Twentieth Century's Greatest Read (s)

Twentieth Century’s Greatest Read
(Novel, Novelette, or short stories)





Everybody has their own selection, I read a lot, but I normally only buy my favoured authors, and a few of them have only written one or two books I feel worthy of mentioning; on the other hand, in the Case of Mary Renault, or Hemingway, or Faulkner, or F. Scott Fitzgerald, even Erich Maria Remarque, they really do not write bad books, all their books are fairly well written. Perhaps the greatest book written, novel that is, in the 20th Century’s “The Great Gatsby,” (the worse being, James Joyce’s ‘Ulysses’), ‘and the greatest writer, who influenced the most people, was William Faulkner, so I believe. Hemingway brought in some new dialogue, and Remarque, showed us how it was over there in Europe without going in circles like Faulkner likes to do, after and during WWII. He, Remarque, was perhaps the most interesting writer, as far as action goes. F. Scott, brought us the Jazz age, and kind of stuck with that through his first four novels, the fifth, he never finished, that being “The … Last Tycoon.” That may have even surpassed the Gatsby, had he not died early on in life.
Funny, now that I look back at these writers, Hemingway, Faulkner, Fitzgerald, were all alcoholics.
Mary Renault being gay hid her passion between the lines in her Greek books of which she had several, I have all her books everyone of them…and all of Faulkner’s, and all of Hemingway’s, and so forth. I have found out it is easier in life to pick out the crazy few, the ones that you really like, and stick with them, instead of trying to fill your library up with junk you never want to look at after you read the first paragraph.
After Hemingway wrote “Across the River and into the Tree,” in which he was scorned for, because it was not of is old self, less than perfect, he went out and wrote, the best seller, you know which one, “The Old Man and the Sea.” That is a good book, but I would have recommended it be a short story, it gets boring.
Faulkner never wrote for the reader to read it once and forget his story, he wrote for the reader to ponder over it, because if you don’t, you lose the plot, and theme, if indeed you can find it, and it is all twisted up usually, he likes to go in circles, like Gertrude Stein often did, so it gets planted in your brain. He is difficult to read. On the other hand, Jack London, is very easy to read, who wrote a book called, “Before Adam,” a great read, and of course “The Call of the Wild,” and all those other books, of which I have about fifteen of his first editions, he wrote so much, I keep finding new books by him I never heard of, and he has some good short stories, like F. Scott, Hemingway and Faulkner. He was clear in his writings, surprisingly so, because he belonged to that alcoholic punch I just mentioned a moment ago.
In any case here is my 20th century list:





The Great Gatsby
Go Down, Moses
The Fifth Column…
Before Adam
I, Claudius
Call of the Wild
Absalom, Absalom!
The Sound and the Fury
A Movable Feast
To Kill a Mockingbird
Light in August
The Beautiful and Damned
The Jazz Age
Kind were her Kisses
The Persian Boy
The Mask of Apollo
Pillars of the Earth
Flight over Water
A Passage to India
The First Man in Rome
The Grass Crown
Across the River and into the Trees
For Whom the Bell Tolls
Far Well to Arms
The Night in Lisbon
The Arch of Triumph
All Quiet on the Western Front
The Lost World
Neverwhere
Dharma Bum
Letters to Allen Ginsberg