The Wind in the Willows, part 2

Especially for you, Pare:

And a better view of the stairs:

Can't even see the house from the street, but I want to live here so bad.

Great Book #46: The Wind in the Willows

'It's my world, and I don't want any other. What it hasn't got is not worth having, and what it doesn't know is not worth knowing.'

The Wind in the Willows is one of those classics I really don’t know why I never read. Now I wish I’d read it as a child, because as I was listening to the Librivox recording (with a variety of readers, most of them excellent) I kept thinking too much like an adult:

A toad riding a horse! Rats and moles eating bacon and lobster! Field mice singing Christmas carols! How silly!

I also wish I didn’t know anything about Kenneth Grahame, thanks to “The Tragedy of Mr. Toad.” [Recently it has been pointed out to me what a rubbishy newspaper the Daily Mail is, so I apologize if 'Femail,' etc. offends anybody.] As I was listening, I did often think about how this book was the most substantial thing the love-hungry Alastair ever got from his father…at least according to the article.

But setting all that aside—this really is a lovely book, full of beautiful descriptions of nature and the changing of the days and seasons.

As he sat on the grass and looked across the river, a dark hole in the bank opposite, just above the water's edge, caught his eye, and dreamily he fell to considering what a nice snug dwelling-place it would make for an animal with few wants and fond of a bijou riverside residence, above flood level and remote from noise and dust. As he gazed, something bright and small seemed to twinkle down in the heart of it, vanished, then twinkled once more like a tiny star. But it could hardly be a star in such an unlikely situation; and it was too glittering and small for a glow-worm. Then, as he looked, it winked at him, and so declared itself to be an eye; and a small face began gradually to grow up round it, like a frame round a picture.

Most of the episodes in The Wind in the Willows emphasize that true friendship occasionally entails a bit of personal sacrifice, and that loving your friends for who they are doesn’t mean letting them go off and make outrageous fools (or menaces) of themselves. This is all communicated quite nicely without bonking children over the head with ‘the moral of the story.’ That said, I bet everybody looks forward to those chapters following the exploits of the incorrigibly conceited Toad, because the other animals are too sensible to be anywhere near as interesting.

'Glorious, stirring sight!' murmured Toad, never offering to move. 'The poetry of motion! The REAL way to travel! The ONLY way to travel! Here to-day--in next week to-morrow! Villages skipped, towns and cities jumped--always somebody else's horizon! O bliss! O poop-poop! O my! O my!'

'O STOP being an ass, Toad!' cried the Mole despairingly.

Toad’s gleefully insane obsession with motor-cars, his imprisonment for auto theft and his flamboyant escape and subsequent adventures while impersonating a washerwoman—these passages are even more enjoyable than all the poignant bits about Rat and Mole’s particular friendship, though I feel a bit guilty saying so.

Toad in drag, fleeing the authorities.

[picture the following shrieked by a huuuge British guy with painted-on warts]:
I'm being attacked by a cushion! AHH! I'm being attacked by a shoe! AHH! I'm being attacked by my foot! AHH!
—Toad in the Masterpiece Theatre version of "The Wind in the Willows"

Great Book #45: Lord of the Flies

I somehow got out of reading this one in middle school Language Arts class, but I was always curious about it; Lord of the Flies is one of those novels nobody seems to like (or if they do they don't own up to it). It’s a shocking book, but what shocked me most was how much I enjoyed it. I listened to the audiobook narrated by the author, which is always a particular treat since you hear the story exactly as it was intended to be read.

Even if you haven't read this book you've probably heard how ugly it gets: English schoolboys plane-wrecked on a deserted island during World War II attempt to form a civilization, which quickly disintegrates. Ralph is focused on maintaining a signal-fire so they can be rescued, while Jack is only interested in hunting pigs and unseating Ralph as 'chief'. Jack succeeds in turning the rest of the 'tribe' against Ralph, and they literally begin to hunt him down like a wild animal.

