Brain Pickings' "Best of" list

This is a list of atypical non-fiction books. Some have been celebrated elsewhere, but I am sure no two of them in the same place. What a glut of excellence! Life is so short.

Things that make a difference to ones literary experience

I have been experimenting with CD audiobooks from the library. I had a good experience with a John LeCarre novel, Our Kind of Traitor, narrated by Robin Sachs. I have fading hearing, but I was able to hear everything just fine with a set of moderately-priced noise-cancelling headphones plugged into an old, cheap CD off-brand "walkman". I mostly listened to it on a brief out-of-town break I took to my friend Lulu's house in Chisago City, lying in one of her luxurious recliners, with Koby sleeping in my lap. Bliss, for the most part. My ears did hurt after a while, and it was darned cold that weekend and we were staying in the basement, which although also luxurious, is heated only by a roaring woodstove. So the temperature was rather uneven, and then I got interrupted from time to time to eat or be sociable or get in the hot tub (ho, hum) or take Koby out to relieve himself in the snow. Sometimes it's hard livin' the easy life. But no, it was a great, a much-needed break. I anjoyed the visit, and Lulu is a wonderful hostess.

Having enjoyed that audiobook a lot, the next time I was at the library, I got a few more. I just now tried to listen to my second audiobook, The Mystery Woman, by Amanda Quick, narrated by Justine Eyre. This was not such a good experience. Same piece of equipment, now lying on my bed, which is where I finished the LeCarre after I got back from my little trip. But first, there was a fault in disc 1, and I couldn't listen to it at all. Disc 2 played OK, but I only listened about two minutes before giving up in disgust. And this is the topic of my post. It makes a huge difference who the narrator is! And I do not like Justine Eyre, although I don't think, after Googling her, that I have seen her in anything. She is an extremely beautiful, if distinctly unfriendly-looking, young woman, but that could be because she has also been a model. (Or she could have been a model for the same reason she looks so distant and miserable, who knows?) Canadian by birth, raised in the Phillipines, educated in the UK, she is described as a classically trained actor. Her voice, how shall I say this? is horrible. Cut glass, but a little bit too much so, with backnotes of a suburban midwestern Canadian. A timbre somewhere between brittle and wheezy, like it's been overbaked on cigarettes and coke, and yet at the same time, flat in that very young way of very bored and snooty youngsters. I'm sorry, Justine, but I could not get past my appalled fascination with your ridiculous voice enough to even hear the content. Which I would probably like if I were reading it myself.

Best SF of 2013

I didn't think I would have read any of these, since SF, especially the new stuff, is not my genre so much anymore. But one I have not only read, but recommended to scores of people, I liked it that much.

Reading the world in one year

Writer Ann Morgan (pictured) set herself the interesting project of reading a book from every UN country in the world plus former member Taiwan. Then she wrote this engaging post about it on the BBC Culture blog.
Right away, you begin to realize the technical challenge if you think about this. Sitting in the UK, where only about 4% of books are translations, and those only from a few major languages, you immediately wonder, how to get the books? Her first step was to create a blog and use it to reach out to book lovers around the world and ask for help. She discovered that storytelling, not written works, were still the main literary medium in some countries, such as the Marshall Islands and Niger. But then even in adapting to the difficulties, she was learning, and sharing on the blog, a new and deeper layer of cultural knowledge about the world. Here is the list, by the way.

Launch of Always a New Leaf

On Sunday, the 7th of July, 2013, I launched this blog as a successor to my previous book blog Deborama's Book Reviews and Store.  I am moving most of the stuff from the old blog to here, with its original publication dates (mostly). But the reason I need a new blog is that the old one was an Amazon Affiliate, but it was a UK Amazon Affiliate. It hasn't earned any money in several years, and I no longer have access to the email address the Amazon Associates account was linked to.
Just a navigational point and a style point : below this launch post are my copied blogposts from Deborama's Book Reviews and Store, but without the graphics of the books or the monetized links. Just above this post will be one or more posts with loads of book links if you want to buy the books from whatever US store is my new affiliate. That's the navigational point. The style point has to do with English spelling. The posts I wrote in England have all British spellings. The ones I wrote after repatriating to America have all American spellings. That's just how it has to be; deal with it.
Another style point, but blogging style rather than writing style is that the relaunch blog will be more closely tied into Bookcrossing, Goodreads, Facebook and other social media. Also the Hennepin County Library system, my position on Friends of the Roosevelt Library, the Little Free Libraries that cover my neighborhood, and my condominium-based book club and writing club. Follow me if you love reading.

