What do you think?
Rate this book
Ninety-Nine Novels: The Best in English Since 1939
In this book Anthony Burgess internationally acclaimed novelist and critic offers his list of the 99 best novels published in English since 1939.
160 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1984
2 people are currently reading
447 people want to read
About the author
Anthony Burgess
360 books4,252 followersLibrarian Note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name.
Seriocomic novels of noted British writer and critic Anthony Burgess, pen name of John Burgess Wilson, include the futuristic classic A Clockwork Orange (1962).
He composed also a librettos, poems, plays, screens, and essays and traveled, broadcast, translated, linguist and educationalist. He lived for long periods in southeastern Asia, the United States of America, and Europe along Mediterranean Sea as well as England. His fiction embraces the Malayan trilogy ( The Long Day Wanes ) on the dying days of empire in the east. The Enderby quartet concerns a poet and his muse. Nothing like the Sun re-creates love life of William Shakespeare. He explores the nature of evil with Earthly Powers , a panoramic saga of the 20th century. He published studies of James Joyce, Ernest Miller Hemingway, Shakespeare, and David Herbert Lawrence. He produced the treatises Language Made Plain and A Mouthful of Air . His journalism proliferated in several languages. He translated and adapted Cyrano de Bergerac , Oedipus the King , and Carmen for the stage. He scripted Jesus of Nazareth and Moses the Lawgiver for the screen. He invented the prehistoric language, spoken in Quest for Fire . He composed the Sinfoni Melayu , the Symphony (No. 3) in C , and the opera Blooms of Dublin .
Seriocomic novels of noted British writer and critic Anthony Burgess, pen name of John Burgess Wilson, include the futuristic classic A Clockwork Orange (1962).
He composed also a librettos, poems, plays, screens, and essays and traveled, broadcast, translated, linguist and educationalist. He lived for long periods in southeastern Asia, the United States of America, and Europe along Mediterranean Sea as well as England. His fiction embraces the Malayan trilogy ( The Long Day Wanes ) on the dying days of empire in the east. The Enderby quartet concerns a poet and his muse. Nothing like the Sun re-creates love life of William Shakespeare. He explores the nature of evil with Earthly Powers , a panoramic saga of the 20th century. He published studies of James Joyce, Ernest Miller Hemingway, Shakespeare, and David Herbert Lawrence. He produced the treatises Language Made Plain and A Mouthful of Air . His journalism proliferated in several languages. He translated and adapted Cyrano de Bergerac , Oedipus the King , and Carmen for the stage. He scripted Jesus of Nazareth and Moses the Lawgiver for the screen. He invented the prehistoric language, spoken in Quest for Fire . He composed the Sinfoni Melayu , the Symphony (No. 3) in C , and the opera Blooms of Dublin .
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 30 of 34 reviews
July 1, 2017
Anthony Burgess admitted in an interview that he pumped this book out in just two weeks because he needed the money. He could only do that because as a reviewer for The Yorkshire Post he reviewed 350 books in just over two years. It is also true that he liberally plagiarized for the first part of this book. This is less shocking than it might as he plagiarized from himself, in this case, his earlier study The Novel Today(1963). Nevertheless, this remains an interesting introduction from a thoughtful novelist to novels Burgess considered either under-appreciated or "too soon forgotten."
Of the 99 I had read just 19 so this has done the job in making me aware of many books I have never heard of that Burgess's brief review indicates to be well worth reading, shining a light on books published between 1939 and 1984.
The list, for those interested:
Of the 99 I had read just 19 so this has done the job in making me aware of many books I have never heard of that Burgess's brief review indicates to be well worth reading, shining a light on books published between 1939 and 1984.
The list, for those interested:
Burgess's list of the best 99 novels published in English from 1939 to 1984
Achebe, Chinua - A Man of the People - (1966)
Aldiss, Brian - Life in the West (1980)
Amis, Kingsley - Lucky Jim (1954)
Amis, Kingsley - The Anti-Death League (1966)
Baldwin, James - Another Country (1962)
Ballard, J.G. - The Unlimited Dream Company (1979)
Barth, John - Giles Goat-Boy (1966)
Bellow, Saul - The Victim (1947)
Bellow, Saul - Humboldt's Gift (1975)
Bowen, Elizabeth - The Heat of the Day (1949)
Bradbury, Malcolm - The History Man (1975)
Braine, John - Room at the Top (1957)
Cary, Joyce - The Horse's Mouth (1944)
Chandler, Raymond - The Long Goodbye (1953)
Compton-Burnett, Ivy - The Mighty and Their Fall (1961)
Cooper, William - Scenes from Provincial Life (1950)
Davies, Robertson - The Rebel Angels (1982)
Deighton, Len - Bomber (1970)
Durrell, Lawrence - The Alexandria Quartet (1957)
Ellison, Ralph - Invisible Man (1952)
Faulkner, William - The Mansion (1959)
Fleming, Ian - Goldfinger (1959)
Fowles, John - The French Lieutenant's Woman (1969)
Frayn, Michael - Sweet Dreams (1973)
Golding, William - The Spire (1964)
Gordimer, Nadine - The Late Bourgeois World (1966)
Gray, Alasdair - Lanark (1981)
Green, Henry - Party Going (1939)
Greene, Graham - The Power and the Glory (1940)
Greene, Graham - The Heart of the Matter (1948)
Harris, Wilson - Heartland (1964)
Hartley, L.P. - Facial Justice (1960)
Heller, Joseph - Catch-22 (1961)
Hemingway, Ernest - For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940)
Hemingway, Ernest - Old Man and the Sea (1952)
Hoban, Russell - Riddley Walker (1980)
Hughes, Richard - The Fox in the Attic (1961)
Huxley, Aldous - After Many a Summer (1939)
Huxley, Aldous - Ape and Essence (1948)
Huxley, Aldous - Island (1962)
Isherwood, Christopher - A Single Man (1964)
Johnson, Pamela Hansford - An Error of Judgement (1962)
Jong, Erica - How to Save Your Own Life (1977)
Joyce, James - Finnegans Wake (1939)
Lessing, Doris - The Golden Notebook (1962)
Lodge, David - How Far Can You Go? (1980)
Lowry, Malcolm - Under the Volcano (1947)
MacInnes, Colin - The London Novels (1957)
Mailer, Norman - The Naked and the Dead (1948)
Mailer, Norman - Ancient Evenings (1983)
Malamud, Bernard - The Assistant (1957)
Malamud, Bernard - Dubin's Lives (1979)
Manning, Olivia - The Balkans Trilogy (1960)
Maugham, Somerset - The Razor's Edge (1944)
McCarthy, Mary - The Groves of Academe (1952)
Moore, Brian - The Doctor's Wife (1976)
Murdoch, Iris - The Bell (1958)
Nabokov, Vladimir - Pale Fire (1962)
Nabokov, Vladimir - The Defence (1964)
Naipaul, V.S. - A Bend in the River (1979)
Narayan, R.K. - The Vendor of Sweets (1967)
Nye, Robert - Falstaff (1976)
O'Brien, Flann - At Swim-Two-Birds (1939)
O'Connor, Flannery - Wise Blood (1952)
O'Hara, John - The Lockwood Concern (1965)
Orwell, George - Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949)
Peake, Mervyn - Titus Groan (1946)
Percy, Walker - The Last Gentleman (1966)
Plunkett, James - Farewell Companions (1977)
Powell, Anthony - A Dance to the Music of Time (1951)
Priestley, J.B. - The Image Men (1968)
Pynchon, Thomas - Gravity's Rainbow (1973)
Richler, Mordecai - Cocksure (1968)
Roberts, Keith - Pavane (1968)
Roth, Phillip - Portnoy's Complaint (1969)
Salinger, J.D. - The Catcher in the Rye (1951)
Sansom, William - The Body (1949)
Schulberg, Budd - The Disenchanted (1950)
Scott, Paul - Staying On (1977)
Shute, Nevil - No Highway (1948)
Sillitoe, Alan - Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1958)
Snow, C.P. - Strangers and Brothers (1940)
Spark, Muriel - The Girls of Slender Means (1963)
Spark, Muriel - The Mandelbaum Gate (1965)
Styron, William - Sophie's Choice (1979)
Theroux, Alexander - Darconville's Cat (1981)
Theroux, Paul - The Mosquito Coast (1981)
Toole, John Kennedy - A Confederacy of Dunces (1980)
Updike, John - The Coup (1978)
Vidal, Gore - Creation (1981)
Warner, Rex - The Aerodrome (1941)
Waugh, Evelyn - Brideshead Revisited (1945)
Waugh, Evelyn - Sword of Honor (1952)
White, T.H. - The Once and Future King (1958)
White, Patrick - Riders in the Chariot (1961)
Williamson, Henry - A Chronicle of Ancient Sunlight (1951)
Wilson, Angus - The Old Men at the Zoo (1961)
Wilson, Angus - Late Call (1964)
Wouk, Herman - The Caine Mutiny (1951)
June 17, 2023
Notable omissions:
Charles Bukowski
Philip.K.Dick
Surprising inclusions:
Ian Fleming
Raymond Chandler
Herman Wouk
A pleasant surprise:
VS Naipaul (he rarely gets included in any list)
Charles Bukowski
Philip.K.Dick
Surprising inclusions:
Ian Fleming
Raymond Chandler
Herman Wouk
A pleasant surprise:
VS Naipaul (he rarely gets included in any list)
May 12, 2025
Occasionally slightly tossed-off and prone to saying 'we' when it means 'I', but a good pocket book to have, as Burgess is the perfect writer for it - someone who reads and likes a lot of novels, and only very seldom the sorts of novels you'd expect him to like as a Catholic conservative with bad, hoary opinions on most non-literary things.
October 19, 2014
I'm going out on a limb here... This is the most useful guide you'll find to reading material in the English-speaking world in the period from the outbreak of WW2 to the year of Orwell's dystopia. He may have had his faults as a novelist but as a critic Burgess was discerning and omniscient. I've even got two copies - one in England and one in Brittany!
July 7, 2017
Way back when this came out I was a middling (later: flailing) engineering student looking for a way somewheres else. This book was invaluable to me in broadening my horizons. As I am a slow reader I never got to all that many of the authors he lists; it was more of a sense of his having constructed a personal aesthetic and making an argument for it that intrigued me most:
Thus did Mr. Burgess immediately become a touchstone of mine. Looking at the book now, and my little self-congratulating checkmarks next to the books from back then, I have to smile at those that sailed under my radar all these years, and which I have still yet to read (Alasdair Gray, Flann O'Brien, Alexander Theroux...), those whom I immediately embraced with perhaps excessive enthusiasm—but which were the perfect writers for the younger me (David Lodge, Robertson Davies, Salinger, Murdoch, Maugham...), and those who deserve more than a re-read (Joyce, Styron, Bellow—not to mention Burgess himself). If anyone ever wants to create a group reading books from this list, count me in!
[The NYT printed the Introduction verbatim (so far as I can tell) and the list here: http://www.nytimes.com/books/97/11/30...]
I now tread dangerous ground. A novel ought to leave in the reader's mind a sort of philosophical residue. A view of life has been indirectly propounded that seems new, even surprising. The novelist has not preached: the didactic has no place in good fiction. But he has clarified some aspect of private or public morality that was never so clear before. As novels are about the ways in which human beings behave, they tend to imply a judgement of behaviour, which means that the novel is what the symphony or painting or sculpture is not —namely, a form steeped in morality. [...And] I do know that we carry a scale of values whereby we know that Anna Karenina is a great novel and The Carpetbaggers an inferior one, and that our standards have something to do with the management of language and concern with the human personality. Sometimes the management of language will be so remarkable that we will be prepared to forgive the lack of human interest; sometimes character interest will condone verbal and structural incompetence. Judging a novel is a rule-of-thumb matter; we cannot appeal to any aesthetic tribunal which will lay down universal laws.
