The Sound and the Fury, by William Faulkner
I read The Sound and the Fury because it’s on my unified list of 100 best novels. I haven’t come across any Faulkner previously, and the only comments I’ve had from others haven’t been positive.
It tells the story of the (disintegration of the) Compson family, relating two specific periods: a day in 1910, and three days in 1928. There are four chapters, each recounting one of those days.
The first chapter (April 7th 1928) is written from the perspective of Benjy, ‘a simpleton’, and son of the family. He has no concept of time, so this chapter is a stream (more like a babble) of consciousness. The only aid is the font switching between roman and italic at discontinuities in his babble. At first I tried hard to make sense of it, but in the end I just let it wash over me, assuming or hoping it would make sense later, as suggested in the introduction.
The second chapter (June 2nd 1910) is written from the perspective of Quentin, ‘the son who went to Harvard’, on the day he killed himself. I only know that because the introduction told me. It wasn’t clear from reading it myself, though you might guess it. This is certainly clearer than the first chapter, but there are still flips between roman and italic, and I wasn’t always entirely sure what was going on.
The third chapter (April 6th 1928) is written from the perspective of Jason, the son who stayed at home. He’s a bad egg, and has manipulated various circumstances for his financial gain, at the emotional cost of others. A lot more things became clearer with this chapter, and bleaker.
The final chapter (April 8th 1928) is written in the third person, and covers another major fracturing of the family, relating to Quentin, the daughter of Jason and Benjy’s sister.
It’s a bleak story, and I didn’t find myself interested in it, or any of the characters. I only stuck with it because it’s on my list, and I found myself watching the pages tick by. Some books have started like this, or had pages, but very few have maintained that right to the end.
I don’t usually read introductions, at least before reading the book, as they tend to be long-winded, and often give away major elements of the story. But this one (by Richard Hughes, in the Vintage Classics edition) is only two pages, and makes life a lot easier if you’ve read it first. It does reveal things, but without some of its pointers I would have been more confused, I’m sure.
One sentence from the introduction I want to comment on; he’s referring to the third and fourth chapters:
It is here this curious method is finally justified: for one finds, in a flash, that one knows all about them, that one has understood more of Benjy’s sound and fury than one had realized: the whole story becomes actual to one at a single moment.
Well, there was no flash of realisation for me, more a gradual rolling back of mist. But the mist never did entirely dissipate. Hughes also suggests that the book will reward a second and further readings. I’m sure I’d get more the second time round, but for full value I think you should roll straight back from the last page to the first, and I just didn’t want to. Life is too short – I shouldn’t have to read a book twice.
In summary, reading this was hard work, and it didn’t really feel like it paid off. Yes, Faulkner was clearly a talented writer; I just didn’t enjoy what he did with his talent on this occasion, and it won’t be on my personal list of “100 best novels”. I’m curious whether all his books are like this?
Slaughterhouse 5, by Kurt Vonnegut
I read Slaughterhouse 5 over a weekend, after finally finishing Gormenghast. After that slog, Slaughterhouse 5 was a breath of fresh air.
It tells the story of Billy Pilgrim, a US soldier in World War II who experiences the Dresden bombing at close hand. For reasons not explained, Billy has become unstuck in time, and slips between different periods in his life, including an alien abduction. That may sound like an odd basis for a book, and I guess it is, but it’s one of the most enjoyable books I’ve read in the last year.
The writing is crisp, thought-provoking and engaging. It managed to make me think about, and find out more about, the Dresden bombings, while still remaining quirky and entertaining.
I’ve read a good number of “serious” books recently, and many of them have been hard work. It was good to be reminded that quality and thought-provoking writing doesn’t have to be heavy going.
