For no particular reason, right? Though I shouldn't partake in these parlor games, I'll cave:

(Roughly since January, though some of these early ones may be from December of last year)

(The first 20)

1. Pan From Lieutenant Thomas Glahn's Papers by Knut Hamsun

In which a young man goes into the forest in Norwegian far north, sings hymns of nature from his isolated hut, and goes a little nuts. Haunting and masterful, a classic, a work of genius.

2. Victoria by Knut Hamsun

Hamsun's attempt at writing a love story (Arthur Koestler calling it one of the greatest love stories in world literature) is more than a little tainted with typically Hamsunian stormclouds.

3. Hunger by Knut Hamsun

The debut, the one that rocked the literary establishment and that is, as some claim, the first sounding bell of what would become "Modernism." Brilliant, hungry, and mad.

4. THE OPPOSING SHORE by Julien Gracq

Can writing be "too poetic"? Or was it simply that I didn't like Julien Gracq's poetry? Still considered something of a classic in France, this book overwhelmed me with winding sentences and metaphors heaped upon metaphors.

5. TROUBLES by J. G. Farrell

A comedy of manners that just so happens to be set in a crumbling hotel at the time of the start of the Irish "troubles" at the turn of the century. Darkness continually edges into the light but never overwhelms. A great book.

6. THE COLOSSUS OF MAROUSSI by Henry Miller

In which the author goes to Greece in the late '30s (before the war forces him to sail back for the States). Ecstatic, brilliant, lovely, one of the great writer's very best books.

7. THE TIME OF THE ASSASSINS by Henry Miller

Miller's so-called "study" of French juvenile delinquent and genius poet Arthur Rimbaud is just as much, if not more, about Henry Miller. Which is not such a bad thing if you like ol' Hank.

8. BEAUTY AND SADNESS by Kawabata Yasunari

Beauty and sadness, cruelty and madness. Kawabata's bleak little yarn about the repercussions of a man deflowering a 15 year-old girl and their meeting twenty years later.

9. SNOW COUNTRY by Kawabata Yasunari

Wintry, chilling, and hauntingly beautiful. Nobel-winner Kawabata's best-known, a great novel.

10. THOUSAND CRANES by Kawabata Yasunari

If I had to choose a favorite amongst Kawabata's slim novels, this might be it. Exquisite as the Japanese tea ceremony.

11. THE SEA AND POISON by Endo Shusaku

Endo's spare, baleful novel about the Japanese doctors who performed experiments on American POWs.

12. DEEP RIVER by Endo Shusaku

Better in theory than in execution, Endo's novel about a group of Japanese lost souls who tour India eventually becomes bogged down in the Catholic author's too-clearly underlined religious concerns.

13. QUICKSAND by Tanizaki Junichiro

Fiendishly clever, Tanizaki concocts a bored housewife who becomes enamored with a young woman at one of her art classes. Heated lesbian desire and madness in 1930s Japan. Can't go wrong.

14. THE SECRET HISTORY OF THE LORD OF MUSASHI by Tanizaki Junichiro

Tanizaki's narrator claims to be privy to secret documents about the bizarre sexual urges of a famous samurai warrior (severed heads, no noses). The book is meant to lampoon staid official histories (all the documents and historical figures here are made-up by Tanizaki) and, while bizarre and even pretty funny, probably has more punch for the Japanese reader. Still, an interesting curio.

15. FUTILITY by William Gerhardie

Little-known gem from the early part of the twentieth century, written by a Russian in English decades before Nabokov pulled a similar feat. Much futility and thwarted desires, a kind of deadpan comedy about modern angst, well ahead of its time.

16. DIARY OF A BAD YEAR by J. M. Coetzee

One of the handful of real masterpieces of the decade, with ruminations on the current bad state of the world, on the impotence felt by modern intellectuals, on death, and on the undying appeal of women with "heavenly derriere" in short dresses.

17. ELIZABETH COSTELLO by J. M. Coetzee

I have not yet had the time to digest this. It is a cryptic little beastie.

18. WOLF TOTEM by Jiang Rong

Celebrated and best-selling Chinese novel about a Chinese student who lives with Mongolian nomads in the early 1980s. Unfortunately not as great as it sounds.

19. ANNA EDES by Deszo Kosztolanyi

Unexpected Hungarian novel from the 1930s that seems to predict later novels of alienation and unexplained crimes. Terrific and memorable.

