We awarded points for each selection – 10 points for a first place pick, nine points for a second place pick, and so on. Then we totaled up all the points and ranked them accordingly. Here are all the books ordered by the number of points each earned. In the parentheses are the initials of the authors that selected them and the points earned. Click on their initials to see their list.
The Pillow-Book of Sei Shonagon (1592). This groundbreaking nonfiction work by a tenth-century lady of the Chinese court uses the list as the structure for personal essays that are bold, funny, unapologetic, and cantankerous. With titles such as “Embarrassing Things,” “Hateful Things,” and Things,” Shonagon reflects on her society, its mores in particular, and on humanity in general.
Total Points: 6 (HJ 6)
The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver (1998). Set in the Belgian Congo in 1959, it details Baptist preacher Nathan Price’s one-man campaign to convert African natives to Christianity in an unforgiving land. Kingsolver juxtaposes Nathan’s monomania with his wife Orleanna’s stoical solidarity with their four daughters, who react variously to their father’s missionary zeal and the culture it never manages to reach (much less transform), in this rich portrayal of American innocence and arrogance run amok.
Total Points: 6 (EDon 6)
The Ponder Heart by Eudora Welty (1954). In this comic monologue filled with witty Southern colloquialisms and vivid images, Miss Edna Earle Ponder, who manages a hotel in a small Mississippi town, describes her family’s wonderfully peculiar history. Her story focuses on her uncle, the eccentric and irrepressible Daniel Ponder, whose poor marriages created as many problems as his generous heart.
Total Points: 6 (LKA 6)
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner by Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1798). Intermingling the fantastic with the real, this long poem begins when a mariner with “long grey beard and glittering eye” asks a trio of wedding guests to hear his tale. One guest stays to learn how the mariner shot the albatross, considered an omen of good luck, and doomed his ship. Though saved from death, the mariner is condemned to walk the earth and tell his story, which may be read as a Christian allegory or as a warning against defiling nature.
Total Points: 6 (BAM 6)
The Sheltering Sky by Paul Bowles (1949). This signature exploration of dislocation follows three young Americans—a married couple and their friend—journeying across the North African desert in search of deeper truths. As their surroundings become more foreign and forbidding, they become unmoored as their connection to the world, each other, and themselves unravels in this work of deep psychological acuity.
Total Points: 6 (DG 6)
The Towers of Trebizond by Rose Macaulay (1956). In the tradition of novels satirizing encounters between eccentric British characters and foreign cultures, Macaulay follows the efforts of four travelers to improve women’s rights, and spread the blessings of the Anglican church, in Turkey. The novel’s first half brims with sharp comic insights. The second half is far more meditative as it focuses on the character Laurie—a church-goer conducting an adulterous affair—who suffers a crisis of faith that becomes a profound spiritual journey.
Total Points: 6 (PCam 6)
Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller (1934). Banned in America for twenty-seven years because it was considered obscene, this autobiographical novel describes the author’s hand-to-mouth existence in Paris during the early 1930s. A later inspiration to the Beat generation, Miller offers various philosophical interludes expressing his joy in life, hostility to social convention, and reverence for women and sex, which he describes with abandon.
Turtle Moon by Alice Hoffman (1992). This is the story of a divorced woman, her disillusioned teenage son, and the events that change their lives in ways both simple and extraordinary. When Keith Rosen runs away from his Florida home - inexplicably taking along a motherless baby - his mother is perplexed and terrified. She takes off on her own journey to find him. The novel follows their path, in a suspenseful and beautifully written story.
Total Points: 6 (JPico 6)
Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett (1953). Two vagabonds, Vladimir and Estragon, “blathering about nothing in particular,” provoke, challenge, and defend each other while they wait for the appearance of the mysterious Godot. Twice the tramps ponder hanging themselves from the branches of a nearby willow tree; twice they try to make sense of a stranger named Pozzo and his leashed servant Lucky. All the characters abide in a world peculiar for its absences: of meaning, rationality, consolation, and of course the slyly named Godot.
Washington Square by Henry James (1880). James deeply admired Balzac. Here he pays homage to the Frenchman by recasting the novel Eugénie Grandet. The setting now is New York but the dynamic is the same: despite her father’s best, often cruel, efforts, an unexceptional, though wealthy young woman falls in love with a dashing fortune hunter. James leaves the reader to wonder which man hurt her worse: the father who told the truth or the lover who deceived her?
