239 Midwestern American High School Books of the 20th Century

the depth of the world itself

I made a big, time-consuming list of 20th century books in the vein of メアリー・ジェーン・エア ‘s 400 books and Grand Hotel Abyss’ 100 books, without looking at either one when I was making it.

Why? Well, FOMOOMAL. But also:

Nearly a year after I wrote tens of thousands of words over six months, including nearly 5,000 on John Pistelli’s good novel, I haven’t been writing much. Both my one and four-year-old children have consumed parts of my brain that were uncolonized by them in the last three years, to everyone’s detriment. I hope to claw that space back in the next eight weeks or so, and making this list feels like a step back into the dark wood of writing at length again. I’m taking an inventory before I start on the journey.

Also: I look at a list of big books for (a small part) of my job! I teach Advanced Placement English Literature, and every year, College Board prints a list of about 40 books that they suggest students use to answer a question based on “a literary concept or idea,” and task the students to “analyze how the literary concept or idea contributes to an interpretation of a literary work.” The questions are something like Authors often use interpersonal cruelty to explore larger trends in society. Choose a work of literary merit that features cruelty and explain how the author uses cruelty to explore a social trend, or Authors will often give a character a literal or figurative gift. This gift can create opportunities for a character but can also bring significant and unexpected challenges. Choose a work of literary merit and explain the impact of a gift on a character.

The teachers of AP English Literature compiled a list a few years ago, and the books that have shown up most often on this question most often in the past 30 years are (unsurprisingly) Great Expectations and Invisible Man. I give that list to my incoming students in May and tell them to pick a couple of books off of it to read, and the most ambitious ones always choose one or both of those books because they stick out visually on this list, and I tell them that just reading that book isn’t going to guarantee that they can answer one of those “interpretation of a literary work” questions; paradoxically, if they don’t understand a word of either of those books because they lack the background knowledge to understand them, they won’t be able to answer any questions (let alone any new one) about them. They obviously ignore this advice.

Since 2019, College Board has told teachers that half of the test will be on the 20th century (basically ok), 25% will be on novels before the 20th century (fairly sensible) and 25% will be on novels in the 21st century (I wish it was more like 5-10%, and the extra 15-20% was distributed to the other centuries).

Additionally, nearly half (45%) of the test outside of that question about a work of literary merit focuses on poetry: students have to close-read (lol, sorry N.K.) a poem and write an essay about it, and then at least three out of the five passages on the multiple choice test are poems. I think a lot of this is because College Board (generally) doesn’t have to excerpt poems for the test and every time they excerpt a novel, short story, or play for the test, they bend it into some awful shape with a mostly-clear “message” for students to interpret and everyone gets confused. In order to avoid being excerpted, a short story would have to be about as long as “Hills Like White Elephants,” maybe, whereas the only poem I remember being excerpted recently was Alexander Pope’s “Imitations of Horace” (College Board cut about 10 stanzas off of the beginning and end of the poem, probably to its benefit!).

Anyway, all of this means that I think a lot of about and read novels, plays, and poetry from the the 20th century, and I don’t read much literary criticism, philosophy, history, or memoir (anymore) from that century: that’s the unique perspective I bring to this list.

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Chōbunsai Eishi, “Thirty-Six Poets,” from the Met. This is based on a list of the “best” poets from critic Fujiwara Kintō in the late 10th century, and I love the look on that guy’s face in the far left.

When I was making my list, there were a few years where I was mostly stumped, but I’d heard of a few of the books on the Wikipedia page and just threw them into a spot based on their reputation. Nearly all of the ones I haven’t read are before 1950, and all the ones I haven’t read are in red.

I did not look at any references besides the “19___ in Literature” and a downloaded copy of my Goodreads history from the last fifteen years or so, nor did I look at the comments in his original post. If I’m interested in reading something because it showed up on his list, or in the comments, or because it turned up on MJE’s list after I re-checked hers after completing mine, I added it in blue. I did at least check all of these places for each year, so if I didn’t add it in blue, it’s because it’s not something that fits in with my kind of idiosyncratic project. It may be good! It just doesn’t fit.

After I made my list, I went back and bolded any entries that corresponded with Pistelli’s list.

