Brooklyn by Colm Tóibín
Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë
Howards End by E. M. Forster
The Blackwater Lightship by Colm Tóibín
The Ballad of the Sad Café by Carson McCullers
Lucky Jim by Kingsley Amis
The Long Goodbye by Raymond Chandler
Falconer by John Cheever
The Folding Star by Alan Hollinghurst
Something New (1915) by P. G. Wodehouse
The Woman Who Walked Into Doors by Roddy Doyle
Party Going by Henry Green
Keep the Aspidistra Flying by George Orwell
The Book of Evidence by John Banville
The Natural by Bernard Malamud
Rabbit, Run by John Updike
Pictures from an Institution by Randall Jarrell
A Girl in Winter by Philip Larkin
The Fortnight in September by R. C. Sherriff
Last Orders by Graham Swift
The Ghost Writer by Philip Roth
Three Bedrooms in Manhattan by Georges Simenon
The Beach by Cesare Pavese
Over the Frontier by Stevie Smith
Cutter and Bone by Newton Thornburg
Crossing to Safety by Wallace Stegner
A Year in the Death of Ricardo Reis by José Saramago
Voices in the Evening by Natalia Ginzburg
Angels on Toast by Dawn Powell
The Actual by Saul Bellow
Foster by Claire Keegan
The Violent Bear It Away by Flannery O’Connor
A Sport and a Pastime by James Salter
Cold Spring Harbor by Richard Yates
Despair by Vladimir Nabokov
“Then We Were Three” by Irwin Shaw
The Dean’s December by Saul Bellow
As always, I followed no itinerary in my choices - I went, as the saying goes, wherever the spirit moved me. The novels that had the greatest effect on me were never either the best or most famous. I thought Howards End, for example, was a muddled book, but just the sort of muddle Forster meant it to be. Wuthering Heights, the most famous on the list, was something of a slog. Evidently Emily Brontë wanted to include the whole of her odd world in it, and it is cumulatively evocative of it.
Only one of them was really disappointing - Cutter and Bone, which wasn't nearly as good as the film. Of all the books, the ones I liked and enjoyed reading most were: The Long Goodbye, with its beautiful evocation of mid-century Los Angeles; Something New, with its exquisite ending; Pictures from an Institution, very funny and very moving; The Fortnight in September, a real find and a loving portrait of middle class English life; The Ghost Writer, a strangely imaginative glimpse by an extremely precocious fledgling writer inside the lives of three people he encounters in a wintry retreat; Three Bedrooms in Manhattan, one of Simenon's "hard" novels that shows us a familiar locale and a fully grown-up love from the inside; Foster, a very gentle tale of a little girl's discovery of the true meaning of family love; and A Sport and a Pastime, that catches moods and (sometimes erotic) moments in time that are unforgettable.
The novels that I look forward to reading again some day on a desert island are Updike's Rabbit, Run, which I misjudged on a first reading, Pictures from an Institution, replete with intelligence, wit, and love, and A Sport and a Pastime. Yet, as Frost wrote, knowing how way leads on to way, I doubt if I should ever go back.
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