20. I SERVED THE KING OF ENGLAND by Bohumil Hrabal

Hrabal's tale of the little man carried by the tide of history, banned in Czechoslovakia for decades. It's a mixture of clownish humor, dirty jokes, and sexual escapades with a vein of darkness running through it. Can't say I loved it, but there is certainly greatness in it.

some of these i've read and some i'm going to read. the miller book you gave me has to move up my list... soon. it's also time for me to read snow country. i've still got a few kawabata i haven't got to yet.

oh, and i just ordered A Burnt Child by Stig Dagerman. i had it sent to georgia. they wouldn't send outside of the u.s. strange when you consider most people don't give a shit about it. it's a christmas gift to myself. thanks for mentioning him earlier.

this list thing, though tedious, is good for remembering what you've read. i forgot some of the books i read last year. these lists jog my feeble memory.

looking forward to reading your next 20...

I loved Troubles by J G Farrell

(the next 20)

21. FOUR GREEK POETS by Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard

A slim and crumbling Penguin paperback anthology that's so old the back cover claims that it includes translations of poems by Greece's Nobel Prize-winner (Odysseus Elytis would win in 1979 and make that plural). So what we have here are early renderings of George Seferis, C. P. Cavafy, Elytis, and Nikos Gatsos by celebrated translators Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard. Interesting to contrast Keeley and Sherrard's early versions of Seferis (one of my very favorite poets) with the current Collected Poems: for instance, the "soul" of the great poem cycle Mythistorema is a "she" in these early translations and an "it" in the newer ones! This is a great little book, a small treasure.

22. WHEN THE TREE SINGS by Stratis Haviaras

Beautiful and brutal novella based on the author's childhood in wartime Greece. Outstanding.

23. MR. COGITO by Zbigniew Herbert

One of the greatest poets of the 20th century, Herbert is best-known for this great work in which the poet creates an alter-ego for himself: Mr. Cogito, who ruminates, with wry humor and remarkable perception (the poetry frequently sparkles, even in translation), on death, failed noble sentiments, bad history, and pop music. One of the great oversights for the Nobel Prize committee. For shame!

24. A STRING OF PEARLS (aka THE 1002nd ARABIAN NIGHT) by Joseph Roth

The great writer of Viennese melancholy and the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire wrote this little confection loosely based on the visit of the Shah of Iran to Vienna in the late 19th century. The Shah becomes enamored with a gorgeous, aristocratic, and unfortunately married woman at a ball and insists that he must "have" her. Panicked at the thought of international scandal, the court scrambles for a solution, and one is offered by the a Captain of Horse: he just so happens to know a young woman at the brothel he frequents who bears a striking resemblance to the young lady in question... I didn't think too terribly much of this when I read it, but it has a remarkable way of lodging itself in the mind. Beneath the lightness and dancing prose is a palpable sense of doom (the book ends in a suicide). Roth is considered one of those greatest-writers-no-one's-ever-heard-of.

25. A TOMB FOR BORIS DAVIDOVICH by Danilo Kis

A brilliant book composed of linked short stories about minor casualties washed away by the tide of History in communist central Europe. Short, bleak, and chilling.

26. A WORLD APART by Gustaw Herling

Still considered by some to be the greatest book about the Soviet gulags, Herling's memoir begins with typical bureaucratic idiocy that's downright Kafkaesque, then descends into the frozen inferno of the camps. A fascinating book written by an unusual character.

27. A FOX IN THE ATTIC by Richard Hughes

I'd heard so much praise of Hughes that I was sure this would be a masterpiece (the author is compared to Tolstoy no less than three times on the back cover of the old Penguin edition I had). But what a disappointment! Was I just in the wrong mood? Perhaps. But I really had to drag myself through this one.

28. ARABIAN SANDS by William Thesiger

The author crossed the "Empty Quarter" of Arabia with the nomads in the 1940s in his bare feet. Thesiger was fascinated by these characters (and did so, as he rues in his introduction, just before the discovery of oil in the region completely changed everything and everyone there), their freedom and their almost absurdly harsh lifestyle. The triumph of the book is not in style but in the sheer amount of wonderfully weird stories and anecdotes.