Thus did Mr. Burgess immediately become a touchstone of mine. Looking at the book now, and my little self-congratulating checkmarks next to the books from back then, I have to smile at those that sailed under my radar all these years, and which I have still yet to read (Alasdair Gray, Flann O'Brien, Alexander Theroux...), those whom I immediately embraced with perhaps excessive enthusiasm—but which were the perfect writers for the younger me (David Lodge, Robertson Davies, Salinger, Murdoch, Maugham...), and those who deserve more than a re-read (Joyce, Styron, Bellow—not to mention Burgess himself). If anyone ever wants to create a group reading books from this list, count me in!
[The NYT printed the Introduction verbatim (so far as I can tell) and the list here: http://www.nytimes.com/books/97/11/30...]
December 18, 2025
کتاب برای من خواننده ایرانی نیست
شایدم برای من نیست
خیلی از کتاب هایی که معرفی شده بود حتی به گوشم نخورده و با سلیقه من هم جور نیست
البته شاید اگر نویسنده به جای چرت و پرت گفتن یه کم روی معرفی خود کتابا تمرکز میکرد با سلیقهم جور در میومدن. ترجمه هم جالب نبود. حالا چه اصراری به استفاده از کلمات اولترا ادبیه؟ سردرد گرفتم واقعا
بعضی از کتابایی که معرفی شد رو خونده بودم. و واقعا بعضیاشونو با جون و دل دوست داشتم ولی خوندن متن نویسنده باعث شد حالم ازشون بهم بخوره. کم از پیرمرد و دریا بدم میومد. نویسنده هم اومد یه چیزی بهش اضافه کرد
لازم به گفتن نیست که بخش آخر کتاب رو حتی نگاه هم نکردم =/
چرت محض
حیف قفسه های زیبای کتابخونه که با همچین جهنمی پر بشه
شایدم برای من نیست
خیلی از کتاب هایی که معرفی شده بود حتی به گوشم نخورده و با سلیقه من هم جور نیست
البته شاید اگر نویسنده به جای چرت و پرت گفتن یه کم روی معرفی خود کتابا تمرکز میکرد با سلیقهم جور در میومدن. ترجمه هم جالب نبود. حالا چه اصراری به استفاده از کلمات اولترا ادبیه؟ سردرد گرفتم واقعا
بعضی از کتابایی که معرفی شد رو خونده بودم. و واقعا بعضیاشونو با جون و دل دوست داشتم ولی خوندن متن نویسنده باعث شد حالم ازشون بهم بخوره. کم از پیرمرد و دریا بدم میومد. نویسنده هم اومد یه چیزی بهش اضافه کرد
لازم به گفتن نیست که بخش آخر کتاب رو حتی نگاه هم نکردم =/
چرت محض
حیف قفسه های زیبای کتابخونه که با همچین جهنمی پر بشه
December 11, 2023
I've only read 17 (#) of the 99 books and 28 of the 87 authors so far ...
Burgess organized his selections by year:
Green, Henry - Party Going (1939)
Huxley, Aldous - After Many a Summer (1939)
Joyce, James - Finnegans Wake (1939)
O'Brien, Flann - At Swim-Two-Birds (1939)
Greene, Graham - The Power and the Glory (1940)
# Hemingway, Ernest - For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940)
Snow, C.P. - Strangers and Brothers (1940-70)
Warner, Rex - The Aerodrome (1941)
Cary, Joyce - The Horse's Mouth (1944)
Maugham, Somerset - The Razor's Edge (1944)
Waugh, Evelyn - Brideshead Revisited (1945)
Peake, Mervyn - Titus Groan (1946)
Bellow, Saul - The Victim (1947)
Lowry, Malcolm - Under the Volcano (1947)
Greene, Graham - The Heart of the Matter (1948)
# Huxley, Aldous - Ape and Essence (1948)
Mailer, Norman - The Naked and the Dead (1948)
Shute, Nevil - No Highway (1948)
Bowen, Elizabeth - The Heat of the Day (1949)
# Orwell, George - Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949)
Sansom, William - The Body (1949)
Cooper, William - Scenes from Provincial Life (1950)
Schulberg, Budd - The Disenchanted (1950)
Powell, Anthony - A Dance to the Music of Time (1951-75)
# Salinger, J.D. - The Catcher in the Rye (1951)
Williamson, Henry - A Chronicle of Ancient Sunlight (1951-69)
Wouk, Herman - The Caine Mutiny (1951)
Ellison, Ralph - Invisible Man (1952)
# Hemingway, Ernest - Old Man and the Sea (1952)
McCarthy, Mary - The Groves of Academe (1952)
# O'Connor, Flannery - Wise Blood (1952)
Waugh, Evelyn - Sword of Honor (1952-61)
# Chandler, Raymond - The Long Goodbye (1953)
Amis, Kingsley - Lucky Jim (1954)
Braine, John - Room at the Top (1957)
Durrell, Lawrence - The Alexandria Quartet (1957-60)
MacInnes, Colin - The London Novels (1957-60)
# Malamud, Bernard - The Assistant (1957)
Murdoch, Iris - The Bell (1958)
Sillitoe, Alan - Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1958)
White, T.H. - The Once and Future King (1958)
Faulkner, William - The Mansion (1959)
Fleming, Ian - Goldfinger (1959)
Hartley, L.P. - Facial Justice (1960)
Manning, Olivia - The Balkans Trilogy (1960-65)
Compton-Burnett, Ivy - The Mighty and Their Fall (1961)
# Heller, Joseph - Catch-22 (1961)
Hughes, Richard - The Fox in the Attic (1961)
White, Patrick - Riders in the Chariot (1961)
Wilson, Angus - The Old Men at the Zoo (1961)
Baldwin, James - Another Country (1962)
Hansford Johnson, Pamela - An Error of Judgement (1962)
Huxley, Aldous - Island (1962)
Lessing, Doris - The Golden Notebook (1962)
Nabokov, Vladimir - Pale Fire (1962)
# Spark, Muriel - The Girls of Slender Means (1963)
Golding, William - The Spire (1964)
Harris, Wilson - Heartland (1964)
Isherwood, Christopher - A Single Man (1964)
Nabokov, Vladimir - The Defence (1964)
Wilson, Angus - Late Call (1964)
O'Hara, John - The Lockwood Concern (1965)
Spark, Muriel - The Mandelbaum Gate (1965)
# Achebe, Chinua - A Man of the People - (1966)
Amis, Kingsley - The Anti-Death League (1966)
Barth, John - Giles Goat-Boy (1966)
# Gordimer, Nadine - The Late Bourgeois World (1966)
Percy, Walker - The Last Gentleman (1966)
Narayan, R.K. - The Vendor of Sweets (1967)
Priestley, J.B. - The Image Men (1968)
Richler, Mordecai - Cocksure (1968)
# Roberts, Keith - Pavane (1968)
Fowles, John - The French Lieutenant's Woman (1969)
Roth, Phillip - Portnoy's Complaint (1969)
Deighton, Len - Bomber (1970)
Frayn, Michael - Sweet Dreams (1973)
Pynchon, Thomas - Gravity's Rainbow (1973)
Bellow, Saul - Humboldt's Gift (1975)
Bradbury, Malcolm - The History Man (1975)
Moore, Brian - The Doctor's Wife (1976)
Nye, Robert - Falstaff (1976)
Jong, Erica - How to Save Your Own Life (1977)
Plunkett, James - Farewell Companions (1977)
Scott, Paul - Staying On (1977)
# Updike, John - The Coup (1978)
Ballard, J.G. - The Unlimited Dream Company (1979)
Malamud, Bernard - Dubin's Lives (1979)
Naipaul, V.S. - A Bend in the River (1979)
# Styron, William - Sophie's Choice (1979)
Aldiss, Brian - Life in the West (1980)
# Hoban, Russell - Riddley Walker (1980)
Lodge, David - How Far Can You Go? (1980)
Toole, John Kennedy - A Confederacy of Dunces (1980)
Gray, Alasdair - Lanark (1981)
Theroux, Alexander - Darconville's Cat (1981)
Theroux, Paul - The Mosquito Coast (1981)
Vidal, Gore - Creation (1981)
Davies, Robertson - The Rebel Angels (1982)
# Mailer, Norman - Ancient Evenings (1983)
==========
99 novels but 87 authors ... those with multiple selections:
Amis, Kingsley
Bellow, Saul
Greene, Graham
Hemingway, Ernest
Huxley, Aldous (3 selections)
Mailer, Norman
Malamud, Bernard
Nabokov, Vladimir
Spark, Muriel
Waugh, Evelyn
Wilson, Angus
==========
alphabetically:
# Achebe, Chinua - A Man of the People (1966)
Aldiss, Brian - Life in the West (1980)
Amis, Kingsley - Lucky Jim (1954)
Amis, Kingsley - The Anti-Death League (1966)
Baldwin, James - Another Country (1962)
Ballard, J.G. - The Unlimited Dream Company (1979)
Barth, John - Giles Goat-Boy (1966)
Bellow, Saul - The Victim (1947)
Bellow, Saul - Humboldt's Gift (1975)
Bowen, Elizabeth - The Heat of the Day (1949)
Bradbury, Malcolm - The History Man (1975)
Braine, John - Room at the Top (1957)
Cary, Joyce - The Horse's Mouth (1944)
# Chandler, Raymond - The Long Goodbye (1953)
Compton-Burnett, Ivy - The Mighty and Their Fall (1961)
Cooper, William - Scenes from Provincial Life (1950)
Davies, Robertson - The Rebel Angels (1982)
Deighton, Len - Bomber (1970)
Durrell, Lawrence - The Alexandria Quartet (1957)
Ellison, Ralph - Invisible Man (1952)
Faulkner, William - The Mansion (1959)
Fleming, Ian - Goldfinger (1959)
Fowles, John - The French Lieutenant's Woman (1969)
Frayn, Michael - Sweet Dreams (1973)
Golding, William - The Spire (1964)
# Gordimer, Nadine - The Late Bourgeois World (1966)
Gray, Alasdair - Lanark (1981)
Green, Henry - Party Going (1939)
Greene, Graham - The Power and the Glory (1940)
Greene, Graham - The Heart of the Matter (1948)
Hansford Johnson, Pamela - An Error of Judgement (1962)
Harris, Wilson - Heartland (1964)
Hartley, L.P. - Facial Justice (1960)
# Heller, Joseph - Catch-22 (1961)
# Hemingway, Ernest - For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940)
# Hemingway, Ernest - Old Man and the Sea (1952)
# Hoban, Russell - Riddley Walker (1980)
Hughes, Richard - The Fox in the Attic (1961)
Huxley, Aldous - After Many a Summer (1939)
# Huxley, Aldous - Ape and Essence (1948)
Huxley, Aldous - Island (1962)
Isherwood, Christopher - A Single Man (1964)
Jong, Erica - How to Save Your Own Life (1977)
Joyce, James - Finnegans Wake (1939)
Lessing, Doris - The Golden Notebook (1962)
Lodge, David - How Far Can You Go? (1980)
Lowry, Malcolm - Under the Volcano (1947)
MacInnes, Colin - The London Novels (1957)