Nordic Noir: From Wallander to Borkmann's Point

Editor's Note: This is the last of my "old" blogposts. Since this post, I have discovered, here in the US, cable channel MhzWorldview which has an international mystery series every night of the week. Swedish Wallander and Van Veeteren are both on there, and the older Wallander, before Krister Henriksson (above), before Yellow Bird Productions. Yellow Bird produced Henriksson's Wallander and the Girl With the Dragon Tattoo films (Swedish, that is) and the Swedish-Danish crime miniseries The Bridge, which is too recent to be on MhzWorldview but which I saw on Hulu. I tried but failed to get my condo book club to like Nordic Noir. However, the Roosevelt Library Book Club mostly loves it too. 
I have been on a Nordic Noir kick ever since the British Wallander debuted on the BBC, which led me to the Swedish Wallander, which I liked better, which led me to the The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, and it just sort of went on from there. Håkan Nesser is Swedish but I think his main character, Chief Inspector Van Veeteren, is of some indeterminate northern European country, which could be Sweden or Holland or Poland, according to Wikipedia. He seems to use British police titles and ranks, which makes sense because he has lived in London for the past couple of decades. Van Veeteren is a popular character, and some of the early novels have been made into TV series in Sweden. In the first five, VV is still on the police force, and in the next five, he is retired and running an antiquarian bookshop but still getting involved in cases. He is something like a halfway mark between Sherlock Holmes and Wallander, with some of the wry and negative self-awareness that Holmes lacks and also some of the mysterious methodology, a mix of genius, showmanship and intuition, that Wallander lacks. Borkmann's Point is about a serial axe-murderer with exactly three victims, at least until he kidnaps a female police detective and no one is sure why or if he has killed her. The Point in the title is a point in time defined by Borkmann, a well-remembered mentor from VV's early days as a detective. He taught that there is always a point in the investigation where you have all the information you need to solve it, and all the information that comes in after that point will slow you down rather than help you. So if one can learn to discern that point, one can ignore all the extraneous information and just sit at ones desk and think. Unfortunately, you can only recognize Borkmann's Point after you have solved the crime, so it's more of a thought experiment than a tactic.

The Polish Officer

Editor's Note: This is the next to last of my blog posts. I actually wrote it just days after I arrived back in the States after 13 years living in the UK. I think I was in a state resembling mild PTSD, the preceding three months had been so stressful, and I was living all alone in a 3 bedroom, two-storey house on Chicago Avenue, which was a little bit scary at night. But anyway, what I wanted to add is that since this post, Public TV carried a great series called Spies of Warsaw starring David Tennant as - the Polish Officer! It had this same scene that so moved me in the book, and it was beautifully done.

Well, it's not often I review and blog a book I have only read one chapter of. In fact, it's not often I review and blog books at all anymore. And maybe I am more jetlagged and culture-shocked than I thought I was, or maybe it really was that good. I just read the first chapter of The Polish Officer by Alan Furst, entitled "The Pilawa Local."  I was in tears. It made me wish I was Polish. And to all my Polish friends, my God, you come from a noble people, and I am heartily sorry if ever in my careless youth I retold or even laughed at a Polack joke, no matter how good-natured.

Books that will change the way you look at Christianity

I found a brief article on the About.com website, which I usually use to find recipes rather than enlightenment, about a list of books on a topic dear to my soul, the history of Christianity and how the gnostics, Jewish "Christians" and others were suppressed by those more politically powerful, a story that is basically about how the religion we now know as Christianity came about. Here are the books, with links to purchase them from Deborama through Amazon.co.uk, (ed. note - now Amazon.com / Prime / Smile) if you should so wish.