29. REVOLUTIONARY ROAD by Richard Yates

Not quite the masterpiece everyone seemed to trumpet it as, but it surely deserved a better film adaptation than the drivel it got.

30. THE LEOPARD by Guiseppe Thomasi de Lampedusa

This book, on the other hand, deserves its reputation. It really is a masterpiece.

31. THE BOOK OF FLIGHTS by J. M. G. Le Clezio

One of the 2008 Nobel laureate's angry young man books, a not-entirely-successful experimental novel that is nonetheless frequently stunning and driven by real intensity. One gets the impression, even in this early book, that the Nobel committee got the right man.

32. LET IT COME DOWN by Paul Bowles

Oh, Paul Bowles, I love you, you ridiculously unlovable old bastard. But this is not your finest hour. Too often it felt like one of your better short stories that just got out of hand. And I knew right where it was going (where your stories always go: insanity and death!). I think for a first-time Paul Bowles reader this novel may be more effective, but I'll take The Sheltering Sky, thank you.

33. THE HAPPY ISLES OF OCEANIA by Paul Theroux

Another unlovable Paul! Crotchety Paul, I tip my hat to you for not romanticizing the South Pacific, which undoubtedly has sunk rather low thanks to the generosity of its European fathers, but I do wish you'd had more fun. I mean, you're paddling the South Pacific, man! Even when you say you're having fun, here, I rarely believe you (you're far more convincing with aggravated and annoyed). And what's with the burning hatred of the Japanese? Regardless, for anyone interested in the South Pacific (me, with a vengeance) this has some worthwhile revelations and even the odd (but still somewhat cranky) moments of beauty and serenity.

34. AUSTERLITZ by W. G. Sebald

Hmm... Hmm... I didn't think I liked it much. No, I was sure I just didn't get it. My eyes would glaze over after the tenth page of one of Sebald's massive paragraphs and I'd realize I'd retained nothing whatsoever. Flip back a few pages. This happened a lot. Yet somewhere towards the end I finally settled into this book's rhythm, and I found peace with it. Must be read a second time for a real verdict.

35. NIKOLAI GOGOL by Vladimir Nabokov

As biographies or literary studies go, this one is proudly its own loony duck. The author dismisses almost all of his subject's output like (finger snap) that! "Juvenilia," "trivial," then the long explanation of the Russian word poshlust... Then the praise and respect for Gogol's great works (according to Nabokov: The Government Inspector, "The Overcoat," Dead Souls). Then the grudging bibliography... A book that is a stream of delights written by one of the real literary geniuses of the century.

36. INVITATION TO A BEHEADING by Vladimir Nabokov

Surreal early Russian novel, written in "two weeks of sustained inspiration," a slapstick comedy about totalitarian terror, with the doomed man waiting for the day his head will be on the block. And waiting, and waiting...

37. BEYOND ILLUSIONS by Duong Thu Huong

Early novel by Vietnamese dissident writer, the first to get her in real hot water with the government, does not paint a flattering portrait of mid-80s Hanoi and the intellectual environment there. Not an exemplary work of literature, but a superior show of courage on the part of its author.

38. THE GOALIE'S ANXIETY AT THE PENALTY KICK by Peter Handke

A story about a man who loses his job, aimlessly strolls around Berlin, sleeps with and murders a movie ticket girl, then takes a trip to the countryside and proceeds to quietly flip out. Unnerving and darkly hilarious.

39. MY SEVERAL WORLDS by Pearl Buck

Buck's moving and fascinating autobiography. What a life! The woman grew up in China during times of amazing turmoil and change, and though she is often dismissed as a sentimental and mediocre writer, this is a consistently fascinating story that I did not expect to think much of. I want to call a moratorium on the literary community using Pearl Buck as a punching bag, if for this book alone.

40. THE PENGUIN KRISHNAMURTI READER

Never less than enlightening. A quiet, plain-spoken Indian teacher's call for interior revolution.

(and further)

41. HOUSE OF ALL NATIONS by Christina Stead

Where to begin? How? Mad, maddening, sprawling, damning, vicious, thrilling, furious, hilarious and huge, the Moby Dick of the Paris financial world in the 1930s, written by an all-but-forgotten eccentric genius. The neglect of Christina Stead is a crime.

