The Great American Read

Updated 10/24/2018.

image from wttw.com

From PBS.org: “The Great American Read was an eight-part series with viewer participation to select America’s favorite novel, told through the prism of America’s 100 best-loved novels. It investigated writers’ fictional worlds, how we as readers are affected by these stories, and what the 100 different books have to say about our diverse nation and our shared human experience.”

The results of the vote are posted here. You can read more about individual books by clicking on titles below or going to the original page at PBS.org.

---

1. Harper Lee To Kill a Mockingbird (1960)
2. Diana Gabaldon Outlander (series, 1991-2014)
3. J.K. Rowling Harry Potter (series, 1997-2007)
4. Jane Austen Pride and Prejudice (1813)
5. J.R.R. Tolkien The Lord of the Rings (trilogy) (1955)
6. Margaret Mitchell Gone with the Wind (1936)
7. E.B. White Charlotte’s Web (1952)
8. Louisa May Alcott Little Women (1869)
9. C.S. Lewis The Chronicles of Narnia (series, 1950-1956)
10. Charlotte Brontë Jane Eyre (1847)

11. L.M. Montgomery Anne of Green Gables (1908)
12. John Steinbeck The Grapes of Wrath (1939)
13. Betty Smith A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (1943)
14. Markus Zusak The Book Thief (2005)
15. F. Scott Fitzgerald The Great Gatsby (1925)
16. Kathryn Stockett The Help (2009)
17. Mark Twain The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876)
18. George Orwell 1984 (1949)
19. Agatha Christie And Then There Were None (1939)
20. Ayn Rand Atlas Shrugged (1957)

21. Emily Brontë Wuthering Heights (1847)
22. Larry McMurty Lonesome Dove (1985)
23. Ken Follett The Pillars of the Earth (1989)
24. Stephen King The Stand (1978)
25. Daphne Du Maurier Rebecca (1938)
26. John Irving A Prayer for Owen Meany (1989)
27. Alice Walker The Color Purple (1982)
28. Lewis Carroll Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865)
29. Charles Dickens Great Expectations (1861)
30. J.D. Salinger The Catcher in the Rye (1951)

31. Wilson Rawls Where the Red Fern Grows (1974)
32. S.E. Hinton The Outsiders (1968)
33. Dan Brown The Da Vinci Code (2004)
34. Margaret Atwood The Handmaid’s Tale (1986)
35. Frank Herbert Dune (1965)
36. Antoine de Saint-Exupéry The Little Prince (1943)
37. Jack London The Call of the Wild (1903)
38. Jean M. Auel The Clan of the Cave Bear (1980)
39. Douglas Adams The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (1979)
40. Suzanne Collins The Hunger Games (trilogy, 2008-2010)

41. Alexandre Dumas The Count of Monte Cristo (1844)
42. Amy Tan The Joy Luck Club (1989)
43. Mary Shelley Frankenstein (1818)
44. Lois Lowry The Giver (1994)
45. Arthur Golden Memoirs of a Geisha (1997)
46. Herman Melville Moby-Dick (1851)
47. Joseph Heller Catch-22 (1961)
48. George R.R. Martin The Game of Thrones (series, 1996-2011)
49. Isaac Asimov The Foundation Trilogy (series, 1951-1953)
50. Leo Tolstoy War and Peace (1869)

51. Zora Neale Hurston Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937)
52. Michael Crichton Jurassic Park (1990)
53. Mario Puzo The Godfather (1969)
54. Gabriel García Márquez One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967)
55. Oscar Wilde The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891)
56. Nicholas Sparks The Notebook (1996)
57. William P. Young The Shack (2007)
58. John Kennedy Toole A Confederacy of Dunces (1980)
59. Tom Clancy The Hunt for Red October (1984)
60. Toni Morrison Beloved (1987)

61. Andy Weir The Martian (2011)
62. Robert Jordan Wheel of Time (series, 1990-2013)>
63. Herman Hesse Siddhartha (1922)
64. Fyodor Dostoyevsky Crime and Punishment (1866)
65. Ernest Hemingway The Sun Also Rises (1926)
66. Mark Haddon The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time (2003)
67. John Knowles A Separate Peace (1959)
68. Miguel de Cervantes Don Quixote (1615)
69. Alice Sebold The Lovely Bones (2002)
70. Paulo Coelho O Alquimista (The Alchemist) (1987)

71. Gary Paulsen Hatchet (1987)
72. Ralph Ellison Invisible Man (1952)
73. Stephenie Meyer The Twilight Saga (series, 2005-2008)
74. Armistead Maupin Tales of the City (series, 1978-2014)
75. Jonathan Swift Gulliver’s Travels (1726)
76. Ernest Cline Ready Player One (2011)
77. Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins Left Behind (1995-2007)
78. Gillian Flynn Gone Girl (2012)
79. Dean Koontz The Watchers (1987)
80. John Bunyan The Pilgrim’s Progress (1678)

