The List of Books


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. 

Image removed.Dhalgren by Samuel R. Delany (1974). Bellona is a city at the dead center of the United States. The population has fled. Madmen and criminals wander the streets. Strange portents appear in the cloud-covered sky. Something has happened there. And into this disaster zone comes a young man—poet, lover, and adventurer—known only as the Kid. Dhalgren is a work of American magical realism, tackling questions of race, gender, and sexuality.

Total Points: 8 (JDíaz 8)

Fiskadoro by Denis Johnson (1985). After a nuclear war devastates the planet, residents of what had been the Florida Keys try to rebuild their lives and communities in a landscape where shards from the obliterated past—religious stories, Jimi Hendrix records, parking decks—remain but are barely understood. By destroying and then rebuilding the world, including the invention of a strange dialect, Johnson’s daring novel probes the nature of communication, memory, and knowledge amid the palpable specter of death.

Total Points: 7 (TCB 8)

Galpo Guccho by Rabindranath Tagore (1912). These beautifully structured stories are vast in range, moving from supernatural tales to historical stories of love. Tagore, who won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1913, is especially good at portraying the little moments of daily life and creating vivid characters—often the poor and dispossessed in his native India—that continue to haunt us.

Total Points: 8 (CD 8)

Hard Times by Charles Dickens (1854). “Now, what I want is, Facts,” reads the opening of this entertaining melodrama animated by impassioned social protest and indignant satire. In the humorless martinet Gradgrind, who preaches and practices uncompromising logic and efficiency, Dickens lampoons the soulless utilitarianism of Victorian philosopher John Stuart Mill. Such reason has spawned the grimy, industrial city of Coketown—which Dickens contrasts with a traveling circus—and informs the subplot concerning Stephen Blackpool’s inescapable, unhappy marriage (a sour fictionalization of Dickens’s own domestic miseries).

Total Points: 8 (TM 5) (MW 3)

Joseph Andrews by Henry Fielding (1742). The comic trouble starts when a naive footman rejects the advances of his employer, Lady Booby, and her servant, Slipslop. Cast out, he and the saintly Parson Adams hit England’s rough roads in search of Joseph’s beloved, Fanny Goodwill. Like Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, the world rewards their goodness with violent complication. After Joseph finds Fanny—who might be his sister—Fielding amps up the sexually charged farce in this novel of friendship and virtue that satirizes Samuel Richardson’s novel Pamela.

Total Points: 8 (ES 8)

Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy (1895). Hardy’s protagonists are souls ahead of their time, who dare to aspire and love in defiance of Victorian class structure and social mores. In this bleak but moving novel, class barriers stymie Jude, a self-educated stonemason and would-be scholar, while convention damns his lover Sue, a pagan protofeminist. The flawed hero and heroine win modern hearts, while the author’s ferocious outcry against legal marriage, established religion, and nature itself, still challenges us today.

Total Points: 8 (TM 6) (LShriv 2)

Lanark: A Life in Four Books by Alasdair Gray (1981). In the maverick Scottish author’s testy allegory, four (eccentrically illustrated) “books,” which are presented nonsequentially, trace the lives of two protagonists who are a single frustrated artist. Grim naturalism depicts Glaswegian painter Duncan Thaw’s losing battles with public indifference and chronic illness. Blakean fantasy traces the parallel sufferings of Thaw’s eponymous alter ego, whose misadventures in the dystopian city of Unthank represent Thaw’s continuing miseries in the hereafter he inhabits following his suicide. Accusatory, opaque, redundant—the novel is also, oddly enough, compulsively readable and perversely memorable.

Total Points: 8 (ALK 5) (IWelsh 3)

Life & Times of Michael K by J. M. Coetzee (1983). A retarded, nearly mute, harelipped man goes native in a South Africa torn by civil war, living off the land before being picked up and passed among institutions. The echo of Kafka in this controversial novel’s title is deliberate: Michael K is caught in a fundamental life trap, embodying both the yearning to be free of language and politics and the impossibility of doing so.

Total Points: 8 (KHarr 8)

Lord Jim by Joseph Conrad (1900). Marlowe, Conrad’s narrator here (as he is in The Heart of Darkness), ironically labels Jim, the disgraced first mate at the center of his tale, “one of us,” meaning the small British colonial elite. However, Jim violates the code one life-defining night when, in a panic, he abandons his sinking ship while the passengers sleep. The ship stays afloat but not Jim’s reputation. Later Marlowe finds the exiled sailor on a remote Indonesian island, where the natives give “Lord Jim” a last chance at self-respect.