It doesn't matter that how they came to be there—why all boys and no girls? evacuated from where, to where? None of the boys mention having been anywhere outside of England—is implausible, and the ending even more so. The boys' descent into savagery is horrifying because it is, for the most part, believable. On any school playground anywhere in the world you can witness myriad minor cruelties that, in the absence of adult supervision, could snowball all too easily; the innocence of childhood is just a veneer over our cruel primal instincts. Jack—what is he, twelve, thirteen?—uses the prospect of a phantom in the forest to rally the boys behind him, paints his face with pig's blood, and does not care that his obsessive ambition to lead the group results in at least two violent deaths. The fearmongering and the struggle for power, the mad despot, the merciless scapegoating and the torturing of anyone who dares to disagree...it all sounds awfully familiar.

Golding's prose can be, erm, too evocative (particularly when the boys go after a wild pig with bloodthirsty glee), but some of the descriptive bits are really splendid: "the lagoon attacked them with a blinding effulgence"; "a sudden communion of shining eyes in the gloom"; "the tree trunks and the creepers that festooned them lost themselves in a green dusk thirty feet above him". And it's not just the jungle atmosphere he nails: "Piggy sat expressionless behind the luminous wall of his myopia." I wonder if somebody with perfect eyesight could understand how apt that sentence is, because I sure do. (Poor Piggy! We never find out what his real name is.)

Golding begins and ends his recording with a conversational bit about how he came to write the book. He said he had to make the group boys only, because if it had been mixed the book would have had to be primarily about sex, and if it had been only girls they would have behaved a whole lot better and there wouldn't have been a story. I don't know about that—at times in my adolescence it certainly seemed like the cattiness of girls was a far more insidious thing than the boys' tendency towards violence and domination—but I did appreciate this: 'I think women are foolish to pretend they are equal to men. They are far superior, and always have been.' As my grandmother says: 'Amen, brother. Amen.'

Great Book #70: Suite Française

I remember the literary hubbub surrounding the English-language publication of Suite Française in the summer of 2006: the trade paperback was stacked on the front table of every bookstore I walked into, with that melancholy tinted black-and- white cover photo of a couple —in a crowded city square, a single suitcase at their feet—who clearly have no idea where they'll lay their heads tonight.

Irène Némirovsky was a Parisian Catholic (of Russian-Jewish extraction) who died at Auschwitz in August 1942 at the age of 39, and this unfinished novel wasn't discovered until the author's daughter started going through her notebooks in the 1990s. I've been listening to the audiobook while I knit, and I understand why the critics have called it a masterpiece: the prose is beautiful, clear and unaffected, and it's remarkable that Némirovsky could cast such cool, keen eye on something so horrible that was happening in real time—the story reads like it was written with the benefit of many years' hindsight.

Most of the characters are intensely unlikable, and in their flight from Paris they resemble rats on a sinking ship. Only the Michauds—humble, hardworking, and sick with worry over the fate of their son—are characters we can get behind. The Michauds are the only men in the book who don’t trample on others to save their own skins; unlike the other men, Maurice Michaud doesn’t consider himself irreplaceable.

Yet there are occasional moments of grace: a refugee crouching in a ditch during an air raid notices a white butterfly flitting among the wildflowers; a mother holds her child so tightly it seems as if she wants to put the baby back into her womb, the only safe place; a young woman tends to a wounded soldier during “the summer they were 20, in spite of everything.”

These moments are rare, however. The book is divided in two (the “suite” being unfinished): “A Storm in June” follows a bunch of miserly, hypocritical Parisian snobs as they flee the city, and “Dolce” observes a community of superstitious farm wives, including two young women locked into cold and loveless marriages. The novel’s prevailing attitude can be encapsulated by Hubert Péricand, who leaves his family a foolhardy teenager eager to see battle, and returns to them a cynical young man:

The people around him, his family, his friends, aroused a feeling of shame and rage within him. He had seen them on the road, them and people like them: he recalled the cars full of officers running away with their beautiful yellow trunks and their painted women, civil servants abandoning their posts, panic-stricken politicians dropping files of secret papers along the road, young girls, who had diligently wept the day the armistice was signed, being comforted in the arms of the Germans. “And to think that no one will know, that there were will be such a conspiracy of lies that all this will be transformed into yet another glorious page in the history of France. We’ll do everything we can to find acts of devotion and heroism for the official records. Good God! To see what I've seen! Closed doors where you knock in vain to get a glass of water and refugees who pillaged houses; everywhere, everywhere you look, chaos, cowardice, vanity and ignorance! What a wonderful race we are!”