81. James Patterson Alex Cross Mysteries (series, 1993-2018)
82. Chinua Achebe Things Fall Apart (1958)
83. Joseph Conrad Heart of Darkness (1899)
84. Marilynne Robinson Gilead (2005)
85. V.C. Andrews Flowers in the Attic (1979)
86. E.L. James Fifty Shades (series, 2011-2012)
87. Kurt Vonnegut The Sirens of Titan (1959)
88. Frank E. Peretti This Present Darkness (1986)
89. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie Americanah (2013)
90. James Baldwin Another Country (1962)

91. Rudolfo Anaya Bless Me, Ultima (1972)
92. John Green Looking for Alaska (2005)
93. Junot Diaz The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2008)
94. Robert R. McCammon Swan Song (1987)
95. Dave Hunt The Mind Invaders (1989)
96. Zadie Smith White Teeth (2000)
97. Jason Reynolds Ghost (2016)
98. Sister Soujah The Coldest Winter Ever (1999)
99. Colson Whitehead The Intuitionist (1999)
100. Romulo Gallegos Doña Bárbara (1929)

---

Go Set a Watchman: You Can't Go Home Again

The biggest lesson to learn from Go Set a Watchman? You can't go home again. That is a prominent theme of the book, but also a warning for those hoping for another To Kill a Mockingbird (see my review here). Mockingbird, published in 1960, focused on Jean Louise "Scout" Finch from the ages of 6 to 9 and her interactions with fellow Maycomb County residents as she tried to understand racism and bigotry. Watchman traverses the same territory from the adult Jean Louise's perspective.

Watchman was written prior to Mockingbird but shelved when her publisher suggested she rework it to focus on the stories of her childhood. The manuscript, thought lost for decades, was found in a safety deposit box. Controversy swirled over the announcement of its publication in the wake of the death of Harper Lee's sister, who had fiercely protected the author's legacy.

Watchman tells the story of 26-year-old Jean Louise, now living in New York, returning to Alabama for a visit. She is naturally conflicted over the changes she observes. However, the story eschews vivid depictions of the physical contrast between the small-town rural life of Scout's youth and her adult, big-city life. I anticipated her observing the slower pace, the buildings which hadn't changed a bit, the businesses she was surprised were still standing, and what people had died or moved away. This would have been similar to how Mockingbird unfurled its lessons couched in character vignettes and snapshots of young Scout's adventures.

Instead, Watchman focuses on the adult Jean Louise's inner turmoil and debates with other characters. This makes for an even deeper exploration into racism and bigotry, but at times it feels less like a novel than a philosophical dialogue constructed by Plato.

In the end, the reader feels Jean Louise's pain in recognizing that home will never be the same and that maybe it was never what she'd thought in the first place. However, the reader also feels another kind of pain. The reader longs to return to the world Harper Lee built for To Kill a Mockingbird but must accept the futility of such a dream.

To Kill a Mockingbird: The Master Class of Novel Writing?

Image from 1962 film version of To Kill a Mockingbird.

With the recent announcement of the impending publication of Harper Lee's Go Set a Watchman, which features a grown-up version of the Scout character she introduced in To Kill a Mockingbird (1960), I was inspired to revisit the latter. According to Slate.com, this Pulitzer Prize winner is part of the curriculum in 3/4 of American public schools and sells about a million copies a year. All told, the book has sold 30 million copies in more than 40 languages (Crash Course Literature 210). The 1962 movie version was nominated for Best Picture and garnered Gregory Peck an Academy Award for Best Actor.

Unsurprisingly, some critics made it their mission to knock the book as overrated. They're wrong. In fact, some of the criticisms of the book are precisely what make it great. For example, Scout, who ranges from ages 6 to 9 during the book, serves as a first-person narrator. However, the sophistication of her language, storytelling, and awareness feel more like an adult. Despite the inconsistency of the approach, it gives the novel an added dimension of allowing the reader to view the story through a child and adult's eyes simultaneously.

Another criticism concerns the potentially disjointed nature of the vignettes about the townspeople. Rather than distract from the primary stories around Boo Radley and Tom Robinson, these seemingly superfluous stories immerse the reader in Maycomb, Alabama. In addition, each of Scout's (and her brother Jem's) encounters leads to another lesson handed down from their father, Atticus, about not judging other people.

The novel also has characters painted in one-dimensional strokes, from the noble heroics of Atticus to the without-any-redeemable-quality nature of Bob Ewell. However, these polarizing characterizations of good and evil remind readers how a child oversimplifies perceptions - and serve as warnings for us to not do so as adults.