The Gormenghast Trilogy, by Mervyn Peake
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I first had a go at reading the Gormenghast trilogy about 24 years ago, at the age of 19, when I was reading a lot of science and fantasy fiction. I gave up less than 100 pages in: my memory was that I found it too slow moving and hard work to read. It’s part of the Big Read 100, so this time I was committed to finishing it. I’m not sure I would have finished it this time otherwise… |
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I made slow and steady progress through the first half of book 1 (Titus Groan). It didn’t grab me, and felt like a bit of a chore to stick with it. But from there until the middle of book 2 (Gormenghast) I really bogged down. I took a break a couple of times and polished off several books, because I just didn’t fancy slogging through this. Why spend a paragraph describing something when you could spend several pages? The writing is very dense, and feels dated, though it may just be Peake’s writing style, rather than a style of the period.
The pace really picked up for the second half of Gormenghast though. I was hooked into the story, and found myself wanting to read just one more chapter. A lot of what had gone before had definitely set the scene, and gave everything a context. I’m deliberately avoiding talking about the plot, but everything builds towards the dénouement at the end of book 2.
Book 3 (Titus Alone) is a very different book: a different genre, and a very different writing style. The first two books were written closely together, but Titus Alone was published nearly 10 years after Gormenghast. All through the first two books, I had a certain image of Gormenghast, and its period. I saw it either in the late middle ages, or in a setting not wildly different from Lord of the Rings. And then on page 5 of Titus Alone we come across a car, and then a bit later planes and helicopters. Does everyone have the same “huh?!” moment I had?
I read Titus Alone fairly quickly. Partly this was down to the different writing style, I think. It’s almost a collection of sound bites, most chapters are shorter than 2 pages. It wasn’t really satisfying, and for me detracted from the rhythm I’d built up on the second half of Gormenghast.
I can imagine it’s hard for people to classify Gormenghast: dark Gothic fantasy? Considering just the first two books, it most reminded me of Dickens: nearly every character is a caricature, the way most characters are in Dickens. It’s what Dickens might have written for fantasy fiction, though Peake’s not as good a writer as Dickens.
Before the Gormenghast Trilogy, Middlemarch was the book from the Big Read 100 that had taken me the longest to read so far. Gormenghast has knocked it into second place: it took about 10 weeks, which is very unusual for me.
Revelations, by Jerry Moffatt
At my rock climbing peak (when we would drive up the M1 to the Peak district 2 weekends in 3), I’d watch all the climbing videos I came across, and also read plenty of books about climbing and climbers. One of my favourite videos is still The Real Thing, which follows Jerry Moffatt and Ben Moon to Fontainebleau, with a cast of various friends. In addition to being clearly excellent climbers, they were obviously having a lot of fun. As soon as Revelations, Jerry Moffat’s ghost-written autobiography, was published I bought a copy online. It arrived during the week, and I took a break from my current book to read it this weekend.
At the end of the first chapter, which covers Jerry’s life up to leaving school, I was feeling disappointed. It read as not much more than a list of “then I did this, then I did that”, and there were a number of typos. Was this a rushed book, and poorly proof-read? Jerry’s dyslexic, so I’d feel bad making comments about typos if it weren’t that the book was ghost-written.
I stuck with it, and quickly got hooked. I romped through the book fairly quickly, wanting to read what would happen next. The thing that makes the book worth reading is Jerry Moffat’s life, and his approach to, and attitude towards, climbing. It’s an insight into what it takes to become the best in any sport. That and the outrageous and stories which pepper the book. Many climbing books start with rock climbing, but transition to mountaineering and other forms of exploration. Revelations is quite rare in the climbing canon, in that the whole book is about rock climbing.
I was really into rock climbing for a number of years, but that was nothing compared to Jerry’s focus. Monomania is probably the right word. But he’s clearly had the killer combination of monomania and talent. I knew various bits of the Jerry Moffatt story, but some of what I ‘knew’ turned out to be wrong, and the full story is compelling reading.
Revelations isn’t going to make the top 10 of literary climbing books, and unlike some climbing books it’s probably not going to appeal to non-climbers. But to rock climbers it’s definitely worth the read, and shows you what it takes to be the best climber in the world.
Book Review: Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie
I finally finished reading Midnight’s Children. It had been on my reading list for a while, as it’s on the Big Read Top 100 (just, it’s at #100), plus it’s on my list of 100 books you should read. I’d put off reading it, because
- It’s a Booker winner. Three times: originally in 1981, and twice it’s been nominated the best of Booker. Booker is often a sign that a book will be hard work, and often also that I won’t enjoy it. And also:
- I don’t know anyone who’s finished it, but had comments from a number of people who’d given up on it.
