Okay, so when I say that I’m naming Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried as book number 65 (alphabetically) on my list of the “100 Most Lovable Novels in the English Language,” I can hear you saying “But wait Jay Ruud, how can you do such a thing? Your list says ‘Most Lovable Novels.’ This book doesn’t… Continue reading Tim O’Brien’s “The Things They Carried”

When most readers think of Vladimir Nabokov, the Russian émigré author who came to the U.S. to teach Russian at Cornell University and began to write novels in English, they think most often of his 1955 novel Lolita, which was a huge best seller and ranked number four on the Modern Library list of the 100… Continue reading Vladimir Nabokov’s “Pale Fire”

Iris Murdoch, one of the most honored British writers of her generation, wrote 26 novels over the course of a 40-year writing career, the earliest of which, Under the Net, is a delightful read and appears on both the Modern Library’s list of the 100 greatest English language novels of the 20th century, and Time magazine’s list of the… Continue reading Iris Murdoch’s “The Sea, The Sea”

Toni Morrison, winner of the 1993 Nobel Prize for literature, holds an almost mythic place in the annals of American literature, as the first African-American writer to win the Nobel Prize and only the second American woman to do so. Morrison’s most popular novel is of course the 1987 Pulitzer-Prize winning Beloved, a gut-wrenching book about… Continue reading Toni Morrison’s “Song of Solomon”