As ranked on our podcast, “Between the Covers,” through Tuesday, December 17, 2024. To tune in to the podcast, try this link: https://betweenthecoverspodcast.podbean.com:
1. Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
Catch-22 is a satirical, anti-war novel that follows the increasingly frantic attempts by the American bombardier Captain John Yossarian to stay alive. He has become convinced that everyone, not only the Germans but also his own incompetent and self-interested superior officers, is out to kill him, and so his only goal in life becomes the avoidance of death: He aims to “live forever or die trying.”
2. Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
Pride and Prejudice is a delightful comedy of manners, written with brilliant wit and what Austen would call a characteristic “archness.” It contains some of the most memorable characters in British fiction, and its theme of the superficial perceived virtue that first impressions might create, as opposed to the deeply committed virtue of a truly good person, is one that still resonates, and might be considered a genuine “truth universally acknowledged.”
3. Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro
Ishiguro takes on genetic engineering and supporting technology, in order to raise questions about what it means to be human …. Are cloned beings as “human” as people born “normally”? Do they even have a soul? The dominant society in Ishiguro’s novel would say no, but reading Kathy’s account will convince you otherwise. Does life have a purpose—and is it the same for cloned individuals as others: to love?
4. Atonement by Ian McEwan
There is a part four, that takes place six decades later. Here an octogenarian Briony, now a well-known novelist, discusses her latest book—which, it is implied, we have just read. And here we discover that the novel is also about fiction itself. How much of what we have just read is true, and how much of it is the invention of the (fictional) author? And how much of that invention is in fact a gesture of atonement? You’ll need to read the book to find out. And to find out how much you yourself are willing to forgive Briony. Or McEwan.
5. To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
Racism is not the only theme in To Kill a Mockingbird, but it’s the most pervasive. The book is also a condemnation of both the schools and the courts—two institutions that should define and promote justice, but often fail to do so. It’s a feminist text as well, in which tomboy Scout fights against the views of femininity promoted by Aunt Alexandra and her ilk. And of course it’s a story of heroism that suggests even one person can make a difference in a difficult situation.
6. The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger
These are rarified heights for a modest little book like Salinger’s. Parts of the novel were published in magazines right after the Second World War, but The Catcher in the Rye was not published in book form until 1951. Salinger intended the novel for an adult audience, but since teenagers could relate easily with Salinger’s sixteen-year-old protagonist Holden Caulfield and his alienation from a society he finds superficial and “phony,” his depression and angst over the loss of innocence, his search for identity, and his feelings of rebellion, it was inevitable that the novel would become a staple in high school classes across the country.
7. The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay by Michael Chabon
“Having lost his mother, father, brother, and grandfather, the friends and foes of his youth, his beloved teacher Bernard Kornblum, his city, his history—his home—the usual charge leveled against comic books, that they offered merely an escape from reality, seemed to Joe actually to be a powerful argument on their behalf…”
8. David Copperfield by Charles Dickens
But chiefly one reads Dickens for the characters. It’s no coincidence that “Dickensian” has become an adjective often applied to memorable characters, especially those who are larger than life, full of warmth or jollity, or weirdly grotesque. Uriah Heep, the “‘umblest” creature on earth, is certainly one of these, as is Copperfield’s Aunt Betsey, who stormed out of the house when David was born because he was not a girl, and her kite-flying houseguest Mr. Dick, who is obsessed with the execution of King Charles I two hundred years earlier. But the most Dickensian of all David Copperfield characters is the impractical but ever big-hearted spendthrift, the jovial and optimistic Mr. Micawber. The novelist J.B. Priestley wrote that “With the one exception of Falstaff,” Micawber was “the greatest comic figure in English literature.” Of the fourteen different film or television versions of the novel, George Cukor had the genius to cast W.C. Fields as Micawber in 1935, and I’ve never been able to see him as anybody else.
9. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
Perhaps what makes Gatsby such a profoundly affecting story is its aspects of tragedy. An admirable self-made figure who rose from humble obscurity to a position of great wealth, Gatsby easily fits Aristotle’s characterization of the tragic hero as a person superior to others in some way, who falls from his high position as a result of his hamartia, literally his failure to hit the mark, usually interpreted as a “tragic flaw” or, more accurately, an “error of judgment.” Gatsby’s error is his monomaniacal quest to win back Daisy through his pursuit of the elusive “American dream.”
10. Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison
Essentially a Bildungsroman or “coming of age” novel, Song of Solomon follows the life of its hero, Macon “Milkman” Dead III, from birth to maturity as he comes to recognize and understand his true heritage. The novel opens as the Black insurance agent Robert Smith leaps from the roof of Mercy Hospital, falling to his death while trying to fly on a pair of blue silk wings (the image of flight becomes important in the book), as dozens of people watch. One of these is the pregnant Ruth Dead, who goes into labor and in the ensuing turmoil is taken into the hospital where she gives birth the first African American baby ever born there—Macon Dead III.
11. Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel
In telling the story of Henry’s divorce from Catherine, his marriage to Anne, and most importantly his break with Rome, Mantel focuses in great detail on her chosen protagonist, the much reviled Thomas Cromwell. What if, she seems to ask, Cromwell has been unfairly maligned by history—by his contemporaries who were jealous of his political skill and legal acumen, by members of the court who perhaps looked down upon him for his humble birth, by Catholics who saw him as ruthless because of his support for the Protestant cause in England.
12. Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov
The multiplicity of possible interpretations of the text—the indeterminacy of the novel’s meaning—is one characteristic of the post-modern. It’s also an example of the postmodern staple metafiction—a form of fiction emphasizing its own fictionality so that the readers are never unaware that they are perusing a fictional text. The novel also encourages an interactive reading process, a post-modern technique known as hypertext that, like an electronic text, may be read straight through, or by jumping between Shade’s lines and Kinbote’s commentary on them.
All of these innovative techniques make Pale Fire a revolutionary and incredibly influential novel, and one that deserves to be on my exclusive list. Besides, it’s just so darn funny it’s hard to resist.
13. Watership Down by Richard Adams
When I read the book (well past my own YA days) I was absolutely carried away by the adventure story of Hazel and Bigwig and their journey to a new home at Watership Down. Their Odyssey recalls the great myths of the western world—like, for instance, well, the Odyssey. Or Moses leading the chosen people to the Promised Land. And this is particularly unusual because the novel’s protagonists are, well, rabbits.
14. 1984 by George Orwell
The story focuses on the protagonist, Winston Smith, a government employee in the ironically named Ministry of Truth. His job is to change and rewrite all past news stories to match what the government currently has decided the “truth” actually is…. And Winston must make all necessary changes to all public records as well as news stories posted in the past, so there is never any documentary evidence that the current lie is not the truth. Books, of course, must be destroyed if they do not reflect the current Party line. As the Party slogan insists: “Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.”
15. Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
The future is a nightmare comprising a predetermined and unalterable caste system, psychological conditioning beginning at birth, the elimination of mothers, fathers, family, and romantic love—things that elicit emotions that can’t be easily controlled—and quashes individuality, all in the name of an all-powerful world state.
16. A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingwa
Hemingway called the novel his “Romeo and Juliet” story, and the five books do suggest the five-act structure of an Elizabethan tragedy, with the crucial turning point in Act Three (with Lieutenant Henry’ rejection of the war and dive from the bridge to freedom) and the tragic denouement in Act Five. Some critics have found the novel closer to pathos than tragedy, but it could be argued that Lieutenant Henry’s “anagnorisis” or tragic knowledge in the end may not be an insight into the meaning of suffering as much as it is insight into the meaninglessness of suffering in the Wasteland following the meaningless war.
17. The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien
These themes—truth, courage, and morality—are, being abstractions, all things that O’Brien says true war stories are never about. However, there is always some part of a true war story that is not absolutely true, and that dictum may be one of the untrue things about this story collection. At least one of the chief things a reader takes away from these stories is the sense that such things as truth, courage and morality are not clear cut, perhaps are even turned on their heads, in the reality of the U.S. war in Vietnam.
18. Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie
Finally, and perhaps most importantly, Rushdie asserts that his chief theme was that “All of India belonged to all of us.” Unlike the Islamic state of Pakistan, partitioned off from India on the day before Indian independence, India was from the beginning intended to be a secular state, in which the many different cultural traditions, religions, and languages form a single multicultural unity. Thus Saleem of the giant nose could be reflective of elephant-nosed Ganesh, the Hindu god of literature (even though Saleem—and Rushdie himself—were born Muslims). The telepathic forum of all midnight’s children reflected Saleem’s vision of that dream. The authoritarian crackdown of Mrs. Gandhi’s Emergency, as presented in the novel, was a betrayal of that vision of democratic multiculturalism. And Rushdie believes the book is just as relevant today, with India’s recent veering once more to the authoritarian right.
19. Moby-Dick by Herman Melville
At times his language too rises to the heights of Shakespearean power. … Of these, the most memorable are some of Ahab’s speeches, like Hamlet’s soliloquies or Satan’s mighty lines from the first books of Paradise Lost, full of power, allusion, rhythm and charisma. You cannot read Ahab’s explanation of his need for vengeance without seeing it as the human struggle against a hostile universe in microcosm:
20. Babbitt by Sinclair Lewis
Babbitt’s own stature reaches its height in Zenith on the day he is elected vice-president of the Boosters’ club. On that same day, his friend Paul shoots his wife. The incident is a major turning point in Babbitt’s life, and the crisis reaches a peak when his own wife and daughter leave him alone and go off to visit relatives. Babbitt’s misgivings about his life come to the fore—he begins to lead a more bohemian lifestyle, has an affair with another woman, drinks and parties, and even begins to think sympathetically of the socialist Doane.
21. Complete Tales by Edgar Allan Poe
Poe’s own starting point is the assertion that in every piece of writing, the “point of greatest importance” is the text’s “unity of effect or impression.” Since as he asserts “All high excitements are necessarily transient,” for the text to have its strongest effect, the reader should be able to peruse it at a single sitting, not exceeding one or two hours. Thus a novel will of necessity have a weaker effect than a short story. Only thus can the reader receive “the immense force derivable from totality.”