Living (and dying) the way she did, witnessing all that she did, it’s no wonder Némirovsky’s characters are either selfish bastards or misanthropes. From the preface to the French edition: "She had absolutely no illusions, not about the attitude of the inert French masses—'loathsome' in their defeat and collaboration—nor about her own fate." She refused to stop writing even when the rest of the French publishing industry were rolling over for the Nazis, and she knew they would eventually murder her for it.

There is a violent act towards the end of "A Storm in June" that disturbed me so much I had to stop listening for a couple of months (I started the book in early October). I don't want to tell you what happened that so turned my stomach, in case this novel is on your list, but suffice it to say my mother will not be reading Suite Française. The passage in question is one of the most shocking things I have ever read.

I get that war is hell and it brings out the very worst in people, but doesn’t it also, if only occasionally, bring out the very best? There were plenty of people who didn’t wish to survive at the cost of their humanity; not every person in France was apathetic, not everyone was a collaborator; just because the word “heroism” is grossly overused doesn’t mean there are no heroes. We see virtually none of that in Suite Française because that wasn't the author's experience; but I imagine it's rather difficult to give your characters a happy ending when you know your own will be anything but.

Great Book #85: Uncle Tom's Cabin

Julie at Forgotten Classics has recently finished her reading of Uncle Tom's Cabin, that seminal novel by Harriet Beecher Stowe. Legend has it that upon meeting Mrs. Stowe, President Lincoln exclaimed, "So this is the little lady who made this big war!"

Stowe's characters—the Christ figures of Uncle Tom and little Eva; runaways Eliza and George, Cassie and Emmeline; and everyone Tom encounters as he suffers through a succession of owners—illustrate in all-too- human terms what Condi Rice has called our country's congenital defect (and no doubt that's the only thing Dr. Rice has ever said that I can agree with!) The novel doesn't merely demonize the slaveholders (that would be too easy, and anyway not all of them are depicted as such; some are weak men with good intentions). Stowe emphasizes that just because Northerners didn't own slaves didn't mean their consciences were unstained by the evil.

Anyway, if you enjoy audiobooks, you should definitely listen to Julie's podcast in lieu of reading Uncle Tom in book form, since she provides so much insightful commentary in addition. I just love the reader's note, with which she begins each set of chapters:

Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote Uncle Tom's Cabin to expose the inhumanity of treating human beings as things. Former slaves agreed that her examples were true to life. Thus, some of the language and attitudes in this book are offensive because they reflect an ugly history. It is said that those who forget history are doomed to repeat it. The reader does not wish to be responsible for dooming anyone by censoring either history or literature. Therefore the book will be read as it is written, offensive language and all.

Julie's reading sometimes brought me to tears, but I don't feel the urge to write a long post on this book. It's an important work— melodrama and all—and everyone (American or not) should read it at some point.

Great Book #15: Death Comes For The Archbishop

This book—the physical book—is quite special to me. My grandmother was a voracious reader, but she owned very few books; the public library was her library. Death Comes For The Archbishop is one of the few books she kept a copy of (writing her name on the fly), and I distinctly remember her saying that Willa Cather was one of her favorite writers. I would have been too young to read her then, but I'm certainly appreciating her now. Willa Cather wrote my all-time favorite ghost story, and I've enjoyed Death Comes For The Archbishop almost as much.

