A Century of Books

I found this idea in another blog that I really like. The blogger had the goal to read a book from every year in the last century during the year 2012. Now, I'm not as adventurous as that, I know I wouldn't be able to read all those books in one year plus my book club books and any new books friends recommend. So, I started to go through my notes and see which years I already have or which are on my wishlist already and came up with the following list. I will add to the list as soon as I read new books from those years.

1900 - Jerome K. Jerome "Three Men on the Bummel" (Three Men on Wheels)
1901 - Thomas Mann "Buddenbrooks: The Decline of a Family" (Buddenbrooks)
1902 - Joseph Conrad "Heart of Darkness"
1903 - W.E.B. Du Bois "The Souls of Black Folk"
1904 - Henry James "The Golden Bowl"
1905 - Edith Wharton "The House of Mirth"
1906 - Maxim Gorki "The Mother" (Мать/Matj)
1907 - Molnár, Ferenc "The Paul Street Boys" (A Pál-utcai Fiúk)
1908 - Montgomery, L. M. (Lucy Maud) "Anne of Green Gables" 
1909 - Frances Hodgson Burnett "The Secret Garden"
1910 - E.M. Forster "Howard's End"
1911 - Edith Wharton "Ethan Frome"
1912 - Thomas Mann "Death in Venice" (Der Tod in Venedig)
1913 - Sarah Morgan Dawson "1842-1909 A Confederate Girl's Diary"
1914 - Mann, Heinrich "Man of Straw" (Der Untertan)
1915 - Franz Kafka "The Metamorphosis" (Die Verwandlung)
1916 - James Joyce "A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man"
1917 - Lagerlöf, Selma "Sancta Lucia. Weihnachtliche Geschichten" [Christmas Stories] (Kristuslegender) - 1893-1917
1918 - Willa Cather "My Ántonia"
1919 -
1920 - Sigrid Undset "Kristin Lavransdatter"
1921 -
1922 - Herman Hesse "Siddhartha" (Siddharta)
1923 - Khalil Gibran "The Prophet" 
1924 - E.M. Forster "A Passage to India"
1925 - F. Scott Fitzgerald "The Great Gatsby"
1926 - A.A. Milne "Winnie the Pooh"
1927 - Virginia Woolf "To the Lighthouse"
1928 - Grimm, Hans Herbert aka Emil Schulz "Schlump. The Story of an unknown soldier" (Schlump. Geschichten und Abenteuer des unbekannten Musketiers Emil Schulz, genannt 'Schlump', von ihm selbst erzählt) - 1928
1929 - Thomas Wolfe "Look Homeward, Angel. A Story of the Buried Life."
1930 - Pearl S. Buck "East Wind: West Wind"
1931 - Willa Cather "Shadows on the Rock"
1932 - Stella Gibbons "Cold Comfort Farm"
1933 - Pearl S. Buck "The Mother"
1934 - Mikahil Sholokhov "And Quiet flows the Don"
1935 - Canetti, Elias "Auto-da-Fé" (Die Blendung)
1936 - Margaret Mitchell "Gone with the Wind"
1937 - Isak Dinesen= Karen Blixen "Out of Africa"
1938 - Graham Greene "Brighton Rock"
1939 - Pearl S. Buck "The Patriot"
1940 - John Steinbeck "The Grapes of Wrath"
1941 - Rey, H.A. "Curious George" - 1941-1966
1942 - Albert Camus "The Stranger/The Outsider" (L’Etranger)
1943 - Betty Smith "A Tree Grows in Brooklyn"
1944 - Eleanor Estes "The Hundred Dresses"
1945 - Mika Waltari "The Egyptian" (Sinuhe Egyptiläinen)
1946 - Pearl S. Buck "Pavilion of Women"
1947 - Albert Camus "The Plague" (La Peste)
1948 - Alan Paton "Cry, The Beloved Country"
1949 - George Orwell Nineteen Eighty Four"
1950 - Nevil Shute "A Town Like Alice"
1951 - Jack Kerouac "On the Road"
1952 - Ernest Hemingway "The Old Man and the Sea"
1953 - Mary Scott "Breakfast at Six"
1954 - William Golding "Lord of the Flies"
1955 - Yaşar Kemal "The Drumming-Out" (Teneke)
1956 - Iris Murdoch "The Flight From the Enchanter"
1957 - Mahfouz, Naguib "Sugar Street" (السكرية/Al-Sukkariyya)
1958 - Elie Wiesel "Night" (La Nuit)
1959 - Goscinny, René; Uderzo, Albert "Asterix the Gaul" (Astérix le Gaulois)
1960 - Harper Lee "To Kill a Mockingbird"
1961 - V.S. Naipaul. "A House for Mr. Biswas"
1962 - Doris Lessing "The Golden Notebook"
1963 - Mary Scott "It’s Perfectly Easy"
1964 - Hannah Green (Joanne Greenberg) I Never Promised you a Rose Garden"
1965 - Scott, Mary "Freddie" - 1965
1966 - Jean Rhys "Wide Sargasso Sea"
1967 - Gabriel Garcia Marquez "One hundred years of solitude" (Cien años de soledad)
1968 - Lew Nikolajewitsch Tolstoy "War and Peace" (Война и мир = Woina i mir) 
1969 - Jurek Becker "Jacob the Liar" (Jakob der Lügner)
1970 - Dee Brown "Bury my Heart at Wounded Knee"
1971 - Alexander Solzhenitsyn "The Red Wheel" cycle
            (Узел I - «Август Четырнадцатого», Красное колесо)
1972 - Richard Adams "Watership Down"
1973 - Kurt Vonnegut "Breakfast of Champions"
1974 - Valentin Rasputin "To Live and Remember" (Zhiwi e pomni = Живи и помни)
1975 - Imre Kertész "Fateless/Fatelessness" (Sorstalanság)
1976 - Rasputin, Valentin (Распутин, Валентин Григорьевич) "Farewell to Matyora" (Прощание с Матёрой) 
1977 - Mario Vargas Llosa "Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter" (La tía Julia y el escribidor) 
1978 - Rita Mae Brown "Six of One"
1979 - Italo Calvino "If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller" (Se una notte d’inverno un viaggiatore)
1980 - Eco, Umberto "The Name of the Rose" (Der Name der Rose/Il nome della rosa)  
1981 - Morton Rhue "The Wave"
1982 - Isabel Allende "The House of the Spirits" - Walker, Alice "The Color Purple" 
1983 - Sten Nadolny "The Discovery of Slowness" (Die Entdeckung der Langsamkeit)
1984 - Kross, Jaan "Professor Martens' Departure" (Professor Martensi ärasõit)
1985 - Margaret Atwood "The Handmaid’s Tale"
1986 - Patricia MacLachlan "Sarah, Plain & Tall"
1987 - Toni Morrison "Beloved"
1988 - Paulo Coelho "The Alchemist: A Fable about Following Your Dream" (O Alquimista)
1989 - Ken Follett "The Pillars of the Earth"
1990 - A.S. Byatt "Possession"
1991 - Jung Chang "Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China"
1992 - Harry Mulisch "The Discovery of Heaven" (De Ontdekking van de hemel)
1993 - Vikram Seth "A Suitable Boy"
1994 - Marianne Fredriksson "Hanna’s Daughters" (Anna, Hanna og Johanna)
1995 - Stefanie Zweig "Nowhere in Africa" (Nirgendwo in Afrika)
1996 - Joyce Carol Oates "We Were the Mulvaneys"
1997 - Charles Frazier "Cold Mountain"
1998 - Jane Smiley "The All-true Travels and Adventures of Lidie Newton"
1999 - Nancy E. Turner "These is my words"