Based on my reading, the best years for the kind of reading that I like to do are 1947, 1963, 1985, 1996 and 1997. The years I most need to revisit are 1941,1961, and 1964.

Following Mary Jane Eyre, I’ve included a [runner up] for many of these years. It’s kind of a [secret] list, since I tried to make the runner up fit into a different genre or textural valence than my favorite book of each year. This technique also means (happily) that my list ends up splitting the difference between MJE and Pistelli as far as length at exactly 149 entries. When I added on their entries, I ended up at a total of 239 books.

The List

1900: Sister Carrie, Theodore Dreiser¹

1901: Buddenbrooks, Thomas Mann

Kim, Rudyard Kipling

1902: The Wings of the Dove, Henry James

L’Immoraliste, Andre Gide

1903: The Souls of Black Folk, W.E.B. DuBois

1904: The Cherry Orchard, Anton Chekov

1905: The House of Mirth, Edith Wharton [The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, Max Weber]

1906: Botchan, Natsume Sōseki

The Confusions of Young Törless, Robert Musil²

1907: The Secret Agent, Joseph Conrad

New Poems, Rainer Maria Rilke

1908: A Room with a View, E.M. Forster

The Man Who Was Thursday, G. K. Chesterton

1909: I give up.³

1910: Howard’s End, E.M. Forster

1911: Ethan Frome, Edith Wharton

Le Bestiaire ou Cortège d’Orphée, Guillaume Apollinaire⁴

1912: The Judgment, Franz Kafka

Swann’s Way, Marcel Proust

1913: Sons and Lovers, D.H. Lawrence [The Custom of the Country, Edith Wharton]⁵

1914: Tender Buttons, Gertrude Stein

Dubliners, James Joyce⁶

1915: The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, T.S. Eliot

Dorothy Richardson, Pointed Roofs

1916: The Metamorphosis, Franz Kafka

1917: The Walk, Robert Walser

The Shadow-Line, Joseph Conrad

1918: Counter-Attack and Other Poems, Siegfried Sassoon [My Antonia, Willa Cather]

The Return of the Soldier, Rebecca West

1919: Within a Budding Grove, Marcel Proust

Demian, Hermann Hesse

1920: The Age of Innocence, Edith Wharton

Storm of Steel, Ernst Junger

1921: I give up.

Michael Robartes and the Dancer, W.B. Yeats

1922: Ulysses, James Joyce [The Waste Land, T.S. Eliot]

The Duino Elegies, Rainer Maria Rilke⁷

1923: Cane, Jean Toomer

The Confessions of Zeno, Italo Svevo

1924: The Magic Mountain, Thomas Mann

A Passage to India, E.M. Forster

1925: Heart of a Dog, Mikhail Bulgakov [The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald]⁸

1926: The Castle, Franz Kafka [Red Cavalry, Isaac Babel]

Morphine, Mikhail Bulgakov

1927: To the Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf [Men Without Women, Ernest Hemingway]

1928: Orlando, Virginia Woolf [King, Queen, Knave, Vladimir Nabokov]

Einbahnstraße, Walter Benjamin

1929: Passing, Nella Larsen [All Quiet on the Western Front, Erich Maria Remarque]

The Sound and the Fury, William Faulkner⁹

1930: As I Lay Dying, William Faulkner [The 42nd Parallel, John Dos Passos]

1931: Chaka, Thomas Mofolo

Mourning Becomes Electra, Eugene O’Neill

1932: Little Man, What Now?, Hans Fallada [Light in August, William Faulkner]

Journey to the End of the Night, Louis-Ferdinand Céline

The Sleepwalkers, Hermann Broch

1933: Down and Out in Paris and London, George Orwell¹⁰

1934: Independent People, Halldór Laxness

The Street of Crocodiles, Bruno Schulz

I, Claudius, Robert Graves

1935: Ideas of Order, Wallace Stevens [Selected Poems of Marianne Moore]

Poems, C. P. Cavafy¹¹

Auto-da-Fé, Elias Canetti

1936: Dumb Luck, Vũ Trọng Phụng

1937: Their Eyes Were Watching God, Zora Neale Hurston [The Road to Wigan Pier, George Orwell]

Rickshaw Boy, Lao She

1938: Brighton Rock, Graham Greene

The Death of the Heart, Elizabeth Bowen

Murphy, Samuel Beckett

1939: The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck

On the Marble Cliffs, Ernst Jünger

1940: The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, Carson McCullers [Native Son, Richard Wright]

To the Finland Station, Edmund Wilson

1941: I give up. It was a bad year for humans!

