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”

It seems that the reputation of Mary Ann Evans, aka George Eliot (since what Victorian publisher would accept a novel by someone with a woman’s name?), just keeps growing stronger and stronger as time goes by. Already a major novelist in her own time, with acclaimed novels like Silas Marner (1861), Daniel Deronda (1876), Adam Bede (1859), and The Mill on the Floss (1860),… Continue reading George Eliot’s “Middlemarch”

Sherlock Holmes is listed by the Guinness Book of World Records as the most portrayed human literary figure in the history of film or television. There have been more than 25,000 publications, stage dramatizations, films or television productions featuring the world’s most famous detective, and his influence on the development of the genre of mystery cannot be… Continue reading Arthur Conan Doyle’s “The Hound of the Baskervilles”

Anthony Doerr’s Cloud Cuckoo Land is my choice for book #26 on my list of the “100 Most Lovable Novels in the English Language.” Although this book was published only two years ago, in September of 2021, it did win the 2022 Grand Prix de Littérature Américaine (awarded to the best American novel translated into… Continue reading Anthony Doerr’s “Cloud Cuckoo Land”

Well, surprise surprise, I mentioned somewhat earlier in this catalogue that I strove mightily to use only one representative novel for each author, so as to include more authors and more of a variety of authors, but that in two instances I just couldn’t limit their contributions to lovable English language novels and had to… Continue reading Charles Dickens’ “David Copperfield”