The Lady Di of her day

I read Georgiana, the Duchess of Devonshire while I was in Portland last year. This is a very rich book, and it is better than the average popular historical biography on several levels. Many contemporary books on "scholarly" subjects, such as history or science, are immensely "dumbed down" to the point that an average layperson such as me, who is college educated but not by any means an academic, feels quite condescended to by the writing style, and a bit cheated by the material. That is definitely not the case with Amanda Foreman's writing. It is never repetitive nor does it over-explain, and yet it remains not only accessible, but also gripping in places, due to the fascinating nature of the subject. As an example of what I mean, here are excerpts from two reader reviews on the Amazon website:

Alexandra from Manningtree: I'm lucky enough to have a history degree, but this book is so accessible you don't need one; Foreman just guides through giving you all extra info without sounding patronising. This has to be the best researched biography I've read... if only my academic reading was as fun.

A Reader from London: I often feel that books aimed at the general reader, ie, someone like me who did not go to university, assume that we are all thickwits who can't tell the difference between good and bad writing. The one thing I loved about Georgiana is that the book has all the quality of academic history while at the same time being very entertaining. Although at times I had to concentrate really hard on a lot of unfamiliar information, I also felt I was getting the real thing.

A brief synopsis of the life of Lady Georgiana Spencer (great x4 aunt of Princess Diana), who became at 19 the Duchess of Devonshire, will give a taste of the rich and engaging tale this book tells. Beautiful, talented and gracious, Georgiana was one of the wealthiest people in the world, yet she was plagued by enormous gambling debts most of her life. She was one of the first women in the modern world to get involved in politics, at a time when women had not even the faintest hope that they would ever vote, and was alternately cheered and jeered for it by the fickle public. She was married to one of the most powerful peers in England, yet she gave birth to a child who was fathered by a man of lesser rank, and had to sneak away to the continent to do so. She was part of a menage a trois, being in love with the manipulative yet charming and somewhat pitiable Lady Elizabeth Frazer, her husband's sometime mistress. Although she died somewhat prematurely in her late 40s, she was a witness to or participant in many of the major episodes of early modern European history.

Dashiell Hammett

While I am waiting for that blast of either energy or inspiration to do my backlog of book reviews, I thought I would post a link to this excellent article about Dashiell Hammett from the San Francisco Gate. As you can probably tell from my choice of reading, I love detective stories, mysteries and crime writing. I am unusual in a way in that I almost equally like the sub-genres of the genre, called rather disparagingly "tea cosy" and "hard-boiled". Noir is another sub-genre that sits to the left of hard-boiled, and yet paradoxically can have a bit of tea cosy about it as well. I think Dashiell Hammett is the godfather of noir. And one of the things I really like, both in crime/mystery/detective fiction and in SF (my second great favourite genre) is a political subtext. Dashiell Hammett's first of only five novels,  Red Harvest, is also a classic in this sub-sub-genre.

The man behind "The Polar Express"

The Minneapolis Star-Tribune book section had this interview with Chris Van Allsburg, the man behind "The Polar Express". I remember seeing this beautiful book in Dayton's around Christmas time either 1985 or 1986. I don't know why I didn't buy it for my son; maybe he had decreed "don't buy me any more books" (always quite possible when you are dealing with me, seeing as how I have about a 95% books given as gifts lifetime record.) If that's the case, I wonder why I didn't buy it for myself? Then Dayton's Department Store (now called Marshall's; it's a long story) had an animatronic Polar Express exhibit one Christmas. I also am not sure if I took my son to see that or not; my daughter would have already been a little old for it, or maybe it was the year she went to live with my sister (another long story.) And now apparently it's a movie with Tom Hanks, but since the only kid I now have is my husband, we did not go to see it. But this is a beautiful book for children of all ages. The movie looks pretty good too.
Blog editor's note: This was published a little over 9 years ago. Since the original post, Daytons that was then called Marshalls is now called Macy's. Also, I saw the film on Cable PPV and it was pretty good. Jan. 27, 2014.