Mother Courage and Her Children, Bertolt Brecht

Thomas the Obscure, Maurice Blanchot

Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, Rebecca West

1942: The Myth of Sisyphus, Albert Camus

1943: Being and Nothingness, Jean-Paul Sartre¹²

Near to the Wild Heart, Clarice Lispector

1944: The Glass Menagerie, Tennessee Williams

Ficciones, Jorge Luis Borges

Notre-Dame-des-Fleurs, Jean Genet

1945: A Street in Bronzeville, Gwendolyn Brooks¹³ [Black Boy, Richard Wright]

1946: Hiroshima, John Hersey [The Iceman Cometh, Eugene O’Neill]

Mimesis, Erich Auerbach

1947: Every Man Dies Alone, Hans Fallada [A Streetcar Named Desire, Tennessee Williams¹⁴]

If This is a Man, Primo Levi

1948: The Heart of the Matter, Graham Greene

Other Voices, Other Rooms, Truman Capote

1949: Nineteen Eighty-Four, George Orwell

Confessions of a Mask, Yukio Mishima¹⁵

1950: Strangers on a Train, Patricia Highsmith¹⁶

I, Robot, Isaac Asimov

The Grass is Singing, Doris Lessing

1951: The Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt [Foundation, Isaac Asimov]

The Rebel, Albert Camus

Memoirs of Hadrian, Marguerite Yourcenar

1952: Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison [Player Piano, Kurt Vonnegut]

1953: The Adventures of Augie March, Saul Bellow

Waiting for Godot, Samuel Beckett

1954: The Mandarins, Simone de Beauvoir

1955: The Talented Mr. Ripley, Patricia Highsmith¹⁷

1956: Night, Elie Weisel [Howl, Allan Ginsberg]

1957: Pnin, Vladimir Nabokov

1958: Things Fall Apart, Chinua Achebe [Our Man in Havana, Graham Greene]

The Leopard, Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa

1959: The Tin Drum, Günter Grass

1960: Rabbit, Run, John Updike

1961: Revolutionary Road, Richard Yates [The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Jane Jacobs¹⁸]

Solaris, Stanislaw Lem

A House for Mr Biswas, V.S. Naipaul

Conversation in The Cathedral, Mario Vargas Llosa

Catch-22, Joseph Heller

1962: Pale Fire, Vladimir Nabokov

1963: The Fire Next Time, James Baldwin [The Group, Mary McCarthy]¹⁹

V., Thomas Pynchon

The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea, Yukio Mishima

1964: Pop. 1280, Jim Thompson²⁰

Julien, Gore Vidal

The Passion According to G. H., Clarice Lispector

The Martyred, Richard E. Kim

A Single Man, Christopher Isherwood

Marat/Sade, Peter Weiss

1965: Everything That Rises Must Converge, Flannery O’Connor [The Autobiography of Malcolm X, Malcolm X]

1966: The Last Picture Show, Larry McMurtry [In Cold Blood, Truman Capote]

Season of Migration to the North, Tayeb Salih

Wide Sargasso Sea, Jean Rhys

1967: One Hundred Years of Solitude, Gabriel García Márquez [The Master and Margarita, Mikhail Bulgakov]

The Joke, Milan Kundera

Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, Tom Stoppard

1968: True Grit, Charles Portis [Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, Phillip K. Dick]

The Nice and the Good, Iris Murdoch

In the First Circle, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

1969: Styles of Radical Will, Susan Sontag [Slaughterhouse-Five, Kurt Vonnegut]

The Left Hand of Darkness, Ursula K. Le Guin

1970: Abandon the Old in Tokyo, Yoshihiro Tatsumi [Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, Dee Brown²¹]

