100 Top Novels

1	Don Quixote	1605, 1630	Miguel de Cervantes	Catholic
2	War and Peace	1869	Leo Tolstoy	Russian Orthodox
3	Ulysses	1922	James Joyce	Catholic (lapsed)
4	In Search of Lost Time	1913-27	Marcel Proust	Jewish Catholic
5	The Brothers Karamazov	1880	Feodor Dostoevsky	Russian Orthodox
6	Moby-Dick	1851	Herman Melville	Transcendentalist
7	Madame Bovary	1857	Gustave Flaubert	Catholic
8	Middlemarch	1871-72	George Eliot	Anglican; agnostic
9	The Magic Mountain	1924	Thomas Mann	Lutheran
10	The Tale of Genji	11th Century	Murasaki Shikibu	Buddhist/Shinto culture
11	Emma	1816	Jane Austen	Anglican
12	Bleak House	1852-53	Charles Dickens	Anglican
13	Anna Karenina	1877	Leo Tolstoy	Russian Orthodox
14	Adventures of Huckleberry Finn	1884	Mark Twain	Presbyterian
15	Tom Jones	1749	Henry Fielding
16	Great Expectations	1860-61	Charles Dickens	Anglican
17	Absalom, Absalom!	1936	William Faulkner	Presbyterian
18	The Ambassadors	1903	Henry James	Anglican
19	One Hundred Years of Solitude	1967	Gabriel Garcia Marquez	Catholic
20	The Great Gatsby	1925	F. Scott Fitzgerald	Catholic
21	To The Lighthouse	1927	Virginia Woolf	Neo-pagan
22	Crime and Punishment	1866	Feodor Dostoevsky	Russian Orthodox
23	The Sound and the Fury	1929	William Faulkner	Presbyterian
24	Vanity Fair	1847-48	William Makepeace Thackeray
25	Invisible Man	1952	Ralph Ellison
26	Finnegans Wake	1939	James Joyce	Catholic (lapsed)
27	The Man Without Qualities	1930-43	Robert Musil	Catholic
28	Gravity’s Rainbow	1973	Thomas Pynchon	Catholic; agnostic
29	The Portrait of a Lady	1881	Henry James	Anglican
30	Women in Love	1920	D. H. Lawrence
31	The Red and the Black	1830	Stendhal	Catholic
32	Tristram Shandy	1760-67	Laurence Sterne	Anglican (Church of Ireland clergyman)
33	Dead Souls	1842	Nikolai Gogol	Russian Orthodox
34	Tess of the D’Urbervilles	1891	Thomas Hardy
35	Buddenbrooks	1901	Thomas Mann	Lutheran
36	Le Pere Goriot	1835	Honore de Balzac	Catholic
37	A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man	1916	James Joyce	Catholic (lapsed)
38	Wuthering Heights	1847	Emily Bronte	Anglican
39	The Tin Drum	1959	Gunter Grass	Catholic
40	Molloy; Malone Dies; The Unnamable	1951-53	Samuel Beckett	Church of Ireland (Anglican)
41	Pride and Prejudice	1813	Jane Austen	Anglican
42	The Scarlet Letter	1850	Nathaniel Hawthorne	Transcendentalist
43	Fathers and Sons	1862	Ivan Turgenev	Russian Orthodox; agnostic
44	Nostromo	1904	Joseph Conrad	Catholic; atheist
45	Beloved	1987	Toni Morrison
46	An American Tragedy	1925	Theodore Dreiser	Catholic; Congregationalist; Chrisitan Science
47	Lolita	1955	Vladimir Nabokov	Russian Orthodox
48	The Golden Notebook	1962	Doris Lessing
49	Clarissa	1747-48	Samuel Richardson
50	Dream of the Red Chamber	1791	Cao Xueqin
51	The Trial	1925	Franz Kafka	Jewish
52	Jane Eyre	1847	Charlotte Bronte	Anglican
53	The Red Badge of Courage	1895	Stephen Crane	Methodist
54	The Grapes of Wrath	1939	John Steinbeck	Episcopalian
55	Petersburg	1916/1922	Andrey Bely	Russian Orthodox; Theosophy; Spiritualism
56	Things Fall Apart	1958	Chinue Achebe
57	The Princess of Cleves	1678	Madame de Lafayette
58	The Stranger	1942	Albert Camus	Catholic; Existentialism
59	My Antonia	1918	Willa Cather	Episcopalian
60	The Counterfeiters	1926	Andre Gide
61	The Age of Innocence	1920	Edith Wharton
62	The Good Soldier	1915	Ford Madox Ford	Catholic; agnostic
63	The Awakening	1899	Kate Chopin	Catholic
64	A Passage to India	1924	E. M. Forster
65	Herzog	1964	Saul Bellow	Orthodox Jew (lapsed); Anthroposophist
66	Germinal	1855	Emile Zola	Catholic
67	Call It Sleep	1934	Henry Roth	Jewish
68	U.S.A. Trilogy	1930-38	John Dos Passos	Catholic
69	Hunger	1890	Knut Hamsun
70	Berlin Alexanderplatz	1929	Alfred Doblin	Catholic
71	Cities of Salt	1984-89	‘Abd al-Rahman Munif
72	The Death of Artemio Cruz	1962	Carlos Fuentes	Catholic
73	A Farewell to Arms	1929	Ernest Hemingway	Catholic
74	Brideshead Revisited	1945	Evelyn Waugh	Catholic
75	The Last Chronicle of Barset	1866-67	Anthony Trollope	Anglican
76	The Pickwick Papers	1836-67	Charles Dickens	Anglican
77	Robinson Crusoe	1719	Daniel Defoe	Protestant Dissenter (Presbyterian)
78	The Sorrows of Young Werther	1774	Johann Wolfgang von Goethe	Deist
79	Candide	1759	Voltaire	raised in Jansenism; later Deist
80	Native Son	1940	Richard Wright	Seventh-day Adventist; Communist
81	Under the Volcano	1947	Malcolm Lowry	Methodist; Anglican; agnostic
82	Oblomov	1859	Ivan Goncharov
83	Their Eyes Were Watching God	1937	Zora Neale Hurston
84	Waverley	1814	Sir Walter Scott	Anglican
85	Snow Country	1937, 1948	Kawabata Yasunari
86	Nineteen Eighty-Four	1949	George Orwell	Anglican
87	The Betrothed	1827, 1840	Alessandro Manzoni	Catholic
88	The Last of the Mohicans	1826	James Fenimore Cooper	Episcopalian
89	Uncle Tom’s Cabin	1852	Harriet Beecher Stowe	Episcopalian; Congregationalist
90	Les Miserables	1862	Victor Hugo	Catholic
91	On the Road	1957	Jack Kerouac	Catholic; Buddhism
92	Frankenstein	1818	Mary Shelley
93	The Leopard	1958	Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa	Catholic
94	The Catcher in the Rye	1951	J.D. Salinger	Jewish Catholic; Scientologist
95	The Woman in White	1860	Wilkie Collins
96	The Good Soldier Svejk	1921-23	Jaroslav Hasek	Catholic
97	Dracula	1897	Bram Stoker	Church of Ireland (Anglican)
98	The Three Musketeers	1844	Alexandre Dumas	agnostic; Catholic
99	The Hound of Baskervilles	1902	Arthur Conan Doyle	Catholic; Spiritualist
100	Gone with the Wind	1936	Margaret Mitchell	Catholic