Find the original list here and  here.

My favourite books 2012 and 2011

A lot of friends keep asking me about my favourite book of last year. Tough question, I'm sure I'd give a different answer every day. And the same applies to my ten favourite books. However, I have been going through my list and have chosen a selection of books that have left an impression on me. I hope there is something there for everybody, I think there are quite a few different choices. Enjoy.

My favourite books 2012

Allende, Isabel "Island Beneath the Sea" (E: La isla bajo el mar) - 2010
Atwood, Margaret "The Handmaid’s Tale" – 1985
Bryson, Bill "A Short History of Nearly Everything" - 2003
Chang, Jung "Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China" - 1991
Follett, Ken "World Without End" – 2007
Hamill, Pete "Snow in August" - 1998 
Mandela, Nelson "Long Walk to Freedom" - 1994
Oates, Joyce Carol "Mudwoman" - 2012
Sackville, Amy "The Still Point" - 2010
Shute, Nevil "A Town Like Alice" - 1950 

My favourite books 2011

Bryson, Bill "At Home. A Short History of Private Life" – 2010
Camus, Albert "The Plague" (FR: La Peste) – 1947
Falcones, Ildefonso "The Hand of Fatima" (E: La mano de Fátima) – 2009
Ilibagiza, Immaculée with Erwin, Steve "Left to Tell: Discovering God Amidst the Rwandan Holocaust" – 2006
Lowenstein, Anna "The Stone City" (Esperanto: La Ŝtona Urbo) – 1999
Mortenson, Greg "Stones into Schools: Promoting Peace with Books, Not Bombs, in Afghanistan and Pakistan" - 2009
O'Farrell, John "An Utterly Impartial History of Britain or 2,000 Years of Upper Calls Idiots in Charge" – 2007
Pamuk, Orhan "Istanbul - Memories of a City" (TR: İstanbul - Hatıralar ve Şehir) – 2003
Ruiz Zafón, Carlos "The Prince of Mist" (E: El príncipe de la niebla) – 1993
Rutherfurd, Edward "The Forest" – 2000

Oates, Joyce Carol "Mudwoman"

Oates, Joyce Carol "Mudwoman" - 2012

Joyce Carol Oates is one of my favourite authors. She surprises me with every new novel. As she did with this one.

Meredith Ruth (M.R.) Neukirchen is an abandoned and then adopted child that grows into a very successful woman. When she is at the top, she starts struggling with her past.