1971: The Copenhagen Trilogy, Tove Ditlevsen [The Underground Man, Ross Macdonald]

Maurice, E.M. Forster

1972: Gorilla, My Love, Toni Cade Bambara

Mumbo Jumbo, Ishmael Reed

1973: Sula, Toni Morrison [Gravity’s Rainbow, Thomas Pynchon]

1974: The Dispossessed, Ursula K. Le Guin

The Heart of Thomas, Moto Hagio

1975: Ragtime, E.L. Doctorow [Barefoot Gen, Keiji Nakazawa²²]

The Periodic Table, Primo Levi

1976: Flight to Canada, Ishmael Reed

The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts, Maxine Hong Kingston

1977: Song of Solomon, Toni Morrison [Angels, Denis Johnson]

Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter, Mario Vargas Llosa

Ceremony, Leslie Marmon Silko

1978: The Stories of John Cheever, John Cheever [Orientalism, Edward Said]

The Sea, the Sea, Iris Murdoch

1979: The White Album, Joan Didion²³ [The Ghost Writer, Phillip Roth]

A Bend in the River, V.S. Naipaul

Burger’s Daughter, Nadine Gordimer

1980: Housekeeping, Marilynn Robinson [Under the Sign of Saturn, Susan Sontag]

The Name of the Rose, Umberto Eco

1981: Midnight’s Children, Salman Rushdie

July’s People, Nadine Gordimer

1982: The Color Purple, Alice Walker [A Pale View of Hills, Kazuo Ishiguro²⁴]

The Book of Disquiet, Fernando Pessoa

1983: Literary Theory, Terry Eagleton²⁵

Life & Times of Michael K, J. M. Coetzee

1984: Neuromancer, William Gibson²⁶ [The House on Mango Street, Sandra Cisneros]

1985: White Noise, Don DeLillo [Blood Meridian, Cormac McCarthy]²⁷

1986: Maus: A Survivor’s Tale I, Art Spiegelman [Swamp Thing, Alan Moore, for 1984-1987]

1987: Beloved, Toni Morrison [An American Childhood, Annie Dillard]

1988: Cat’s Eye, Margaret Atwood²⁸ [Dalva, Jim Harrison]

Foucault’s Pendulum by Umberto Eco

1989: The Book of Evidence, John Banville [The Joy Luck Club, Amy Tan]

1990: The Things They Carried, Tim O’Brian [Come Over, Come Over, Lynda Barry]

Omeros, Derek Walcott

Possession, A.S. Byatt

1991: Mao II, Don DeLillo [Maus II: A Survivor’s Tale, Art Spiegelman]

1992: The Children of Men, P.D. James [All The Pretty Horses, Cormac McCarthy]

The Volcano Lover, Susan Sontag

1993: Stone Butch Blues, Leslie Feinberg [The Skating Rink, Roberto Bolaño]

Arcardia, Tom Stoppard

1994: The Waterworks, E.L. Doctorow [Chelsea Girls, Eileen Miles]

Paradise, Abdulrazak Gurnah

1995: Stuck Rubber Baby, Howard Cruse [Independence Day, Richard Ford]

Blindness, José Saramago

1996: Seven Guitars, August Wilson [Palestine, Joe Sacco]²⁹

1997: American Pastoral, Phillip Roth [Mason & Dixon, Thomas Pynchon]³⁰

The Puttermesser Papers, Cynthia Ozick

1998: Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, Peter Biskind [Seeing Like a State, James C. Scott]

Paradise, Toni Morrison

1999: Waiting, Ha Jin [T Singer, Dag Solstad]

Ghostwritten, David Mitchell

Disgrace, J. M. Coetzee

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The Discourse after the List (more discourse in footnotes)

• I’ve also recently finished Naomi K’s book and her recent Thomas Bernhard post, and so her thoughts on list-making and literary trends (especially the 21st-century trend towards valorizing difficult authors in translation) were on my mind here. I still added a few books to this list that seem pretty unpleasant, but making this list made me realize that I’m currently an “upper-middlebrow” reader, just as she defines herself in the Bernhard post. This isn’t a term she uses in WSGATGB, and I suspect that it’s not one that would define a lot of her reading habits in the 00’s and 10’s, when (based on the book) it seems she was actually much more of a “highbrow lay reader.” You can’t be a middlebrow lay reader and crush Kant and Hegel and classics of East and Southeast Asian literature and learn Anglo-Saxon.

