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. 

London Fields by Martin Amis (1989). Nicola Six, a psychic femme fatale in a soul-sick, lightly futuristic London, has a premonition that one of two men she’s just met will murder her, and then she works to make that happen. All of Amis’s tropes—the coming apocalypse, the self-consciousness of authorship, and hilarious clashes of sexes and classes—get full play in this sprawling romp of a novel.

Total Points: 7 (TBiss 6) (RW 1)

McTeague by Frank Norris (1899). Gritty realism, social conscience, and American dreams power this tale of an oafish mineworker who becomes an unlicensed dentist in San Francisco. He marries a young woman and together they share a happy life, until she wins a small fortune in the lottery. This luck enflames their greed and the envy of their friends, leading to ruin for all and to one of the most memorable climaxes in literature: two men—one alive, one dead—handcuffed to one another in Death Valley.

Total Points: 7 (SK 7)

Metamorphoses by Ovid (8 c.e.). Shining through Ovid’s poetic encyclopedia of myths involving the transformations of gods and humans is this Heraclitean truth: existence is change. His versions of Orpheus, Narcissus, Pygmalion, and Hercules have been etched in our collective memory. Yet he was, as a critic once said, “counter-classical”—fun rather than imperial, personal rather than grave. Of all the Latin authors, Ovid, who also wrote a sex manual, is the one who never once reminds you of a marble bust.

Total Points: 7 (AB 7)

Nightwood by Djuna Barnes (1936). Following the painful end of an eight-year lesbian relationship, Barnes crafted this avant-garde novel that explores love, desire, and obsession in rich lyric prose. Set mostly in Paris during the years between the world wars, Nightwood revolves around the mysterious Robin Vote and the two lovers she abandoned: her German husband, Baron Felix Volkbein, and an American woman, Nora Flood. Heartbroken and confused, the spurned lovers seek advice from a most unlikely source, an alcoholic transvestite named Dr. Matthew Dante O’Connor, whose solipsistic stream of consciousness ramblings suggest the mysteries and miseries of romantic love.

Total Points: 7 (AF 7)

One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest by Ken Kesey (1962). In Ken Kesey’s first novel, the insane asylum becomes an allegory for the larger world as the patients are roused from their lethargy by the arrival of Randall Patrick McMurphy, a genial, larger than life con man who fakes insanity to get out of a ninety-day prison sentence. By the time McMurphy learns that he is now under the cruel control of Nurse Ratched and the asylum, he has already set the wheels of rebellion in motion. Narrated by Chief Broom Bromden, an Indian who has not spoken in so long he is believed to be deaf and mute, McMurphy’s rebellion is a spectacular foretelling of what the 1960s were to bring.

Total Points: 7 (MCon 7)

Phineas Finn: The Irish Member by Anthony Trollope (1869). A handsome, romantically profligate young Irishman, Phineas Finn leaves his sleepy home and secret fiancée for the political world of London. As he charts the rise and fall of his calculating yet endearing hero, Trollope plunges us into the machinations of the day (especially “the Irish question”) and, for good measure, introduces not one, not two, but four fascinating love interests. The novel—the second in the Palliser series—is long. But Trollope reminds us that sometimes more is more.

Total Points: 7 (CS 7)

Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen (1811). Austen doubled her heroines here, giving us the down-on-their-luck Dashwood sisters. Elinor, the cool-headed elder, seems to embody common sense, while Marianne is “eager in everything.” The novel’s joy comes from watching the girls shape-shift their way through their love troubles, trading back and forth between their roles and natures. As each girl is by turns hardheaded and hot-hearted, Austen’s novel reveals the fluid nature of identity.

Total Points: 7 (DM 7)

Stories of Mavis Gallant (1922–2014). Expatriate experience and cultural contrasts energize the knowing, roomy fiction of the native Canadian, sometime Parisian, master. Praised for her story sequences (such as the semiautobiographical Linnet Muir tales and those focused on aging French author Henri Grippes), Gallant also excels in generously detailed depictions of an unwanted arranged marriage (“Across the Bridge”), a German POW’s survival skills (“Ernst in Civilian Clothes”), and numerous other vivid dramatizations of displacement and rootlessness (such as “The Ice Wagon Going Down the Street,” “The Four Seasons”).