42. THE SAILOR WHO FELL FROM GRACE WITH THE SEA by Mishima Yukio

I may have read this at the tail end of last year. Oh well, it goes on the list! As slim and as pointed as an icepick in the ear, Mishima's tale of a group of demonic twelve year-old boys who decide to murder one of the boys' mother's lover.

43. PALE FIRE by Vladimir Nabokov

Too much to wrap my poor pitiful mind around. Is it brilliant? Almost too much so. And it is absolutely insane, a real freak. What kind of madman would concoct a book like this? It baffled the hell out of me, and I could see the genius, and feel very much humbled by it, but it failed to move me. And I certainly should read it again, if I ever get up the courage to try.

44. A LIFE'S MUSIC by Andrei Makine

Poetic and memorable, but I felt it was a touch too derivative of past Russian masterpieces. I have received insulting remarks from the book's admirers for saying so.

45. A HERO'S DAUGHTER by Andrei Makine

Again, fine without truly banging the gong on the highest peak. Still, I am grateful for Makine's stubborn insistence on being old-fashioned; the writer thankfully never calls attention to what a clever boy he is.

46. FLAWS IN THE GLASS by Patrick White

One of the century's major (and most criminally neglected) English-language writers composes an evasive and frankly often dull autobiography. Stay with the novels.

47. THE DIVING POOL by Ogawa Yoko

Creepy and atmospheric short stories, and yet I think too many great claims have been made for this author. Nothing here approaches earthshattering.

48. BARABBAS by Par Lagerkvist

A religious parable about crisis of faith from the Swedish Nobel Prize winner. It was alright.

49. THE BLACK BOOK by Orhan Pamuk

My Name is Red is a real masterpiece, and Snow is outstanding. Yet I was astonished to realize how little I liked this one. I kept going, waiting for it to improve, waiting for it to mean something or go somewhere, but waited in vain. It really started to make me angry even! The worst kind of post-modernist anti-adventure about the search for identity, blah blah. Way too long and boring as dirt.

50. ADAM, ONE AFTERNOON by Italo Calvino

Early short stories (late 1940s) from Calvino, before Calvino would become Calvino, so to speak. These are mostly grounded in wartime and post-war realities, though you can see early touches of the author's later imaginative flights. I did not find a standout in this collection, though some in their brief span - they're almost all only a few pages - do toughly lodge in the mind.

Yeah, that's 50! But why stop there...?

51. The Sibyl by Par Lagerkvist

Another Lagerkvist book, stumbled upon by chance. I decided to give him another chance because someone informed me that the author was in fact an atheist, which puts his underwhelming Barabbas in a different light. This was better, but still about faith-or-lack-thereof and those issues that Scandinavians seem to have a special knack for wrestling around with, and that interests me somewhat less.

52. Lovely Green Eyes A Novel by Arnost Lustig

Tough, elliptical novel about a girl with the titular eyes who survives the concentration camps by working as a whore for the German army.

53. The Immortal Bartfuss by Aharon Appelfeld

A stranger, more cryptic book about a Holocaust survivor, a curmudgeonly old gent in Israel, estranged from his wife, kid, and friends, who finds the past he's so carefully kept at bay for so many years slowly closing in on him. I think I took this one too fast, waiting for it to really be about something obvious, when its real purposes were buried under the surface and in its strange, stilted, surreal dialogue exchanges.


54. A Song of Truth and Semblance by Cees Nooteboom

Novella of no little interest and some great exchanges - however its post-modernist concerns about the role of the author and the lives of literary characters didn't ultimately do much for me.

55. The Lost Steps by Alejo Carpentier

One of the major influences on the so-called Magic Realist school of Latin American fiction, Carpentier is relatively little-known today. This novel is almost sunk by three things: an almost fatal lack of humor, dry and winding sentences, and a seemingly simplistic Civilization vs Outright Rejection Of argument that even someone who sympathizes with the author's point of view (as I do) might be inclined to groan at once in awhile. But sticking with this novel, which can almost never be thought of as a pleasant task, has its rewards. At its best - mostly in the second half - it truly reaches the heights.