  But Kanakia was never a brodernist, and neither am I, even though I’ve read a lot of works in translation.

• My list isn’t always searching for Greatness, but it’s always searching for some sort of compromise between mastering a form (my beloved Wharton, Forster, Highsmith, Doctorow, and Ishiguro) and breaking it (my equally beloved Stein, Kafka, Joyce, Woolf, Faulkner and Pynchon). I probably wouldn’t enjoy Tender Buttons as much now as I did when I was 22 (I don’t enjoy Pynchon as much, based on how I felt about Shadow Ticket), but I did enjoy it at that age, and not because I felt forced into reading it. I probably wouldn’t teach Tender Buttons to high schoolers, but I definitely force them to try to understand “Anecdote of the Jar,” which isn’t that different. I could have chosen to write my English seminar paper in college on thirty other things, but I liked Tender Buttons and I loved Zora Neale Hurston and I was bored by Hemingway and Lawrence.

• Unlike Naomi, I started my dive into Great literature with poetry in college, and I still read a lot of it. I’ve recently gotten really into Anne Sexton, for instance. I don’t like complexity or difficulty in poetry or prose for its own sake and I don’t believe that reading more books in translation (or more books from non-white or non-male authors) would necessarily make my list better. I obviously got my pick for 1931 from WSGATGB. As it was, my list had 29 books in translation (19%), 32 books by non-white authors (20%), and 36 books by non-male authors (24%), but with the additions I made, it went up significantly in all of the categories. So it’s a little less diverse than either MJE or Pistelli, though it definitely changes as it goes along, and making the list immediately prompted me to read (and so far enjoy!) Natsume Sōseki’s Botchan, for instance…it’s really short, and I keep wondering if the translation I’m reading is just really crazy or if the book is actually that crazy.

1. There’s a much-anthologized scene from this novel in Chapter 3 that’s the only thing I’ve read from it. 1900: naturalism has a few gasps left to breathe, and then it will (thankfully) die! Though I guess I probably prefer naturalism to, um, autofiction, if I’m thinking about fin de siècle literary movements.

2. What is with the bildungsroman at the turn of the 20th century? Kim, Botchan, The Confusions of Young Torless, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, Sons and Lovers…how many of these do I need to read? The form is over a hundred years old at this point, it’s been perfected by Dickens. I don’t know, I guess I’m a sucker for this stuff, just like John. But it doesn’t surprise me that Modernism is around the corner and it mostly rejects the “boarding school motif.”

3. The fact that Pistelli picked Three Lives here and MJE’s only 1909 pick is a pretty obscure William James book tells me that this is one of the years that is “comparatively bare of world-changing work,” and I don’t feel too bad about giving up on it. I’m happy with Tender Buttons (more on that below) so I don’t need Stein here just for reasons of representation. But following footnote three, I have no idea if Botchan, like Gitanjali, is something non-Japanese folks like because it’s actually good (Yeats) or because they’re getting tricked (Lukas). I’m more tempted to dip into the international literature of the 1910s-1940s because I know that it’s not worth reading Edith Wharton’s fifteenth novel, for example.

4. I’m not even sure I want to read Ethan Frome (see footnote 2). Pistelli offers art theory (Wassily Kandinsky’s Concerning the Spiritual in Art) but Mary Jane Eyre offers some tiny poems and woodcuts (Le Bestiaire ou Cortège d’Orphée) and so I probably would read Guilliame Apollinaire if I had to read something in 1911 (but I don’t).

5. When I eventually read Proust, I hope that it gets more interesting as it goes along, because I keep getting bored halfway through Swann’s Way and I know I’m not bored by either of these books. I’ve tried other Lawrence books and they’ve found various ways of turning me off, and The Custom of the Country is definitely one of my favorite Wharton books (I’d call it the [secret] book of hers, and leave The Age of Innocence as the canonical one).

