On this blog I will mostly be writing about books. I have wanted for some time to read TIME Magazine's list of the 100 best novels. I read mostly nonfiction, and I feel that reading some fiction would be a nice experience. I'm looking forward to seeing how my ability to talk about novels and my ideas about what constitutes good writing will change over the course of the project.
There isn't any real reason why I should pick that list as the source of my reading material. I just like lists, and so does TIME magazine. They have lists of all sorts of things - the 100 Greatest Albums, and the 100 most important people of the year. I've seen publication on the shelf put out by TIME such as the 100 most important people in history, and 100 recent important scientific discoveries. The Modern Library also has a list of the 100 best novels of the 20th century, which I suppose I could read when I'm done with this project (although I suspect there will be considerable overlap between the two lists.) Unlike TIME's, the Modern Library's list is ranked, which I don't like. I think it invites petty squabbling over which books are better than others. Is Ulysses really better than The Great Gatsby? Who cares? The question doesn't say anything about each book's individual merit. Each book is written for several reasons, but not among them for any book is that it be compared to other books. As I'm reading Catch-22, am I really supposed to be considering how it stacks up against Slaughterhouse 5 and Nineteen Eight-Four?
The other notable difference between the two lists is that the ML list goes back farther. TIME restricted itself to novels that saw a review in their magazine upon its first publication. This forces them to exclude books published in languages other than English as well as those before 1923, the year of TIME's debut. This leaves out the ML's number one, 1922's Ulysses. The Modern Library indulges itself two years of the previlous century, including 1899's Heart of Darkness. The Modern Library gave much more weight to older books: the most recent one in 1983's Ironweed. TIME makes up for its lost two decades by going into the 21st century.
I'm looking forward most to reading the books on the list that I've already read and seeing how my opinion of them changes after a second reading. I also most want to read The Catcher in the Rye, because I've never met a single person who has read it and liked it, and Lolita, because I've read only the first paragraph, and it may be the best writing I've ever read.
Of course, if I read one book a week it will take me just under two years to finish this project, that's not very likely: all of The Lord of the Rings's 1200 pages are included. That's a pretty tall order for one week. That's okay - it will be a great accomplishment if I actually do finish.
I've started reading A Clockwork Orange already, and my next few posts will be about how I don't think it's all that great.
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