The List: An Overview

With a global economic crisis hitting just at the very beginning of my martyr year (33), I have decided that there is no time like the present to tackle that most passive of labors—a full survey of the semi-flawed and still hotly-contested Modern Library Best 100 Novels list.

Call it masochism, if you will. I certainly will, knowing that The List features both the most staggeringly unreadable of authors (Theodore Dreiser) and a book so notoriously unreadable, even the most hyper-literate of English Professors tacitly believe it might be a joke (Finnegan’s Wake). But given the very real possibility that I might have more time on my hands in upcoming months, there seems no better time to tackle this project.

A few notes:

1. Clearly, I have read some of these titles before. This is hardly a boast. At least seven titles on this list show up on typical U.S. public school curricula and at least two or three of those I was taught while still in middle school. Additionally, I was an English major and took as many twentieth century novel classes, knocking out at least another twenty. All told between my unspectacular academic career and my own appetite for books, I’ve read a little more than half of these books before. The question of whether or not I read them again really comes down to how well I think I know them, how many times I’ve read them before and whether or not I feel like my life will be made any richer by doing a close reading “Animal Farm” again. In the event that I opt out of a title, I will provide a compelling reason I am not doing a thorough re-reading and try to instead focus on another book by the same author, or the event that I’ve comes to mind), read pretty much every published novel by said author, I’ll try to find an adequate substitute.

2. That said, it is my stated goal to complete every title on the list. Including the both the afore-mentioned Joyce’s folly as well as a fuckload of Anthony Powell. Clearly some books take longer than others, but I will attempt to keep you updated in a reasonable span of time. I am trying to read these in order, but library/bookstore availability might hamper that at times, so the best I can promise is that they will be posted in order.

3. As for the rest, Be Flat will continue to cover other literary, musical and cultural topics as I see fit. I anticipate List coverage might be suspended as 2009 nears lit-award season and the release date of the new Pynchon novel.