56. Memoirs of an Anti-semite by Gregor von Rezzori

Rezzori is one of the few authors I've recently come across who's really excited me just by reading about him - as if one of the classic 1930s writers of the fascinating and tumultuous Central European pre-war years had miraculously lived into the 1990s. These five autobiographical stories, which Rezzori claims was dubbed a "novel" in five stories at the publisher's request rather than author's intent, mostly recall the pre-war years of his childhood and youth (only the melancholy and beautiful final story is of the author as old man in the age of consumerism). All of the stories have the narrator's relationship with Jews as theme, and attempt to honestly portray his anti-semitism, bred into him by his parents and his aristocratic milieu. The book is a remarkable portrait of those days, written with consummate artistry.

57. My Life as Emperor by Su Tong

Absolutely terrific, one of the rare novels that manages the feat of having intelligence and artistry while also moving at a brisk pace. I wasn't sure I'd ever read another Su Tong novel after Rice. The talent of that book's author was never in doubt, but its bleakness and relentless brutality was hard to take. In My Life as Emperor all the main characters are either dead (often meeting their ends in a spectacularly unpleasant fashion) or destitute by the end. But now, ten years on, I understand more of what Su Tong is getting at with these period pieces of his. In Rice a sadistic peasant rises to power, and in My Life (set in some vague historic time concocted by Su) a sadistic child is made emperor. I'm sure the author has no intent to draw parallels between these bullies and anything occurring in the present day...

58. Les Chemins de la mer by Francois Mauriac

[This book is only listed under its French title here. The English title is The Unknown Sea. I suppose it's just been out of print for too long - the copy I have is an elderly Penguin paperback.:] Written - or translated - in a rather stilted, 19th century style, this book begins with the suicide of the debt-ridden father of an aristocratic family and their quick descent into destitution. Its themes are the pernicious effects of money and lack thereof, and spiritual emptiness. At times it reads like a minor 19th century Russian novel - say, something by Leskov, or one of Turgenev's more forgettable works. The characters are too neatly types meant to illuminate the author's ideas. It never feels nearly as tragic as it wants to be, though I wonder if the fault is the novel or the translator.

59. The Garlic Ballads A Novel by Mo Yan

How a fellow who wrote a book like this is not only not in jail but still able to publish under the Chinese regime is a mystery to me. The corrupt and idiotic local government tries to restrain the peasants from rioting after having forced them to (over)plant garlic which they're unable to sell. Violent, disgusting, excessive, and thoroughly unsubtle - worth a dip into the dark carnival mind of Mo Yan, but not something I'd recommend to anyone.

60. Shyness and Dignity by Dag Solstad

A queer little book. A man has been teaching Ibsen's Wild Duck to ungrateful middle school students for 25 years, and one day he just flips out. As he goes walking through Oslo, terrified of having thrown his career away, he reflects on the path that led him to his current mediocrity, especially his college friendship with a brilliant philosophy student and the student's "indescribably beautiful" wife. I'm not sure what this book was getting at, really. It rambled along (many long sentences and paragraphs) then rather abruptly ended.

61. Hope Abandoned A Memoir by Nadezhda Mandelstam

I continue to be dig into the failings of the 20th century, the eradication of culture, and the triumph of stupidity, barbarism, and cruelty. Nadezhda's brave and bitter memoir is nothing less than a finely detailed portrait of and condemnation of the Russia of her time, the regime that sent her poet husband - one of the greatest Russian poets of the century - to his frozen Siberian death and then tossed him into an unmarked hole in the ground without bothering to tell his widow until years after the fact. This huge book took me months to finish, though it was never boring (however there are so many references to names and historical events that the reader would be totally out to sea without translator Max Hayward's notes at the end). Deeply saddening, angry, and even darkly funny at times (proving that Kafka saw too well!), a testament, a settling of scores, an artistic philosophy, and a real eye-opener.

Reunion by Fred Uhlman

A beautiful novella about friendship in 1930s Germany and the cloud of Nazism that slowly rolls in. Marred only by a too-abrupt final chapter and its indifferent tone so at odds with the rest of the book.

View with a Grain of Sand Selected Poems by Wislawa Szymborska

Stunning poems by this master of whimsical darkness. How is it that so often these poems which seem so light and dancing can be so unsettling? They often end with a punch line that stops you in your tracks. This is a generous sampling from nearly forty years and I shouldn't complain, but... Oh, the rhymes! I have too much difficulty believing that rhymes in translation aren't achieved without some real damage to fidelity. A line or two here and there? Certainly. But a whole poem with a completely intact rhyme scheme? I have difficulty. It muddies the water for me. I am grateful, regardless.