The Fine Fifteen: Novels

October 4, 2009

[cc image by Caro’s Lines]

Slightly modified from a meme I was “tagged” for:

take 15 minutes (no more!) to list, in no particular order, 15 books (in this case novels) that have most intensely “stuck with you.” No Googling, etc.

I was a bit surprised by what I came up with—definitely not the same list I’d create given more time. I’ve added a few brief notes after the fact:

The Sound and the Fury (William Faulkner) – a tale of an idiot that’s no idiot and that ends up signifying everything. Say “stream of consciousness” and this is the work I think of first. Time- and mind-bending.

Infinite Jest (David Foster Wallace) – Alas, poor Yorick. Alas, DFW. In my own way I knew him well. Did you know you can laugh and cry at the same time (and I don’t mean happy tears)? Needless to say, David Foster Wallace has come up here many times.

Ulysses (James Joyce) – 18 mini-books in one, each with an individual style. Relentlessly allusive; at once stylistically sprawling and a picture taken with a macro lens that hadn’t been invented yet. I documented much of my re-reading of Ulysses a while back.

Cryptonomicon (Neal Stephenson) – could have put Diamond Age or Snow Crash here, but this is the one that popped into my head.

Lord of the Rings (J.R.R. Tolkien) – sneaking in a trilogy is probably cheating, but I consider this one big book. I think Tolkien did too. I’m well aware of what some consider flaws, but LoTR wormed its way into my heart early. I cry at the end—the very end—every time.

Lolita (Vladimir Nabokov) – I’ve written about Lolita before. It’s not the book too many think it is… it’s so much more.

Crime & Punishment (Fyodor Dostoevsky) – Raskolnikov is an indelible, horrifying, tragic, pathetic and disgusting character. And yet I have great sympathy for the deepest driving forces in his life and how they break us on their terrible racks.

Catcher in the Rye (J.D. Salinger) – I liked this more the second-time around than I did the first. I’d like to think it’s because I’ve retained my sense of wonder. The alternative is bleak.

Time’s Arrow (Martin Amis) – The imagery of time literally running in reverse, the homunculus narrator, and finally an original—even brilliant—evocation of the Holocaust. Time’s Arrow is criminally underrated.

Huckleberry Finn (Mark Twain) – A reasonable argument could be made for Huckleberry Finn as the greatest (if not The Great) American novel. It’s just hard to see through the layers of popularization and the book rendered constantly as a cartoonish work for juveniles.

Affliction (Russell Banks) – Wade Whitehouse is another unforgettable character: out of control, the abused become an abuser, unable to find his way. And the col Northeastern winter. And the utter absence of Whitehouse in this story, told after his disappearance… uncovered piece-by-piece by a scholar who is discovering an obsession of his own.

The Great Gatsby (F. Scott Fitzgerald) – Another solid contender for the Great American Novel (and the “American” part is exceedingly important).

Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (Lewis Carroll) – A novel even more shrunken in the popular imagination than Huckleberry Finn.

A Prayer for Owen Meany (John Irving) – Sappy? Whatever. I’m not ashamed of it.

A Deepness in the Sky (Vernor Vinge) – I could list any number of sci-fi novels that shifted my perception, but Vinge’s novel both took off the top of my head and intersected with a lifelong interest in physics, relativity and time-dilation. I could have easily substituted Rainbows End, but that might be because I read it more recently.

Tags: fiction, fine fifteen, memes, novels, reading