that takes readers from fifteenth-century Constantinople to twentieth- and then twenty-first century America and then to a twenty-second century generational… Continue reading Anthony Doerr’s “Cloud Cuckoo Land”

Barbara Kingsolver (2022) When, at the age of 15, I first read David Copperfield, Charles Dickens’ classic novel of the protagonist’s struggle to rise above child poverty in a society seemingly structured to keep him poor, it was the first book that made me tear up at the end, that glorious end with the angelic Agnes ever… Continue reading Demon Copperhead

The Women of Troy Pat Barker (2021) If you can’t quite place the name Briseis, you can probably be excused. It’s not Hecuba or Hellen. It’s not Cassandra or Penelope. Briseis is simply a very minor character in The Iliad—albeit a significant one, since she is, according to Homer, the cause of the rift between Achilles… Continue reading The Women of Troy

Sharpe’s Assassin Bernard Cornwell (2021) Bernard Cornwell has at least three great virtues as a novelist, and a writer of historical fiction particularly.  The first is his meticulous attention to historical detail, in manners, clothing, and other aspects of material culture, but most of all in his descriptions of military encounters. Weaponry, fighting tactics, even,… Continue reading Sharpe’s Assassin