I felt like giving up a few times, particularly in the middle third of the book, but it was on my list so I stuck with it, and ended up kinda glad that I did.
It tells the story of Saleem Sinai, an Indian boy born at midnight 15th August 1947, exactly the same time as the partition of India and Pakistan. All children born in India in that hour (the midnight’s children of the title) have strange abilities, and the closer to midnight they were born, the stronger their powers. The book is written as the autobiography of Saleem, looking back at the age of 32 on both his life, and the first 32 years of India, taking in Pakistan and Bangladesh.
Saleem’s life parallels India’s, and many of India’s major events are also major events in Saleem’s life (in a way that reminded me of Forrest Gump). It’s almost like a history lesson about India, Pakistan and Bangladesh, with the surreal tale of Saleem woven through and around it.
I can imagine some reviewers describing the writing as dense and rich, and while Rushdie is skilled wordcrafter, at times I thought it pretentious. His writing reminded me of John Irving: a similar quirky style; but it also reminded me of Irving’s later books, which I find similarly hard work.
I’m glad that I read it, but is it one of the best 100 novels of all time? Personally, I don’t think so. One of the key questions for me, on my first reading of an author is “does it make me want to read more by this author?”. And for Salman Rushdie, no, it doesn’t.
Big Read Top 21 – Filling in the Gaps
Of the Top 21 books in the BBC’s Big Read I had only read 11 at the time. I read a lot, but to that date hadn’t read many classics; so I decided to read the other 10. Here’s what I thought of them.
I thought Pride and Prejudice was excellent: crisp, efficient writing, sparkling humour, good observational descriptions of life and mores of the period; and a surprisingly good read. Jane Eyre wasn’t as good as P&P, but a deserving classic nonetheless. I’d already seen a number of film and TV adaptations of Rebecca, so I was very familiar with the story. It was enjoyable enough, and clearly a classic, but it just didn’t fire me up; apparently it particularly appeals to teenage girls. I’d previously dismissed Little Women as a girl’s book; it was an easy read, and I got into it more than expected. It read like it was aimed at a younger audience than the other books above. These four are all deserving to be in a “best novels” list, I think.
One of the classifications I’d use for books on this kind of list is whether it ever feels like hard work reading them. Catch-22 was the first one that felt a bit like work. I just don’t get why people rate it so highly. It was ok, but I wouldn’t put it in my top 21. Gone with the Wind was never hard work, but read more like a holiday read, or romantic / historical pulp fiction. Most of the books I’ve kept, but once I’d finished with Gone with the Wind it went straight to a charity shop.
Birdsong was one of the books I enjoyed the most: well written and a gripping story. I haven’t really read much about the first World War, just picked stuff up from TV and films. The descriptions of trench warfare, tunnelling, and bodies trampled into muddy battlefields were eye opening – making me think beyond my cliched sound-bite view of WWI. I know some people think the love interest detracts from the book, but I think it’s better for having the human interest interwoven.
I hadn’t read any Dickens prior to this list, and had a expectation of dry prose that would probably make my “hard work” list. Great Expectations was none of those things. A good story, very well written; most of these books are well written, but Dickens reads like he really crafted his sentences. One thing with all Dickens that I’ve read so far: most of the characters feel like caricatures. Maybe that’s a result of the initial serialisation in periodicals?
I was up to date on my Harry Potter, but hadn’t read any of the His Dark Materials trilogy; the two series seemed in some sense to be competing at the time. I was sucked into the world of HDM, and thought the writing was better than Harry Potter; it feels more literary, and better suited to an older age range. I got bogged down for a patch in the third book (The Amber Spyglass). Overall I thought this was good, but I wouldn’t score it as highly (it came 3rd in the Big Read).