I imagine it is extremely difficult to write A (Good) Novel In Which Nothing In Particular Happens (the only other example I can think of is John McGahern's That They May Face the Rising Sun). A story without a plot (or an episodic plot as in this case) has to compensate in other ways, with memorable characters and an extraordinarily vivid sense of time and place.

This novel follows the life, work, and travels of Father Jean Latour in 19th-century New Mexico. Death Comes For The Archbishop continually reminded me of Georgia O'Keeffe—but Cather paints the American Southwest with words, from the perilous mountains and ravines the priests must traverse to the eerie mesa towns perched high above the desert floor. Take this sublimely simple description of dusk:

They relapsed into the silence which was their usual form of intercourse. The Bishop sat drinking his coffee slowly out of the tin cup, keeping the pot near the embers. The sun had set now, the yellow rocks were turning grey, down in the pueblo the light of the cook fires made red patches of the glassless windows, and the smell of piñon smoke came softly through the still air. The whole western sky was the colour of golden ashes, with here and there a flush of red on the lip of a little cloud. High above the horizon the evening-star flickered like a lamp just lit, and close beside it was another star of constant light, much smaller.

And like her landscapes, Cather is brilliant at nailing a character in just a few words:

Don Manuel Chavez, the handsomest man of the company, very elegant in velvet and broadcloth, with delicately cut, disdainful features—one had only to see him cross the room, or to sit next him at dinner, to feel the electric quality under his cold reserve; the fierceness of some embitterment, the passion for danger.

The electric quality under his cold reserve. Gives me chills! Conversely, here's a splendid encapsulation of the Bishop's assistant, his dear old friend Father Vaillant: He added a glow to whatever kind of human society he was dropped down into.

The other remarkable aspect of this novel is its abiding respect for Catholic missionaries. Desert life is a constant hardship, yet the Mexicans to whom Father Latour administers lead richly spiritual lives. They may have only the plainest, most serviceable clothes to wear to Mass, but they take great pleasure in arranging what little finery they have on their Madonna statues. Cather writes admiringly of their complete lack of materialism and the strength of their faith in the midst of unthinkable cruelty, so it's quite difficult to believe the author wasn't a devout Catholic herself (she was born a Baptist and later joined the Episcopal Church). My grandmother was a devout Catholic, but I'm sure that's only a small part of why she loved this novel.

Here are a few more of my favorite lines (I'm not giving anything away—it is in the title, you know!):

The old man smiled. "I shall not die of a cold, my son. I shall die of having lived."

During those last few weeks of the Bishop's life he thought very little about death; it was the Past he was leaving. The future would take care of itself.

Sometimes, when Magdalena or Bernard came in and asked him a question, it took him several seconds to bring himself back to the present. He could see they thought his mind was failing; but it was only extraordinarily active in some other part of the great picture of his life—some part of which they knew nothing. When the occasion warranted he could return to the present. But there was not much present left...only the minor characters of his life remained in present time.

Great Book #27: The Little Prince

Back in high school one of my friends gave me a copy of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry's The Little Prince as a birthday present. I remember her giving it to me with a certain air of momentousness, as if the book had changed her life and she wanted that experience for me. I'm ashamed that it took me so long to read it, but now that I have, I see why she felt that way.

The narrator is a pilot who has crashed in the Sahara and needs to fix his engine before his water supply runs out. A mysterious 'little man' with a head of golden curls appears out of nowhere, and asks him to draw a sheep. The little prince answers none of the narrator's questions about who he is or where he came from, but he always seems to know what the narrator is thinking, and the narrator eventually finds out that the little prince lives on an asteroid with three volcanoes (one extinct, but you never know) and only one flower, of which the prince is very fond. His planet is so small you can watch the sunset dozens of times a day just by going for a walk.

In his interstellar travels the prince meets several adults, each on their own tiny planet, and each engaged in something completely pointless. I tend to think of myself as an overgrown child, but I’m certainly not immune to the grown-up absurdities the prince points out. But above all, The Little Prince is a fable about love, loneliness, and letting go. He meets a fox who begs to be tamed: "Wheat is of no use to me. The wheat fields have nothing to say to me. And that is sad. But you have hair that is the color of gold. Think how wonderful that will be when you have tamed me! The grain, which is also golden, will bring me back the thought of you. And I shall love to listen to the wind in the wheat..." Of course, the little prince must eventually part with the narrator, too—the scene is poignant but not overly sentimental.