Mailer, Norman - The Naked and the Dead (1948)
# Mailer, Norman - Ancient Evenings (1983)
# Malamud, Bernard - The Assistant (1957)
Malamud, Bernard - Dubin's Lives (1979)
Manning, Olivia - The Balkans Trilogy (1960)
Maugham, Somerset - The Razor's Edge (1944)
McCarthy, Mary - The Groves of Academe (1952)
Moore, Brian - The Doctor's Wife (1976)
Murdoch, Iris - The Bell (1958)
Nabokov, Vladimir - Pale Fire (1962)
Nabokov, Vladimir - The Defence (1964)
Naipaul, V.S. - A Bend in the River (1979)
Narayan, R.K. - The Vendor of Sweets (1967)
Nye, Robert - Falstaff (1976)
O'Brien, Flann - At Swim-Two-Birds (1939)
# O'Connor, Flannery - Wise Blood (1952)
O'Hara, John - The Lockwood Concern (1965)
# Orwell, George - Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949)
Peake, Mervyn - Titus Groan (1946)
Percy, Walker - The Last Gentleman (1966)
Plunkett, James - Farewell Companions (1977)
Powell, Anthony - A Dance to the Music of Time (1951)
Priestley, J.B. - The Image Men (1968)
Pynchon, Thomas - Gravity's Rainbow (1973)
Richler, Mordecai - Cocksure (1968)
# Roberts, Keith - Pavane (1968)
Roth, Phillip - Portnoy's Complaint (1969)
# Salinger, J.D. - The Catcher in the Rye (1951)
Sansom, William - The Body (1949)
Schulberg, Budd - The Disenchanted (1950)
Scott, Paul - Staying On (1977)
Shute, Nevil - No Highway (1948)
Sillitoe, Alan - Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1958)
Snow, C.P. - Strangers and Brothers (1940)
# Spark, Muriel - The Girls of Slender Means (1963)
Spark, Muriel - The Mandelbaum Gate (1965)
# Styron, William - Sophie's Choice (1979)
Theroux, Alexander - Darconville's Cat (1981)
Theroux, Paul - The Mosquito Coast (1981)
Toole, John Kennedy - A Confederacy of Dunces (1980)
# Updike, John - The Coup (1978)
Vidal, Gore - Creation (1981)
Warner, Rex - The Aerodrome (1941)
Waugh, Evelyn - Brideshead Revisited (1945)
Waugh, Evelyn - Sword of Honor (1952)
White, T.H. - The Once and Future King (1958)
White, Patrick - Riders in the Chariot (1961)
Williamson, Henry - A Chronicle of Ancient Sunlight (1951)
Wilson, Angus - The Old Men at the Zoo (1961)
Wilson, Angus - Late Call (1964)
Wouk, Herman - The Caine Mutiny (1951)
==========
Burgess's mildly irreverent introductory amusing musings are worth the price of admission: on what makes a novel ("...if a work of fiction can be bound in hard covers, its pages stitched and not stapled, we had better accept that it is a novel. This is a matter of convention only ... I once had the notion of writing a fiction of a dying man who sees the unfolded Times on his bed and deliriously traces all his past life as though it were the content of that newspaper - news items, editorials, crossword puzzle, everything. If I did not write that book it is because the novel is a commercial form that is not intended to lose money."); experiences as a reviewer ("...it was clear that certain novels had to be reviewed whether I wished to review them or not."); why 99? ("...The 99 novels I have chosen I have chosen with some, though not with total, confidence... there is a great deal of known excellence not represented here ... the reader can decide on his own hundredth. He may even choose one of my own novels."); admittedly neglected popular novels ("...They do not pretend to be Henry James; they expect, unlike James, to make money... Professors of literature neglect certain works because they perform their declared function all too thoroughly ... there are no symbols to dig out..."); characterization ("...no novelist who has created a credible personage can ever be quite sure what that personage will do..."); time and space ("...it often happens that a created background is more magical than the real thing..."); dialogue ("... one can forgive a great deal if only the characters sound like people ...too much pouring out of information cribbed directly from an encyclopaedia substitutes for real speech..."); narrative shape ("...the characters of an art novel resist the structure which their creators try to impose ... they do not even want the book to come to an end and so they have, sometimes arbitrarily, as in E. M Forster, to be killed off."); authorial philosophy and/or morality ("...I now tread on dangerous ground ... it is hard to like an author who knows too much and shows off ... but we have a right to intelligence, knowledge of the human soul, a certain decency ... this does not mean the author has to be nice to their characters..."); various mea culpas ("...as you start on my list, you will discover that few of these attributes seem to apply ... judging a novel is a rule-of-thumb matter; we cannot appeal to any aesthetic tribunal which will lay down universal laws ... it is in order to regret that some English-speaking countries be represented more than others ... if you disagree violently with some of my choices I shall be pleased...").
The primary reason for reading this probably quickly cobbled together publication, undoubtedly assembled from preexisting sources like lectures and reviews, is the focused intelligence of Burgess's pithy observations. The second is to get some possible future great books to read on the radar (turns out there's a lot, humbling considering that the time period, 1939-83, is confined to less than half a century). The third of course is to consider my own list:
1st, Burgess's choices I agree with:
Huxley, Aldous - Ape and Essence (1948)
O'Connor, Flannery - Wise Blood (1952)
Malamud, Bernard - The Assistant (1957)
Spark, Muriel - The Girls of Slender Means (1963)
Gordimer, Nadine - The Late Bourgeois World (1966)
Achebe, Chinua - A Man of the People (1966)
Hoban, Russell - Riddley Walker (1980)
2nd, additional choices by those authors:
O'Connor, Flannery - The Violent Bear It Away (1960)
Spark, Muriel - The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1961)
Spark, Muriel - Loitering with Intent (1981)
Malamud, Bernard - God's Grace (1982)
3rd, same authors, different books:
Waugh, Evelyn - The Loved One (1948)
Chandler, Raymond - The Little Sister (1949)
Nabokov, Vladimir - Lolita (1955)
Greene, Graham - The Quiet American (1955)
Greene, Graham - A Burnt-Out Case (1960)
4th, my own additional picks:
McCullers, Carson - Reflections in a Golden Eye (1941)
Steinbeck, John - Cannery Row (1945)
Steinbeck, John - The Pearl (1947)
Wodehouse, P. G. - The Mating Season (1949)
Jackson, Shirley - Hangsaman (1951)
Highsmith, Patricia - The Talented Mr. Ripley (1955)
Tevis, Walter - The Hustler (1959)
Williams, John - Butcher's Crossing (1960)
Vonnegut, Kurt - Mother Night (1961)
Leonard, Elmore - Hombre (1961)
Burgess, Anthony - A Clockwork Orange (1962)
Vonnegut, Kurt - Cat's Cradle (1963)
Thompson, Jim - The Grifters (1963)
Williams, John - Stoner (1965)
Rhys, Jean - Wide Sargasso Sea (1966)
McMurtry, Larry - The Last Picture Show (1966)
Kavan, Anna - Ice (1967)
Savage, Thomas - The Power of the Dog (1967)
Portis, Charles - True Grit (1968)
Le Guin, Ursula K. - The Left Hand of Darkness (1969)
Vonnegut, Kurt - Slaughterhouse Five (1969)
Gardner, John - Grendel (1971)
Higgins, George V. - The Friends of Eddie Coyle (1971)
Williams, John - Augustus (1972)
Morrison, Toni - Sula (1973)
Tyler, Anne - Celestial Navigation (1974)
Le Guin, Ursula K. - The Dispossessed (1974)
Wolfe, Gene - Peace (1975)
Russ, Joanna - We Who Are About To ... (1976)
Oates, Joyce Carol - The Triumph of the Spider Monkey (1976)
Fitzgerald, Penelope - The Bookshop (1978)
Crowley, John - Engine Summer (1979)
Priest, Christopher - The Affirmation (1981)
Crowley, John - Little, Big (1979)
Robinson, Marilynne - Housekeeping (1980)
Walker, Alice - The Color Purple (1982)
Ingalls, Rachel - Mrs. Caliban (1982)
Tyler, Anne - Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant (1982)
Tevis, Walter - The Queen's Gambit (1983)
random observations: I'm obviously light on the 40s and 50s ... making this list brought to my attention that when it comes to 'literary' fiction most of my favorites are written in languages other than English but this is turned on its head when it comes to my fantasy, SF and crime fiction favorites ... I even had to dip into my 4-stars to balance out the list ... on the other hand, though I am not well read enough to even pick 55 novels or so I easily and genuinely found many more novels by more women writers to include on my list than Burgess did on his ... stretching the criteria on the early side would have included some of the usual suspects like The Great Gatsby, A Farewell to Arms, The Sound and the Fury, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes ... just a handful of years on the late side would have let me include books by Vonnegut, Tyler, Oates I favor more than those on my list, a very famous Atwood, a Winterson, a Penelope Lively, the only novel from New Zealand that I have read, the only novel by Updike I would consider ...
