Hungry Mind Book Review's Best 100 of the 20th Century

Blog editor's note: I confess, I am cheating on this one. The only thing that's the same as the original Deborama's Book Review and Store's post is the title. There has been so much water under the bridge. The original post, which was just a link and a promise anyway, happened to appear just before the Ruminator Bookstore, successor to the Hungry Mind of fond memories, closed. The Ruminator Review, also previously known as Hungry Mind, ceased publication in 2005. And the link this goes to looks dodgy and impermanent, so I am copying to the whole list in the post to preserve it.
Back in 1998, when I left the Twin Cities, one of the cultural jewels of our fair towns was the Hungry Mind bookstore, located on the Macalester College campus and owned by David Unowsky. He also published The Hungry Mind Review. The bookstore and the review changed their names to Ruminator in 2000, when Unowsky sold the rights to the name Hungry Mind to Hungry Minds, Inc., publishers of the ... for Dummies books.
Here's another great website with some more information about the associated publishing company, also called Hungry Minds and then later Ruminator.
Some time in the free book review's heyday, when it was still called The Hungry Mind Review, they published this list of the 100 best books of the 20th Century. In a lot of ways that I cannot pinpoint or justify, this seems to me to be a very Minnesotan list. Not that it has too many Minnesota books on it, oh, no. Because Minnesotans are like Brits in that way, smug and self-satisfied, maybe, but they would never blow their own horns. It's not perfect, but it's a lot better than most of these lists.

The Hungry Mind Review's 100 Best 20th Century Books

Rank	Author	Novel and Year
1	Henry Adams	The Education of Henry Adams (1918)
2	James Agee and Walker Evans	Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941)
3	Dorothy Allison	Bastard out of Carolina (1992)
4	Rudolfo Anaya	Bless Me Ultima (1972)
5	Sherwood Anderson	Winesburg, Ohio (1919)
6	Maya Angelou	I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1970)
7	Gloria Anzaldúa	Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (1987)
8	James Baldwin	Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953)
9	James Baldwin	The Price of the Ticket: Collected Nonfiction (1985)
10	Edward Ball	Slaves in the Family (1998)
11	Saul Bellow	Herzog (1964)
12	Paul Bowles	The Sheltering Sky (1948)
13	William Burroughs	Naked Lunch (1959)
14	Truman Capote	In Cold Blood (1966)
15	Raymond Carver	Cathedral (1983)
16	Willa Cather	O Pioneers! (1913)
17	Willa Cather	Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927)
18	John Cheever	Collected Stories (1978)
19	Sandra Cisneros	House on Mango Street (1984)
20	Don DeLillo	White Noise (1985)
21	Joan Didion	Slouching Towards Bethlehem (1968)
22	Vine Deloria Jr.	Custer Died for Your Sins (1983)
23	John Dos Passos	U.S.A. (1930)
24	Theodore Dreiser	An American Tragedy (1925)
25	W.E.B. DuBois	The Souls of Black Folk (1903)
26	Ralph Ellison	Invisible Man (1952)
27	Louise Erdrich	Love Medicine (1984)
28	William Faulkner	The Sound and the Fury (1926)
29	William Faulkner	As I Lay Dying (1930)
30	William Faulkner	Go Down, Moses (1940)
31	F. Scott Fitzgerald	The Great Gatsby (1925)
32	M.F.K. Fisher	The Art of Eating (1954)
33	Francisco Goldman	The Ordinary Seaman (1997)
34	Alex Haley	Roots (1976)
35	Joseph Heller	Catch-22 (1961)
36	Ernest Hemingway	The Sun Also Rises (1926)
37	Ernest Hemingway	The Short Stories (1938)
38	Michael Herr	Dispatches (1984)
39	Chester Himes	My Life of Absurdity: The Autobiography (1976)
40	Linda Hogan	Mean Spirit (1990)
41	bell hooks	Ain't I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism (1982)
42	Zora Neale Hurston	Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937)
43	Henry James	The Wings of the Dove (1902)
44	LeRoi Jones (Amira Baraka)	Blues People: Negro Music in White America (1963)
45	Jack Kerouac	On the Road (1957)
46	Ken Kesey	One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1962)
47	Jamaica Kincaid	Annie John (1983)
48	Maxine Hong Kingston	Woman Warrior (1976)
49	Jerzy Kosinski	The Painted Bird (1976)
50	Harper Lee	To Kill a Mockingbird (1960)
51	Li-Young Lee	The Winged Seed (1995)
52	Sinclair Lewis	Babbitt (1922)
53	Cormac McCarthy	The Crossing (1994)
54	Carson McCullers	The Heart is a Lonely Hunter (1940)
55	Norman Mailer	The Naked and the Dead (1948)
56	Bernard Malamud	The Magic Barrel (1958)
57	Malcolm X and Alex Haley	The Autobiography of Malcolm X (1965)
58	Rollo May	Love and Will (1969)
59	Thomas Merton	The Seven Storey Mountain (1948)
60	Henry Miller	Tropic of Cancer (1934)
61	N. Scott Momaday	House Made of Dawn (1968)
62	Wright Morris	Field of Vision (1956)
63	Toni Morrison	Sula (1973)
64	Toni Morrison	Song of Solomon (1977)
65	Toni Morrison	Beloved (1987)
66	Toni Morrison	Jazz (1992)
67	Vladimir Nabokov	Lolita (1958)
68	John G. Neihardt	Black Elk Speaks (1932)
69	Flannery O'Connor	A Good Man is Hard to Find (1955)
70	Charles Olson	Call Me Ishmael (1947)
71	Tillie Olson	Tell Me a Riddle (1961)
72	Jon Okada	No-No Boy (1977)
73	Grace Paley	Collected Stories (1994)
74	Walker Percy	The Moviegoer (1961)
75	Katherine Anne Porter	Flowering Judas and Other Stories (1930)
76	Thomas Pynchon	Gravity's Rainbow (1973)
77	Adrienne Rich	On Lies, Secrets and Silence (1979)
78	Philip Roth	Portnoy's Complaint (1969)
79	J.D. Salinger	The Catcher in the Rye (1951)
80	May Sarton	At Seventy (1984)
81	Leslie Marmon Silko	Ceremony (1977)
82	Isaac B. Singer	The Collected Stories of Isaac Bashevis Singer (1982)
83	Gertrude Stein	The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1993)
84	John Steinbeck	The Grapes of Wrath (1937)
85	William Styron	Sophie's Choice (1979)
86	James Thurber	A Thurber Carnival (1945)
87	Jean Toomer	Cane (1923)
88	Mark Twain	Letters from the Earth (1962)
89	John Updike	Rabbit, Run (1960)
90	Gore Vidal	The United States: Essays (1952-1992)
91	Kurt Vonnegut	Slaughterhouse Five (1969)
92	Alice Walker	The Color Purple (1982)
93	Robert Penn Warren	All the Kings Men (1946)
94	Nathanael West	The Day of the Locust (1939)
95	John Edgar Wideman	Philadelphia Fire (1990)
96	William Carlos Williams	In the American Grain (1925)
97	Edmund Wilson	To the Finland Station (1940)
98	Thomas Wolfe	You Can't Go Home Again (1941)
99	Richard Wright	Native Son (1940)
100	Wakako Yamauchi	Songs My Mother Taught Me (1994)

