In front of an airport rack of books, I count up the number of titles I’ve read, usually almost none, and I do the same at B&N’s New Arrivals table, where I generally find four or five that are in my “done” stack at home. Such a sense of accomplishment to have read books other people haven’t even bought yet!
So, of course I file away January’s inevitable lists of the “best books of the year” and fell even further under the thrall of listmania when I discovered the ambitious “Best Fiction of the 20th Century”! This meta-list compiles and compares rankings of “best books” from several notable sources: the Library Journal list, the Modern Library list, the Koen book distributors list, and the Radcliffe Publishing Course list. The lists contain 221 separate works.
About this exercise, compiler Brian Kunde says, “We may take exception to what got on the lists. We may protest over what was left off. But we do learn what others considered notable in our culture — and discover how much of it we’ve neither experienced, thought about, or heard of.”
That’s the truth! The books at the top of the list are familiar, at least by title, but nearer the bottom, memory goes sketchy. Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano (#99)? Reynolds Price’s Kate Vaiden (#192)? Colin Wilson’s The Outsider (#219)?
Some of the books I’d like to check off (Done!) on these lists, did I read them or just see the movie? After the 11 TV episodes of Brideshead Revisited (#144), does anyone actually read the book anymore? TV and movie versions may have aced out the print originals of I, Claudius (#53) or 2001: A Space Odyssey (#94), too. Some books I might have read a long time ago, did I really read, or just mean to? After a few decades, memory may have resolved the matter in my favor.
The Modern Library website provides separate lists of the 100 Best as determined by its Board AND by the online votes of some 217,500 “readers.” A comparison is instructive. While the board leads its list off with Ulysses, The Great Gatsby, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Lolita, and Brave New World (four of which I’ve read—yay!), the top ten in the reader list includes seven books by either Ayn Rand* or L. Ron Hubbard (none of which I’ve read), plus The Lord of the Rings, To Kill a Mockingbird, and 1984. The readers don’t get around to Ulysses until slot 11. How many of them have actually read it, I wonder, and how many just think they should have? I confess, I have not. Slogging through Portrait of the Artist . . was enough, and while I used to know all the words to the song, “Finnegan’s Wake,” I haven’t tackled the book.
*A footnote about Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged: Idaho state senator John Goedde brags “That book made my son a Republican!” He’s introduced a bill to require every high school student in the state to read it and pass a test on it to graduate.
Kunde takes the existing list rankings and creates a composite score—a ranking of rankings. The top 10 using his method are:
- The Great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzgerald
- 1984 by George Orwell (that’s worth a re-read now)
- Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
- The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
- Lolita by Vladimir Nobokov
- Ulysses by James Joyce
- Animal Farm by George Orwell
- Lord of the Flies by William Golding
- The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger
- Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
I’ve read them all, except that big lump in the gravy, Ulysses. But these are the best 20th century books, the world has moved on, and the list is old. Only four books on it are from the 1990s and less than eight percent were published later than 1980. As time passes, more of late-century works may achieve the recognition that eventually came to other books—most notably, the now #1 ranked Gatsby.
Not that sales are a reliable measure of quality, but when Fitzgerald died in 1940, The Great Gatsby was a commercial failure, having sold fewer than 25,000 copies since its publication in 1925. Today it continues to sell 500,000 copies a year.
Exploring further:
“The Best English-Language Fiction of the Twentieth Century: A Composite list and Ranking.” by Brian Kunde.
“In Search of the Century’s Best Books” by Brian Kunde