In my own writing, I can only dream of achieving half of what Mockingbird accomplishes. Harper Lee paints her characters and the town with such vivid language that the reader is transported to that place and time. Scout's sense of exploration and child-like curiosity is fully embraced even as she is exposed to ugly truths about racism and prejudice.

These are all qualities which play into my current project, Abigail's Atlantis, about a 12-year-old girl coming to grips with the transition from childhood to adulthood. While the language and perspective I employ may occasionally feel too adult, that's precisely the point. Like Mockingbird, I want to capture that in-between state of sometimes seeing things as a child and at other times as an adult. If I can make the same mistakes as Mockingbird with even a modicum of the same ability, I'll consider my book a success.

---

Musing Over Manifest and Mockingbird

Most of my visits to the library involve my kids. This is a good thing because I end up browsing the children's section. Recently I stumbled across the 2011 Newbery winner, Clare Vanderpool's Moon Over Manifest. As stated on the Association for Library Service for Children website, "the Newbery Medal is awarded annually by the American Library Association for the most distinguished American children's book published the previous year."

Having dipped my toe into the literary waters of middle-grade fiction with Otter and Arthur and the Sword in the Stone, it seemed appropriate to read some of the most celebrated works targeted at that age group. Manifest succeeds largely in that it is written such that it has as much, if not more, appeal for adults as it does kids.

Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird often sprang to mind. Manifest lacks the powerful theme of that classic, but resembles it in how we see the town and its people through the eyes of a young girl trying to better understand her father. The two books also resemble each other in that kids are central figures, but that doesn't make these children's stories. Mockingbird deals with heavy themes and circumstances suggesting readers be at least teenagers. Manifest is so rooted in giving the reader a glimpse of history that it would have limited appeal to pre-teen readers, which makes me question somewhat what criteria Newbery uses to define something as a "children's book."

The lesson for me as a writer is the value of telling a story which appeals to children and adults. Otter and Arthur and the Sword in the Stone and its in-progress sequel, Otter and Arthur and the Round Table, are much less sophisticated stories. I deliberately kept the language and the plot simple to keep younger readers' interest. At the same time, I worked hard to infuse the stories with themes, characters, and scenarios to which adults would relate. Did I succeed? You'll have to stay tuned for the sequel (due in Autumn 2013), but you can check out the first book here:

---

Time Magazine: Top 100 All-Time Novels

First posted 6/10/2020.

