hogglestock

Auster, Baldwin, Benson, Bram Collins, Cunningham, Durrell, Forster

I had so much fun making my list of my favorite novels by women, that I decided to make one of novels by men. As I did with the women’s list, I included all the novels that ranked at least an eight on my ten-point rating scale. I was surprised to see that my male list was 25 books longer than my female list. Perhaps it shouldn’t have been such a big surprise given the ways of the publishing world and society in general, but I thought my list would be skewed a little more to the female side. As it is, of the 185 novels that I ranked an eight or above, 43% were written by women. That is almost (but not quite) in line with the general population distribution.

Were the men given special treatment?
As I went through my books read list I was surprised at how often the male authors seem to have benefited from being rated when I was a decade younger and felt like the grand works of old men deserved higher marks than my enjoyment level would have allowed. At the time I was really trying to plow through the Modern Library list which was stuffed with white men. While some of them were truly spectacular reads, I still feel like I gave them higher marks because their literary importance, rightly or wrongly, had been codified in the Modern Library list. To make up for that, as I went through my spreadsheet for this list I downgraded 20 books that I know in my heart I didn’t like that much and so they don’t appear on this list.

Committee of one redux (with similar caveats galore)
As with the women’s list, I didn’t try and consider any sort of literary importance. I decided that I would simply list my favorite books by men. To do so I looked to my spreadsheet of books that I have read since 1994, sorted them by rating, and then removed all the women. Keep the following in mind as you peruse the list:

• I removed anything that wasn’t a novel. *With the exception of Thad Carhart’s The Piano Shop on the Left Bank. I love this piece of non-fiction so much I refused to exclude it here. Although, in retrospect, I should have then not excluded 84, Charing Cross Road, or Anne Fadiman’s Ex Libris both of which I find so delightful they make my head spin. Unlike those two, however, the Carhart is much less known by bookish types, so I feel the need to sing its praise here.
• Besides separating them into three broad categories, they are otherwise listed in alpha order by author. Thus #1 does not necessarily equate to being my all time favorite book etc.
• These are books I enjoyed–who am I to rank anything according to literary merit?
• My rankings are a reflection of how I felt when I read the book. I realized as I compiled the list that my feelings have changed somewhat.
• Being a committee of one, the list is most impacted by the fact that it only relies on the 1,000 or so books I have read since 1994. 

Hesse, Just, Leavitt, Lewis Maugham, Shute, Trollope, Waugh, Wolfe

1. Bennett, Alan – The Uncommon Reader
2. Brown, Todd – Entries from a Hot Pink Notebook
3. Carhart, Thad – The Piano Shop on the Left Bank*
4. Ford, Robert – The Student Conductor
5. Forster, E.M. – A Room with a View
6. Forster, E.M. – Howard’s End
7. Gallico, Paul – Flowers for Mrs. Harris
8. Irving, John – A Prayer for Owen Meany
9. London, Jack – Martin Eden
10. McEwan, Ian – On Chesil Beach
11. Ross, Sinclair – As for Me and My House
12. Shute, Nevil – In the Wet
13. Trillin, Calvin – Tepper Isn’t Going Out
14. Waugh, Evelyn – Brideshead Revisted
15. Wilde, Oscar – The Picture of Dorian Gray
16. Williams, John – Stoner