It is amazing how ordinary events can bring up topics you have long forgotten. And it is close to a miracle how Joyce Carol Oates can bring this to life on her pages. An almost fantasy-like story, although more magic realism, a story that has it all, it's a thriller, but it's so much more than a thriller. It's a philosophical book as well as the description of a journey to find oneself.

A quote to think about: "Earth-time is a way of preventing everything happening at once."

From the back cover:

"A riveting novel that explores the high price of success in the life of one woman - the first female president of a lauded ivy league institution - and her hold upon her self-identity in the face of personal and professional demons, from Joyce Carol Oates, author of the New York Times bestseller A Widow’s Story.

Mudgirl is a child abandoned by her mother in the silty flats of the Black Snake River. Cast aside, Mudgirl survives by an accident of fate - or destiny. After her rescue, the well-meaning couple who adopt Mudgirl quarantine her poisonous history behind the barrier of their middle-class values, seemingly sealing it off forever. But the bulwark of the present proves surprisingly vulnerable to the agents of the past.

Meredith 'M.R.' Neukirchen is the first woman president of an Ivy League university. Her commitment to her career and moral fervor for her role are all-consuming. Involved with a secret lover whose feelings for her are teasingly undefined, and concerned with the intensifying crisis of the American political climate as the United States edges toward war with Iraq, M.R. is confronted with challenges to her leadership that test her in ways she could not have anticipated. The fierce idealism and intelligence that delivered her from a more conventional life in her upstate New York hometown now threaten to undo her.

A reckless trip upstate thrusts M.R. Neukirchen into an unexpected psychic collision with Mudgirl and the life M.R. believes she has left behind. A powerful exploration of the enduring claims of the past, Mudwoman is at once a psychic ghost story and an intimate portrait of a woman cracking the glass ceiling at enormous personal cost, which explores the tension between childhood and adulthood, the real and the imagined, and the 'public' and 'private' in the life of a highly complex contemporary woman."

Find links to all my other Joyce Carol Oates reviews here.

Hamill, Pete "Snow in August"

Hamill, Pete "Snow in August" - 1998

Brooklyn, two years after World War II. An 11 year old Irish Catholic boy whose father died in battle and who lives alone with his mother befriends a Czech Rabbi and learns about Judaism and the Holocaust. Together they face racism and violence. Together with Michael, we learn about the Yiddish language, Jewish history, Jewish literature, the Jewish folkloristic Golem and - baseball.

The story is well-told, switching between the past and the present, building anticipation. You could almost read the story in a day but you don't want to say good-bye too early to the characters as you hopefully grow to love them as much as I did.

I really loved this book and would like to read more by this author.

From the back cover:

"In the year 1947, Michael Devlin, eleven years old and 100 percent American-Irish, is about to forge an extraordinary bond with a refugee of war named Rabbi Judah Hirsch. Standing united against a common enemy, they will summon from ancient sources a power in desperately short supply in modern Brooklyn-a force that's forgotten by most of the world but is known to believers as magic."

Liao, Yiwu "Testimonials or: For a Song and a Hundred Songs"

Liao, Yiwu "Testimonials or: For a Song and a Hundred Songs: A Poet's Journey Through a Chinese Prison" (Chinese: 證詞/Zheng-Ci) - 2000

I read the expanded German translation of a Chinese book by Yiwu Liao "Für ein Lied und hundert Lieder: Ein Zeugenbericht aus chinesischen Gefängnissen". He just received the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade (Friedenspreis). The book "describes the horrific treatment of Liao Yiwu and other political prisoners in a Chongqing prison who were arrested after the June 4, 1989 crackdown".

It's terrifying to read what people in Chinese prisons have to go through. This is a good book to read but with horrible pictures of what they do to each other. It's hardly believable that human beings can be like that.

What a tragic report of so many lives lost and wasted. At times, I thought, "Do I really want to know all this?" But then I carried on because if people can endure those tortures, we should at least make an effort to know about it. How much can a person endure?

There is also a lot of poetry in this book since Yiwu Liao is a poet, and a lot of Chinese history and literature, information about Chinese life and thinking. My favourite proverb mentioned: "Distant water won't quench your immediate thirst".

From the back cover:

"In the spring of 1989, news of the Tiananmen Square protests and their bloody resolution reverberated throughout the world. A young poet named Liao Yiwu, who had up until then lead an apolitical bohemian existence, found his voice in that moment, and, like the solitary man who stood firmly in front of a line of tanks, Liao proclaimed his outrage - only his weapon would be his words. Liao's memoir, For a Song and a Hundred Songs, captures the four dehumanizing years he spent in jail for writing the incendiary poem 'Massacre'. Through the power and beauty of his prose, he reveals the brutal reality of crowded Chinese prisons - the harassment from guards and fellow prisoners, the torture, the conflicts among human beings in close confinement, and the boredom of everyday life. Hailed by Philip Gourevitch as 'one of the most original and remarkable Chinese writers of our time,' Liao presents a stark and devastating portrait of a nation in flux, exposing a side of China that outsiders rarely ever get to see. This honest account and witness to history will forever change the way you view the rising superpower of China."

Yiwu Liao received the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade (Friedenspreis) in 2012.

