Part of the charm of Nick Hornby’s High Fidelity is Rob Fleming’s Top 5 Lists. Lists organize a lot of information in a succinct, light-hearted format. Lists are easy to read and easy to write. List-making ignites spontaneous, off the top of the head thinking oppose to outlining that requires organized thought.
Lists also are great for bloggers who checked-out nine books from the library in one month; flip-flopped back and forth between four them, ignoring the other five, not finishing any of them and most importantly putting this month’s book club selection on the back-burner. So, as I continue to drudge through The Memory Keeper’s Daughter (yet another book that uses illness as a metaphor to tug at readers' heartstrings and push the plot forward), I offer you a not so charming list of “15 Novels That Have Impacted Me.”
Here you will see my preference for the dark depressing tales with no happy endings in sight. Despite all the violence, murder, suicide, mental illness, prostitution, rape, obsession, depravity, poverty, destitution, isolation, brutality, tragedy, melancholy, and depression in these novels, there is very little physical illness. I’ll take the Dust Bowl, a touch of Arsenic, a fatal car accident and a jump in front of a train any day over Cancer or Down Syndrome.
This list is in no particular order. Due to my time crunch, I’ll fill in short explanations later this week with a few of these novels being worthy of complete blog posts.
1. Great Expectations, Charles Dickens
2. The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald
3. The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck
4. Return of the Native, Thomas Hardy
5. Jude the Obscure, Thomas Hardy
6. Notes from the Underground, Fyodor Dostoyevsky
7. Crime and Punishment, Fyodor Dostoyevsky
8. Madame Bovary, Gustave Flaubert
9. The Good Earth, Pearl Buck
10. Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy
11. Song of Solomon, Toni Morrison
12. Loving Frank, Nancy Horan
13. One Hundred Years of Solitude, Gabriel Garcia Marquez
14. Jealousy, Alain Robbe-Grillet
15. Moll Flanders, Daniel DeFoe