Woodcutters by Thomas Bernhard (1984). In this darkly humorous, hypnotically repetitious, stream of consciousness novel, an embittered and idealistic Austrian writer attends an “artistic” dinner party soon after the suicide of an old friend. With sharp psychological and emotional insight, Bernhard takes readers inside the mind of his narrator as he ruminates angrily on his hosts and their other guests, picking over his memories of his relationship with them and the dead woman.
Total Points: 6 (LMill 6)
A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess (1962). The linguistic virtuosity of this futuristic tale—told in nadsat, a russified English—lures us into an unwilling complicity in the drug-fueled bouts of ultraviolence committed by Alex and his droogs (comrades). While the book’s first part portrays these alienated sociopaths, the second part is an old-fashioned allegory: to win release from prison, Alex submits to behavior modification, trading his free will for freedom in this Cold War–era novel that protests against the intimate threat of totalitarian power.
Total Points: 5 (PE 5)
A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway (1929). Based on Hemingway’s experiences during World War I, this romantic tragedy recounts the story of Frederic Henry, an American volunteer in the Italian ambulance corps who meets and eventually falls in love with a maternal yet alluring English nurse, Catherine Barkley. Eventually, they abandon the war for neutral Switzerland—Frederic and Catherine have made “a separate peace”—though other dangers await in this story of commitment, individual choice, and the narrow line separating courage and hypocrisy.
Total Points: 5 (SV 5)
A Legacy by Sybille Bedford (1956).
Appreciation of Sybille Bedford’s A Legacy by David Leavitt
A Legacy, Sybille Bedford’s remarkable first novel, might most simply be described as the story of two houses. “One was outrageously large and ugly,” Bedford tells us in the opening paragraph; “the other was beautiful. They were a huge Wilhelminian town house in the old West of Berlin, built and inhabited by the parents of my father’s first wife, and a small seventeenth-century château and park in the South, near the Vosges, bought for my father by my mother.”
So Bedford sets us down, with remarkable velocity and confidence, right in the middle of the world to which she is going to devote the next 360 pages. This is the world of Germany before the Second World War. The owners of the Wilhelminian townhouse are Jews; the heroine’s father is a Catholic aristocrat living in a sort of splendid rural poverty. As she is “bundled to and fro” between these two houses, our narrator—a version of Bedford herself—describes for us not just the struggle of her own growing up, but the complex intermingling of three very different families, as well as the rumblings of social and political change that underlie and ultimately disrupt the domestic and marital dramas in which she is enmeshed.
Because Bedford published A Legacy in 1956, her knowledge of what was to come invests the novel with an air of fragility and foreboding. The prose is stunning; raised in a mire of European languages, Bedford clung to English as a life raft, and she shows her gratitude by employing her adopted language with a grace and agility to rival Henry James’s. Yet what is perhaps most astonishing about this astonishingly rich novel—more memorable, for me, even than E. M. Forster’s Howards End, the other great English novel about houses—is the deftness with which its author reconciles two literary virtues that in other hands might seem irreconcilable: intimacy and grandeur.
Total Points: 5 (DL 5)
A Severed Head by Iris Murdoch (1961). Infused with Freudian theories—especially about male sexuality—and Jungian archetypes, this novel centers on a man who must search his soul and his mind after his wife leaves him for her psychoanalyst. With often dark, deadpan humor, Murdoch uses deception, adultery, and sex to address morality and responsibility, the nature of reality, and the power of the unconscious.
Total Points: 5 (AMH 5)
Anywhere but Here by Mona Simpson (1986). Carolyn Leavitt writes: “A manipulative mother intent on making her daughter a star, journeys with her from Wisconsin to California. Along the way, she tries on different men for husband potential and struggles not to let the fantasy become too threadbare when some broad daylight is splashed upon it. Simpson’s book is a gripping portrayal of mother/daughter dynamics, but it’s also the story of a thwarted American dream and the thorny nature of family love and need.”
Total Points: 5 (CL 5)
Blithe Spirit by Noël Coward (1941). As the Nazis bore down on Britain, Coward filled London theaters with this gay and witty farce about death. The sublime silliness begins when a writer holds a séance to research his novel on a murderous fake psychic. Who should appear but his first wife, dead these six years and none too happy about wife number two.
