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 World According to Garp by John Irving (1978). I first found this book when I was stuck in a miserable first marriage and living in Pittsburgh, a city that seemed to hate me. To say this book rescued my life is an understatement. A wild and wooly tale of a writer and the characters in his life, the book is filled with joy and surprise after surprise. Irving zips through story lines, blending comedy with tragedy, for a wild, painful, exuberant ride of a novel.
Total Points: 2 (CL 2)
V. by Thomas Pynchon (1963). This sprawling postmodern spy novel spiked with Rabelasian humor is ignited by a cryptic line in the journals of Herbert Stencil’s late father: “There is more behind and inside V. than any of us had suspected. Not who, but what: what is she.” The son’s search for the mysterious V.—involving a range of deliciously named characters, including the “schlemiel and human yo-yo” Benny Profane—stretches across three continents and two centuries, bringing Stencil ever closer to the secret powers that have conspired to control, and thereby corrupted, the modern world.
Total Points: 2 (TCB 2)
Voss by Patrick White (1957). A fearless man with a titanic ego, Johann Voss decides to prove his almost divine greatness by leading a party across the untamed Australian continent in 1845. Before his trip, he meets a young spinster with whom he will carry on a spiritual courtship through telepathy and dreams. Voss suffers immensely during his arduous journey; as he is humbled, he learns the meaning of Christian spirituality in this novel by the Australian Nobel laureate.
Total Points: 2 (TK 2)
W, or The Memory of Childhood by Georges Perec (1975). Perec was an experimental French author fascinated by literary boundaries—one of his novels, A Void, does not contain the letter E. Here, autobiographical chapters recalling (and trying to recall) childhood memories, when most of his family was murdered in the Holocaust, alternate with those telling the fictional story of an Aryan island called W that becomes totalitarian. Gradually, we see that each section says what the other cannot, as the riveting stories form a meta-meditation on narrative form.
Total Points: 2 (DM 2)
We Were the Mulvaneys by Joyce Carol Oates (1996). The Mulvaneys are blessed by all that makes life sweet. But something happens on Valentine’s Day, 1976—an incident that is hushed up in the town and never spoken of in the Mulvaney home—that rends the fabric of their family life...with tragic consequences. Years later, the youngest son attempts to piece together the fragments of the Mulvaneys’ former glory, seeking to uncover and understand the secret violation that brought about the family’s tragic downfall.
Total Points: 2 (EWhite 2)
What’s for Dinner? by James Schuyler (1978).
Best known as a poet, Schuyler brings his eye for intimate details to this quirky comedy about three families in suburban Long Island. As his characters deal with rowdy children, alcoholism, and loneliness, Schuyler subtly explores the forces that tear people apart and bring them back together.
Total Points: 2 (PCam 2)
With by Donald Harrington (2004). The Ozark town of Stay More was Harington’s Yoknapatawpha, a literary landscape much like the Arkansas community where he spent youthful summers that Harington created and populated with a cast of indelible charcaters. A daring coming-of-age story of survival and love, this novel is the sensual, suspenseful tale of Robin Kerr, a young girl abducted from her family and brought to a remote Ozark mountaintop, where she is left to fend for herself. Over the course of a decade, Robin grows up without human relationship, but with the company of animals and an inhabit, the half-living ghost of a young boy.
Total Points: 2 (BW 2)
A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court by Mark Twain (1889). Few writers made ideas as entertaining as Twain, whose gifts are on full display when he transports an ingenious American named Hank “The Boss” Morgan to sixth-century England. The clash of sixth-and nineteenth-century mores allows Twain to offer scorching satires of compulsory religion, aristocracy, and superstition—and smart considerations of subjects ranging from slavery, trade unions, and technology to death and taxes—within the thrilling atmosphere of the Round Table and its legendary characters, including Lancelot, Merlin, and Guenever.
Total Points: 1 (RP 1)
A Personal Matter by Kenzaburo Oë (1969). The preeminent voice of Japan’s New Left from the 1960s, Oë brings a most un-Japanese rawness and rebellion to his semiautobiographical story of a young intellectual who fathers a brain-damaged baby. This modern morality tale juxtaposes its protagonist’s tortuous cerebral musings with a visceral world of blood and bile, sexual deviance, and medically sanctioned infanticide. Oë’s grotesqueries paradoxically render his characters more human and sympathetic, rather than less, while the sometimes self-conscious artifice of his language accommodates a society adrift from tradition and meaning.