6. Pistelli had to leave this one on the table because of the bit of never repeating an author, which, good on him, but man, 1914 is a tough year for literature, and I don’t know why. WWI hadn’t even started. The zeitgeist is indeed hard to predict.

7. Why is 1922 “thick with masterpieces”? I’m legitimately curious about this, because I wasn’t conflicted at all here: I’d read those two things, I haven’t read Rilke, but I’d like to…what am I missing?

8. This is one of those fun things where BOTH Bulgakov and Fitzgerald wrote novels that no one read at the time, for different reasons. I haven’t read either one in over a decade, but I’ve got more affection for the underdog so that’s why I support the novel about taking a guy’s heart out that’s a metaphor for the repression in the Soviet Union over a novel about rich people (that I liked!).

9. I keep meaning to read this, but in typical Pistelli fashion, I don’t know if he prefers it to As I Lay Dying and doesn’t want to list two Faulkners in a row or if he just thinks Civilization and its Discontents is that good. I mean, it is the best book of Freud’s that I’ve read (I haven’t read all of Freud) and I do think about it a few times a year, so I can be convinced!

10. Really tough year for literature…not surprisingly!

11. I’m not sure why MJE’s list had Harmonium and The Auroras of Autumn on it, but that’s in the nature of the secret list…it’s also just kind of funny that 1935 is such a year for poetry, though it’s more accurately just a down (half-decade) for literature, since all of the poets in this year wrote their poetry before 1935 and are mostly collecting it here.

12. I’m never going to read this past the introduction (which I read in college for some reason), but I was stumped by 1942 and couldn’t bring myself to write “I give up” again. The 1930’s and 1940’s have some lean years for literature.

13. Gwendolyn Brooks is heavily anthologized, but I don’t think it’s just for reasons of representation: “kitchenette building” is really one of the best poems of the 1940s. Her first collection is more than a little influenced by Langston Hughes, but he’s also underrated. I just haven’t read a whole collection of his poems like I had read A Street in Bronzeville, and also he was kind of busy building a movement and didn’t quite seem to burrow in to the process of just being a poet.

14. I just plain like The Glass Menagerie more than A Streetcar Named Desire (the bildungsroman strikes again!), but I understand that the former is a [secret] while the other is canon. And while Every Man Dies Alone shouldn’t be a secret, it is, while The Plague (1947) has graduated to canon (even though it’s not quite as good as either Williams or Fallada’s works). I could have also included Bellow’s The Victim and probably Mann’s Doctor Faustus here (either one is much more interesting than The Heart of the Matter in 1948), so 1947 is a very good year.

15. As something of a reply to Pistelli’s footnote 9—I guess I have a bit of a lacunae when it comes to 1948 and 1949, because I don’t even like The Heart of the Matter or Nineteen Eighty-Four very much, and I like The Naked and the Dead even less. I like The Second Sex, but I also like recommending The Mandarins more (speaking of “today’s practical politics,” um, The Mandarins is pretty essential!). I simply missed Death of a Salesman on the Wikipedia page, but that’s probably more likely my pick for 1949. I just got done reading a Carl Jung book, so I am very much not in the mood for The Hero with a Thousand Faces or The White Goddess…I also just don’t know if there’s anything I’d get out of them that I couldn’t get elsewhere.

16. This is basically a way to smuggle The Price of Salt onto this list, because it can’t quite compete with the two books of 1952 but it’s one of my favorite books of the 1950’s. Conveniently, I didn’t care about any other books from 1950 on the Wikipedia page, though there’s a chance I’ll enjoy the Lessing and Asimov books based on their other works.

17. Lolita, I read you, and I never think about you…except for the one scene when Humbert is crying next to his car in the American Southwest. And yes, I see how this footnote contradicts #16, but all I can do is protest that 1955 didn’t have more literature to recommend for itself. And hey, I didn’t totally forget Nabokov: he’s on here twice more.

18. Lolol that these two books came out during the same year. The suburbs are cooked. Also, if you’re considering reading The Power Broker…maybe just read The Death and Life instead? I enjoyed the latter much, much more.