a Shadow

My Favorites

My Favorite Movies:

1. Magnolia
2. Raiders of the Lost Ark
3. All the Real Girls
4. There Will Be Blood
5. Bleu
6. Sweet and Lowdown
7. The Family Man
8. The Big Lebowski
9. Cast Away
10. Unbreakable

[On the Bubble: Gattaca, Big Fish, Jerry Maguire.] I wish there were more critically respectable films on this list, but it is what I like and I can defend the hell out of these films.

[I filled out a longer movie questionnaire found here]

My Favorite Bands:

1. Radiohead
2. The Veils
3. Sigur Ros
4. The Flaming Lips
5. Explosions in the Sky
6. K-os
7. Aimee Mann
8. Godspeed! You Black Emperors/ A Silver Mt. Zion
9. Andrew Bird
10. Neutral Milk Hotel

Recent favorites: The National, The New Pornographers, Band of Horses,

Older favorites: Remy Zero, Our Lady Peace, Guster, Jimmy Eat World

Favorite Poets (I rank only the dead b/c the living are still working):

1. E. E. Cummings
2. Robert Frost
3. Maria Rainer Rilke
4. Pablo Neruda
5. Wallace Stevens
6. Robert Creeley
7. Walt Whitman
8. W. H. Auden
9. Odysseus Elytis
10. Robert Lax

I ranked my Top Ten Books from both Modern and Dead Poets.

