Celebrating the Three-Quarters Mark!

After nearly four years of reading, I have finally reached the three-quarters mark on this list of 100 best English-language fiction novels written between 1923 and 2006.  In November of 2013, I began book number 51 on the chronological list, James Agee’s A Death in the Family, published in 1958.  Philip K. Dick’s Ubik, number 75, is the last book on the list published in the ‘60s, which means nearly a quarter of the hundred books were published in the 1960s.  And it was a hell of a decade for fiction—I have given out more 5-star reviews in this quarter than in any of the two quarters preceding it.  There were a ton of fantastic reads, but as I have done at the previous landmark moments, I will give you my own best-of list (in chronological order):

• John Barth’s The Sot Weed Factor
• Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird
• Joseph Heller’s Catch-22
• Vladimir Nabokov’s Pale Fire
• Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook
• Jerzy Kosinski’s The Painted Bird
• Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49
• Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five

In the interest of keeping the list short, I chose novels that I think anyone would enjoy, but there were a whole set of novels that I loved but that I think have particular tastes associated with them.  These are:

• James Agee’s A Death in the Family
• Muriel Spark’s The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie
• V.S. Naipaul’s A House for Mr. Biswas
• Saul Bellow’s Herzog
• Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea
• William Styron’s The Confessions of Nat Turner
• John Fowles’s The French Lieutenant’s Wife

There were several novels that were very well written but that didn’t resonate with me or that I found problematic politically or philosophically:

• John Updike’s Rabbit, Run
• Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
• Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange
• Philip Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint

There was only one novel that I thought the prose itself was unimpressive, even as the story was wonderful, and that was Philip K. Dick’s Ubik.  There were only a handful of sentences that I felt rose above the functional to express something beautiful or profound in a beautiful way.  The story was wonderful and the writing was fine, but the prose was not nearly as impressive as the other writer’s on this list.

And now it’s time to forge ahead into the final 25 books on the list.  I expect I’ll get there sometime in the middle of 2016.  But for now, it’s on to a book that I have never read, but that nearly every pubescent and pre-pubescent girl in the ‘70s and ‘80s read: Judy Bloom’s Are You There God?  It’s Me, Margaret.