Burgess organized his selections by year:
Green, Henry - Party Going (1939)
Huxley, Aldous - After Many a Summer (1939)
Joyce, James - Finnegans Wake (1939)
O'Brien, Flann - At Swim-Two-Birds (1939)
Greene, Graham - The Power and the Glory (1940)
# Hemingway, Ernest - For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940)
Snow, C.P. - Strangers and Brothers (1940-70)
Warner, Rex - The Aerodrome (1941)
Cary, Joyce - The Horse's Mouth (1944)
Maugham, Somerset - The Razor's Edge (1944)
Waugh, Evelyn - Brideshead Revisited (1945)
Peake, Mervyn - Titus Groan (1946)
Bellow, Saul - The Victim (1947)
Lowry, Malcolm - Under the Volcano (1947)
Greene, Graham - The Heart of the Matter (1948)
# Huxley, Aldous - Ape and Essence (1948)
Mailer, Norman - The Naked and the Dead (1948)
Shute, Nevil - No Highway (1948)
Bowen, Elizabeth - The Heat of the Day (1949)
# Orwell, George - Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949)
Sansom, William - The Body (1949)
Cooper, William - Scenes from Provincial Life (1950)
Schulberg, Budd - The Disenchanted (1950)
Powell, Anthony - A Dance to the Music of Time (1951-75)
# Salinger, J.D. - The Catcher in the Rye (1951)
Williamson, Henry - A Chronicle of Ancient Sunlight (1951-69)
Wouk, Herman - The Caine Mutiny (1951)
Ellison, Ralph - Invisible Man (1952)
# Hemingway, Ernest - Old Man and the Sea (1952)
McCarthy, Mary - The Groves of Academe (1952)
# O'Connor, Flannery - Wise Blood (1952)
Waugh, Evelyn - Sword of Honor (1952-61)
# Chandler, Raymond - The Long Goodbye (1953)
Amis, Kingsley - Lucky Jim (1954)
Braine, John - Room at the Top (1957)
Durrell, Lawrence - The Alexandria Quartet (1957-60)
MacInnes, Colin - The London Novels (1957-60)
# Malamud, Bernard - The Assistant (1957)
Murdoch, Iris - The Bell (1958)
Sillitoe, Alan - Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1958)
White, T.H. - The Once and Future King (1958)
Faulkner, William - The Mansion (1959)
Fleming, Ian - Goldfinger (1959)
Hartley, L.P. - Facial Justice (1960)
Manning, Olivia - The Balkans Trilogy (1960-65)
Compton-Burnett, Ivy - The Mighty and Their Fall (1961)
# Heller, Joseph - Catch-22 (1961)
Hughes, Richard - The Fox in the Attic (1961)
White, Patrick - Riders in the Chariot (1961)
Wilson, Angus - The Old Men at the Zoo (1961)
Baldwin, James - Another Country (1962)
Hansford Johnson, Pamela - An Error of Judgement (1962)
Huxley, Aldous - Island (1962)
Lessing, Doris - The Golden Notebook (1962)
Nabokov, Vladimir - Pale Fire (1962)
# Spark, Muriel - The Girls of Slender Means (1963)
Golding, William - The Spire (1964)
Harris, Wilson - Heartland (1964)
Isherwood, Christopher - A Single Man (1964)
Nabokov, Vladimir - The Defence (1964)
Wilson, Angus - Late Call (1964)
O'Hara, John - The Lockwood Concern (1965)
Spark, Muriel - The Mandelbaum Gate (1965)
# Achebe, Chinua - A Man of the People - (1966)
Amis, Kingsley - The Anti-Death League (1966)
Barth, John - Giles Goat-Boy (1966)
# Gordimer, Nadine - The Late Bourgeois World (1966)
Percy, Walker - The Last Gentleman (1966)
Narayan, R.K. - The Vendor of Sweets (1967)
Priestley, J.B. - The Image Men (1968)
Richler, Mordecai - Cocksure (1968)
# Roberts, Keith - Pavane (1968)
Fowles, John - The French Lieutenant's Woman (1969)
Roth, Phillip - Portnoy's Complaint (1969)
Deighton, Len - Bomber (1970)
Frayn, Michael - Sweet Dreams (1973)
Pynchon, Thomas - Gravity's Rainbow (1973)
Bellow, Saul - Humboldt's Gift (1975)
Bradbury, Malcolm - The History Man (1975)
Moore, Brian - The Doctor's Wife (1976)
Nye, Robert - Falstaff (1976)
Jong, Erica - How to Save Your Own Life (1977)
Plunkett, James - Farewell Companions (1977)
Scott, Paul - Staying On (1977)
# Updike, John - The Coup (1978)
Ballard, J.G. - The Unlimited Dream Company (1979)
Malamud, Bernard - Dubin's Lives (1979)
Naipaul, V.S. - A Bend in the River (1979)
# Styron, William - Sophie's Choice (1979)
Aldiss, Brian - Life in the West (1980)
# Hoban, Russell - Riddley Walker (1980)
Lodge, David - How Far Can You Go? (1980)
Toole, John Kennedy - A Confederacy of Dunces (1980)
Gray, Alasdair - Lanark (1981)
Theroux, Alexander - Darconville's Cat (1981)
Theroux, Paul - The Mosquito Coast (1981)
Vidal, Gore - Creation (1981)
Davies, Robertson - The Rebel Angels (1982)
# Mailer, Norman - Ancient Evenings (1983)
==========
99 novels but 87 authors ... those with multiple selections:
Amis, Kingsley
Bellow, Saul
Greene, Graham
Hemingway, Ernest
Huxley, Aldous (3 selections)
Mailer, Norman
Malamud, Bernard
Nabokov, Vladimir
Spark, Muriel
Waugh, Evelyn
Wilson, Angus
==========
alphabetically:
# Achebe, Chinua - A Man of the People (1966)
Aldiss, Brian - Life in the West (1980)
Amis, Kingsley - Lucky Jim (1954)
Amis, Kingsley - The Anti-Death League (1966)
Baldwin, James - Another Country (1962)
Ballard, J.G. - The Unlimited Dream Company (1979)
Barth, John - Giles Goat-Boy (1966)
Bellow, Saul - The Victim (1947)
Bellow, Saul - Humboldt's Gift (1975)
Bowen, Elizabeth - The Heat of the Day (1949)
Bradbury, Malcolm - The History Man (1975)
Braine, John - Room at the Top (1957)
Cary, Joyce - The Horse's Mouth (1944)
# Chandler, Raymond - The Long Goodbye (1953)
Compton-Burnett, Ivy - The Mighty and Their Fall (1961)
Cooper, William - Scenes from Provincial Life (1950)
Davies, Robertson - The Rebel Angels (1982)
Deighton, Len - Bomber (1970)
Durrell, Lawrence - The Alexandria Quartet (1957)
Ellison, Ralph - Invisible Man (1952)
Faulkner, William - The Mansion (1959)
Fleming, Ian - Goldfinger (1959)
Fowles, John - The French Lieutenant's Woman (1969)
Frayn, Michael - Sweet Dreams (1973)
Golding, William - The Spire (1964)
# Gordimer, Nadine - The Late Bourgeois World (1966)
Gray, Alasdair - Lanark (1981)
Green, Henry - Party Going (1939)
Greene, Graham - The Power and the Glory (1940)
Greene, Graham - The Heart of the Matter (1948)
Hansford Johnson, Pamela - An Error of Judgement (1962)
Harris, Wilson - Heartland (1964)
Hartley, L.P. - Facial Justice (1960)
# Heller, Joseph - Catch-22 (1961)
# Hemingway, Ernest - For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940)
# Hemingway, Ernest - Old Man and the Sea (1952)
# Hoban, Russell - Riddley Walker (1980)
Hughes, Richard - The Fox in the Attic (1961)
Huxley, Aldous - After Many a Summer (1939)
# Huxley, Aldous - Ape and Essence (1948)
Huxley, Aldous - Island (1962)
Isherwood, Christopher - A Single Man (1964)
Jong, Erica - How to Save Your Own Life (1977)
Joyce, James - Finnegans Wake (1939)
Lessing, Doris - The Golden Notebook (1962)
Lodge, David - How Far Can You Go? (1980)
Lowry, Malcolm - Under the Volcano (1947)
MacInnes, Colin - The London Novels (1957)
Mailer, Norman - The Naked and the Dead (1948)
# Mailer, Norman - Ancient Evenings (1983)
# Malamud, Bernard - The Assistant (1957)
Malamud, Bernard - Dubin's Lives (1979)
Manning, Olivia - The Balkans Trilogy (1960)
Maugham, Somerset - The Razor's Edge (1944)
McCarthy, Mary - The Groves of Academe (1952)
Moore, Brian - The Doctor's Wife (1976)
Murdoch, Iris - The Bell (1958)
Nabokov, Vladimir - Pale Fire (1962)
Nabokov, Vladimir - The Defence (1964)
Naipaul, V.S. - A Bend in the River (1979)
Narayan, R.K. - The Vendor of Sweets (1967)
Nye, Robert - Falstaff (1976)
O'Brien, Flann - At Swim-Two-Birds (1939)
# O'Connor, Flannery - Wise Blood (1952)
O'Hara, John - The Lockwood Concern (1965)
# Orwell, George - Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949)
Peake, Mervyn - Titus Groan (1946)
Percy, Walker - The Last Gentleman (1966)
Plunkett, James - Farewell Companions (1977)
Powell, Anthony - A Dance to the Music of Time (1951)
Priestley, J.B. - The Image Men (1968)
Pynchon, Thomas - Gravity's Rainbow (1973)
Richler, Mordecai - Cocksure (1968)
# Roberts, Keith - Pavane (1968)
Roth, Phillip - Portnoy's Complaint (1969)
# Salinger, J.D. - The Catcher in the Rye (1951)
Sansom, William - The Body (1949)
Schulberg, Budd - The Disenchanted (1950)
Scott, Paul - Staying On (1977)
Shute, Nevil - No Highway (1948)
Sillitoe, Alan - Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1958)
Snow, C.P. - Strangers and Brothers (1940)
# Spark, Muriel - The Girls of Slender Means (1963)
Spark, Muriel - The Mandelbaum Gate (1965)
# Styron, William - Sophie's Choice (1979)
Theroux, Alexander - Darconville's Cat (1981)
Theroux, Paul - The Mosquito Coast (1981)
Toole, John Kennedy - A Confederacy of Dunces (1980)
# Updike, John - The Coup (1978)
Vidal, Gore - Creation (1981)
Warner, Rex - The Aerodrome (1941)
Waugh, Evelyn - Brideshead Revisited (1945)
Waugh, Evelyn - Sword of Honor (1952)
White, T.H. - The Once and Future King (1958)
White, Patrick - Riders in the Chariot (1961)
Williamson, Henry - A Chronicle of Ancient Sunlight (1951)
Wilson, Angus - The Old Men at the Zoo (1961)
Wilson, Angus - Late Call (1964)
Wouk, Herman - The Caine Mutiny (1951)
==========
Burgess's mildly irreverent introductory amusing musings are worth the price of admission: on what makes a novel ("...if a work of fiction can be bound in hard covers, its pages stitched and not stapled, we had better accept that it is a novel. This is a matter of convention only ... I once had the notion of writing a fiction of a dying man who sees the unfolded Times on his bed and deliriously traces all his past life as though it were the content of that newspaper - news items, editorials, crossword puzzle, everything. If I did not write that book it is because the novel is a commercial form that is not intended to lose money."); experiences as a reviewer ("...it was clear that certain novels had to be reviewed whether I wished to review them or not."); why 99? ("...The 99 novels I have chosen I have chosen with some, though not with total, confidence... there is a great deal of known excellence not represented here ... the reader can decide on his own hundredth. He may even choose one of my own novels."); admittedly neglected popular novels ("...They do not pretend to be Henry James; they expect, unlike James, to make money... Professors of literature neglect certain works because they perform their declared function all too thoroughly ... there are no symbols to dig out..."); characterization ("...no novelist who has created a credible personage can ever be quite sure what that personage will do..."); time and space ("...it often happens that a created background is more magical than the real thing..."); dialogue ("... one can forgive a great deal if only the characters sound like people ...too much pouring out of information cribbed directly from an encyclopaedia substitutes for real speech..."); narrative shape ("...the characters of an art novel resist the structure which their creators try to impose ... they do not even want the book to come to an end and so they have, sometimes arbitrarily, as in E. M Forster, to be killed off."); authorial philosophy and/or morality ("...I now tread on dangerous ground ... it is hard to like an author who knows too much and shows off ... but we have a right to intelligence, knowledge of the human soul, a certain decency ... this does not mean the author has to be nice to their characters..."); various mea culpas ("...as you start on my list, you will discover that few of these attributes seem to apply ... judging a novel is a rule-of-thumb matter; we cannot appeal to any aesthetic tribunal which will lay down universal laws ... it is in order to regret that some English-speaking countries be represented more than others ... if you disagree violently with some of my choices I shall be pleased...").