What's all too poignant is the fate of the author, which you can't help ruminating on as you look at his watercolors. Saint-Exupéry was a World War II pilot who was shot down during a reconnaissance mission in 1944, the year after The Little Prince was published.

—

He cried out, then:
"What! You dropped down from the sky?"
"Yes," I answered, modestly.
"Oh! That is funny!"
And the little prince broke into a lovely peal of laughter, which irritated me very much. I like my misfortunes to be taken seriously.

—

When I was a little boy, the lights of the Christmas tree, the music of the Midnight Mass, the tenderness of smiling faces, used to make up, so, the radiance of the gifts I received.

—

"And when your sorrow is comforted (time soothes all sorrows) you will be content that you have known me. You will always be my friend."

Great Book #42: Man's Search For Meaning

Man's Search For Meaning by Viktor Frankl: I can't overstate how brilliant, how useful, how life-affirming it is. In a sentence, this slim book is about "saying yes to life in spite of everything"—the author was an innovative psychiatrist and neurologist from Vienna who survived Auschwitz and three other Nazi death camps. The first section describes his experiences in the concentration camps, and the second outlines Dr. Frankl's form of psychotherapy, logotherapy (from the Greek logos, "meaning"), in very practical terms.

Dr. Frankl's psychiatric training made him uniquely equipped to observe his own behavior and those of his comrades in the death camps with a sort of 'cold curiosity.' He served as camp doctor, and had a chance to escape at one point, but decided not to abandon his typhus patients. He does not hold himself up as some example of 'the right way to suffer', however: "We who have come back, by the aid of many lucky chances or miracles—whatever one may choose to call them—we know: the best of us did not return."

Actual survival was, in a sense, irrelevant. To keep ever-present in his mind the faces of his loved ones (his wife in particular) and a vision of his future life, to retain his dignity and human impulses without denying the horrific reality of the concentration camp, marveling at a beautiful sunset even as his friends went 'up the chimneys'—he did all this, but without the intervention of blind chance at crucial moments he might not have survived. Dr. Frankl writes of emaciated prisoners exchanging recipes over hard physical labor, planning a post-war dinner party they knew full well would probably never happen. But that's beside the point. It's not about when you die, but how you've lived.

There are so many moving and insightful passages I want to share with you here, but I'd end up transcribing most of the book! So here are just a few of the parts I underlined:

"'Listen, Otto, if I don't get back home to my wife, and if you should see her again, then tell her that I talked of her daily, hourly. You remember. Secondly, I have loved her more than anyone. Thirdly, the short time I have been married to her outweighs everything, even all we have gone through here.' Otto, where are you now? Are you alive? What has happened to you since our last hour together? Did you find your wife again? And do you remember how I made you learn my will by heart—word for word—in spite of your childlike tears?"

"...Mental health is based on a certain degree of tension, the tension between what one has already achieved and what one still ought to accomplish, or the gap between what one is and what one should become."

"To be sure, a human being is a finite thing, and his freedom is restricted. It is not freedom from conditions, but it is freedom to take a stand toward the conditions."

"A statistical survey recently revealed that among my European students, 25 percent showed a more-or-less marked degree of existential vacuum. Among my American students it was not 25 but 60 percent." [And this was written in the 1950s!]

"...We watched and witnessed some of our comrades behave like swine while others behaved like saints. Man has both potentialities within himself; which one is actualized depends on decisions but not on conditions."

"...You may of course ask whether we really need to refer to 'saints.' Wouldn't it suffice just to refer to decent people? It is true that they form a minority. More than that, they always will remain a minority. And yet I see therein the very challenge to join the minority. For the world is in a bad state, but everything will become still worse unless each of us does his best."