Total Points: 8 (PM 8)

Man’s Fate by André Malraux (1933). Chronicling the communist uprising against Chiang Kai-shek’s nationalists in Shanghai in 1927, this novel is a revolutionary’s cookbook. It shows the planning and politics of the insurrection, the street battles that accompanied it, and the successful, remorselessly cruel nationalist counterattack (the nationalist general throws captured communists in the furnaces of a train). When the book was published in 1933, the Chinese revolution looked kaput. When the communists triumphed in 1948, it seemed prophetic.

Total Points: 8 (AF 8)

Mother's Milk by Edward St. Aubyn (2006). Writing with the scathing wit and bright perceptiveness, English author Edward St. Aubyn creates a complex family portrait that examines the shifting allegiances between mothers, sons, and husbands. The novel’s perspective ricochets among all members of the Melrose family—the family featured in St. Aubyn’s widely praised trilogy, Some Hope—starting with Robert, who provides an exceptionally droll and convincing account of being born; to Patrick, a hilariously churlish husband who has been sexually abandoned by his wife in favor of his sons; to Mary, who’s consumed by her children and overwhelming desire not to repeat the mistakes of her own mother. All the while, St. Aubyn examines the web of false promises that entangle this once illustrious family—whose last vestige of wealth, an old house in the south of France—is about to be donated by Patrick’s mother to a New Age foundation. The result is an up-to-the-minute dissection of the mores of child-rearing, marriage, adultery, and assisted suicide, written in luminous and acidic prose that combines the most excruciating emotional pain with the driest comedy.

Total Points: 8 (AWald 8)

No Country for Old Men (screenplay) by Joel and Ethan Coen (2007).

Total Points: 8 (TJ 8)

Norwood by Charles Portis (1966). The comic conversation and surreal adventure that distinguish Portis’s fiction shine in this first novel about Norwood Pratt, a war hero with country music dreams who’s stuck in a small Texas town. Seeking escape, Norwood decides to find an old Marine buddy who owes him seventy dollars. His trip to Manhattan and then Memphis is filled with quirky characters (a midget, an educated chicken), strange situations, and homespun wisdom: “Don’t let your mouth write a check that you’re ass can’t cash.”

Total Points: 8 (WK 8)

Père Goriot by Honoré de Balzac (1834). When law student Eugène de Rastignac falls for the high-maintenance daughter of Père Goriot, a wheat merchant King Lear who has impoverished himself elevating his daughters in Parisian society, he needs more money than he can make honestly. That’s when Vautrin, a fellow boarder at his pension, suggests that Rastignac might make his fortune . . . at the cost of a minor murder. The tension becomes almost unbearable as Rastignac wrestles with his conscience and readers confront Vautrin, whose contempt for conventional morality prefigures every existential hero since.

Total Points: 8 (TP 8)

Red Dragon by Thomas Harris (1981). Imitation is the most annoying form of flattery for archfiend Dr. Hannibal Lecter in this terrifying predecessor to The Silence of the Lambs. Red Dragon describes the original capture of cannibalistic serial killer Lecter and his subsequent indignation on hearing that another monster is imitating his sadistic methods. Harris skillfully leaves open who is manipulating whom when Lecter agrees to help the FBI track down the copycat, who matches Lecter eye for eye—literally.

Total Points: 8 (DFW 8)

Scaramouche by Rafael Sabatini (1921). Swashbuckling swordsman, inspiring orator, actor, lawyer, revolutionary politician, Andre-Louis Moreau “was born with the gift of laughter and a sense that the world was mad.” He must employ all his skills in seeking revenge against the wicked aristocrat who murdered his friend, a young clergyman, for expressing democratic ideas. The tension mounts when Moreau learns his adversary hopes to wed his beloved. A master of action-adventure (his other works include Captain Blood), Sabatini paints Moreau’s story against the surging French Revolution, coloring his high drama with history and politics.

Total Points: 8 (MC 8)

Sophie’s Choice by William Styron (1979). This novel is at once the story of a young writer’s coming of age and his slow uncovering of the story of Sophie, his neighbor in a Brooklyn boarding house and a Polish survivor of the Holocaust who has had to make a biblical choice between her children. Comic and tragic, the story moves with symphonic grace toward its final denouement. Looking back across the span of years, an older, somewhat wiser Stingo recreates in lush detail post–World War II Brooklyn and one man’s slow awakening to the horrors people are capable of.