Books of Poetry (Bought & Given) : 2008

• Divine Comedy: Journeys Through a Regional Geography by John Kinsella
• Black Maria by Kevin Young
• To Repel Ghosts by Kevin Young
• Dear Darkness by Kevin Young
• After a Spell by Nance Van Winkel
• 100 Love Sonnets by Pablo Neruda Tr. by Gustavo Escobedo
• Sea Change by Jorie Graham
• God Particles by Thomas Lux
• Burnt Island by D. Nurkse
• Poems and Prose by Gerard Manley Hopkins
• Natural Birth by Toi Dericotte
• Captivity by Toi Dericotte
• Native Guard by Natasha Trethewey
• On the Ground by Fanny Howe
• Rules of the House by Tsering Wangmo Dhompa
• Outside History by Eavan Boland
• Skirts and Slacks by W.S. Di Piero
• Goest by Cole Swenson
• Otherwise by Jane Kenyon
• Seventy Prepositions by Carol Snow
• The Orchard by Brigit Pegeen Kelly
• The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens
• Loose Woman by Sandra Cisneros
• Uproar: Antiphonies to Psalms by Brooks Haxton
• Evohe by Cristina Peri Rossi
• Given Sugar, Given Salt by Jane Hirshfield
• Recyclopedia: Trimmings, S*PeRM**K*T, and Muse & Drudge by Harryette Mullen
• Selected Poems 1966-1987 by Seamus Heaney
• Far Side of the Earth by Tom Sleigh
• Here, Bullet by Brian Turner
• Garbage by A.R. Ammons
• Radio, Radio by Ben Doyle
• Portable Kisses by Tess Gallagher
• Splay Anthem by Nathaniel Mackey
• Collected Poems by W.H. Auden
• Collected Poems 1975-2005 by Robert Creeley
  
• The Last News of Mr. Nobody by Emmanuel Moses
• Interglacial by James Richardson
• Itinerary by Reginald Shepherd
  
• DaZE by Matthew Cooperman (for review & reviewed)
• Discount Fireworks by Wendy Taylor Carlisle (for review, forthcoming)
• Invisibility Exhibit by Sachiko Murakami (for review, forthcoming)

Poetry Foundation’s Best Poetry Books of 2008

Their teasers for their list of favorite books is here.

Creatures of a Day : Reginald Gibbons

Twigs and Knucklebones : Sarah Lindsay

The Fifty Minute Mermaid : Nuala Ni Dhomhnail

George Oppen : Collected Poems

Sleep’s Powers : Jacqueline Risset

my vocabulary did this to me The Collected Poetry of Jack Spicer

King Driftwood : Robert Minhinnick

The Walking-Away World : Kenneth Patchen

The Essential George Johnston

Kyotologic : Anne Gorrick

The Alphabet : Ron Silliman

Crabwise to the Hounds : Jeramy Dodds

Elephants & Butterflies : Alan Michael Parker

Bosston : Ed Barrett

For All We Know : Ciaran Carson

Selected Poems 1969-2005 : David Harsent

Book Design of the Year

Vote for the best Book Design of the year at the NYTimesBook blog:

My three faves:

Ye Singers

Let steeple bells be swungen

and io, io, io!

Schlaf in himmlischer ruh.

Aphorisms by Roger Ebert

Ebert gives his best quips here.

A sample:

I have often asked myself, “What would it look like if the characters in a movie were animatronic puppets created by aliens with an imperfect mastery of human behavior?” Now I know. — “Friends and Lovers”

This movie doesn’t scrape the bottom of the barrel. This movie isn’t the bottom of the barrel. This movie isn’t below the bottom of the barrel. This movie doesn’t deserve to be mentioned in the same sentence with barrels.

She and Daredevil are powerfully attracted to each other, and even share some PG-13 sex, which is a relief, because when superheroes have sex at the R level, I am always afraid someone will get hurt. — “Daredevil”

Best Poems By Month from Poetry Magazine

Jan: Moose Dreams by William Johnson

Feb: Ross: Children of the Ghetto by George Szirtes

Mar: Conversion Comedy by Ange Mlinko

Apr: What is it to be human? by Waldo Williams

May: Seawater Stiffens Cloth by Jane Hirshfield

June: An Aubade by Joel Brouwer

July/Aug: My Moses by Wendy Videlock

Sept: Clary by Atsuro Riley

Oct: Tell the Bees by Sarah Lindsay

Nov: Ernesto Cardenal and I by Roberto Bolano (n/a)

Dec: Ad Hominem by Nicky Beer

Best Issue of 2008: April (Translation Issue)

3 Illustrators I Love

Hienrich Kley:

John Held Jr:

Lyonel Feininger: