The 100 Best Books?

This morning I ran across a Newsweek list of the supposed 100 best books ever, which they obtained in 2009 by crunching the numbers from several Top Ten lists. 

Don't get me wrong, some of the books placed here do belong.  But others emphatically do not, or probably on any reasonable Top-1000 list.  And all kinds of books which are not merely good, but great, world-changing even, have been left out. 



One of the biggest problems with this list is its over-abundance of second-rate American novels.  (Mind you, I didn't say third rate!)   While American myself, I have a hard time believing any American piece of literature yet produced belongs above any of Charles Dicken's five or ten best novels, for instance, let alone the best of Shakespeare or Tolstoy.  Yet not one single Dickens appears on the list at all.

Here's the list.  It'll be easier to explain which books do NOT belong on it (at least, among those I have read!), than remember which do.  But I'll attempt both.

	Order
War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy	1
1984 by George Orwell	2
Ulysses by James Joyce	3
Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov	4
The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner	5
Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison	6
To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf	7
The Iliad by Homer	8
The Odyssey by Homer	8
Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen	9
The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri	10
The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer	11
Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift	12
Middlemarch by George Eliot	13
Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe	14
The Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger	15
Gone With the Wind by Margaret Mitchell	16
One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez	17
The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald	18
Catch-22 by Joseph Heller	19
Beloved by Toni Morrison	20
The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck	21
Midnight's Children by Salman Rushdie	22
Brave New World by Aldous Huxley	23
Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf	24
Native Son by Richard Wright	25
Democracy in America by Alexis de Tocqueville	26
On the Origin of Species by Charles Darwin	27
The Histories by Herodotus	28
On the Social Contract by Jean-Jacques Rousseau	29
Capital: A Critique of Political Ecomony, Vol. 1: The Process of Production of Capital by Karl Marx	30
The Prince by Niccolò Machiavelli	31
The Confessions by Augustine	32
Leviathan by Thomas Hobbes	33
The History of the Peloponnesian War by Thucydides	34
The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien	35
Winnie-the-Pooh by A. A. Milne	36
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe by C. S. Lewis	37
A Passage to India by E. M. Forster	38
On the Road by Jack Kerouac	39
To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee	40
The Holy Bible: New Revised Standard Version (NRSV) by Zondervan	41
A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess	42
Light in August by William Faulkner	43
The Souls of Black Folk by W. E. B. Du Bois	44
Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys	45
Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert	46
Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy	48
Hamlet by William Shakespeare	49
King Lear by William Shakespeare	50
Othello by William Shakespeare	51
The Sonnets by William Shakespeare	52
Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman	53
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain	54
Kim by Rudyard Kipling	55
Frankenstein by Mary Shelley	56
Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison	57
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest by Ken Kesey	58
For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway	59
Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut Jr	60
Animal Farm by George Orwell	61
Lord of the Flies by William Golding	62
In Cold Blood by Truman Capote	63
The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing	64
In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust	65
The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler	66
As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner	67
The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway	68
I, Claudius by Robert Graves	69
The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers	70
Sons and Lovers by D. H. Lawrence	71
All the King's Men by Robert Penn Warren	72
Go Tell It on the Mountain by James Baldwin	73
Charlotte's Web by E. B. White	74
Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad	75
Night by Elie Wiesel	76
Rabbit, Run by John Updike	77
The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton	78
Portnoy's Complaint by Philip Roth	79
An American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser	80
The Day of the Locust by Nathanael West	81
Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller	82
The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett	83
The Amber Spyglass by Philip Pullman	84
The Golden Compass by Philip Pullman	84
His Dark Materials by Philip Pullman	84
The Subtle Knife by Philip Pullman	84
Death Comes for the Archbishop by Willa Cather	85
The Interpretation of Dreams by Sigmund Freud	86
The Education of Henry Adams by Henry Adams	87
Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-Tung by Mao Tse-Tung	88
The Varieties of Religious Experience by William James	89
Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh	90
Silent Spring by Rachel Carson	91
The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money by John Maynard Keynes	92
Lord Jim by Joseph Conrad	93
Goodbye to All That by Robert Graves	94
The Affluent Society by John Kenneth Galbraith	95
The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame	96
The Autobiography of Malcolm X by Malcolm X	97
Eminent Victorians by Lytton Strachey	98
The Color Purple by Alice Walker	99
The Second World War {complete} by Winston S. Churchill

What needs to go:  All the Hemingway and Phillip Pullman books.  They're mildly entertaining and moderately interesting, and Pullman evokes thoughts of some kind or other, but he's ignorant of history as a clam is of geothermals.  Chairman Mao -- good heavens, how did that savage get in there?  Some of his poems are original enough, but let's just set a rule that literature from people who don't mind killing tens of millions of their countrymen is defective in some way.  The same with Karl Marx: he's OK as a writer, but a mere educated cultist as a thinker.  The Lion the Witch, and the Wardrobe?  We can find something better from Lewis than that.  I haven't read Galbraith or that Freud, but I'm skeptical.  1984 is important, but not that important -- down to 70 or so.  Get rid of Lolita, because pedophilia isn't something to teach kids, sorry.  100 Years of Solitude is over-rated. Rousseau (probably), The Prince (maybe), Leviathan, Charlottes' Web (what's that book doing in that sentence?)  Also Silent Spring (probably), Slaughterhouse 5 (definitely), Invisible Man, Gone With the Wind, Catcher in the Rye, Catch-22, Great Gatsby (not that great -- a weak copy-cat pseudo-Victorian novel of manners) and probably Virginia Wolf.  This is supposed to be a book of great literature, not a record of how American high school teachers abuse their lit students.  "Goodbye to All That!" (94)  And Keynes, too, since he was wrong -- substitute Adam Smith. 

And sorry, Bears of Very Little Brain have a hard time making the top-100 list -- though I'll keep Pooh in mind. 

What can stay: War and Peace, Iliad, Odyssey, Pride and Prejudice, Divine Comedy, Canterbury Tales, Gulliver, Brave New World (lower), Democracy in America, Origin of Species, Herodotus, Confessions, Night, Varieties of Religious Experience, Lord Jim (maybe), Heart of Darkness, Wind in the Willows (maybe), Huck Finn, Malcolm X.  (See!  I'm not that prejudiced against American writers!) 

What needs to be added:

The Bible first, of course: placing it 41, after To Kill a Mockingbird, a touching novel by a precocious            young woman, looks like a calculated insult.
Analects of Confucius.
Dao De Jing
Tang poems. (Mao over that?  Are you crazy?)
Journey to the West.
Bhagavad Gita.
Bacchae (Euripides)
Medea (Euripides)
The Frogs
Prometheus Bound
The Campaigns of Alexander (Arrian)
City of God
Poetic Edda
Dream of the Rood
Brothers Karamazov (someone thought Catch-22 more deserving than this?)
First Circle (Solzhenitsyn). 
One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
Gulag Archipelago
Resurrection.  (Tolstoy)
Great Expectations (Dickens)
Tale of Two Cities
Christmas Carol
Nickolas Nicklesby
Wealth of Nations
Reflections on the Revolution in France
Orthodoxy (Chesterton)
The Everlasting Man
Perelandra (C. S. Lewis)
Surprised by Joy
Till We Have Faces
The Last Battle
From Pagan to Christian (Lin Yutang)
Imperial Peking: Seven Centuries of China
The Kite Runner
For the Glory of God (Stark)
Lost in the Cosmos (Percy)
Les Miserables (if there's room)
Peace Child (Richardson)
Life of Johnson
Harry Potter?