Total Points: 1 (DMe 1)
A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan (2010). Bennie is an aging former punk rocker and record executive. Sasha is the passionate, troubled young woman he employs. In this novel, which won the National Book Critics Circle award for fiction and was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner award, Egan brilliantly reveals their pasts, along with the inner lives of a host of other characters whose paths intersect with theirs. With music pulsing on every page, this is a startling, exhilarating novel of self-destruction and redemption.
Total Points: 1 (MSouthgate 1)
A Voice Through a Cloud by Denton Welch (1950). “Though Welch has the abilities of a novelist,” John Updike wrote, “misfortune made him a kind of prophet.” In this autobiographical novel, Welch describes the bicycle accident that left him partially paralyzed at age twenty, the painful treatments he suffered, and the loneliness he endured. Filled with acute observations and revealing self-analysis, this intimate novel offers a wrenching portrait of despair.
Total Points: 1 (PCam 1)
Alias Grace by Margaret Atwood (1996). This historical novel reimagines the life of a notorious and enigmatic woman from nineteenth century Canada, Grace Marks. She has been convicted for her involvement in the vicious murders of her employer, Thomas Kinnear, and Nancy Montgomery, his housekeeper and mistress. Some believe Grace is innocent; others think her evil or insane. Now serving a life sentence, Grace claims to have no memory of the murders. Dr. Simon Jordan, an up-and-coming expert in the burgeoning field of mental illness, is engaged by a group of reformers and spiritualists who seek a pardon for Grace. He listens to her story while bringing her closer and closer to the day she cannot remember. What will he find in attempting to unlock her memories? Is Grace a female fiend? A bloodthirsty femme fatale? Or is she the victim of circumstances?
Total Points: 1 (TLeClair 1)
Amours de Voyage by Arthur Hugh Clough (1858). A nineteenth-century figure who expressed twentieth-century skepticism about action and belief, Clough set this tragicomic narrative poem during the unsuccessful Italian Revolution of 1848–49. Much of the poem consists of letters from an erudite Englishman named Claude to his friend Eustace, describing his inability to commit to the woman he loves or engage himself in the political turmoil swirling around him. Yet, his self-awareness is so acute that he does not offer a lament of his limitations so much as an ironic self-portrait of an oddly decisive man.
Total Points: 1 (JBarn 1)
Amours de Voyage by Arthur Hugh Clough (1858). A nineteenth-century figure who expressed twentieth-century skepticism about action and belief, Clough set this tragicomic narrative poem during the unsuccessful Italian Revolution of 1848–49. Much of the poem consists of letters from an erudite Englishman named Claude to his friend Eustace, describing his inability to commit to the woman he loves or engage himself in the political turmoil swirling around him. Yet, his self-awareness is so acute that he does not offer a lament of his limitations so much as an ironic self-portrait of an oddly decisive man.
Total Points: 1 (JBarn 1)
Atonement by Ian McEwan (2001). When Briony Tallis, a precocious adolescent on an English estate, writes a play to mark her brother’s homecoming in 1935, she sets in motion a real-life tragedy that marks the end of her innocence. Through the awful ramifications of her one lie, McEwan explores the mysteries of writing itself, the moral ambiguities of art, and the arc of twentieth-century English history, especially during World War II.
Total Points: 1 (GG 1)
Atonement by Ian McEwan (2001). When Briony Tallis, a precocious adolescent on an English estate, writes a play to mark her brother’s homecoming in 1935, she sets in motion a real-life tragedy that marks the end of her innocence. Through the awful ramifications of her one lie, McEwan explores the mysteries of writing itself, the moral ambiguities of art, and the arc of twentieth-century English history, especially during World War II.
Total Points: 1 (GG 1)
Break It Down by Lydia Davis (1986). Through crisp, propulsive sentences laced with knowing irony, Davis plunges readers into various streams of consciousness in her debut collection. Ideas rather than action animate these thirty-four stories—some no more than a paragraph long, most set in a character’s racing, obsessive mind. “I’m going to break it all down,” says the man in the title story, trying to calculate the cost of his last love affair. Like most Davis characters, he finds more questions than answers. And like most Davis characters, he is drawn with such empathy that he pulls the reader into his madness. Only when we take a step back can we laugh, deeply, at the absurdity of it all.
