I picked up a copy of Kazuo Ichiguro's novel, Never Let Me Go at a charity book sale this week. You'll remember (from my previous posting) that Time magazine put this book on its best 100 novels since 1923 list, even though the book came out just this year. Personally, I think it takes awhile to draw a true conclusion on the merits of any particular novel, and a book should be out for at least a year before I would include it on my top 100 novels list.
Meanwhile, The New York Times doesn't think "Never Let Me Go" is good enough to make its 10 best books of 2005 list (though they did grant the novel a place on their list of 100 notable books of this year).
I bring this up just to emphasize the point that I think "best of" lists are really interesting conversation starters, but not the end-all and be-all of good taste.
I will let you know what I think of "Never Let Me Go," probably sometime in '06.
Finally, I'm contemplating my own best of list for 2005, but it will be best books I personally read in 2005. I'm not fast enough to keep up with all the interesting books published in a given year! More on this topic later.
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John Updike, for the 1998 World Almanac, compiled a list titled "The Ten Greatest Works of Literature, 1001-2000." (I'm not sure what, aside from the Bible, was missed by excluding the first milennium.)His list: 1. Thomas Aquinas, "Summa Theologica." 2. Dante Alighieri, "The Divine Comedy." 3. Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, "Don Quixote." 4. William Shakespeare, "Comedies, Histories and Tragedies." 5. Voltaire, "Candide." 6. Edward Gibbon, "The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire." 7. Leo Tolstoy, "War and Peace." 8. Fyodor Dostoevsky, "The Possessed." 9. Marcel Proust, "Remembrance of Things Past." 10. James Joyce, "Ulysses." For those who don't save old almanacs, the full, but not very full, write-up can be found in his collection "More Matter: Essays and Criticism" (1999, Alfred A. Knopf) along with such charming psuedo-lists as "Books That Changed My Life" and "Five Remembered Moments of Reading Bliss." Only Proust appears on all three; coincidentally, my chief literary goal for 2006 (having missed the Ulysses boat) is to read "Remembrance of Things Past."
Ooooo, I want to read Remembrance of Things Past too!! I'm hoping to get the Ulysses book group to read that next, but Jill has made a strong case for Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon.
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