I bought all of the books I had to read well ahead of reading them, and had them all sitting on the shelf. War and Peace was intimidating, partly just down to the size of it (approx 1500 pages), but also because of the comments I’d get from people when I told them W&P was in my reading queue. So this ended up being the last book I read from the Top 21. I really enjoyed it, and it never felt hard work, apart from perhaps when trying to keep track of the who’s who. It felt deserving of the epic epithet, and a true literary classic. I could imagine Tolstoy really working hard on this book.
Here’s a quick classification of the ones I read in this batch:
| Better than expected | Good | Didn’t Care For |
|---|---|---|
| War and Peace | Jane Eyre | Catch-22 |
| Pride and Prejudice | His Dark Materials | Gone with the Wind |
| Great Expectations | Little Women | |
| Birdsong | Rebecca |
Many of the books I had already ticked off were read when I was a teenager or younger. At some point I’ll go back and re-read them.
Generating a list of Best 100 Novels
This post describes how I came up with a list of Best 100 Novels, which I posted recently. Unsurprisingly this has generated a wide range of comments, from people who think it’s a great list, and others who think it’s hopeless.
What? and Why?
I wanted a list of “100 novels you should read”. Whenever I used to see such lists I would always get a pitifully low score. I read a lot, but it felt like I was missing some of a reader’s cultural context. I was in a reading group for a year or so, and liked the fact that I ended up reading quite a few books that I otherwise wouldn’t have read. Quite a few I didn’t particularly enjoy (Notes on a Scandal by Zoë Heller sticks in my mind) and certainly wouldn’t recommend, but the group broadened my reading horizons.
I was given The Big Read book, and decided to work my way through the books in the Top 100. I’m currently on my 80th book. The Big Read top 100 is a mixed bag – some feel ‘worthy’ and others don’t. It was an attempt to create the nation’s (UK’s) favourite books, so includes a good number of children’s books. The list was based on popularity, voted by the general public. There are quite a few books which wouldn’t be on a personal top 100.
So while I’m continuing on my Big Read odyssey, I wanted a better list.
A better list?
Some playing with google quickly turned up a number of ‘top 100 books’ lists. I decided to create a meta-list, by aggregating selected lists. Some of the lists are based on popularity votes, and others are based on supposed literary merit, selected by book reviewers or voted on by authors. I guessed that a merging of both types of lists would result in a list made up of ‘heavyweights’ and books which stand out as cultural reference points.
I created a spreadsheet, and added all the books from 10 different lists. For each list every book is given a score:
- If the book is in the list, and the list is ordered, the score is the position in the list (so Lord of the Rings scores 1 point for the Big Red.
- If the list isn’t ordered, all books on the list get a fixed score (at the moment I use 50).
- All books not on the list also get a fixed ‘penalty’ score. I tried various values for this, and found that it didn’t change the overall result very much. Right now it’s 500. Given I was looking for books which people agreed were good, it seemed sensible to give a stiff penalty for not appearing in a list.
So the lower the overall score for a book, the better the book.
The Lists
The first list I included was The Big Read Top 100: the BBC ran a TV series around this in 2003, and a lot of people had voted, plus it was the list that started me off.
The Waterstone’s bookstore chain ran a poll to find the hundred greatest books of the 20th Century.
Modern Library, an imprint of Random House publishing, published the Modern Library’s Best 100 Novels list. They also ran a reader poll; both lists are on the linked page. I used the board’s list. Hmm, should I factor in the readers’ list as well?
The Telegraph newspaper (in the UK) published their Top 100 books list; this was based on a poll of top books, for world book day, in 2007.
Time magazine published a list of all-time 100 novels from 1923 onwards, as selected by two critics.
The Guardian (a UK newspaper) published a list of the top 100 books of all time, as “determined from a vote by 100 noted writers from 54 countries”. This is a serious list, and isn’t biased towards the English language. Don Quixote was named as the top book in history, but the list was otherwise unordered. Writing this, I’ve realised I should have given Don Quixote 1 point instead of 50. I’ll have to regenerate the list when I’m done writing this, and see what affect that has. I’ve read 12 off this list.