Soul of a Butterfly

This morning I read a book review for a biography/autobiography of Muhammad Ali from the Times Online Books mailing list. Sometimes, a really good review is almost as good as the book itself. This review was excellent, and is the sort of thing I aspire to in my book reviews. Reviews of books that the reviewer didn't enjoy are rarely good, only when the reviewer is good with corrosive sarcasm and the book is bad enough in a big enough way to deserve it. But a good review of a good book gives you a taste of why that book is so good, gives you a taste of the book itself and gives you a little more besides.

Take love, for example: and the book is all about love. For Ali, it seems essential that he loves vast numbers of people, and is loved back by them. I was there in Atlanta when he lit the Olympic flame, and I felt the oceans of love washing towards him from America and the world. I have been at prize-fights where the very name Ali gets a bigger cheer than either contestant. Ali: the world’s most beloved sportsman; perhaps the world’s most beloved human.

Which is odd when you remember that he spent years as a hate-magnet. Quite deliberately: he modelled his free-wheeling braggart monologues on a wrestler named Gorgeous George, reasoning that the more people who wanted to see his ass whupped, the more tickets he would sell. He was always an actor, an illusionist, a man who adores conjuring tricks. He still does them; though now, as a devout Muslim who will never deceive, he afterwards insists on showing you how it was done.

Blogkeeping and My Life (partially a cross-post from Deborama)

(A little late with the cross-post; I've been sick.)
As badly as I have been neglecting this blog, I have been even worse at my book review and bookstore blog and at Deborama's Kitchen, my food and food politics blog. So I am cross-posting this at both, because I have been a) actively reading and planning, bursting even, to review a couple of books, and b) I have some cookie recipes to post and some simmering thoughts about all this diet and nutrition stuff. First the cookies. As those of you in Britain will know, last week was the big Children In Need charity fund drive. My employer (a mega multi-national) is a big participant and this year I sold cookies. Real American cookies baked by a real American grannie, is how I advertised them. They even (ugh!) put my picture on the intranet, posing with my cookies held out in front, a fake smile on my face, not a hint of (detectable) irony (I hope.) As for food politics, it has been brought to the fore, for me, by the recent hunting-with-dogs ban. I used to be a vegetarian. I am still selective about what animal products I will eat, and I try to influence DH who is pretty much not. I saw a Countryfile show on Sunday where a gamekeeper and a leader of a shooting ("wild" birds) group debated two anti-hunting activists. My thoughts, about which I will probably not get more specific, were about the comparative ethics (from an anti-animal-cruelty viewpoint) of eating game vs. farm animals. I do believe that the world is evolving towards total veganism, which I think is a good thing. But I tried and failed at that for myself, in the here and now. So this is a pragmatic argument for me. Maybe I will get more specific, later. I have to think about it.

Now, as to the books. While the siege of Fallujah was going on, I was reading Absolute Friends, by John le Carre. This book echoed against some very dark and despairing sentiments I was already experiencing due to watching "The Power of Nightmares" on the BBC, and due to the same nightmare scenario being acted out in Fallujah and elsewhere. I need , desparately, to review this book. I want to talk about it to someone. But my energy continues to wane and every little task I accomplish after work or on the weekend is a major triumph. So in the meantime, life must go on, and long train journeys must be endured, so I started on some other books. Right now I am about halfway through Cryptonomicon (Neal Stephenson) and it is so very very excellent. I am enjoying it immensely.

Be very afraid of what's not on the label

I am currently reading Not on the Label: What Really Goes into the Food On Your Plate, by Felicity Lawrence. It is really frightening. And I have been a savvy food-politics activist for about 35 years and still I didn't know about some of the appalling things covered in this book. It seems to affect everyone this way. Here are some excerpts from Amazon's reader reviews:

"I thought I had some idea about how supermarkets operate and how our food is produced, but I didn't know the half of it. Read this book (then lend it to everyone you know), ponder its contents for a while and I am sure you will change your shopping habits."