This is one of the very best books I have ever read. Enough said, right?

Great Book #71: The Third Policeman

Even if I'd read The Third Policeman before I'd heard anything about Brian O'Nolan (a.k.a. Flann O'Brien, Myles na gCopaleen, et al.), I still would have figured the author was a total character. 'Maddening' is one of many adjectives used on the back cover, and it's certainly the most apt.

The unnamed narrator tells us of his claustrophobic existence somewhere in rural Ireland, and of his relationship with the leech-like John Divney, who's taken over his dead parents' farm and refuses to leave. Divney hatches a plan to murder a local miser, Mathers, and steal his money, and the hapless narrator agrees.

After returning to the house of the dead-and-buried miser to retrieve the money box, the narrator encounters Mathers in a dirty old bathrobe sipping watered-down tea. The money box has disappeared, and needless to say the narrator can't really be asking the inexplicably-alive-or-maybe-undead Mathers where it is. So he goes to the local police station thinking he'll claim he's lost his (nonexistent) American gold watch, and get the policemen's help finding the money box instead. There are a pair of cartoonish policemen at the station, and they spend a lot of time blabbing about humans who are part-bicycle and bicycles that are part-human, declaring this or that an 'insoluble pancake.' They take the narrator through the woods and down an elevator into a subterranean complex they claim is eternity, which they've found via the cracks on a bedroom ceiling that just happen to form a map of the area. Down in eternity the narrator wishes for wealth, a bottle of the best whiskey, and a fine suit, all of which materialize, but then the policemen tell him he can't take it into the elevator or they'll all explode. And so on and so forth.

After the first two (thoroughly engrossing) chapters I found The Third Policeman quite a tough slog—much too much gratuitous bizarreness, and the footnotes drove me nuts—but looking back on it now I see it all makes perfect sense. I wish I could discuss the ending, but I don't want to spoil it for you. I'll just say that what once seemed clever now feels derivative, because Brian O'Nolan did it first.

I think I'll be including my favorite passage in each of my '100 great books' write-ups. From page 40 of The Third Policeman:

...A good road will have character and a certain air of destiny, an indefinable intimation that it is going somewhere, be it east or west, and not coming back from there. If you go with such a road, he thinks, it will give you pleasant travelling, fine sights at every corner and a gentle ease of peregrination that will persuade you that you are walking forever on falling ground.

Next up (talk about a diverse assortment of titles!): Viktor Frankl's Man's Search for Meaning.

100 Great Books

I've come across several 100-great-books lists on various blogs, and I think it's a great idea: read 100 books (fiction or nonfiction) that you feel you ought to have read already, setting an end-date of five or seven (or ten?) years from now. They don't all have to be classics per se, but reading them can fill in the gaps where your literary education is concerned.

I decided that at least 20% of the books on my list should be translated works (which are starred on my list below). I intend to consume several of these books on CD/podcast, because let's face it—if I don't "read" while I knit, it's probably going to take me well over 10 years to get through this list. I also don’t think I’m going to get around to reading any doorstoppers like Ulysses, Herodotus’ Histories, de Toqueville's Democracy in America, or War and Peace; I’ll read them eventually, but in the meantime I’d rather read the Joyce and Tolstoy I already have on hand (Portrait of the Artist and a collection of the shorter novels and stories, respectively). I’m also thinking about making somewhat shorter lists for plays and poetry.

If you’re thinking about making a list yourself, check out the 'best' lists at the Modern Library, Waterstones, The Guardian, and San José State University (that one's aptly titled 'The Guilt List').

1. Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe
2. Foundation by Isaac Asimov
3. Go Tell it on the Mountain by James Baldwin
4. The Adventures of Augie March by Saul Bellow
5. Beowulf
6. The Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio *
7. Labyrinths by Jorge Luis Borges *
8. Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
9. Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë (Librivox)
10. The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov *
11. A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess
12. Possession by A.S. Byatt
13. In Cold Blood by Truman Capote
14. Silent Spring by Rachel Carson
15. Death Comes for the Archbishop by Willa Cather (read August-September '09)
16. Cathedral by Raymond Carver
17. Don Quixote by Miguel Cervantes *
18. The Wapshot Chronicle by John Cheever
19. The Vagabond by Colette *
20. Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
21. The Last of the Mohicans by James Fenimore Cooper (Librivox)
22. The Chocolate War by Robert Cormier
23. The Red Badge of Courage by Stephen Crane
24. The Divine Comedy by Dante *
25. The Origin of Species by Charles Darwin (Librivox)
26. Eugénie Grandet by Honoré de Balzac *
27. The Little Prince by Antoine de Sainte-Exupéry * (read August 2009)
28. Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe (Librivox)
29. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick
30. Hard Times by Charles Dickens (Librivox)
31. An American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser
32. The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoyevsky * (coming soon on Librivox)
33. Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky * (Librivox)
34. The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco *
35. Middlemarch by George Eliot (Librivox)
36. The Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
37. The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner
38. Tom Jones by Henry Fielding
39. Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert *
40. A Room with a View by E.M. Forster (Librivox)
41. The Magus by John Fowles
42. Man's Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl * (read July/August 2009)
43. Cold Comfort Farm by Stella Gibbons
44. Neuromancer by William Gibson
45. Lord of the Flies by William Golding (audiobook, listened February 2010)
46. The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame (Librivox; listened May 2010)
47. The Power and the Glory by Graham Greene
48. Hunger by Knut Hamsun *
49. Far from the Madding Crowd by Thomas Hardy (Librivox)
50. A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway
51. Steppenwolf by Hermann Hesse *
52. Riddley Walker by Russell Hoban
53. Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston
54. Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce
55. The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka *
56. The Woman Warrior by Maxine Hong Kingston
57. The Jungle Book by Rudyard Kipling
58. On the Road by Jack Kerouac
59. Lady Chatterley's Lover by D. H. Lawrence
60. The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing
61. If Not Now, When? by Primo Levi *
62. It Can’t Happen Here by Sinclair Lewis
63. The Call of the Wild by Jack London (Librivox)
64. The Naked and the Dead by Norman Mailer
65. Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel García Márquez *
66. Of Human Bondage by Somerset Maugham
67. Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller
68. The Wind-up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami *
69. Under the Net by Iris Murdoch
70. Suite Française by Irène Némirovsky * (audiobook—listened September-December '09)
71. The Third Policeman by Flann O'Brien (read June-July '09)
72. A Good Man Is Hard To Find by Flannery O'Connor
73. One Thousand and One Nights (a.k.a. Arabian Nights) *
74. Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon
75. All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque*
76. Portnoy’s Complaint by Philip Roth
77. Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie
78. Blindness by José Saramago *
79. Rob Roy by Walter Scott (coming soon on Librivox)
80. The Jungle by Upton Sinclair
81. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
82. A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith
83. One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Alexander Solzhenitsyn *
84. The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
85. Uncle Tom's Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe (audio version, Forgotten Classics)
86. Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift (Librivox)
87. Vanity Fair by William Makepace Thackeray (Librivox)
88. Walden and Civil Disobedience by Henry David Thoreau
89. The Great Short Works of Leo Tolstoy *
90. Rabbit, Run by John Updike
91. Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea by Jules Verne * (Librivox)
92. The Ice Palace by Tarjei Vesaas *
93. Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut
94. The Time Machine by H.G. Wells (read August 2010)
95. The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty
96. Look Homeward, Angel by Thomas Wolfe
97. A Vindication of the Rights of Woman by Mary Wollstonecraft
98. A Room of One’s Own by Virginia Woolf
99. Native Son by Richard Wright
100. We by Yevgeny Zamyatin *

The plan is to annotate this list periodically, blogging brief(ish) 'book appreciations' as I go. Feel free to leave me more recommendations —the master list is actually much longer!

First up: The Third Policeman by Flann O'Brien (I just finished it this week).