In 2004, Australian TV station ABC ran a poll to find Australians’ 100 favourite books. There are some non-fiction books in there, but I left them in, as I figured they wouldn’t make it into the top 100. Cloudstreet by Tim Winton was the highest scoring book by an Australian author. If you like John Irving (the Garp and Hotel New Hampshire period) then I reckon you’d enjoy Cloudstreet.
Canada.com published Canadians’ 100 Best Books of All Time, based on a Canadian readers’ poll.
best100novels.com is a website dedicated to a list of the best 100 novels. Anyone can vote for their top 10, and these votes go into the overall tally. The site also has reader reviews for the books. There is a lot of overlap between my generated list and this one.
The final list was The Novel 100, taken from a book written by a literature professor.
Conclusion
The process described produced an interesting list, many of which I want to read. It was tempting to edit the list, and drop books that I felt didn’t belong. Mostly these are books that I don’t think would feature in a reader’s poll in 10 or 15 years time: Harry Potter, the Da Vinci Code, Gone with the Wind, and others. But that’s not the list I was trying to create.
Please pass on any other relevant lists you come across – I’ll regenerate the list if I get enough lists to add.
A Unified List of the Best 100 Novels
This list was generated by merging 10 different ‘top 100′ lists from the UK, US, Australia and Canada, to see if the cream floated to the top. The lists are a mixture of public popularity and literary merit. Interestingly, only one book appeared on every list: it’s in first place here.
Note that I merged lists from English-speaking countries, so there is undoubtedly a bias towards books originally written in English. I’ve written a separate post on generating a list of best 100 novels, which describes the method, and the specific lists I included.
Where possible, book titles are linked through to the Project Gutenberg free ebook.
| Rank | Book | Author |
| 1. | Nineteen Eighty-Four | George Orwell |
| 2. | The Great Gatsby | F. Scott Fitzgerald |
| 3. | The Grapes Of Wrath | John Steinbeck |
| 4. | The Catcher in the Rye | J.D. Salinger |
| 5. | Catch-22 | Joseph Heller |
| 6. | One Hundred Years Of Solitude | Gabriel García Márquez |
| 7. | Gone with the Wind | Margaret Mitchell |
| 8. | Ulysses | James Joyce |
| 9. | On The Road | Jack Kerouac |
| 10. | The Lord of the Rings | J.R.R. Tolkien |
| 11. | To Kill a Mockingbird | Harper Lee |
| 12. | Pride and Prejudice | Jane Austen |
| 13. | Wuthering Heights | Emily Brontë |
| 14. | The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe | C.S. Lewis |
| 15. | Great Expectations | Charles Dickens |
| 16. | War and Peace | Leo Tolstoy |
| 17. | Lolita | Vladimir Nabokov |
| 18. | Animal Farm | George Orwell |
| 19. | Crime And Punishment | Fyodor Dostoyevsky |
| 20. | Anna Karenina | Leo Tolstoy |
| 21. | Lord Of The Flies | William Golding |
| 22. | Brideshead Revisited | Evelyn Waugh |
| 23. | Midnight’s Children | Salman Rushdie |
| 24. | Love In The Time Of Cholera | Gabriel García Márquez |
| 25. | The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy | Douglas Adams |
| 26. | Jane Eyre | Charlotte Brontë |
| 27. | The Hobbit | J.R.R. Tolkien |
| 28. | To the Lighthouse | Virginia Woolf |
| 29. | Middlemarch | George Eliot |
| 30. | Rebecca | Daphne du Maurier |
| 31. | Dune | Frank Herbert |
| 32. | Brave New World | Aldous Huxley |
| 33. | A Prayer For Owen Meany | John Irving |
| 34. | Watership Down | Richard Adams |
| 35. | The Sound and the Fury | William Faulkner |
| 36. | Little Women | Louisa May Alcott |
| 37. | Invisible Man | Ralph Ellison |