Total Points: 5 (AT 5)
Darkness at Noon by Arthur Koestler (1940). An old Party member is arrested for treason in Stalin’s Russia. As his interrogators try to pry a false confession out of Rubashov, the state’s twisted logic—that Rubashov’s innocence, and his identity itself, are bourgeois luxuries compared to the task of preserving the revolution from exterior threats—is exposed in this novel, which deeply influenced how intellectuals in the West and dissidents in the East interpreted the Cold War experience.
Total Points: 5 (AF 5)
Dawn by Octavia E. Butler (1987). Lilith Iyapo has just lost her husband and son when atomic fire consumes Earth—the last stage of the planet’s final war. Hundreds of years later Lilith awakes, deep in the hold of a massive alien spacecraft piloted by the Oankali—who arrived just in time to save humanity from extinction. They have kept Lilith and other survivors asleep for centuries, as they learned whatever they could about Earth. Now it is time for Lilith to lead them back to her home world, but life among the Oankali on the newly resettled planet will be nothing like it was before. For the first time since the nuclear holocaust, Earth will be inhabited. Grass will grow, animals will run, and people will learn to survive the planet’s untamed wilderness. But their children will not be human. Not exactly. This is the first noevl in Butler's acclaimed Lilith's Brood trilogy.
Death of the Fox (1971), The Succession (1983), and Entered from the Sun (1990), a trilogy by George Garrett. Packed with conspiracies, intrigues, bright language, and even more colorful characters, these novels enter the mind and mores of late Elizabethan and early Stuart England through dramatic events: Death of the Fox hinges on the rise, fall, and execution of Sir Walter Raleigh in 1618; The Succession re-creates the royal rivalries that surfaced as James I assumed the throne in 1603; Entered from the Sun focuses on the possible political implications of the murder of poet and playwright Christopher Marlowe in 1597.
Total Points: 5 (MSB 5)
Far from the Madding Crowd by Thomas Hardy (1874). Set in his fictional Wessex countryside in southwest England, this novel was Hardy's breakthrough work. Though it was first published anonymously in 1874, its quick and tremendous success persuaded Hardy to give up his first profession, architecture, to concentrate on writing fiction. The story of the ill-fated passions of the beautiful Bathsheba Everdene and her three suitors offers a spectacle of country life brimming with an energy and charm not customarily associated with Hardy.
Total Points: 5 (MMCPH 5)
Frankenstein by Mary Shelley (1818). Readers should be grateful that Dr. Phil was not around in 1818. If he had been, Mary Shelley may have chosen to discuss her traumatic life with him. Instead, she turned trauma into art and wrote Frankenstein, in which the outcast Dr. Victor Frankenstein usurps God’s and woman’s life-giving power to create a monster who for all his desire cannot be loved. This novel about unwanted things is gripping, frightening, inspiring, and very different from the movies based on it.
Total Points: 5 (AB 5)
Gorilla, My Love by Toni Cade Bambara (1972). A feminist and civil rights activist, Bambara strove to create literature that reflected the experiences of black women, the strength of black communities from the urban North to the rural South, and the challenges they faced. Showcasing Bambara’s talent for transforming her social concerns into art, the fifteen stories in this collection feature sharp-tongued first-person narrators who draw on their charm, resolve, and compassion to triumph over—or at least make peace with—life’s obstacles.
Total Points: 5 (PCle 5)
Henderson the Rain King by Saul Bellow (1956). Bellow’s characters often stumble along comic paths toward equilibrium, and none of the Nobel laureate’s creations is more rollicking than Eugene Henderson. A multimillionaire cut loose in Africa, Henderson is a portrait of human striving, with his battle cry: “I want, I want, I want.” We follow him off the beaten tourist path, watching him blow up a cistern filled with frogs, make friends with a lioness, and be crowned the Rain King after he seems to end a long drought. As always with Bellow, comedy is the handmaiden of an ultimate optimism. “I am a true adorer of life,” Henderson says, “and if I can’t reach as high as the face of it, I plant my kiss somewhere lower down.”
Total Points: 5 (EC 5)
His Dark Materials by Philip Pullman (1995–2000). This epic trilogy, comprised of Northern Lights (a.k.a., The Golden Compass), The Subtle Knife, and The Amber Spyglass, reconceives Paradise Lost as an adventure/fantasy from an atheist, humanist perspective. Like Adam and Eve, Lyra and Will embrace knowledge. But for them it is the path to liberation, not damnation. In thrilling quests across magic universes filled with demons, angels, and talking animals, they battle “the Authority” that demands faith while repressing freedom.
Total Points: 5 (CD 5)