Books achieving a 9 (Loved it)
17. Auster, Paul – The Brooklyn Follies
18. Baldwin, James – Another Country
19. Baldwin, James – Giovanni’s Room
20. Baldwin, James – Go Tell it on the Mountain
21. Banks, Iain – The Wasp Factory
22. Barnes, Julian – The Sense of an Ending
23. Benson, E.F. – So far all of his novels that I have read
24. Boll, Heinrich – The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum
25. Carey, Edward – Observatory Mansions
26. Carr, J.L. – A Month in the Country
27. Chatwin, Bruce – On the Black Hill
28. Coetzee, J.M. – Disgrace
29. Collins, Wilkie – The Woman in White
30. Crichton, Michael – The Andromeda Strain
31. Dickey, James – Deliverance
32. Dreiser, Theodore – An American Tragedy
33. Dumas, Alexandre – The Three Musketeers
34. Duplechan, Larry – Blackbird
35. Fearing, Kenneth – The Big Clock
36. Ferris, Joshua – Then We Came to the End
37. Fitzgerald, F. Scott – Tender is the Night
38. Flaubert, Gustave – A Simple Heart
39. Forster, E.M. – A Passage to India
40. Frayn, Michael – The Trick of It
41. Greene, Graham – The End of the Affair
42. Greene, Graham – Travels with My Aunt
43. Hemingway, Ernest – The Sun Also Rises
44. Hesse, Hermann – Pretty much all of his novels (except Steppenwolf)
45. Huxley, Aldous – Brave New World
46. Isherwood, Christopher – A Meeting By the River
47. Jenkins, Herbert – Patricia Brent, Spinster
48. Joyce, James – The Dead
49. Koestler, Arthur – Darkness at Noon
50. Lamb, Wally – She’s Come Undone
51. Lebrecht, Norman – The Song of Names
52. Lewis, Sinclair – All of his novels
53. Lodge, David – Changing Places
54. London, Jack – The Call of the Wild
55. Maugham, W. Somerset – Most of his novels
56. McEwan, Ian – Sweet Tooth
57. Nabokov, Vladimir – Lolita
58. O’Brien, Darcy – A Way of Life, Like Any Other
59. Peck, Richard – London Holiday
60. Priestly, J.B. – Angel Pavement
61. Selvadurai, Shyam – Funny Boy
62. Sherriff, R.C. – A Fortnight in September
63. Sherriff, R.C. – The Hopkins Manuscript
64. Shute, Nevil – The rest of his novels not listed above
65. Soehnlein, K.M. – The World of Normal Boys
66. Stegner, Wallace – Crossing to Safety
67. Steinbeck, John – The Grapes of Wrath
68. Stephenson, Neal – Cryptonomicon
69. Uhlman, Fred – Reunion
70. Vonnegut, Kurt – Slaughterhouse Five
71. White, Edmund – Hotel de Dream
72. Wolff, Tobias – Old School

Books achieving an 8 (Really liked it)
73. Auster, Paul – Sunset Park
74. Baldwin, James – The rest of his novels not listed above
75. Bowles, Paul – The Sheltering Sky
76. Bram, Christopher – Surprising Myself
77. Constant, Benjamin – Adolphe
78. Cunningham, Michael – Most of his novels
79. Doctorow, E.L. – Ragtime
80. Durrell, Lawrence – All four of the Alexandria Quartet
81. Fforde, Jasper – The Eyre Affair
82. Findley, Timothy – Most of his novels
83. Forster, E.M. – Where Angels Fear to Tread
84. Gide, Andre – Strait is the Gate
85. Gide, Andre – The Counterfeiters
86. Gide, Andre – The Immoralist
87. Hemingway, Ernest – The Old Man and the Sea
88. Hoeg, Peter – Smilla’s Sense of Snow
89. Howells, William Dean – The Rise of Silas Lapham
90. Huxley, Aldous – Point Counter Point
91. Just, Ward – All of his novels
92. Leavitt, David – Most of his novels
93. Mackail, Denis – Greenery Street
94. MacLaverty, Bernard – Grace Notes
95. Mawer, Simon – The Glass Room
96. Miller, Merle – The Warm Feeling
97. Orwell, George – Burmese Days
98. Remarque, Erich Maria – All Quiet on the Western Front
99. Sinclair, Upton – The Jungle
100. Stegner, Wallace – Angle of Repose
101. Trollope, Anthony – All of his novels so far
102. Waugh, Evelyn – The rest of his novels not listed above
103. Wenzel, Kurt – Lit Life
104. Williams, Conrad – The Concert Pianist
105. Wolfe, Tom – All of his post-1960s novels