From LincolnLibraries.org: “In 2005, Time® magazine’s literary critics, Lev Grossman and Richard Lacayo selected what they considered to be the top 100 English-language novels published from 1923 to 2005 (1923 being the year Time® began publishing). As usual, with any “top 100” list, these were their subjective choices, and obviously do not reflect the views of any other reader. However, their list inarguably includes numerous works of influential English-languge literature.” Note: the original list was unranked, presented alphabetically by book titles. The rankings here are based on GoodReads.com. Harper Lee To Kill a Mockingbird (1960) George Orwell 1984 (1949) J.R.R. Tolkien The Lord of the Rings (trilogy: 1954-55) J.D. Salinger The Catcher in the Rye (1951) F. Scott Fitzgerald The Great Gatsby (1925) C.S. Lewis The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe (1950) William Golding Lord of the Flies (1954) George Orwell Animal Farm (1954) Joseph Heller Catch-22 (1961) John Steinbeck The Grapes of Wrath (1939) Margaret Mitchell Gone with the Wind (1936) Kurt Vonnegut Slaughterhouse-Five (1969) Vladimir Nabokov Lolita (1955) Ken Kesey One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1962) Anthony Burgess A Clockwork Orange (1962) Judy Blume Are You There, God? It’s Me, Margaret (1972) Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons Watchmen (1986) Kazuo Ishiguro Never Let Me Go (2005) Ian McEwan Atonement (2001) Chinua Achebe Things Fall Apart (1958) Toni Morrison Beloved (1987) Ralph Ellison Invisible Man (1952) Virginia Woolf Mrs. Dalloway (1925) Ernest Hemingway The Sun Also Rises (1926) Jack Kerouac On the Road (1957) A.S. Byatt Possession (1990) Raymond Chandler The Big Sleep (1939) E.M. Forster A Passage to India (1924) Robert Graves I, Claudius (1934) Zora Neal Hurston Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937) William Faulkner The Sound and the Fury (1929) Robert Penn Warren All the King’s Men (1946) Margaret Atwood The Blind Assassin (2000) Richard Wright Native Son (1940) Virginia Woolf To the Lighthouse (1927) E.L. Doctorow Ragtime (1975) John Fowles The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1969) Carson McCullers The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter (1940) William Faulkner Light in August (1932) William Burroughs Naked Lunch (1959) John Le Carré The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1963) Cormac McCarthy Blood Meridian (1985) Don DeLillo White Noise (1985) David Foster Wallace Infinite Jest (1995) Neal Stephenson Snow Crash (1992) Richard Yates Revolutionary Road (1961) Evelyn Waugh Brideshead Revisited (1945) Salman Rushdie Midnight’s Children (1981) Muriel Spark The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1960) Willa Cather Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927) Thornton Wilder The Bridge of San Luis Rey (1928) William Gibson Neuromancer (1984) Jonathan Franzen The Corrections (2001) Philip Roth American Pastoral (1998) Graham Greene The Power and the Glory (1939) Thomas Pynchon The Crying of Lot 49 (1966) Philip Roth Portnoy’s Complaint (1969) Jean Rhys Wide Saragosso Sea (1966) Thomas Pynchon Gravity’s Rainbow (1973) Dashiell Hammett Red Harvest (1929) John Updike Rabbit, Run (1960) Zadie Smith White Teeth (2000) Malcolm Lowry Under the Volcano (1947) Jerzy Kosinski The Painted Bird (1976) James Baldwin Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953) V.S. Naipaul A House for Mr. Biswas (1961) Joan Didion Play It As It Lays (1970) Kingsley Amis Lucky Jim (1954) Philip K. Dick Ubik (1969) Doris Lessing The Golden Notebook (1962) Graham Greene The Heart of the Matter (1948) Vladimir Nabokov Pale Fire (1962) Walker Percy The Moviegoer (1961) William Styron The Confessions of Nat Turner (1968) Henry Miller Tropic of Cancer (1934) John O’Hara Appointment in Samarra (1934) Martin Amis Money: A Suicide Note (1984) James Dickey Deliverance (1970) Nathanael West The Day of the Locust (1939) Marilynn Robinson Housekeeping (1981) Christina Stead The Man Who Loved Children (1940) John Barth The Sot-Weed Factor (1960) Saul Bellow The Adventures of Augie March (1953) Saul Bellow Herzog (1964) Flann O’Brien At Swim-Two-Birds (1939) Henry Roth Call It Sleep (1935) Paul Bowles The Sheltering Sky (1949) Evelyn Waugh A Handful of Dust (1934) Richard Ford The Sportswriter (1986) Christopher Isherwood The Berlin Stories (1945) James Agee A Death in the Family (1958) William Gaddis The Recognitions (1955) Robert Stone Dog Soldiers (1975) Bernard Malamud The Assistant (1957) Henry Green Loving (1945) Iris Murdoch Under the Net (1954) Anthony Powell A Dance to the Music of Time (1975) Theodore Dreiser An American Tragedy (1925) John Cheever Falconer (1977) Elizabeth Bowen The Death of the Heart (1938) Resources and Related Links: LincolnLibraries.org: Time Magazine’s Top 100 All-Time Novels (1923-2005)” (alphabetical listing by title) GoodReads.com: “Time Magazine’s All-Time 100 Novels” (ranked list)

 

To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee Published 10 Years Ago This Month

updated 7/5/2020.

To Kill a Mockingbird Harper Lee

First Publication: May 1960 Category: Southern, gothic coming-of-age novel Sales: 40 million

Accolades:

About the Book: One of the best-loved stories of all time.” AZ Harper Lee’s “masterwork” AZ “was an immediate critical and financial success for its author.” LC It is “a gripping, heart-wrenching, and wholly remarkable tale of coming-of-age in a South poisoned by virulent prejudice.” AZ “The plot and characters are loosely based on Lee’s observations of her family, her neighbors and an event that occurred near her hometown of Monroeville, Alabama, in 1936, when she was 10 years old. The story is told by the six-year-old Jean Louise Finch;” WK through her eyes, the reader “views a world of great beauty and savage inequities.” AZ Meanwhile, Atticus Finch, “her father – a crusading local lawyer – risks everything to defend a black man unjustly accused of a terrible crime.” AZ He “one of the most enduring and heroic characters in all of American literature,” LC serving “as a moral hero for many readers and as a model of integrity for lawyers.” WK One critic called him “the most enduring fictional image of racial heroism.’” WK “To Kill a Mockingbird is probably the most widely read book dealing with race in America.” WK It has been translated into over forty languages and was adapted into an Academy Award-winning film in 1962. “The novel is renowned for its warmth and humor, despite dealing with the serious issues of rape and racial inequality.” WK “Scholars have noted that Lee also addresses issues of class, courage, compassion, and gender roles in the American Deep South. The book is widely taught in schools in the United States with lessons that emphasize tolerance and decry prejudice. Despite its themes, To Kill a Mockingbird has been subject to campaigns for removal from public classrooms, often challenged for its use of racial epithets.” WK Resources and Related Links: Writ by Whit (2/9/2019). “10 Books Which Impacted Me” AZ Amazon LC Library of Congress (2012). “Books That Shaped America” WK Wikipedia