Alcoa Presents: Fantastic Fiction

Recently my sister invited me on Facebook to list the 15 books which had most affected me. I didn't have time to do it then, but I thought it would be an interesting exercise. After giving it some thought, I'll try to pick fifteen.

I'm going to limit my list here to books of fiction. Although I read far more nonfiction than fiction, I would be more likely to identify fifteen *writers* of nonfiction that have impressed or affected me than fifteen individual nonfiction books. Maybe I'll do that in a future posting.

I'm also not counting books that affected me greatly as a kid, although there are plenty of those. Mostly they were series rather than individual books -- for example, Matt Christopher's children's sports novels; John D. Fitzgerald's "The Great Brain" series; Beverly Clearly's books; Lloyd Alexander's Prydain series; Thornton W. Burgess's series; Roald Dahl's "Charlie/Willy Wonka" books, the Alfred Hitchcock and the Three Investigators series, etc. Maybe that deserves a list of its own, but I'm sure I'd forget something important. It's been a while.

Anyway, here is the list of the fifteen books of fiction that are most memorable to me. In a couple of cases I've broken the rules and listed collected series rather than individual works, because in those cases it certainly can be said that the oeuvre as a whole is greater than any particular example. I'll list them roughly in chronological order of publication.

Charles Dickens -- A Tale of Two Cities
Fyodor Dostoevsky -- Crime and Punishment
Fyodor Dostoevsky -- The Brothers Karamazov
Mark Twain -- Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
F. Scott Fitzgerald -- The Great Gatsby
Franz Kafka -- The Trial
Ernest Hemingway -- The Sun Also Rises
John Steinbeck -- Of Mice and Men
Albert Camus -- The Plague
William Golding -- Lord of the Flies
Arthur Miller -- Death of a Salesman
Agatha Christie's Hercule Poirot mysteries
P.G. Wodehouse's Jeeves novels and stories
John Kennedy Toole -- A Confederacy of Dunces
Nick Hornby -- How to be Good

OK, there is is. A lot of them are "classics", but that's why they're classics, right? They're great books and have a strong influence on anyone reading them. And there are plenty of classics that didn't touch me that much, and many others that I liked a lot but not quite as deeply as these. And of course, there are some that I haven't gotten to yet, or never will.

There are also some (brilliantly executed) "entertainments" in the forms of Christie's and Wodehouse's series. The two most modern books on the list are both superb comedic novels. The one thing that unites the books in that they all tell a good story, and none is particularly difficult stylistically. Some may be long, like the Dostoevsky novels, but none of them is work to trudge through. To leave a lasting impression, it's true, a book should have interesting, "alive" characters and a deeply meaningful theme. But to be loved, a book has to be a pleasure to devour. And I think all of these are just so.