Be Best

I spent the morning thinking about the listing of my top 40 recommendations. I don’t see any reason to make any major changes at this time but I realize that there are so many texts that I have yet to read, many of which might be contenders for the top 40.

Several years back I had yet to read George Eliot’s Middlemarch and suggested that I would probably place it in the top forty based on the comments and suggestions of others. I have since then read Middlemarch and, although I did not revere the novel to the extent of its praise, Middlemarch did in fact push its way into the list.

Then for a while I was considering David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest. That too made the list after I read it, but just barely. Today I probably would use William Gaddis’s novel The Recognitions.

One thing I noticed was that for a “best” list it was also useful as a “biggest” or “most challenging” list despite several shorter, less complex novels being represented.

Why is that?

What novels would you expect to make the list if and when I finally get around to reading them … or should I put then at the top of my next reading list immediately?

Top 40 Reading Suggestions

1. Ulysses — James Joyce
2. Madame Bovary — Gustave Flaubert
3. À La Recherche du temps perdu — Marcel Proust
4. The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy — Laurence Sterne
5. Don Quixote — Miguel de Cervantes
6. The Brothers Karamazov — Fyodor Dostoevsky
7. Anna Karenina — Leo Tolstoy
8. The Faerie Queene — Edmund Spenser
9. Finnegans Wake — James Joyce
10. Waiting For Godot — Samuel Beckett
11. Our Lady of the Flowers — Jean Genet
12. Under the Volcano — Malcolm Lowry
13. The Last Temptation of Christ — Nikos Kazantzakis
14. The Cairo Trilogy
15. La Vie mode d’emploi — Georges Perec
16. Bouvard et Pécuchet — Gustave Flaubert
17. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man — James Joyce
18. The Magic Mountain — Thomas Mann
19. JR — William Gaddis
20. Crime and Punishment — Fyodor Dostoevsky
21. Le Voyeur — Alain Robbe-Grillet
22. The Makioka Sisters — Junichero Tanizaki
23. Absalom, Absalom! — William Faulkner
24. To the Lighthouse — Virginia Woolf
25. Lolita — Vladimir Nabokov
26. The Sea of Fertility — Yukio Mishima
27. Middlemarch — George Eliot
28. Moby Dick — Herman Melville
29. The Leopard — Giuseppe di Lampedusa
30. A Dance to the Music of Time — Anthony Powell
31. Mulligan Stew — Gilbert Sorrentino
32. Naked Lunch — William S. Burroughs
33. The Good Soldier — Ford Madox Ford
34. The Awakening Land — Conrad Richter
35. The Alexandria Quartet — Lawrence Durrell
36. Clarissa — Samuel Richardson
37. Europe Central — William Vollmann
38. The Tin Drum — Günter Grass
39. The Adventures of Augie March — Saul Bellow
40. Infinite Jest — David Foster Wallace