Total Points: 7 (ML 2) (FP 5)

 

Image removed.Nel Wright and Sula Peace met as children in the small town of Medallion, Ohio. Their devotion is fierce enough to withstand bullies and the burden of a dreadful secret. It endures into adulthood even after Nel has grown up to be a pillar of the black community and Sula has become a pariah. But their friendship ends in an unforgivable betrayal—or does it? The terrifying, comic, ribald and tragic novel explores the mysteries of death and sex, friendship and poverty to answer the question.

Total Points: 7 (JDíaz 7)

The Beans of Egypt, Maine (1985), Letourneau’s Used Auto Parts (1988), Merry Men (1994), a trilogy by Carolyn Chute. These grimly naturalistic novels, set in an inland “world” of house trailers and logging camps, depict the harsh lives and quiet dignity of the rural poor in Maine. The trilogy moves outward: The first novel creates a series of characters that are real grotesques, offering vignettes of adultery, drunkenness, and destroyed dreams. Life gets no easier in the second novel, but Big Lucien Letourneau, who runs an automobile junkyard, displays a rare and generous compassion. The third novel, which has the most political overtones, echoes the legend of Robin Hood to suggest how Egypt, Maine, and her people have been exploited.

Total Points: 7 (MSB 7)

The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler (1939). This is the first novel featuring hard-boiled Los Angeles private eye Philip Marlowe, a tough guy with a fast gun and a quick wit. Noting that he “was neat, clean, shaved and sober, and I didn’t care who knew it,” Marlowe goes to work for a dying L.A. oil tycoon whose two lusty daughters have fallen prey to an array of drug dealers, pornographers, and bootleggers intent on separating the old man from his money.

Total Points: 7 (CH 4) (RBP 3)

The Burning Plain and Other Stories by Juan Rulfo (1953). Like Ernest Hemingway, Rulfo found men who are shaped by violence too fascinating to judge or condemn. Set in the period around the Mexican Revolution, his short stories use pared down prose to portray peasants who are seized sometimes by historical forces and given the opportunity to create and destroy on a mass scale. More usually, they decimate or are decimated in miserable increments.

Total Points: 7 (SC 7)

The Color Purple by Alice Walker (1982). As if being black weren’t hard enough, Walker’s Pulitzer Prize– winning novel shows how bad life can get if you’re also a woman. Wondrously, Walker gives voice to the unlikeliest of heroes—a barely literate teenager named Celie who writes letters to God as an escape from life with her monstrous stepfather. After raping and impregnating her, he forces her to marry Mr., a cruel older man. Hope comes in the form of Shug, Mr.’s lover, and together the two women begin to loosen the shackles of race and gender.

Total Points: 7 (BMC 3) (ED 3) (SMK 1)

The Comedians by Graham Greene (1966). The poverty and desperation of Papa Doc Duvalier’s Haitian dictatorship inform this cynical tale of failed individuals trying to hustle something from a failed state. The comedians—who hide their true identities behind masks—include Mr. Brown, a failed art swindler and now inheritor of a waning imperial hotel, Mr. Jones, a con man, and the oblivious Mr. Smith, who dreams of establishing a vegetarian center on the troubled island. As Greene contrasts these schemers with men combating Duvalier, he delivers a gripping geopolitical novel that packs a moral punch.

Total Points: 7 (CH 7)

The Evening of the Holiday by Shirley Hazzard (1966). Over the course of a festive summer in the Italian countryside, Sophie, who is half English and half Italian, has an affair with Tancredi, an Italian who is separated from his wife and family. Hazzard’s first novel displays the talents and interests that mark her career: luminous prose, the tension between desire and morality, the necessity of choice, and the inevitability of endings.

Total Points: 7 (PCam 7)

The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers (1940). After his roommate of ten years becomes mentally ill, the deaf-mute John Singer moves to a boarding house, where he serves as an emotional buffer for a host of isolated “grotesques” who project their own longing onto him. This inspiringly sad story of misfits in a working-class Georgia town is attuned to the racial and social dynamics of the Depression-era South. Yet, McCullers also conveys a pervasive loneliness and desperation broader than any given historical moment.

Total Points: 7 (GDG 7)

The Hours by Michael Cunningham (1998). This Pulitzer Prize–winning novel describes three women whose lives resonate with Virginia Woolf’s novel Mrs. Dalloway. There is Woolf herself, contemplating suicide even as she imagines her great novel; an American housewife in 1949 who can’t quite fathom her discontent; and a contemporary woman, a lesbian in a long-term relationship, whose great love, a man, is dying of AIDS. Melancholy, hope, and endurance suffuse this intimate novel that suggests, “There’s just this for consolation: an hour here or there when our lives seem, against all odds and expectations, to burst open and give us everything we’ve ever imagined. . . . [Still] we hope, more than anything, for more.”

Total Points: 7 (AS 7)

The legends of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table. These tales of medieval chivalry, romance, and high adventure composed primarily from the twelfth through fifteenth centuries feature a host of iconic characters: Sir Galahad, Lancelot, Mordred, Guinevere, Merlin, and the Lady of the Lake. These are stories that gave us Camelot, the Round Table, and the search for the Holy Grail. Versions abound but the best place to start is with Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte D’Arthur.

Total Points: 7 (JSalt 7)

The Lorax by Dr. Seuss (1971). This picture book is a poignant environmental fable about a beautiful forest of Truffula trees destroyed for the sake of the mass production of curious garments called Thneeds. Long after the forest has been destroyed, the Once-ler who destroyed it comes out of his “Lerkim on top of his store” to tell this cautionary tale to children.

Total Points: 7 (LMill 7)

The Lord of the Rings by J. R. R. Tolkien (1954–56). An Oxford medievalist, Tolkien drew on his vast knowledge of mythology, theology, and linguistics to imagine this epic trilogy. The books chronicle the hobbit Frodo’s attempt to destroy the magical ring of Sauron, Lord of Darkness. “The Fellowship of the Ring” introduces the men, dwarves, and elves summoned by the wizard Gandalf to protect Frodo. In “The Two Towers,” Frodo and his companion Sam continue their quest toward Mount Doom, while the rest of the fellowship are brought into the battle detailed in “The Return of the King.”

Total Points: 7 (CD 6) (RPow 1)

The Messiah of Stockholm by Cynthia Ozick (1987). In this novel from Ozick’s mystical period, Lars Andemening, a mousy, fortyish book reviewer for a Swedish daily, has a grandiose fantasy: that he is the son of Bruno Schulz, a Polish writer murdered during World War II by a Nazi officer. But when a woman turns up in Stockholm also claiming to be Schulz’s child and with a copy of Schulz’s long-lost novel The Messiah, Lars’s quest to learn about Schulz turns Oedipal.

Total Points: 7 (TCB 7)

The Once and Future King by T.H. White (1958). This retelling of the saga of King Arthur is a fantasy classic as legendary as Excalibur and Camelot, and a poignant story of adventure, romance, and magic. Lev Grossman calls it “the perfect boys’ book.”

Total Points: 7 (RG 3) (LG 4)

The Paper Bag Princess by Robert Munsch (1980). The beautiful princess Elizabeth is about to marry Prince Ronald when a dragon destroys her castle, burns her clothes and kidnaps Ronald. The clothes-less Princess—and proto-feminist heroine—dons a large paper bag and hunts down the dragon and her cherished prince. She outwits the dragon but Ronald is not too happy because she is not “dressed like a real princess.”

Total Points: 7 (JPico 7)

The Radiant Way by Margaret Drabble (1987). While the title suggests a rational universe, this novel focuses on the jarring dislocations of three women who meet at Cambridge in the 1950s. The psychiatrist and mother Liz Headland—who ties together the trilogy The Realms of Gold, The Radiant Way, and A Natural Curiosity—­is joined by her friends Alix Bowen, a do-gooding teacher, and Esther Breuer, an art scholar. Their experiences run the gamut, from comfortable wealth to family problems to labor unrest to a grisly murder, as they reflect Drabble’s interest in characters trying to reach beyond their bourgeois lives.

Total Points: 7 (DC 7)

The Rings of Saturn by W. G. Sebald (1995). An idiosyncratic chronicle of a walk along England’s eastern coast, this novel moves between physical encounters and prolonged meditations on history and memory. As the narrator visits derelict estates and slumbering villages, he ponders among other things Thomas Browne’s skull, Rembrandt’s Anatomy Lesson, Conrad’s journey into the heart of the Congo, the battle of Waterloo, and a villager’s model of Herod’s temple. Seemingly unrelated, the sketches weave a strange tapestry of grief, tranquility, nostalgia, and despair.

Total Points: 7 (EH 7)