"All the chapters made a big impact but I was particularly moved by the descriptions of the migrant agricultural workers living on rubbish tips in Spain, of coffee farmers who were paid so little for their crop that they couldn't support their families and of the phenomenally destructive (and disgusting) practice of prawn farming in South-East Asia. . . Time and time again what came across is the enormous power of the supermarkets and how in competing with each other to be cheapest they create misery all the way down the food supply chain. Some of the supermarket practices described simply beggar belief."

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time

I loved this book, and even more importantly, my darling hubby liked this book. I give him about 12 to 20 books a year to read, after I have read and liked them, and think he might like them, and he only likes about a fifth of them. So either he is very hard to please, or I am rubbish at guessing what he will like (a bit of both really.)
So, you have probably heard about this book by Mark Haddon - that it is about a 12 year old boy with Asperger's syndrome, and neighbour's dog that gets killed with a pitchfork. And since the title is a well-known quote from a Sherlock Holmes story, you would guess that it's a sort of detective story. Well, it is and it isn't. Mostly it isn't. I think this is mostly a story about how people's brains work, and how they don't all work the same way. And this can be a tragedy. There is a certain amount of tragedy in this story, and I felt some overwhelming maternal protectiveness for the likable hero, Christopher.
This has occasionally been referred to as a children's book, but I have never seen it in the children's or young adult section. It is no more a children's book than Life of Pi, which also features a young boy protagonist and is a very similar book in many ways. It is far too short a book to get away with telling even a little bit of the narrative (apart from the fact that a dog is killed in the opening chapter, but everyone knows that). I prefer to concentrate on why I liked it, and why DH liked it. I think we both liked it because the boy reminded us of ourselves, but for each of us, these were very different aspects of ourselves. I identified with Chris's inability to "take in" all of his sensory environment, while being unable to screen it out the way normal people do. Although I do not have Asperger's syndrome or any diagnosed condition, I am what is known as a "low-screener" which means that all my senses are very acute (although often not particularly accurate) and I can be very "oppressed", like Chris, by colours I don't like, crowds, smells and chaos in general. And, like Chris, I use mental exercise to calm myself, often pursuing activities that would drive normal people crazy, in order to drive myself sane. DH, on the other hand, is a very, very "high screener". But he has another of the traits of Asperger's syndrome (in common with some other conditions) which is an extreme difficulty "reading" the emotions, facial expressions and body language of other people, and an aversion to the sort of familiar touching that most people do as part of their socializing. DH again is not diagnosed with a syndrome, and he likes hugs and has no problem shaking hands or anything, but still there is that commonality there and I think that plus the boy protagonist's clever maths-geek atheism, made him really identify with Chris.
This is, I think, the great strength of this wonderful little book, that it enables anyone to feel a real kinship with someone with a condition which usually makes its sufferers seems very alien to the rest of humanity. And it makes his condition, and mental illness generally, very knowable and understandable and not a cause for fear and dread.

Northern Lights / The Subtle Knife / The Amber Spyglass : His Dark Materials Trilogy

Editor's Note: In the US, the first volume of the trilogy is called The Golden Compass. Also, a film has been made.

I heard these books described as a thinking-person's Harry Potter. That doesn't really do them justice. The format, the intent, the audience, the world-view, all are different in several degrees from Harry Potter. The main thing is that the Harry Potter stories are in the familiar reductionist mode of children's fiction that has borrowed from the highly stylized world of Saturday morning cartoons. Utterly absent are moral nuance, and pleasures are simple and greedy, even for the "good" characters. Everything is very easy to identify as good or evil, fun or boring, giving feelings of pride or shame, and the violence is strangely sanitized. The only moral choices the "good" characters face is whether to act loyally to their friends ("friendship" being the highest imaginable "good" in this world-view) and the power of loyalty to friends neutralizes any other action, from being silent and stubborn to authority figures, right on up to remorselessly killing "bad" characters.
Pullman's stories, though, apart from seeming to me to be too intellectually challenging for most modern pre-teens (I don't mean that to sound as insulting as it probably does, but really they are quite philosophically rarefied in parts) are more in the old style of children's literature, being as weird as Alice in Wonderland and as violent as Grimm's fairy tales and yet as modern as The Little Prince was in its day. And talk about moral nuance, hard choices, and ethical grey areas, these not only proliferate as the story goes on, they more or less drive the entire plot. There are parts that are better than others in the books, and this is something that I imagine young readers will find especially difficult, because there are times when as the focus switched from one group battling unspeakable evil to another, I was quite tempted to read ahead to where the dropped thread was picked up again, and got quite annoyed at almost turgid parts, even though I could tell they were necessary for the whole picture. The sweep of the stories are quite broad, encompassing universes and their creation and destruction, yet somehow not in the old SF Dr. Who kind of way ("Oh, well, when you've seen one megalomaniac who wants to rule the universe, you have pretty much seen them all") but more in that vertiginous way one feels if one allows oneself to really think about the possible implications of quantum physics.
To sum up the trilogy, without injecting any narrative or teasers, I would say that these three books comprise a Faustian fairy tale about parallel histories, theology and physics, featuring a pair of protagonists who are a twist on the old Tristan and Iseult mythology. And it's got talking warrior bears and witches and magical implements that can be replicated in a physics lab.

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".

Cavedweller, by Dorothy Allison (Dorothy Allison Lite?)

I guess it was about twelve years ago at least that I read Dorothy Allison's Bastard Out of Carolina.  (Editor's Note: Now eighteen!) What an experience that was; it absolutely bowled me over. A few years later she came to Minneapolis to speak at the Amazon Women's Bookstore (no relation to the online outfit, which it pre-dated by two decades.) I think it was then that I bought Two or Three Things I Know For Sure, her book of essays which quickly became a classic of queer non-fiction, as her novel was of queer literature.
I was probably expecting more of the same in Cavedweller. Although there is some pain and guilt and a soap-opera worth of messed-up lives, and although it still has that ineffable ability to bring back my own Southern childhood and young adult days through subtle references to sounds and smells and plants and foods and places, it is just not in the same league as Bastard Out of Carolina. That might be A Good Thing, though, because I am sure a lot of people just couldn't quite take Bastard Out of Carolina; it was very raw and very real (largely autobiographical) and yet very alien to most people who, when they say they had a horrible childhood, don't quite mean the same thing as Dorothy Allison means. I love Dorothy Allison, and I will happily read anything she writes. But I think BOOC was a one-shot deal.

A novel like a poem: If Nobody Speaks Of Remarkable Things, by Jon McGregor

Editor's Note: At the time I wrote this, McGregor had no further novels, but now, nine years later, he does. Also, I am not sure if I knew when I wrote this that he was local, not to the town in Leicestershire where I lived, but to the city, Nottingham, where I worked, a city that started to almost feel like a hometown to me. He has come into the recognition I felt he deserved back then, and the novel is now referred to as "critically acclaimed" on Alibris.

The first, and so far, I believe, only novel by Jon McGregor, this is a book that needs more recognition. Reviewers liked it - a lot - and so did I. It is written in a poetic style like a long poem in blank verse. Many of the main characters in the story are never named but are referred to by the house number on the street where the "remarkable things" take place. The story is also like a Greek tragedy, in that almost all of the action takes place in a very short space of time, and on a single street in a typical Northern English city. The street is not a posh or fashionable one; most of the inhabitants are students or immigrants or disabled. There are children playing in the street, which doesn't happen so much in the upscale neighbourhoods. There are people making love in the afternoon, there are very old people who stand at the window and see what goes on in the street. This is an elegaic story, a story full of wonder and melancholy and miracles and disasters and minute observation of the everyday. It's not like any other novel you have ever read.