The primary reason for reading this probably quickly cobbled together publication, undoubtedly assembled from preexisting sources like lectures and reviews, is the focused intelligence of Burgess's pithy observations. The second is to get some possible future great books to read on the radar (turns out there's a lot, humbling considering that the time period, 1939-83, is confined to less than half a century). The third of course is to consider my own list:
1st, Burgess's choices I agree with:
Huxley, Aldous - Ape and Essence (1948)
O'Connor, Flannery - Wise Blood (1952)
Malamud, Bernard - The Assistant (1957)
Spark, Muriel - The Girls of Slender Means (1963)
Gordimer, Nadine - The Late Bourgeois World (1966)
Achebe, Chinua - A Man of the People (1966)
Hoban, Russell - Riddley Walker (1980)
2nd, additional choices by those authors:
O'Connor, Flannery - The Violent Bear It Away (1960)
Spark, Muriel - The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1961)
Spark, Muriel - Loitering with Intent (1981)
Malamud, Bernard - God's Grace (1982)
3rd, same authors, different books:
Waugh, Evelyn - The Loved One (1948)
Chandler, Raymond - The Little Sister (1949)
Nabokov, Vladimir - Lolita (1955)
Greene, Graham - The Quiet American (1955)
Greene, Graham - A Burnt-Out Case (1960)
4th, my own additional picks:
McCullers, Carson - Reflections in a Golden Eye (1941)
Steinbeck, John - Cannery Row (1945)
Steinbeck, John - The Pearl (1947)
Wodehouse, P. G. - The Mating Season (1949)
Jackson, Shirley - Hangsaman (1951)
Highsmith, Patricia - The Talented Mr. Ripley (1955)
Tevis, Walter - The Hustler (1959)
Williams, John - Butcher's Crossing (1960)
Vonnegut, Kurt - Mother Night (1961)
Leonard, Elmore - Hombre (1961)
Burgess, Anthony - A Clockwork Orange (1962)
Vonnegut, Kurt - Cat's Cradle (1963)
Thompson, Jim - The Grifters (1963)
Williams, John - Stoner (1965)
Rhys, Jean - Wide Sargasso Sea (1966)
McMurtry, Larry - The Last Picture Show (1966)
Kavan, Anna - Ice (1967)
Savage, Thomas - The Power of the Dog (1967)
Portis, Charles - True Grit (1968)
Le Guin, Ursula K. - The Left Hand of Darkness (1969)
Vonnegut, Kurt - Slaughterhouse Five (1969)
Gardner, John - Grendel (1971)
Higgins, George V. - The Friends of Eddie Coyle (1971)
Williams, John - Augustus (1972)
Morrison, Toni - Sula (1973)
Tyler, Anne - Celestial Navigation (1974)
Le Guin, Ursula K. - The Dispossessed (1974)
Wolfe, Gene - Peace (1975)
Russ, Joanna - We Who Are About To ... (1976)
Oates, Joyce Carol - The Triumph of the Spider Monkey (1976)
Fitzgerald, Penelope - The Bookshop (1978)
Crowley, John - Engine Summer (1979)
Priest, Christopher - The Affirmation (1981)
Crowley, John - Little, Big (1979)
Robinson, Marilynne - Housekeeping (1980)
Walker, Alice - The Color Purple (1982)
Ingalls, Rachel - Mrs. Caliban (1982)
Tyler, Anne - Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant (1982)
Tevis, Walter - The Queen's Gambit (1983)
random observations: I'm obviously light on the 40s and 50s ... making this list brought to my attention that when it comes to 'literary' fiction most of my favorites are written in languages other than English but this is turned on its head when it comes to my fantasy, SF and crime fiction favorites ... I even had to dip into my 4-stars to balance out the list ... on the other hand, though I am not well read enough to even pick 55 novels or so I easily and genuinely found many more novels by more women writers to include on my list than Burgess did on his ... stretching the criteria on the early side would have included some of the usual suspects like The Great Gatsby, A Farewell to Arms, The Sound and the Fury, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes ... just a handful of years on the late side would have let me include books by Vonnegut, Tyler, Oates I favor more than those on my list, a very famous Atwood, a Winterson, a Penelope Lively, the only novel from New Zealand that I have read, the only novel by Updike I would consider ...
January 28, 2008
Burgess' book is valuable not because it is anything like an authoratative or comprehensive study of the English-language novel over the 2nd half of the 20th century -- but because it is a very personal glimpse at some of the ideas and stories that helped to shape one of the better novelists of the century, and because it is well-written and fun. Burgess may limit himself to his own language, and mostly to the UK and USA, but he finds a wide number of genres and themes, picks lengthy series and very short works, books that are quite famous and others that are obscure and now hard to find. This is one of my favorite such books and I return to it often, though I confess I haven't yet read many of the books he covers.
November 7, 2025
What an awesome guide. This is a must have for anyone wanting to discover an eclectic mix of the best English literature of the mid 20th century. Burgess does a good job sharing his thoughts on his selections, without giving away their plots or overly demystifying them.
April 21, 2018
A great book for dipping in and out of. Some excellent choices, of course, and it has prompted me to read a dozen or so books which I hadn't heard of beforehand.
I couldn't really give this book any more than three stars as Burgess does drag on and it gets a tad tedious at times. I also understand that he wrote the entire thing in two weeks for money and this shows. However - I did get a different sense of appreciation for Burgess knowing that he was sat there, cigarette in hand, gin on the table in front of him, bashing out these reviews (the ones which weren't taken from his previous Yorkshire Evening Post days) in dire need of cash.
Pick it up. It's worth having a read through.
I couldn't really give this book any more than three stars as Burgess does drag on and it gets a tad tedious at times. I also understand that he wrote the entire thing in two weeks for money and this shows. However - I did get a different sense of appreciation for Burgess knowing that he was sat there, cigarette in hand, gin on the table in front of him, bashing out these reviews (the ones which weren't taken from his previous Yorkshire Evening Post days) in dire need of cash.
Pick it up. It's worth having a read through.
August 10, 2019
Burgess selects a bunch of his favourite novels from between 1939 and 1984, the end-date set largely because of the association of the year with Orwell's book of that name. The book is subtitled a personal choice and that's what we get, though in passages where Burgess reflects on his selections, he often justifies his choices as the best novel a particular author has written rather than relying solely on his own preferences. We learn quite a lot about Burgess, too, in his explanations of the appeal (or shortcomings) of various novels and novelists. It is quite appealingly written, and offers an idiosyncratic but nonetheless intriguing overview of the middle of the twentieth century. Some of the novels have faded from sight since the list was composed, but Burgess’ writing frequently made me want to pick some of these back up, or at least to give me reason to pause when I see them on the pound racks of second hand bookshops.
Of the novelists represented, eleven are women; though Burgess is discussing anglophone literature and the majority of his authors are from Britain or the US, he does include at least one novelist from each of Nigeria, “the Caribbean”, Australia, Canada, India, South Africa, Ireland.
However, the emphasis on the personal does come at a cost. A very large number of the authors and novels are either “like Kafka” or “approach Kafka” or are in some respects like Kafka but fall short by dint of some other trait. Allegedly conceived in response to the influence of Orwell, the influence of Kafka is much more heavily apparent. The other touchstone of what makes a skilled novelist is Henry James, with a few bones thrown to Dickens, and in one more surprising instance, to Trollope. This will be unlikely to overlap with many readers’ picture of what makes a good novelist, or even a good novelist of the twentieth century.
Despite repeatedly eschewing the “national” model of Anglophone literature, Burgess puts a substantial emphasis on particular backgrounds and groups within that literature; some examples include self-tormenting Catholics, self-deriding Jews, God-hating atheists, Joycean Irish inheritors. I suggest this is another point where Burgess’ personal views become less convincing. Contemporary psychological views play a large part of his analysis, particularly some of the more scatological choices, and, again, these present a less convincing aspect of Burgess’ criticism.
Of the novelists represented, eleven are women; though Burgess is discussing anglophone literature and the majority of his authors are from Britain or the US, he does include at least one novelist from each of Nigeria, “the Caribbean”, Australia, Canada, India, South Africa, Ireland.
However, the emphasis on the personal does come at a cost. A very large number of the authors and novels are either “like Kafka” or “approach Kafka” or are in some respects like Kafka but fall short by dint of some other trait. Allegedly conceived in response to the influence of Orwell, the influence of Kafka is much more heavily apparent. The other touchstone of what makes a skilled novelist is Henry James, with a few bones thrown to Dickens, and in one more surprising instance, to Trollope. This will be unlikely to overlap with many readers’ picture of what makes a good novelist, or even a good novelist of the twentieth century.
Despite repeatedly eschewing the “national” model of Anglophone literature, Burgess puts a substantial emphasis on particular backgrounds and groups within that literature; some examples include self-tormenting Catholics, self-deriding Jews, God-hating atheists, Joycean Irish inheritors. I suggest this is another point where Burgess’ personal views become less convincing. Contemporary psychological views play a large part of his analysis, particularly some of the more scatological choices, and, again, these present a less convincing aspect of Burgess’ criticism.
August 6, 2018
A personal, and idiosyncratic, review of 99 novels of the mid- and later-20th Century (1939-1983), English-language and fairly wide-ranging, albeit pick-and-choose. He devotes a page or two to each book, and takes in those that were important at the time (The Naked and the Dead, the The Alexandria Quartet, 1984,The French Lieutenant's Woman) as well as some that might not have aged well (John Barth's Giles Goat-Boy). It includes a sample or two of noteworthy authors of the period, such as Ernest Hemingway, James Baldwin, Saul Bellow, William Faulkner, Graham Greene. Some samples are surprising, for instance, William Golding's The Spire (not Lord of the Flies, and Burgess explains why), or Aldous Huxley (Island, a fine book, rather than Brave New World). A few are surprising: Raymond Chandler, Ian Fleming, Len Deighton (the war novel Bomber), Herman Wouk (The Caine Mutiny, a durable and perhaps underrated sea classic).
It's a good sampler of books that people of a certain age may have read and appreciated, or missed and might want to visit. It's also a good syllabus for a course in mid-20th Century literature and, at 1-2 pp. summaries, easy introductory reading.
It's a good sampler of books that people of a certain age may have read and appreciated, or missed and might want to visit. It's also a good syllabus for a course in mid-20th Century literature and, at 1-2 pp. summaries, easy introductory reading.
June 1, 2015
What I like about Burgess's book-length greatest hits of the middle third of the 20th century's novels is that he frequently strays from the reservation in all aspects -- "lowbrow" fare like Ian Fleming's "Goldfinger" and Herman Woulk's "The Caine Mutiny" stand tall next to "At Swim-Two-Birds," "Gravity's Rainbow" and "Portnoy's Complaint," the usual best-of-list books that you can't really ignore and still be called well-read. Apart from his concise, dense capsule reviews, you get a few sides of the non-canon greats that you might miss via the Time, Radcliffe, MLA etc. lists. Some good dystopian sci-fi enters as we hit the '80s, though in Burgess's world, the middle '50s and early '60s were the golden age of Aristocratic Families In Decline in novel form. (No Richard Yates?)
Of course, critiquing his choices is the point -- it's his personal favorites, not the "best". In fact, he frequently says that he chooses books by specific authors not because they are the bet work, but because they move him specifically. At times, there's some odd comments about "Feminist" literature (though he's generally favorable to it) and specifically the stridency of "women's liberationists," so take that as a light warning. Or not. I don't know. Maybe "The Golden Notebook" *is* strident? How would I know?
Burgess's book is also nice if you're the sort who reads reading lists and plans to dig into them, but never really feel like you know where to start. For example, I know in theory that "At Swim-Two-Birds" is another take on the modernist Irish idiom, but apart from my friend Mo's great blog (http://piebooks.blogspot.com), most of what I know about "important" literature is only that it's important, not what it feels like to read it. Mo (and Burgess) have done the heavy lifting, slogged through the trenches of "important" and "fun" books alike, and give you not only their historical resonance, but also the enjoyment of reading them.
Also, the introduction concerning "what is a novel" and "what is a novel's unique quality" is worth the price of admission alone.
Of course, critiquing his choices is the point -- it's his personal favorites, not the "best". In fact, he frequently says that he chooses books by specific authors not because they are the bet work, but because they move him specifically. At times, there's some odd comments about "Feminist" literature (though he's generally favorable to it) and specifically the stridency of "women's liberationists," so take that as a light warning. Or not. I don't know. Maybe "The Golden Notebook" *is* strident? How would I know?
