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.

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.

Two Crackers from Once Upon A Crime

Blog editor note: Nowadays, Lia Matera is a friend on Facebook. Although I still have not met her in person, and we can't go out for coffee together because we live a couple of thousand miles apart, we actually are as good friends as two can be on Facebook, chatting, cross-commenting, and liking a lot of the same things. I was really honored to have her accept me as a friend, given that I am "just a fan". But it's true, her books are some of my favorites amongst contemporary crime drama.  


In a previous post, I bemoaned the lack of good, independent bookstores in most of Britain. Once Upon A Crime, in Minneapolis, is one of the type of bookstores I was thinking about. On my recent trip there for the birth of grand-daughter Savannah, I visited OUAC and purchased five books, reviews of which follow.

Bad Boy Brawly Brown, by Walter Mosley, is a book you will expect to be good if you are already familiar with Mosley's Easy Rawlins series. And it doesn't disappoint. The Easy Rawlins books are all in chronological order, so the story develops, society in multi-racial Los Angeles changes through the decades, and characters grow, change and in some cases die. This is the first novel after the death of Mouse, Easy's criminally violent but strangely endearing oldest friend. The ghost of Mouse haunts the story, plaguing Easy and giving him strength at the same time. This story takes place in the early 1970s, and concerns Easy's attempts to save a young boy from falling into a life of criminality through the strange politics of black power in that era. It is full of all the things you want in an Easy Rawlins story: tender family dramas and piercing sociological insights alternating with anatomically described fight scenes and thrilling car chases.

Star Witness, a Willa Jansson Mystery, by Lia Matera, is one in a series that is a personal favourite of mine. Willa Jansson is a lawyer with a colourful past. She is what we used to call a "red diaper baby"; her parents are 1960s radicals, her values are unashamedly leftist, and her heroes are secular and intellectual and revolutionary, like her parents. The early books in the series featured Willa working for a leading leftist lawyer and then, when he died in an early book, an idealistic legal cooperative. Now she works for a corporate firm, and so gets into those typical nineties-naughties conflicts of belief vs. livelihood. In this story, a bit of a departure, she gets roped into the world of alien abductees and conspiracy theorists, and gets herself tied up in some Gordian knots of legal ethics and personal responsibility. The thing that really shines about Lia Matera's books is the dialogue, both internal and external. I cannot recommend them highly enough.

Persia Cafe, by Melany Nielson

This is the fifth book that I bought at Once Upon A Crime in Minneapolis.
This is a mystery of sorts, but it features neither a cop nor a PI nor even an amateur investigator. But a crime occurs, what we would now call a hate crime, although in the time and place of the story - Mississippi in the 1960s - such a term did not exist. The principal character is a young white woman, Fannie Leary, who runs the Persia Cafe. At the start of the story, the Persia Cafe is the only place in town to eat out or even have coffee and it is patronised by whites only. The cook, of course, is black, and in the way of white families in the South, because she has worked for Fannie's family all her life, she is in the sort of relationship with them that I will not even try to describe, because you cannot understand it unless you experience it. This is the relationship that my ex-father-in-law and others of his ilk referred to when they said "We care for our nigras," in a tone and context that made it clear that "yankees" and outsiders cared not for their own nigras and were exposing them to harm. But if a black person did something to put himself outside their "protection", well, that is a relationship that it is also hard to understand, except in terms of pure evil, the natural predatory nature of the human beast coming out.
The main arc of this story is what used to happen when a white woman did something to put herself outside the protection of the Southern white men. Fannie does not quite declare herself a race traitor (as I did myself in the 1960s in suburban Atlanta, and if I had done the same in Mississippi, I may not have grown up to tell about it.) But her crime of omission is enough to get the Persia Cafe boycotted by the white community, so in a moment of supreme courage, she invites the black community to dinner at the cafe.
What we get at this point is a great picture of a small southern community on the cusp of change. Having lived through this era and this place, I can attest that the picture is accurate and believable. Oh, and Fannie solves the crime, too, the original crime, which does turn out to be murder. This is a great story, a cut above the genre.

Two Women - A PI and A Vicar - Two Mysteries

Here are two more books that I bought at Once Upon A Crime in Minneapolis.
In the Bleak Midwinter, by Julia Spencer-Fleming, is a first crime novel, featuring one of those unlikely buddy pairs that can make detective stories either really entertaining or cringingly bad, depending mostly on the writer's skill with dialogue and narrative touch with relationships. (There is an obvious intention to start a "series" here, including a taster of the forthcoming second novel.) This writer is neither the best nor the worst I have encountered, but nearer the top than the bottom, so, so far so good. The pair is a newly appointed female Episcopalian priest and a married, male, non-religious local police chief. The scene is set to bring them together by a newborn baby being left in the church porch, and the attempts to find the mother, the father or the truth about what happened to them. Extra tension is added to the relationship by a small romantic attachment on both sides, and needs to be filled that are not being met by the wife on one hand or the vocation on the other. Not at all bad for a first timer.
The Big Dig, on the other hand, is one in a long-established and well-respected series by crime author Linda Barnes. The female PI, six-foot tall, red-headed, ex-cop Carlotta Carlyle of Boston, is very much in the V. I. Warshawski/Kinsey Mullhone vein. The Big Dig is a real project, the massive engineering feat of putting all the freeways in downtown Boston underground, the "central artery tunnel", which is the largest modern engineering project in the world. And a great setting for a mysterious death that may be a murder.