Stowe, Harriet Beecher "Uncle Tom’s Cabin"

Stowe, Harriet Beecher "Uncle Tom’s Cabin" - 1852

This is one of the most tragic stories I have ever read, and I think I've read my fair share of tragedies. I have read books about wars, concentration camps and slavery, to name but a few. As with other classic stories, I had heard about the content, I knew what was going to happen to Uncle Tom, I knew what happened to slaves, how they were sold and tortured, how they would sell spouses and children away from their families. But it's tragic every time again, especially if you put a name to the people involved, if they are described in such a way that they come alive on the paper.

Harriet Beecher Stowe has managed to do just this, she brings alive all those poor people who had no rights at all and who had no hope that anything would ever improve in their lives, that they and their loved ones would get away from a fate worth than death.

There is Uncle Tom, a faithful servant to a good "master" who would never sell him. Or would he? Several other characters in the novel learn that when money is involved, everything is possible, whether the owner wants to sell their "possessions" or not. Then there is his family who have to say good-bye to husband and father, knowing they will never see him again. And then there are all the other poor souls, all of whom have a cross to bear, one story seems more unbearable than the next. Amazing how they still can go on and even have compassion. But they do.

I read that "Uncle Tom's Cabin" is not read in school anymore because of the racial prejudices that were around at the time and that the author repeats several times. I don't think that's a reason not to read it anymore, on the contrary. That would be the same as not reading anything about concentration camps and the Nazis anymore. No, I think as long as we read these stories and are aware of the prejudices that used to exist, we can fight those that still are around. The more we see about it, the more ridiculous they seem and the earlier they will be eliminated.

I totally loved reading this story, even though I never like this way of describing a story of this content.

From the back cover:

"Uncle Tom, Topsy, Sambo, Simon Legree, little Eva: their names are American bywords, and all of them are characters in Harriet Beecher Stowe's remarkable novel of the pre-Civil War South. Uncle Tom's Cabin was revolutionary in 1852 for its passionate indictment of slavery and for its presentation of Tom, 'a man of humanity, as the first black hero in American fiction. Labeled racist and condescending by some contemporary critics, it remains a shocking, controversial, and powerful work - exposing the attitudes of white nineteenth-century society toward "the peculiar institution" and documenting, in heartrending detail, the tragic breakup of black Kentucky families "sold down the river." An immediate international sensation, Uncle Tom's Cabin sold 300,000 copies in the first year, was translated into thirty-seven languages, and has never gone out of print: its political impact was immense, its emotional influence immeasurable.

The narrative drive of Stowe's classic novel is often overlooked in the heat of the controversies surrounding its anti-slavery sentiments. In fact, it is a compelling adventure story with richly drawn characters and has earned a place in both literary and American history. Stowe's puritanical religious beliefs show up in the novel's final, overarching theme - the exploration of the nature of Christianity and how Christian theology is fundamentally incompatible with slavery."

Buck, Pearl S. "The Exile"

Buck, Pearl S. "The Exile" - 1936

Pearl S. Buck grew up mostly in China, the daughter of American missionaries. In her many novels she describes the life of Chinese people past and present.

This book, however, is a biography about her mother, Carie Stulting Sydenstricker, a missionary and the wife of a missionary, who led most of her adult life in a foreign place, who went through hard times both politically as well as personally. She lived through several invasions, the Japanese, the Russians, through illnesses and death of her children. She lives in two worlds and cannot claim either of them as her real home in the end.

Same as her novels, I really loved this biography of the author's mother. She shows how much love can change life of the people around you and sometimes of a lot more.

From the back cover:

"The biography of the mother of Pearl S. Buck, a portrait of an American woman in China."

Find other books by Pearl S. Book that I read here.

Pearl S. Buck received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1938 "for her rich and truly epic descriptions of peasant life in China and for her biographical masterpieces".

I contribute to this page: Read the Nobels and you can find all my blogs about Nobel Prize winning authors and their books here.

Brijs, Stefan "The Angel Maker"

Brijs, Stefan "The Angel Maker" (Dutch/Flemish: De engelenmaker) - 2005

A story about a doctor who clones lives a very private life with his children in a remote village in the German speaking part of Belgium. As the story unfolds, we get to know his secret.

We had chosen the book because there are only a few Dutch books translated into English. We had different feelings about the story. It was gripping, a thriller, thought-provoking.

We learned about Asperger syndrome, autism and how inmates of asylums used to be treated. And about cloning.

It was interesting to see the contrast between modern science and narrow-mindedness. The book was easy to read but had so many layers. There was a lot of symbolism, the trinity appeared again and again.

The author did a great research, a lot of information and facts seemed correct.

Some really enjoyed the book, others found it disturbing and depressing, even horrific, disgusting, took some of us way past our comfort zone. It is very gothic-like.

The small town mentality was disturbing. We found that they are the same everywhere.

There was nobody in the whole novel we could relate to, even the children were portrayed so inhuman, we could only feel empathy for the school teacher.

We like to say that "science is value free", that there can be no limits, it's discovery for the sake of discovery. What do we do with the discoveries, someone will use it who doesn't have the inhibitions. The quote "Medicine has allowed us to die more slowly." was mentioned.

You know from the first sentence, this is not going to end well. He leaves a lot of questions open.

I didn't care much for the title, in German, an angel maker is someone who performs an unsafe illegal abortion, However, as a subject, this was just as bad. I hadn't looked forward to the book and didn't care for it much. I also didn't like the (original) cover picture or the one of the artist. The former reminded me of a fried egg gone bad, the latter made me think the author was writing about himself.

Still, we had a very interesting discussion about a sensitive subject.

We discussed this in our book club in November 2012.

From the back cover:

"A literary page-turner about one man’s macabre ambition to create life - and secure immortality

The village of Wolfheim is a quiet little place until the geneticist Dr. Victor Hoppe returns after an absence of nearly twenty years. The doctor brings with him his infant children - three identical boys all sharing a disturbing disfigurement. He keeps them hidden away until Charlotte, the woman who is hired to care for them, begins to suspect that the triplets - and the good doctor - aren’t quite what they seem. As the villagers become increasingly suspicious, the story of Dr. Hoppe’s past begins to unfold, and the shocking secrets that he has been keeping are revealed. A chilling story that explores the ethical limits of science and religion, The Angel Maker is a haunting tale in the tradition of The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and Frankenstein. Brought to life by internationally bestselling author Stefan Brijs, this eerie tale promises to get under readers’ skin."

The 100 Greatest Fiction Books as Chosen by The Guardian

I love lists. Lists that have been put together by people smarter than me, who have read more than I have and who know so much more about them. It's always a great way to find "new" and interesting literature.

I already have a list of the 100 Books by the BBC, and lately, I came across one by the Guardian "The 100 Greatest Fiction Books". Not at all the same novels as on the other one, therefore it is so interesting to add this to my ever increasing "wishlist".

1. Don Quixote - Miguel de Cervantes
2. Pilgrim's Progress - John Bunyan
3. Robinson Crusoe - Daniel Defoe  
4. Gulliver's Travels - Jonathan Swift
5. Tom Jones - Henry Fielding
6. Clarissa - Samuel Richardson
7. Tristram Shandy - Laurence Sterne 
8. Dangerous Liaisons - Pierre Choderlos De Laclos
9. Emma - Jane Austen
10. Frankenstein - Mary Shelley
11. Nightmare Abbey - Thomas Love Peacock
12. The Black Sheep - Honoré De Balzac
13. The Charterhouse of Parma - Stendhal
14. The Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
15. Sybil - Benjamin Disraeli
16. David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
17. Wuthering Heights - Emily Brontë 
18. Jane Eyre - Charlotte Brontë
19. Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray  
20. The Scarlet Letter - Nathaniel Hawthorne
21. Moby-Dick - Herman Melville
22. Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
23. The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
24. Alice's Adventures In Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
25. Little Women - Louisa May Alcott
26. The Way We Live Now - Anthony Trollope
27. Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy  
28. Daniel Deronda - George Eliot 
29. The Brothers Karamazov - Fyodor Dostoevsky
30. The Portrait of a Lady - Henry James
31. Huckleberry Finn - Mark Twain
32. Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde - Robert Louis Stevenson
33. Three Men in a Boat - Jerome K. Jerome
34. The Picture of Dorian Gray - Oscar Wilde
35. The Diary of a Nobody - George Grossmith
36. Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
37. The Riddle of the Sands - Erskine Childers
38. The Call of the Wild - Jack London
39. Nostromo - Joseph Conrad
40. The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
41. In Search of Lost Time - Marcel Proust
42. The Rainbow - D. H. Lawrence
43. The Good Soldier - Ford Madox Ford
44. The Thirty-Nine Steps - John Buchan
45. Ulysses - James Joyce 
46. Mrs. Dalloway - Virginia Woolf
47. A Passage to India - E. M. Forster
48. The Great Gatsby - F. Scott Fitzgerald
49. The Trial - Franz Kafka
50. Men Without Women - Ernest Hemingway
51. Journey to the End of the Night - Louis-Ferdinand Celine
52. As I Lay Dying - William Faulkner
53. Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
54. Scoop - Evelyn Waugh
55. USA - John Dos Passos
56. The Big Sleep - Raymond Chandler
57. The Pursuit Of Love - Nancy Mitford 
58. The Plague - Albert Camus 
59. Nineteen Eighty-Four - George Orwell
60. Malone Dies - Samuel Beckett
61. Catcher in the Rye - J.D. Salinger 
62. Wise Blood - Flannery O'Connor
63. Charlotte's Web - E. B. White
64. The Lord Of The Rings - J. R. R. Tolkien
65. Lucky Jim - Kingsley Amis
66. Lord of the Flies - William Golding
67. The Quiet American - Graham Greene
68. On the Road - Jack Kerouac 
69. Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
70. The Tin Drum (Die Blechtrommel) - Günter Grass
71. Things Fall Apart - Chinua Achebe
72. The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie - Muriel Spark
73. To Kill A Mockingbird - Harper Lee
74. Catch-22 - Joseph Heller   
75. Herzog - Saul Bellow
76. One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel García Márquez  
77. Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont - Elizabeth Taylor
78. Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy - John Le Carré
79. Song of Solomon - Toni Morrison
80. The Bottle Factory Outing - Beryl Bainbridge
81. The Executioner's Song - Norman Mailer
82. If on a Winter's Night a Traveller - Italo Calvino
83. A Bend in the River - V. S. Naipaul
84. Waiting for the Barbarians - J.M. Coetzee
85. Housekeeping - Marilynne Robinson
86. Lanark - Alasdair Gray
87. The New York Trilogy - Paul Auster
88. The BFG - Roald Dahl
89. The Periodic Table - Primo Levi
90. Money - Martin Amis
91. An Artist of the Floating World - Kazuo Ishiguro
92. Oscar And Lucinda - Peter Carey
93. The Book of Laughter and Forgetting - Milan Kundera
94. Haroun and the Sea af Stories - Salman Rushdie
95. LA Confidential - James Ellroy
96. Wise Children - Angela Carter
97. Atonement - Ian McEwan
98. Northern Lights - Philip Pullman
99. American Pastoral - Philip Roth
100. Austerlitz - W. G. Sebald

Same as with the BBC list, I don't think I'm ever going to read all of them because there are a few I really wouldn't want to read but I have marked those in bold that I have read (only 45 so far) and added the links to those books I have already reviewed.

There are also other lists on Art, Biography, Environment, History, Journalism, Literature, Mathematics, Memoir, Mind, Music, Philosophy, Politics, Religion, Science, Society, and Travel that you can find HERE.

Fitzgerald, F. Scott "Tender Is the Night"

Fitzgerald, F. Scott "Tender Is the Night" - 1934

An American in Paris, well, no, several Americans in the South of France, to be exact. Some rich expatriates live the perfect life, only, one of them is schizophrenic and marries her psychiatrist.

You can detect in the story and the way it is told that this is also the writer of "The Great Gatsby".

Apparently, the authors wife was also schizophrenic, and he based this story on his own life. He describes the whole situation very well, very lively, absolutely believable. It seems so true, and, yet, immensely sad.

I have read this book years ago but it still resonates with me. I also really liked the title.

From the back cover:

"The French Riviera in the 1920s was discovered by Dick and Nicole Diver who turned it into the playground of the rich and glamorous. Among their circle is Rosemary Hoyt, the beautiful starlet, who falls in love with Dick and is enraptured by Nicole, unaware of the corruption and dark secrets that haunt their marriage."

Lindgren, Astrid "The Six Bullerby Children"

Lindgren, Astrid "The Six Bullerby Children" (Swedish: Barnen i Bullerbyn) - 1947

Next to "Seacrow Island" (Swedish: Tjorven Vi på Saltkråkan), my favourite story by Astrid Lindgren. This is a trilogy about six children who live in the little village of Bullerby, Lisa, Britta, Anna, Lasse, Bosse and Olle. They talk about their life in the little village, their little adventures and pranks. They live in the first half of the last century, no technology, a life most of us don't remember.

These are lovely little stories about an innocent childhood that doesn't exist anymore. Still, a lovely account, also a very nice read to for younger children.

From the back cover:

"Welcome to Noisy Village! Go crayfishing in the summer at Nocken, "dipping in the pot" at Christmastime with Lisa and Karl, and join Britta and Anna who know the best way to go about "nutting" for the New Year. In this gently humorous tale, master storyteller Astrid Lindgren takes us through a year in the lives and customs of six Swedish children living on a group of three farms in the countryside.

Ten-year-old Lisa tells about her brothers and playmates and the happy times they spend at work and at play in their Swedish village."

Astrid Lindgren received the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade (Friedenspreis) in 1978.  

Robinson, Barbara "The Best Christmas Pageant Ever"

Robinson, Barbara "The Best Christmas Pageant Ever" (aka "The Worst Kids in the World") - 1972

I first learned about this book when my son played Charlie Bradley in a school play. Since we are quite the book family, we went and bought the book to read. It was just as fantastic. I think every child should read this story.

You can learn in this play what Christmas is all about, what it really means. Not about who has the tallest tree and the most presents, who has the best grades and the largest house. But about a little child being born more than 2,000 years ago and people are still talking about it.

The story is both unusual, even unconventional and hilarious. A lovely plot with a happy end. A good Christmas story.

From the back cover:

"Comedy / All Groups / 4m, 6f, plus 8 boys and 9 girls In this hilarious Christmas tale, a couple struggling to put on a church Christmas pageant is faced with casting the Herdman kids - probably the most inventively awful kids in history. You won't believe the mayhem - and the fun - when the Herdmans collide with the Christmas story head on! This delightful comedy is adapted from the best selling book and the only story ever to run twice in McCall's Magazine. 

'An American classic.' -McCall's Magazine '

One of the best Christmas stories ever - and certainly one of the funniest.' - Seattle Times"

and

"Hey! Unto you a child is born!"

Meet the Herdmans--they lie, cheat, and love to give clonks on the head. They are, without a doubt, the worst kids in the history of the world. So no one is prepared when this outlaw family invades church one Sunday and decides to take over the annual Christmas pageant.

None of the Herdmans has ever heard the Christmas story before. Joseph, Mary, the baby Jesus--it's all news to them. So they're convinced that the Wise Men should bring pizza and that the Angel of the Lord is straight out of a comic book. Everyone worries that this year's pageant will be horrible (just like the Herdmans!), but they are sure to make it the most unusual anyone has seen and, just possibly, the best one ever.

Adapted from the beloved novel of the same name, this sparkling picture-book version is perfect for younger children. They will delight in the antics of the terrible Herdmans, who surprise everyone when they capture the true meaning of Christmas."

Bach, Richard "Jonathan Livingston Seagull"

Bach, Richard "Jonathan Livingston Seagull" - 1970

This book was published more than 40 years ago and I remember reading it almost immediately. I was a teenager at the time and was very interested in everything spiritual, anything that contributed to world and inner peace. This book was just the right one. Jonathan Livingston is a seagull who is not happy with his life, with all the other seagulls always fighting. He tries to do something better, he wants to be the best flying seagull. Then he meets two other seagulls who want to take him to a higher place, a kind of paradise. He learns a lot about the meaning of life which he teaches to his fellow seagulls when he returns.

I loved this book. I loved it even more when Neil Diamond wrote a soundtrack to the movie they made from this story. I don't remember the movie all that well but as a huge Neil Diamond fan, I do remember his music. Very well. It might have to do with the fact that I bought the CD (well, first the vinyl, later the CD) but I doubt it, his music is just fantastic.

The novel is very positive yet very thought-provoking. And it's still very meaningful today. It advises us not to put people in a box, to keep an open mind.

From the back cover:

"This is a story for people who follow their hearts and make their own rules...people who get special pleasure out of doing something well, even if only for themselves...people who know there's more to this living than meets the eye: they'll be right there with Jonathan, flying higher and faster than ever they dreamed.

Jonathan Livingston Seagull is no ordinary bird. He believes it is every gull's right to fly, to reach the ultimate freedom of challenge and discovery, finding his greatest reward in teaching younger gulls the joy of flight and the power of dreams. The special 20th anniversary release of this spiritual classic!"

Shakespeare, William "Romeo and Juliet"

Shakespeare, William "Romeo and Juliet" - 1597

It's always weird reading a well-known classic for the first time. I had this experience with "Romeo and Juliet". We all grow up with the story, it is retold again and again in other books, other plays and movies. And since I don't particularly like reading plays which I think should be performed rather than read, I had never read the whole story.

So, the other day, I picked it up. 126 pages, not a biggie, can be read in a day or two, so even if I don't like the book, no harm done.

Was it worth the effort? Totally. Shakespeare's writing makes it worth reading his plays, even if it's not always easy to understand those old English words. Oh, to be able to write like that! How wonderful would that be. But reading him is the next best thing.

From the back cover:

"A tragedy written early in the career of playwright William Shakespeare about two young 'star-crossed lovers' whose deaths ultimately unite their feuding families. It was among Shakespeare's most popular plays during his lifetime and is one of his most frequently performed plays. Today, the title characters are regarded as archetypal young lovers.

She is only fourteen, he is only a few years older. Their families are bitter enemies, sworn to hatred. Yet Romeo and Juliet meet and fall passionately in love. Defying their parents' wishes, they are secretly married, but their brief happiness is shattered by fate.

This famous pair of star-crossed lovers lives forever in Shakespeare's haunting play."

Roy, Arundhati "The God of Small Things"

Roy, Arundhati "The God of Small Things" - 1997

A tragedy, full of neglect, abuse, deceit, an almost poetic narrative. Sounds interesting.

However, I have quite an ambivalent relationship with Booker prize winners, I either love them or loathe them. Some of them I dislike so much, you will find them among the worst books I ever read.

This novel had a strange effect on me. I love reading about India and have read and really enjoyed quite a few of their literature (see here). So, I always wanted to know how the story goes on, what happens to the characters, that was the good side of this book.

But the characters, there wasn't a single one I liked, well, maybe one but he didn't fare very well in the novel. The story jumps back and forth, I suppose the author wanted to build anticipation. Usually, I quite like that style, here, it was just annoying. A very bleak and hopeless story.

From the back cover:

"The year is 1969. In the state of Kerala, on the southernmost tip of India, fraternal twins Esthappen and Rahel fashion a childhood for themselves in the shade of the wreck that is their family. Their lonely, lovely mother, Ammu, (who loves by night the man her children love by day), fled an abusive marriage to live with their blind grandmother, Mammachi (who plays Handel on her violin), their beloved uncle Chacko (Rhodes scholar, pickle baron, radical Marxist, bottom-pincher), and their enemy, Baby Kochamma (ex-nun and incumbent grandaunt). When Chacko's English ex-wife brings their daughter for a Christmas visit, the twins learn that things can change in a day, that lives can twist into new, ugly shapes, even cease forever, beside their river..."

Arundhati Roy won the Booker Prize for "The God of Small Things" in 1997.

When I close a book ...