Total Points: 8 (DH 8)

Stoner by John Williams (1965). William Stoner is born at the end of the nineteenth century into a dirt-poor Missouri farming family. Sent to the state university to study agronomy, he instead falls in love with English literature and embraces a scholar’s life, so different from the hardscrabble existence he has known. And yet as the years pass, Stoner encounters a succession of disappointments: marriage into a “proper” family estranges him from his parents; his career is stymied; his wife and daughter turn coldly away from him; a transforming experience of new love ends under threat of scandal. Driven ever deeper within himself, Stoner rediscovers the stoic silence of his forebears and confronts an essential solitude. Tom Bissel calls this “the best ‘quiet’ book I've ever read, and the most heartbreaking.”

Total Points: 8 (TBiss 8)

Survival in Auschwitz by Primo Levi (1947). In 1943, Primo Levi, a twenty-five-year-old chemist and “Italian citizen of Jewish race,” was arrested by Italian fascists and deported from his native Turin to Auschwitz. This memoir is Levi’s classic account of his ten months in the German death camp, a harrowing story of systematic cruelty and miraculous endurance. Remarkable for its simplicity, restraint, compassion, and even wit, it remains a lasting testament to the indestructibility of the human spirit.

Total Points: 8 (AFilip 8)

The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain (1876). Twain’s charming fictionalization of his Hannibal, Missouri, boyhood marks the passages, large and small, of youth: Tom plays hooky from school, courts Becky Thatcher, gets lost with her in the Bat Cave, and runs afoul of Injun Joe. Tom even manages to eavesdrop on his own funeral. The way he convinces his friends to pay him for the privilege of whitewashing his fence proves that he is a trickster for the ages.

Total Points: 8 (AP 8)

The Book of Laughter and Forgetting by Milan Kundera (1978). A pastiche that deliberately recalls the narrative games of Tristram Shandy, this novel uses seven thematically linked tales (as well as forays into philosophy, musicology, literary criticism, and autobiography) to explore the permeable borders between Eastern and Western Europe, eroticism and banal libertinism, and the public versus the private, which Kundera sees as the shrinking, doomed cradle of civilization.

Total Points: 8 (DAD 8)

The Easter Parade by Richard Yates (1976). Carolyn Leavitt writes: “Yates is one of my favorite writers, and he really isn’t as well known as he should be.  This searing story of two sisters, both destined for unhappiness, and their unfolding lives, is riveting. The novel follows the sisters, children of divorce, over four decades. Sarah settles into an unhappy marriage while Emily is torn by one love affair after another, and her burgeoning job success begins to fade out along with her romantic prospects. The ending, as Emily begins her slow spiral down is shocking and somehow inevitable. Gorgeously written, this book deserves to find a new audience.”

Total Points: 8 (CL 8)

The Gate of Angels by Penelope Fitzgerald (1990). The year is 1912 and, it seems, reason is finally giving the heave-ho to faith. At least that’s what rector’s son turned Cambridge scientist Fred Fairly thinks, until a freakish bicycle accident connects him to the beautiful and mysterious Daisy Saunders. Though he has made a pledge of celibacy, he is now in love and so must puzzle the questions of chaos and order, fate, chance, and the wonders of the soul in this funny, sharp novel of ideas.

Total Points: 8 (EH 8)

The Giving Tree by Shel Silverstein (1964). This parable about the parent–child bond features an apple tree that gives and gives and a boy who takes and takes. As the boy matures, his needs become harder to meet. But the tree never fails, ultimately sacrificing life and limb. Silverstein, who also illustrated this children’s book, casts no moral judgments in this open-ended tale that concludes with the boy, now an old man, sitting on all that’s left of the tree, a stump: “And the tree was happy.”

Total Points: 8 (AT 8)

The Ice Age by Margaret Drabble (1977). Drabble is a quietly dogged social novelist, and her books can be read collectively as a history of contemporary England’s soul. Here she uses Anthony Keating, a former BBC official turned failed real estate developer, to explore the gloomy interregnum between the go-go 1960s and the more seriously materialistic Thatcher era, when the cozy values of old England were growing increasingly shabby without any new values to replace them.

Total Points: 8 (DC 8)