| 38. | Anne Of Green Gables | LM Montgomery |
| 39. | Emma | Jane Austen |
| 40. | Memoirs Of A Geisha | Arthur Golden |
| 41. | Beloved | Toni Morrison |
| 42. | Of Mice And Men | John Steinbeck |
| 43. | The Heart of Darkness | Joseph Conrad |
| 44. | Les Miserables | Victor Hugo |
| 45. | The Wind in the Willows | Kenneth Grahame |
| 46. | The Da Vinci Code | Dan Brown |
| 47. | Tess Of The D’Urbervilles | Thomas Hardy |
| 48. | Winnie the Pooh | A.A. Milne |
| 49. | Birdsong | Sebastian Faulks |
| 50. | Captain Corelli’s Mandolin | Louis de Bernieres |
| 51. | Slaughterhouse Five | Kurt Vonnegut |
| 52. | Life of Pi | Yann Martel |
| 53. | A Clockwork Orange | Anthony Burgess |
| 54. | The Count Of Monte Cristo | Alexandre Dumas |
| 55. | A Passage to India | E.M. Forster |
| 56. | Moby Dick | Herman Melville |
| 57. | A Suitable Boy | Vikram Seth |
| 58. | The Stand | Stephen King |
| 59. | Possession | A.S. Byatt |
| 60. | Madame Bovary | Gustave Flaubert |
| 61. | A Tale Of Two Cities | Charles Dickens |
| 62. | The Trial | Franz Kafka |
| 63. | I, Claudius | Robert Graves |
| 64. | The Handmaid’s Tale | Margaret Atwood |
| 65. | The Secret History | Donna Tartt |
| 66. | His Dark Materials | Philip Pullman |
| 67. | The Harry Potter Series | J.K. Rowling |
| 68. | The Brothers Karamazov | Fyodor Dostoyevsky |
| 69. | Don Quixote | Miguel de Cervantes |
| 70. | Sons and Lovers | D.H. Lawrence |
| 71. | The Pillars Of The Earth | Ken Follett |
| 72. | A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man | James Joyce |
| 73. | The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn | Mark Twain |
| 74. | The Kite Runner | Khaled Hosseini |
| 75. | An American Tragedy | Theodore Dreiser |
| 76. | Alice’s Adventures In Wonderland | Lewis Carroll |
| 77. | Bleak House | Charles Dickens |
| 78. | The Time Traveller’s Wife | Audrey Niffenegger |
| 79. | A Fine Balance | Rohinton Mistry |
| 80. | The Sun Also Rises | Ernest Hemmingway |
| 81. | Nostromo | Joseph Conrad |
| 82. | Under the Volcano | Malcolm Lowry |
| 83. | The Golden Notebook | Doris Lessing |
| 84. | The Heart is a Lonely Hunter | Carson McCullers |
| 85. | The Stranger | Albert Camus |
| 86. | Native Son | Richard Wright |
| 87. | Gravity’s Rainbow | Thomas Pynchon |
| 88. | The Poisonwood Bible | Barbara Kingsolver |
| 89. | Perfume | Patrick Süskind |
| 90. | Things Fall Apart | Chinua Achebe |
| 91. | David Copperfield | Charles Dickens |
| 92. | Charlie And The Chocolate Factory | Roald Dahl |
| 93. | Pale Fire | Vladimir Nabokov |
| 94. | Persuasion | Jane Austen |
| 95. | Atlas Shrugged | Ayn Rand |
| 96. | The Tin Drum | Gunter Grass |
| 97. | Vanity Fair | William Makepeace Thackeray |
| 98. | Atonement | Ian McEwan |
| 99. | Light in August | William Faulkner |
| 100. | The Secret Garden | Frances Hodgson Burnett |
When the BBC ran The Big Read, I set myself a goal of reading all of the Big Read Top 100. As I’ve been working through the list it has been clear that some books are there due to their popularity at the time of the poll, and others are more enduring.
An online search for other lists quickly revealed that certain books appear near the top of most lists (Great Expectations, for example), others vary widely (for example Ulysses), and some books only appear on one list (national favourites, such as Tim Winton’s excellent Cloudstreet, from Australia). All of the books in this merged 100 appear on at least three lists, the top 10 are in 7 or more lists.
The only editing of the list I’ve done is to collapse series down to a single entry, where appropriate. Some lists have the Harry Potter books listed separately, other as a single entry.