Source: The Hungry Mind Review. I am actually embarrassed to say how many of these I have read. I have bolded the author and title of those I have read, and just the author if I have read other works by her/him.

Jennifer Government, by Max Barry

Editor's note: This is one future dystopia that has really stood the test of time. I am still recommending it to people. In fact, I need to get a copy from the library and read it again myself.

I am finally getting around to reviewing Jennifer Government, and what excellent timing, coming on the heels of the latest atrocity wrought by the US use of privatized paramilitaries (also known as mercenaries). It is the complete privatization of all "services" that could possibly be performed by the government that drives the plot of this small, frantically-paced, quirky SF novel, set in the usual near-future dystopia. But as near-future dystopias go, this one is the most believable yet, and the real likely result of current neo-con trends. Jennifer works for the government, true, just as Buy Mitsui works for Mitsui and Hack Nike works for Nike and Billy NRA - well, one of them does work for the NRA and the other one is pretending to, hence the confusion. But even though Jennifer's job with the government is tracking down and apprehending criminals (not that there's much one can do anymore that is criminal) she can only go to work if she gets funding, and that may have to come from the grief-stricken parents of a murder victim. Funding once acquired, she goes to work to uncover a brilliant new marketing strategy at Nike - mass murders of youths who have just purchased their $2,500 trainers (to raise the street cred, you see.) Jennifer thinks the style of this sounds familiar - sounds like her ex-husband, as a matter of fact. And so it is! John Nike, he is known as now. But it turns out that the killing was assigned to a soft little pleb named Hack Nike who contracted it out to The Police (TM) (who, in one of the novel's many comic touches, play "Every Breath You Take" constantly at their headquarters, because it's their corporate anthem.) They in turn contract it out to the NRA, who are essentially the best funded and most profitable of all the private armies on the planet.
I have a mixed reaction to this book. The premise is spot-on, and some of the wise-ass comedy is absolutely brilliant. On the down-side, and this is not necessary in a black-comic SF novel but it is often the case, the characters are very cartoon-y. I think Barry is trying to humanize Jennifer by giving her a child (the reason she is no longer married to evil John) and the usual single-parent struggle, and a beginnings of a love-life, but all it does is detract from her integrity as a character (rather than as a person) because he is not quite a good enough writer to pull that off. It might have been better to centre her character around devotion to the job and make her lonely and introspective. Also, I am not a big fan of slapstick, even in visual forms, and I find most attempts to write slapstick vaguely irritating. (The one exception being Thomas Pynchon, which is why I admire him so much.) But in all, the good outweighs the bad, and I would give this book an 8.5 out of 10 as SF and a 5 out of 10 as "Literature".