I read this little quote the other day: "Stories never really end". I agree wholeheartedly. If a story is written well, you get attached to the characters, you get to know them, you get to feel with them, fear for them, love them, hate them, they are almost like real people to you. Well, they are almost like real people to me.
So, when the book ends, when there are no more pages on which my friends live, it is more an "Au Revoir" or an "Auf Wiedersehen" than a "Good-bye". First of all, I can go back and re-read the book. But in the meantime, I can think about them the same way I think about friends who just go on a long holiday. Or who move away. I can imagine what happens to them in the meantime, if they are still alive at the end of the book, that is.

Every novel has a story that starts long before the first page of the book, sometimes we are lucky and get told a big part of their history, sometimes just a little , but we always can imagine our heroes and heroines as little children. Have they been naughty or nice? Have they been rich or poor? In any case, as we can imagine their lives before the book, we can also remember their lives after the book. We can try to imagine whether that happy end really is a happy end. Or how the open end works out.

That is one of the main reasons I don't really like sequels that have been written by another person. I don't want to read what another person thinks what happened to my friends, I want to imagine it myself. If the author didn't write a sequel, she or he must have had a reason for it. And if the author died before finishing the novel, I don't want to know what someone else thinks should have happened, I will have to rely on my own imagination. Which is the best in any case.

Jonasson, Jonas "The Hundred-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out the Window and Disappeared"

Jonasson, Jonas "The Hundred-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out the Window and Disappeared" (Swedish: Hundraåringen som klev ut genom fönstret och försvann) - 2009

Translated into 35 languages, the biggest success, except for his native Sweden, was in Germany where he sold over a million copies. And that's where I found this gem of a book. This story contains everything, crime, murder mystery, historical fiction, alternate fiction, love, drama, and a huge sense of humour. It is so hilarious, and exciting. The story is told in two parts, the life of Allan Karlsson until he turns 100 and after he turns 100. And both parts are full of adventures.

This is an easy read novel that is still full of information and philosophy. A nice story about a man who does not want to fit in, who does not want to give up.

On Jonas Jonasson's website, you can find all the countries he travelled to and the people he met during his life. He travelled from Sweden to Moscow, Stalingrad (Volgograd), Gulag camps, Vladivostok, Los Alamos, The White House, Washington, China, Himalaya, Tibet, Afghanistan, Iran, North Korea, Bali, Paris and met Tsar Nicolas (well, that was his father), Gustav Fabergé (his father, as well), Vladimir Lenin, Miguel Primo de Rivera, Francisco Franco, Robert Oppenheimer, Harry S Truman, Soong May-ling, Eleonor Roosevelt, Jiang Ping, Winston Churchill, Tage Erlander, Joseph Stalin, Kim II Sung, Kim Jong II, Kirill Meretskov, Mao Tse Tung, Charles de Gaulle, Lyndon B. Johnson, Richard Nixon.

Apparently, the author is presently writing his second novel. I know exactly who is going to read it once it's out.

From the back cover:
"It all starts on the one-hundredth birthday of Allan Karlsson. Sitting quietly in his room in an old people's home, he is waiting for the party he-never-wanted-anyway to begin. The mayor is going to be there. The press is going to be there. But, as it turns out, Allan is not...Slowly but surely Allan climbs out of his bedroom window, into the flowerbed (in his slippers) and makes his getaway. And so begins his picaresque and unlikely journey involving criminals, several murders, a suitcase full of cash, and incompetent police. As his escapades unfold, we learn something of Allan's earlier life in which - remarkably - he helped to make the atom bomb, became friends with American presidents, Russian tyrants, and Chinese leaders, and was a participant behind the scenes in many key events of the twentieth century. The Hundred-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out of the Window and Disappeared is a fun, feel-good book for all ages."

Lukefahr, Oscar, C.M. "We Worship"

Lukefahr, Oscar, C.M. "We Worship: A Guide to the Catholic Mass" - 2004

Oscar Lukefahr is a well known Catholic priest and theologian in the United States. He has written several books about the Catholic faith, including "We Believe... A Survey of the Catholic Faith". In this book, he doesn't just explain how a Mass is set up but also what it means and why every Catholic should attend it. He answers a lot of questions people have about the set-up of Mass and also its spiritual meaning. It can also be used for teaching anyone who wants to know more about the Catholic Mass.

From the back cover:

"This edition is newly updated with the Roman Missal, Third Edition

What is the Mass? The one thing Jesus asked us to do for him! In a warm and down-to-earth manner, Father Oscar Lukefahr presents a positive and enriching look at the Mass and its significance. Using examples from the lives of real people, he provides

- Solid reasons for attending Mass
- A look at the fascinating history of the Mass through the centuries
- A step-by-step guide to the Mass according to the NEW General Instruction of the Roman Missal, Third Edition
- Suggestions for participation that open mind and heart to the full meaning of the Mass
- What Jesus really meant by "this is my body...this is my blood"
- Frequently asked questions about the Mass
- Practical steps for building a solid Catholic spirituality on the foundation of the Eucharist

Each chapter concludes with questions for discussion and refl ection (useful for group participation or personal study) and with activities to help readers apply what they learn to everyday living.

Readers of this book will learn to experience and love the Mass. We Worship will be welcomed by all who want to deepen their appreciation of Mass and by those looking for reasons to return to the Eucharist. Catechists will find in it a complete, easily understandable tool that will appeal to teens and adults."