Burgess's book is also nice if you're the sort who reads reading lists and plans to dig into them, but never really feel like you know where to start. For example, I know in theory that "At Swim-Two-Birds" is another take on the modernist Irish idiom, but apart from my friend Mo's great blog (http://piebooks.blogspot.com), most of what I know about "important" literature is only that it's important, not what it feels like to read it. Mo (and Burgess) have done the heavy lifting, slogged through the trenches of "important" and "fun" books alike, and give you not only their historical resonance, but also the enjoyment of reading them.
Also, the introduction concerning "what is a novel" and "what is a novel's unique quality" is worth the price of admission alone.
January 25, 2022
Like all "best of" lists, highly personal and flawed; but fun to browse.
Burgess was a prolific book reviewer, working during the '60s and '70s for the Yorkshire Post, Guardian, and Observer. His assignment for the Yorkshire Post ended after he opened a batch review with one of his own books, written pseudonymously. He was a disciplined, hard-working reviewer and, in the national press awards of 1979, on the strength of his Observer reviews, he was named critic of the year.
Drawing on more than two decades of reviews, he was commissioned to write 99 Novels. In his introduction, Burgess describes the collection as a list of "fine novels" while the cover inflates this to "The Best in English since 1939". Each of the 99 novels is from the period between 1939 and 1983 (no more than 5 in a single year) and is reviewed in 300-600 words, with an introduction to the author, a summary of the plot, and a commentary from Burgess on why the novel merits selection.
Burgess's list is broad-ranging, spanning anglophone novels from the UK, US, Canada, Australia, Caribbean, and Africa. Because Burgess was reviewing for British papers, his list of 99 probably gives disproportionate weight to British authors. He includes not only "serious" literature, but also more "popular" writers such as Len Deighton, Nevil Shute, Colin MacInnes, and Ian Fleming. In his elegant introduction, Burgess summarizes that: "all of the novelists here have added something to our knowledge of the human condition,... have managed language well, have clarified the motivations of action, and have sometimes expanded the bounds of imagination. And they entertain, or divert, which means to turn our faces away from the repetitive patterns of daily life and look at humanity and the world with new interest and even joy."
Reading through the reviews, one senses that Burgess is attracted to authors who engage with contemporary society, who ponder where it is going and how it impacts its members. With the post-War recovery and emerging consumer economy, anxieties about the cold war and nuclear proliferation, and the social and class upheavals of the '60s and '70s there was much for authors to address. Burgess also appreciates novels that innovate, that advance, in some way, the modernist impulses of the inter-war years.
One of the pleasures of reading a collection such as this is to discover authors and novels that are intriguing. In this measure, I found 99 Novels disappointing. Only one or two reviews prompted me to add books to my "to read" list. Many of the novels now appear dated, with a focus on the "human condition" specific to the post-war period. Interestingly, almost one-in-three of Burgess's 99 novels are not widely read today and also receive relatively low ratings by current readers. (I judged novels to have a continuing readership when they garnered at least 2,000 goodreads reviews in January 2022, and to be well-liked when they had an average reader rating of at least 3.80.)
Burgess admits that his list is personal, excluding authors and novels that others would have included. With hindsight, I wonder about his exclusion, for example, of Paul Bowles, Carson McCullers, Toni Morrison, William Trevor, and John Williams. Others have suggested that his jealousy of more successful authors led him to disparage John le Carré (not included in 99 Novels) as an author only of “competent novels of espionage”.
The book, while elegantly packaged (at least in my Simon and Schuster hardcover) is less-than-competently edited. The fourth novel in the Contents section is incorrectly attributed to Flann O'Brian, rather than O'Brien; and Robertson Davies's "Rebel Angels" is referred to as "Rebel Angles" in its review!
Cross-referencing between Burgess's list of novels and their current goodreads ratings produces this list of their respective authors:
1. Durable Masterworks (still widely read today and highly rated):
Chinua Achebe, James Baldwin, Saul Bellow, Raymond Chandler, Robertson Davies, Len Deighton, Lawrence Durrell, Ralph Ellison, Ian Fleming, John Fowles, Alexander Gray, Graham Greene, Joseph Heller, Ernest Hemingway, Russell Hoban, Christopher Isherwood, Olivia Manning, Somerset Maugham, Iris Murdoch, Vladimir Nabokov, Flann O'Brien, Flannery O'Connor, George Orwell, Mervyn Peake, Walker Percy, Anthony Powell, Thomas Pynchon, J.D. Salinger, Paul Scott, Alan Sillitoe, William Styron, Paul Theroux, John Kennedy Toole, Gore Vidal, Evelyn Waugh, T.H. White, Herman Wouk
2. Niche Treasures: (still highly rated, but not widely read today)
Joyce Cary, William Faulkner, James Plunkett, J.B. Priestley, William Sansom, Budd Schulberg, Nevil Shute, C.P. Snow, Alexander Theroux, Patrick White, Henry Williamson
3. Difficult Reads: (widely read today, but with weaker ratings (i.e., below 3.80))
John Barth, John Braine, William Golding, James Joyce, Doris Lessing, Malcolm Lowry, V.S. Naipul, R.K. Narayan, Keith Roberts, Philip Roth
4. Unfashionable?: (no longer widely read, and with weaker ratings (i.e., below 3.80)
Brian Aldiss, J.G. Ballard, Elizabeth Bowen, Malcolm Bradbury, Ivy Compton-Burnett, Michael Frayn, Nadine Gordimer, Henry Green, Pamela Hansford, Wilson Harris, L.P. Hartley, Richard Hughes, Erica Jong, David Lodge, Colin MacInnes, Mary McCarthy, Brian Moore, Robert Nye, John O'Hara, Mordecai Richler, John Updike, Rex Warner, Angus Wilson
5. Mixed Record:
Kingsley Amis (2 novels: 1 difficult read, 1 unfashionable), Saul Bellow (2 novels: 1 durable masterwork, 1 unfashionable), Aldous Huxley (3 novels: 1 durable masterwork; 2 difficult reads), Norman Mailer (2 novels: 1 durable masterwork, 1 unfashionable), Bernard Malamud (2 novels: 1 durable masterwork, 1 unfashionable), Muriel Spark (2 novels: 1 difficult read, 1 unfashionable)
Burgess was a prolific book reviewer, working during the '60s and '70s for the Yorkshire Post, Guardian, and Observer. His assignment for the Yorkshire Post ended after he opened a batch review with one of his own books, written pseudonymously. He was a disciplined, hard-working reviewer and, in the national press awards of 1979, on the strength of his Observer reviews, he was named critic of the year.
Drawing on more than two decades of reviews, he was commissioned to write 99 Novels. In his introduction, Burgess describes the collection as a list of "fine novels" while the cover inflates this to "The Best in English since 1939". Each of the 99 novels is from the period between 1939 and 1983 (no more than 5 in a single year) and is reviewed in 300-600 words, with an introduction to the author, a summary of the plot, and a commentary from Burgess on why the novel merits selection.
Burgess's list is broad-ranging, spanning anglophone novels from the UK, US, Canada, Australia, Caribbean, and Africa. Because Burgess was reviewing for British papers, his list of 99 probably gives disproportionate weight to British authors. He includes not only "serious" literature, but also more "popular" writers such as Len Deighton, Nevil Shute, Colin MacInnes, and Ian Fleming. In his elegant introduction, Burgess summarizes that: "all of the novelists here have added something to our knowledge of the human condition,... have managed language well, have clarified the motivations of action, and have sometimes expanded the bounds of imagination. And they entertain, or divert, which means to turn our faces away from the repetitive patterns of daily life and look at humanity and the world with new interest and even joy."
Reading through the reviews, one senses that Burgess is attracted to authors who engage with contemporary society, who ponder where it is going and how it impacts its members. With the post-War recovery and emerging consumer economy, anxieties about the cold war and nuclear proliferation, and the social and class upheavals of the '60s and '70s there was much for authors to address. Burgess also appreciates novels that innovate, that advance, in some way, the modernist impulses of the inter-war years.
One of the pleasures of reading a collection such as this is to discover authors and novels that are intriguing. In this measure, I found 99 Novels disappointing. Only one or two reviews prompted me to add books to my "to read" list. Many of the novels now appear dated, with a focus on the "human condition" specific to the post-war period. Interestingly, almost one-in-three of Burgess's 99 novels are not widely read today and also receive relatively low ratings by current readers. (I judged novels to have a continuing readership when they garnered at least 2,000 goodreads reviews in January 2022, and to be well-liked when they had an average reader rating of at least 3.80.)
Burgess admits that his list is personal, excluding authors and novels that others would have included. With hindsight, I wonder about his exclusion, for example, of Paul Bowles, Carson McCullers, Toni Morrison, William Trevor, and John Williams. Others have suggested that his jealousy of more successful authors led him to disparage John le Carré (not included in 99 Novels) as an author only of “competent novels of espionage”.
The book, while elegantly packaged (at least in my Simon and Schuster hardcover) is less-than-competently edited. The fourth novel in the Contents section is incorrectly attributed to Flann O'Brian, rather than O'Brien; and Robertson Davies's "Rebel Angels" is referred to as "Rebel Angles" in its review!
Cross-referencing between Burgess's list of novels and their current goodreads ratings produces this list of their respective authors:
1. Durable Masterworks (still widely read today and highly rated):
Chinua Achebe, James Baldwin, Saul Bellow, Raymond Chandler, Robertson Davies, Len Deighton, Lawrence Durrell, Ralph Ellison, Ian Fleming, John Fowles, Alexander Gray, Graham Greene, Joseph Heller, Ernest Hemingway, Russell Hoban, Christopher Isherwood, Olivia Manning, Somerset Maugham, Iris Murdoch, Vladimir Nabokov, Flann O'Brien, Flannery O'Connor, George Orwell, Mervyn Peake, Walker Percy, Anthony Powell, Thomas Pynchon, J.D. Salinger, Paul Scott, Alan Sillitoe, William Styron, Paul Theroux, John Kennedy Toole, Gore Vidal, Evelyn Waugh, T.H. White, Herman Wouk
2. Niche Treasures: (still highly rated, but not widely read today)
Joyce Cary, William Faulkner, James Plunkett, J.B. Priestley, William Sansom, Budd Schulberg, Nevil Shute, C.P. Snow, Alexander Theroux, Patrick White, Henry Williamson
3. Difficult Reads: (widely read today, but with weaker ratings (i.e., below 3.80))
John Barth, John Braine, William Golding, James Joyce, Doris Lessing, Malcolm Lowry, V.S. Naipul, R.K. Narayan, Keith Roberts, Philip Roth
4. Unfashionable?: (no longer widely read, and with weaker ratings (i.e., below 3.80)
Brian Aldiss, J.G. Ballard, Elizabeth Bowen, Malcolm Bradbury, Ivy Compton-Burnett, Michael Frayn, Nadine Gordimer, Henry Green, Pamela Hansford, Wilson Harris, L.P. Hartley, Richard Hughes, Erica Jong, David Lodge, Colin MacInnes, Mary McCarthy, Brian Moore, Robert Nye, John O'Hara, Mordecai Richler, John Updike, Rex Warner, Angus Wilson
5. Mixed Record:
Kingsley Amis (2 novels: 1 difficult read, 1 unfashionable), Saul Bellow (2 novels: 1 durable masterwork, 1 unfashionable), Aldous Huxley (3 novels: 1 durable masterwork; 2 difficult reads), Norman Mailer (2 novels: 1 durable masterwork, 1 unfashionable), Bernard Malamud (2 novels: 1 durable masterwork, 1 unfashionable), Muriel Spark (2 novels: 1 difficult read, 1 unfashionable)
August 16, 2022
Burgess was most famous for his dystopian novel 'A Clockwork Orange' and was a prolific writer of books, scripts and other materials. It would seem reasonable to assume that such an impressive litterateur would provide some valuable insights into modern English language literature, hence this reviewer's decision (in part) to read '99 Novels'. Unfortunately this 1984 publication was not as worthy as hoped. Whilst one understands that this is a personal selection with all the relevant subjective values and idiosyncratic choices that Burgess made this text falls down in its most important mission. If books are positioned as most meritorious they must be worthy of reading, and the selector or reviewer needs to ensure that his or her selections will arouse curiosity, desire, interest. Burgess might have written this book from a personal desire to justify his choices, however he is also through his summaries, his comments, 'selling' his choices. Sadly his ability to pitch the literary attractiveness of each title in this selection is rather limited.