Total Points: 1 (EH 1)
Breaking and Entering by Joy Williams (1988). A teenage couple breaks into empty vacation homes in Florida to live “the ordered life of someone else. . . . For they themselves were not preparing for anything, they were not building anything.” This picaresque novel describes the offbeat adventures of these alienated drifters—with alcoholic aristocrats and aged female bodybuilders—in sharply observant language that evokes the sadness, loneliness, and isolation of modern life.
Total Points: 1 (DC 1)
Charming Billy by Alice McDermott (1998). In a small bar somewhere in the Bronx, a funeral party has gathered to honor Billy Lynch. Through the night, his friends and family weave together the tale of a husband, lover, dreamer, and storyteller, but also that of a hopeless drunk whose immense charm was but a veil over a lifetime of secrets and all-consuming sorrow. As they comfort his widow, the gentle Maeve, they remember as well his first love, Eva, who died of pneumonia, and whose ghost haunted his marriage and drove him to the bottle. Who is truly responsible for Billy's life and death, and what does it mean to mythologize a friend's suffering? Beautifully written and teeming with fine portraits of Irish-American life in New York,shows how a community can pin its dreams to one man, and how good intentions can be as destructive as the truth they were meant to hide.
Total Points: 1 (MMCPH 1)
Closely Watched Trains by Bohumil Hrabal (1965). As if he doesn’t have enough trouble living in German-occupied Czechoslovakia during World War II, Milos Hrma learns he is impotent during his first sexual encounter. After trying to commit suicide, he returns to his job tending German trains while imagining ways to reassert his manhood. In an alternately funny and sad, lusty and bleak novel, politics and sex merge in a tragic climax that suggests the heroism of the common man.
Total Points: 1 (ALK 1)
Daybook: The Journal of an Artist by Anne Truitt
Total Points: 1 (AO 1)
Death in Midsummer and Other Stories by Yukio Mishima (1968). The diversity of this collection’s subject and form will surprise anyone who knows only Mishima’s legend, which he carefully created through an ascetic life and a failed attempt to ignite a bushido (samurai) movement in Japan—a move that ended with his ritual suicide in 1970. The tales—including a Noh play, a Buddhist fable, a comedy of manners, and a love triangle among three men—all reflect Mishima’s profound alienation from the drift and purposelessness of modern life.
Total Points: 1 (PF 1)
The “star” of this hairraising novel is Alberto Ruiz-Tagle, an air force pilot who exploits the 1973 coup to launch his own version of the New Chilean Poetry, a multimedia enterprise involving sky-writing, poetry, torture, and photo exhibitions. For the unnamed narrator, who first encounters this "star" in a college poetry workshop, Ruiz-Tagle becomes the silent hand behind every evil act in the darkness of Pinochet's regime. The narrator, unable to stop himself, tries to track Ruiz-Tagle down, and sees signs of his activity over and over again in this tale marked by dark vision conveyed through corrosive, mocking humor that still sparkles.
Franny and Zooey by J. D. Salinger (1961). Salinger wrote: “FRANNY came out in The New Yorker in 1955, and was swiftly followed, in 1957 by ZOOEY. Both stories are early, critical entries in a narrative series I'm doing about a family of settlers in twentieth-century New York, the Glasses. It is a long-term project, patently an ambiguous one, and there is a real-enough danger, I suppose that sooner or later I'll bog down, perhaps disappear entirely, in my own methods, locutions, and mannerisms. On the whole, though, I'm very hopeful. I love working on these Glass stories, I've been waiting for them most of my life, and I think I have fairly decent, monomaniacal plans to finish them with due care and all-available skill.”
Total Points: 1 (RG 1)
Haiku of Matsuo Basho (1644-1694). A spiritual seeker who practiced Zen Buddhism while wandering throughout seventeenth-century Japan, Basho helped transform the form of light verse that would become haiku into a serious art form. “Traveling sick; / My dreams roam / On a withered moor,” reads the last of his spare, evocative poems that recount his life and travels, while reflecting a range of moods.
Total Points: 1 (AP 1)