19. I had to leave off both Marlen Haushofer’s The Wall and Plath’s The Bell Jar in order to include Mary McCarthy’s The Group, and if I’d read V., there’s a decent chance it would have displaced it as well. McCarthy basically already has an Esther-like character in her book (along with three others), so The Group is better than The Bell Jar, but leaving off The Wall was painful, since it’s definitely better than a lot of the stuff I included from the late 1940s and 1950s.

20. Pace Pistelli’s footnote 8, I don’t like Herzog and I don’t feel like I need to read McLuhan since he’s quoted at me every single day. So, following footnote 8, I should have just put 77 Dream Songs here because I do love it, with [The Whitsun Weddings] close behind. Time to go read more 1960’s poetry!

21. I don’t love that I have this book on the list but not anything by a Native American author. I basically agree with Pistelli’s Footnote 16 on this question of “acknowledgement,” though as a historical question, the trauma of dispossession that took place on the soil called the Americas is just plain interesting, if nothing else, and informs basically everything set in a rural area for a very, very long time in American literature, so I find that the understanding I gained through Bury Me at Wounded Knee helped me read most of this literature much more closely. Louis Erdrich has written some great novels, just not great enough to make the cut in any given year. No good answers here!

22. Along with Pistelli in Footnote 11, I’m not really a “manga person” but I love both Abandon the Old in Tokyo and this work. I’d never heard of The Heart of Thomas but I’ve got to check it out now. I feel fine claiming that there’s lots of classic graphic novels in the 1980’s and 1990s—I’ve got four of them listed in the [secret list] for each year, and two more in the main list, for a total of eight including the 70’s manga.

23. I’ve read The Madwoman in the Attic, and it wouldn’t be a bad subtitle for The White Album.

24. Pistelli’s Footnote 15 on Ishiguro is truly one of the greats—most people on Substack would turn it into a whole post! I happen to have hated The Unconsoled, but his general point about Ishiguro recapitulating the history of the novel is totally correct, and when I teach the bildungsroman through Never Let Me Go in AP Literature we really have a good time.

25. I haven’t read this in a really long time, I just couldn’t believe I didn’t have anything else for 1983…I am pretty sure I prefer it to Andrea Dworkin’s Right-Wing Women, though I definitely don’t prefer it to The Madwoman in the Attic, or Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s Between Men, if we’re going to list works of literary theory from the early 1980’s.

26. Pistelli, I join you in my bias towards science fiction. Based on Mating and Lady Chatterly’s Lover and Nightwood, the genre as literary fiction that I struggle with the most is probably romance.

27. Fences is also a good pick here but I found room for Wilson later on in the century. Other 1985 books that would have been perfect for 1983 instead of Literary Theory: Love in the Time of Cholera, World’s Fair…1985 is a good year for literature.

28. I love Pistelli’s Footnote 14 on Cat’s Eye and Atwood, and the only thing I’ll add is that I’ve convinced two nearly-graduated high schoolers to read Cat’s Eye and they both loved it.

29. I once read Seven Guitars with students. It didn’t go over well, but I loved it every time I got to reread it. I’ve read all of Sacco’s stuff and Palestine’s probably among his best and I read it over a decade ago, so don’t go claiming I have some agenda here, man…Sacco’s work is just worth reading, that’s all.

If I’m going to read a Sebald book (and it’ll happen eventually) it probably won’t be his debut novel especially since 1996 is so packed full of good stuff: I didn’t use Joyce Carol Oates’ We Were the Mulvaneys though it’s the best thing I’ve ever read from her, or David B.’s Epileptic (which didn’t finish until 2003), or, most obviously, Infinite Jest, which isn’t exactly comparable to anything else in this year, but which I don’t really like even though I have finished it. I also could have included Kenneth Lonergan’s This is Our Youth here, though it wasn’t published in a reader’s edition until 1999, because it was first staged in 1996, and I love the play and his movies.

30. The greatest year? I would have fit in Daniel Clowes’ Ghost World, Charles Frazier’s Cold Mountain or Phillip Pullman’s The Subtle Knife in most years, but nothing’s going to compete against those two monoliths. I’ll also probably read Underworld at some point, though I did give it up the first time after about 50 pages (I like shorter DeLillo?). I will obviously read Paradise by Morrison eventually, too.