That Burgess self-consciously and continually refers to some of his choices through their relationship with other earlier books or authors is fine. One understands that comparisons to Joyce, Rabelais, Conrad, James etc is useful for trying to contextualise the short essays he writes on each book and attendant author because literature does rely on earlier writing. Also as these books are supposedly great in their literary value it is only right to judge them in the light of past masterpieces. The inherent problem with this approach however is that not every reader has such a pre-existing frame of reference and/or there is an implicit smugness regarding Burgess's choices. It is as if at times Burgess is saying to his readers that you have to know Kafka, for example, to understand Flann O'Brien. This elitist approach may impede the willingness for readers to engage with Burgess's suggestions.
Having said that there are some choices that Burgess has made that are relatively populist. It is rather surprising that among the titles written of herein include Ian Fleming's 'Goldfinger' and Len Deighton's 'Bomber'. There are also some very popular books that have become iconic in both literary circles and popular culture (e.g. 'Catch 22', 'The French Lieutenant's Woman', 'Brideshead Revisited', '1984'). Overall, without having a similarly detailed knowledge of every book Burgess listed, the selections that he has made seem reasonable and worthy of further exploration. Yet, as stated earlier, Burgess doesn't do enough to 'sell' some of the less accessible or illustrious choices he has made. It is hard to find the enthusiasm one might hope for in considering novels such as 'The Girls of Slender Means' by Muriel Spark, or 'Cocksure' by Mordecai Richler when Burgess's praise is rather obtuse or guarded.
It must also be said that there is a distinct anti-Antipodean attitude present in Burgess's choices, with only two Australian authors and none from New Zealand. Burgess finds it hard to surpass his prejudice against the literary output of authors from these countries, and frankly it smacks of an attitude bred through colonial attitudes. Yes, there are nods to South African (Gordimer), Nigerian (Achebe) and Caribbean (Naipaul) authors, however for the most part Burgess sticks to British or American authors.
'99 Novels' possesses the benefit of being a relatively short book and therefore one can read it, make choices informed by Burgess's text, and get onto reading the books one wants to. Burgess gives a 'taste' of each novel as if it is like a degustation menu at a Michelin starred restaurant. This is a positive of this book.
So, who will read or benefit from Burgess's work? For those readers who have not ventured too much into 'modern' English literature there will be some encouragement to be found for engaging with these chosen works. Burgess also establishes a schema of literary criticism and conceptualisation of the novel that will assist the more critical reader in developing their appreciation of fiction. However, as stated earlier '99 Novels' doesn't do enough to drive readers towards those selections discussed in its pages. At its centre this is Burgess writing of books he liked and he doesn't really care whether or not one wants to read his choices.
That Burgess self-consciously and continually refers to some of his choices through their relationship with other earlier books or authors is fine. One understands that comparisons to Joyce, Rabelais, Conrad, James etc is useful for trying to contextualise the short essays he writes on each book and attendant author because literature does rely on earlier writing. Also as these books are supposedly great in their literary value it is only right to judge them in the light of past masterpieces. The inherent problem with this approach however is that not every reader has such a pre-existing frame of reference and/or there is an implicit smugness regarding Burgess's choices. It is as if at times Burgess is saying to his readers that you have to know Kafka, for example, to understand Flann O'Brien. This elitist approach may impede the willingness for readers to engage with Burgess's suggestions.
Having said that there are some choices that Burgess has made that are relatively populist. It is rather surprising that among the titles written of herein include Ian Fleming's 'Goldfinger' and Len Deighton's 'Bomber'. There are also some very popular books that have become iconic in both literary circles and popular culture (e.g. 'Catch 22', 'The French Lieutenant's Woman', 'Brideshead Revisited', '1984'). Overall, without having a similarly detailed knowledge of every book Burgess listed, the selections that he has made seem reasonable and worthy of further exploration. Yet, as stated earlier, Burgess doesn't do enough to 'sell' some of the less accessible or illustrious choices he has made. It is hard to find the enthusiasm one might hope for in considering novels such as 'The Girls of Slender Means' by Muriel Spark, or 'Cocksure' by Mordecai Richler when Burgess's praise is rather obtuse or guarded.
It must also be said that there is a distinct anti-Antipodean attitude present in Burgess's choices, with only two Australian authors and none from New Zealand. Burgess finds it hard to surpass his prejudice against the literary output of authors from these countries, and frankly it smacks of an attitude bred through colonial attitudes. Yes, there are nods to South African (Gordimer), Nigerian (Achebe) and Caribbean (Naipaul) authors, however for the most part Burgess sticks to British or American authors.
'99 Novels' possesses the benefit of being a relatively short book and therefore one can read it, make choices informed by Burgess's text, and get onto reading the books one wants to. Burgess gives a 'taste' of each novel as if it is like a degustation menu at a Michelin starred restaurant. This is a positive of this book.
So, who will read or benefit from Burgess's work? For those readers who have not ventured too much into 'modern' English literature there will be some encouragement to be found for engaging with these chosen works. Burgess also establishes a schema of literary criticism and conceptualisation of the novel that will assist the more critical reader in developing their appreciation of fiction. However, as stated earlier '99 Novels' doesn't do enough to drive readers towards those selections discussed in its pages. At its centre this is Burgess writing of books he liked and he doesn't really care whether or not one wants to read his choices.
April 7, 2020
Were I to believe in guilty pleasures, this book would fit the bill: breezy capsule reviews with minimal summary and a heavy dose of personal critical assessment. My interests here are admittedly a bit base. They rest on several grounds: their mindless readability (essentially, in the short “chapters”, a nonfiction equivalent of the Dan Brown model of page-turning momentum); some autistic, antiquarian impulse towards cataloguing and omniscient list-making; (shame-facedly) their work as micro-plot infusions, aka replicating flash fiction in the dullest possible way; and the pleasure of an intelligent person making pithy, witty, idiosyncratic literary evaluation, ie drive-by criticism, or, less charitably for me, a means of curating my own pre-Twitter literary Twitter.
Out of the four, the latter most approaches something actually edifying (although, truthfully, there’s little reward waiting on the backend of an hour of this type of reading [much like Twitter itself]). And Burgess’s own preoccupations are helpfully laid bare throughout. It is, consequently, a somewhat quaint collection, spot-on redolent of the specific concerns of a specific type of man at the specific time of this selection. Consider his take an element of Brian Moore’s THE DOCTOR’S WIFE — “there was a time when we could make sound ethics and theological judgments on our sexual aberrations ... and allay our frustrations in a sense of duty, but those days are gone” — as representative of the free-floating Catholic conservativism (you can’t quite call it reaction) underscoring much of the work here.
Likewise, there’s a preponderance of stuffy generational saga that speaks more to the ambient taking-for-granted-their-importance in the air at the time than to their own worth. To Burgess’s credit, his reviews, if not outright critical, nevertheless often seem to subtly acknowledge just such a fact. In talking about John O’Hara’s largely forgotten LOCKWOOD CONCERN, to take one example, Burgess notes that the “book looks, on the surface, like a highly contrived melodrama, but there is a good deal of complexity in it.” He could as easily have copy-pasted this same sentiment through near half the entries, with only minor amendations to that initial “let’s-acknowledge-it’s-middlebrow” section and the final “but-point-out-the-hidden-value-nonetheless” refinement.
To the same effect, the first half of the work seems to make the same knee-jerk equivalence between length and seriousness (indeed, he even explicitly says as much at one point, in relation to a Herman Wouk World War entry, whose “considerable length is appropriate to the weightiness of its subject”). He starts with Henry Green, but that seems to be a feint, as the rest suggests an aversion to brevity, of a piece with the middlebrow taste of the time. The very same Wouk entry, however, demonstrates one of the areas in which he does prove insightful: namely, on the material circumstances that, whether enabling or restricting, nonetheless structure both the lives of novelists and, consequently, the types of works they’re therefore able to produce. Here, he notes that, despite his constant disparagement by the literary establishment, Wouk’s YOUNGBLOOK HAWKE “is the only novel we have which brutally gives the facts about profit and loss accounts, the hard graft of writing, the Balzacian details of the sordour and the literary life.” Conversely, his John Barth consideration points out (in an appropriately droll cut) that he writes the “kind of novel that American professors are capable of producing, seeing the campus as the world and, being free of the marketplace which oppresses non-university novelists, cherishing the paid leisure which can produce really long books on the old pattern of Fielding and Dickens.”
Nonetheless, apart from these interludes of character and vigor, the work is much too given over to summary. The occasional really-thought-through, coherent analytical piece – as in the kind given to LUCKY JIM – demonstrates the broader possibilities of the book, were Burgess given any thoroughgoing incentive to the thing. But that’s a hard thing to sustain to across 99 books, especially when the form asks so little to succeed.
Out of the four, the latter most approaches something actually edifying (although, truthfully, there’s little reward waiting on the backend of an hour of this type of reading [much like Twitter itself]). And Burgess’s own preoccupations are helpfully laid bare throughout. It is, consequently, a somewhat quaint collection, spot-on redolent of the specific concerns of a specific type of man at the specific time of this selection. Consider his take an element of Brian Moore’s THE DOCTOR’S WIFE — “there was a time when we could make sound ethics and theological judgments on our sexual aberrations ... and allay our frustrations in a sense of duty, but those days are gone” — as representative of the free-floating Catholic conservativism (you can’t quite call it reaction) underscoring much of the work here.
Likewise, there’s a preponderance of stuffy generational saga that speaks more to the ambient taking-for-granted-their-importance in the air at the time than to their own worth. To Burgess’s credit, his reviews, if not outright critical, nevertheless often seem to subtly acknowledge just such a fact. In talking about John O’Hara’s largely forgotten LOCKWOOD CONCERN, to take one example, Burgess notes that the “book looks, on the surface, like a highly contrived melodrama, but there is a good deal of complexity in it.” He could as easily have copy-pasted this same sentiment through near half the entries, with only minor amendations to that initial “let’s-acknowledge-it’s-middlebrow” section and the final “but-point-out-the-hidden-value-nonetheless” refinement.
To the same effect, the first half of the work seems to make the same knee-jerk equivalence between length and seriousness (indeed, he even explicitly says as much at one point, in relation to a Herman Wouk World War entry, whose “considerable length is appropriate to the weightiness of its subject”). He starts with Henry Green, but that seems to be a feint, as the rest suggests an aversion to brevity, of a piece with the middlebrow taste of the time. The very same Wouk entry, however, demonstrates one of the areas in which he does prove insightful: namely, on the material circumstances that, whether enabling or restricting, nonetheless structure both the lives of novelists and, consequently, the types of works they’re therefore able to produce. Here, he notes that, despite his constant disparagement by the literary establishment, Wouk’s YOUNGBLOOK HAWKE “is the only novel we have which brutally gives the facts about profit and loss accounts, the hard graft of writing, the Balzacian details of the sordour and the literary life.” Conversely, his John Barth consideration points out (in an appropriately droll cut) that he writes the “kind of novel that American professors are capable of producing, seeing the campus as the world and, being free of the marketplace which oppresses non-university novelists, cherishing the paid leisure which can produce really long books on the old pattern of Fielding and Dickens.”
Nonetheless, apart from these interludes of character and vigor, the work is much too given over to summary. The occasional really-thought-through, coherent analytical piece – as in the kind given to LUCKY JIM – demonstrates the broader possibilities of the book, were Burgess given any thoroughgoing incentive to the thing. But that’s a hard thing to sustain to across 99 books, especially when the form asks so little to succeed.
November 5, 2023
[Allison & Busby] (1984). SB. Reprint. 160 Pages. Purchased from World of Books Ltd.
I gather that this ‘long essay’ was written in great haste (~2 weeks). There’s evidence of that. For instance, “The Aerodrome” is said to “seem” to be set in England, where it’s also although thought to “undoubtedly” be located.
The Introduction’s interesting.
He’d likely feel - today, nearly forty years on - that Orwell’s 1984 is closer to realisation.
I was struck with this observation on creative writing: “Create your characters, give them a time and place to exist in, and leave the plot to them… action must spring out of the temperament with which you have endowed them…”
I guess that, if one places a hypothetical fox in a like chicken coop, the narrative unfolds unaided. That only works, though, for cartoon(ish) types rendered with broad brushes and poster paint?
A fascinating selection; I don’t recall a more compelling list. By no means a rehash of ‘obvious’ choices, though “The Catcher in the Rye” does make it: simultaneously predictable and mystifying.
There are other more debatable inclusions. He references - for example - “For Whom the Bell Tolls” (Hemingway), “Ancient Evenings” (Mailer), “Portnoy’s Complaint” (Roth) and “The Unlimited Dream Company” (Ballard) - amongst the worst books I’ve ever read. Overrated, and - in some ways - revolting, crud. (I do like JGB, in general, though.)
There’s no mention of the “strange man” (“false detective”) who graces “Party Going” (Green). His accent morphed ongoing… “Brummagem”, “Yorkshire”, “educated”, “ordinary”… for whatever reason - and it’s hard to suppress an element of scorn on this point - Burgess chose to undergo his own transformation in that respect…
No doubt, he was very well read. His frequent implications of omniscience (hyperbole reliance) grated on me, though.
“…certainly the best war novel to emerge from the United States…”
“No novel has better caught the atmosphere…”
“No fiction has ever done better at presenting…”
“No writer has worked harder at the…”
“No writer has ever written with such authority…”
“…the only novel we have which…”
“…the most important post-war novel…”
:
Just past the half-way mark… he starts to hedge: “…probably…” gets deployed - perhaps acknowledging that, from the ‘60s onwards, there might have been at least a few works with which he was not altogether familiar.
The list far exceeds 99 volumes, in practice. ‘No. 26’ - “A Chronicle of Ancient Sunlight”, for example, itself runs to fifteen titles.
Excellent.
Sadly out-of-print, but readily to hand. eBay offers 12 copies today.
I gather that this ‘long essay’ was written in great haste (~2 weeks). There’s evidence of that. For instance, “The Aerodrome” is said to “seem” to be set in England, where it’s also although thought to “undoubtedly” be located.
The Introduction’s interesting.
He’d likely feel - today, nearly forty years on - that Orwell’s 1984 is closer to realisation.
I was struck with this observation on creative writing: “Create your characters, give them a time and place to exist in, and leave the plot to them… action must spring out of the temperament with which you have endowed them…”
I guess that, if one places a hypothetical fox in a like chicken coop, the narrative unfolds unaided. That only works, though, for cartoon(ish) types rendered with broad brushes and poster paint?
A fascinating selection; I don’t recall a more compelling list. By no means a rehash of ‘obvious’ choices, though “The Catcher in the Rye” does make it: simultaneously predictable and mystifying.
There are other more debatable inclusions. He references - for example - “For Whom the Bell Tolls” (Hemingway), “Ancient Evenings” (Mailer), “Portnoy’s Complaint” (Roth) and “The Unlimited Dream Company” (Ballard) - amongst the worst books I’ve ever read. Overrated, and - in some ways - revolting, crud. (I do like JGB, in general, though.)
There’s no mention of the “strange man” (“false detective”) who graces “Party Going” (Green). His accent morphed ongoing… “Brummagem”, “Yorkshire”, “educated”, “ordinary”… for whatever reason - and it’s hard to suppress an element of scorn on this point - Burgess chose to undergo his own transformation in that respect…
No doubt, he was very well read. His frequent implications of omniscience (hyperbole reliance) grated on me, though.
“…certainly the best war novel to emerge from the United States…”
“No novel has better caught the atmosphere…”
“No fiction has ever done better at presenting…”
“No writer has worked harder at the…”
“No writer has ever written with such authority…”
“…the only novel we have which…”
“…the most important post-war novel…”
:
Just past the half-way mark… he starts to hedge: “…probably…” gets deployed - perhaps acknowledging that, from the ‘60s onwards, there might have been at least a few works with which he was not altogether familiar.
The list far exceeds 99 volumes, in practice. ‘No. 26’ - “A Chronicle of Ancient Sunlight”, for example, itself runs to fifteen titles.
Excellent.
Sadly out-of-print, but readily to hand. eBay offers 12 copies today.
August 20, 2024
This book is a triple pleasure.
1) It's a browser's paradise. Every reader is looking for something new to read, and this book is chock-full of fantastic suggestions.
2) Anthony Burgess needs no introduction: his short, opinionated summaries on the 99 novels he selected are a joy to read, as well as thought-provoking.
3) Finally, at an age when we hear so much about how everything is decadent, the arts are no longer what they used to be, everything past is better (not that there's not some truth to that), it's a relief to find out about so many literary masterpieces much closer to us.
For sure I won't stop reading the great literature of past centuries or millennia, but it's important to be attuned to what fiction writers have to say about our own reality, or at least about how the world used to be within living memory.
1) It's a browser's paradise. Every reader is looking for something new to read, and this book is chock-full of fantastic suggestions.
2) Anthony Burgess needs no introduction: his short, opinionated summaries on the 99 novels he selected are a joy to read, as well as thought-provoking.
3) Finally, at an age when we hear so much about how everything is decadent, the arts are no longer what they used to be, everything past is better (not that there's not some truth to that), it's a relief to find out about so many literary masterpieces much closer to us.
For sure I won't stop reading the great literature of past centuries or millennia, but it's important to be attuned to what fiction writers have to say about our own reality, or at least about how the world used to be within living memory.
December 30, 2017
I first read this book the year that it came out, 1984 (Orwellian!), and in the interim I have reached for it from time to time to refresh my memory as to the author's comments regarding this or that novel. It was, perhaps, an even greater pleasure reading it from cover-to-cover for a second time; Burgess' chronological list is eclectic and eccentric for what it does include and unapologetic for that which it excludes. I added some titles to my Amazon wish-list as I turned the pages. Well done, Burgess!!
October 26, 2018
Published in 1984, an idiosyncratic but worthy selection of the "best" novels in English (1939-1983). Burgess was not only a noteworthy author, but also a prolific reader and reviewer. His choices tend toward a focus on religious characters, but not exclusively. Rather, his criteria include bringing a newness in worldview or technique. Many familiar authors, and many more I might not have stumbled upon otherwise. I have a lot of reading to do...
Read
February 13, 2021Entertaining and informative (lots of enticing references to other books, other writers, other places and events I didn't know and wanted to find out about), these are all short reviews, mostly just one page, some stretching to two or three.
Read
March 20, 2021Even though I haven't read most of the books that Anthony Burgess reviewed i loved reading them because they interested me so much and now i have a lot more books on my tbr and I'm definitely going to read the ones that i can get my hands on.
October 16, 2018
As escolhas são bastante idiossincráticas, mas o livro é divertido e ressalta autores que nunca conheceríamos sem ele
April 17, 2021
I’ve got 99 problems but a book ain’t one.
October 2, 2021
With a few exceptions, this is mostly useful as a list of novels to avoid reading.
September 26, 2015
What I like most about Mr. Burgess's collection of reviews is its eclectic nature. The choices for the 99 best novels since 1939 range from Henry Green's Party-Going to Robertson Davies The Rebel Angels. In fact, those are the first and last entries. In between, cheek-to-cheek you will find William Faulkner and Ian Fleming. Herman Wouk's Caine Mutiny is listed, rarely a pick of the literati, but a long time favorite of mine. Then there are books I have never heard of, Lanark by Alasdar Gray? There are favorites here, Powell's Dance to the Music of Time (all if it!). Mystifying choices, Erica Jong. I especially like that there are books I have never met before. I love being introduced to new friends. The reviews themselves are wryly unapologetic, candid, and intriguing. On John Barth, as loathed a modernist as one could pick, one often cited for a self indulgence as close to onanism as writing can be (though I for the most part (the parenthesis are for you, JB) love him) Burgess notes, "Whatever you might think of him, you cannot ignore John Barth." Of Giles Goat-Boy, a high school favorite of mine, Burgess says, "the taking of it seriously entails the taking of it unseriously." Exactly! He has almost sold me on books I would have left to myself pointedly avoided. Perhaps I might give Fleming a try after all. I didn't just say that did I?
January 28, 2009
If you like the fiction of Anthony Burgess you will probably enjoy his opinions about other authors. This is his very personal selection of the best English fiction from 1939 through 1983. The authors range from modernists like Joyce, Henry Green and Flann O'Brian to more traditional stylists like Waugh, Graham Greene and Elizabeth Bowen. Some of my personal favorites include Rex Warner (The Aerodrome, 1941), Christopher Isherwood (A Single Man, 1964), and Robertson Davies (The Rebel Angels, 1982); but there are many others that I have enjoyed (e.g. novels by Naipaul, Murdoch, Faulkner, O'Hara, Salinger, et al.) along with those unfamiliar titles that tempt me based on the trust I have in Burgess's opinions. I am impressed with his selection based on the novels that I have read, but the commentaries are worth reading whether you read the selected works or not. His list is referenced in The Literary Almanac and is worthy of a place among all literate readers' reference shelves.
March 26, 2007
Some kind of EVERYTHING YOU ALWAYS WANTED TO KNOW ABOUT ENGLISH MODERN NOVELS, BUT WERE AFRAID TO ASK! Simply every reader can disagree with the master on some of the choices as well many examples of exaggerated acclaims, but somehow its chronological look at the process of creation since the begining of the WW I gives you the insight to follow what has gone with a forgotten generation of angry young men! Reading the book, you can easily find out for what reason HP stands for Harry Potter nowadays, when Harold Pinter is merely heralded as a Nobel winner!
May 25, 2009
Burgess, who apparently spent about as much time reading as I do breathing, often gravitates toward books I wouldn't dream of reading-- tetralogies on the dim lives of British diplomats, novels written in invented dialects, extravagantly conceived dystopias. But there's a lot to be gained from going through a smart guy's informal faves list, and--25 years after first reading this thing--I'm amazed by how his judgments have stuck with me.
February 15, 2009
Burgess provides a wonderful listing of books, many of which are now overlooked or forgotten. I haven't read them all, but I've read a great number of them, and I've rarely been disappointed. I think you can find on the internet the actual list, but what you'll miss is the little mini-review by Burgess.
Displaying 1 - 30 of 34 reviews