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Listeners' Favorite Books of the 20th Century


After two programs (January 1999 and January 2000), during which we took your suggestions for the "best of th e century" booklist, here it is. While a few 19th century titles have slipped in here and there, this is essentially a tribute to 20th literature. Plenty of titles—from the light and frothy to the much weightier—to keep you busy until, well, at least the next century.

Some authors were mentioned repeatedly for a variety of titles: E.B.White, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Solzhenitzyn, Pratchett, Kingsolver, Orwell, Faulkner, Cather, Woolf. Other authors were favored for a single title or series: C.S. Lewis (the Narnia series), Asimov (the Foundation series), Kundera (The Unbearable Lightness of Being), J.K. Rowling (the Harry Potter series), Tolkien (the trilogy and The Hobbit), Morrison (Beloved), Paton (Cry the Beloved Country), Remarque (All Quiet on the Western Front), Marquez (A Hundred Years of Solitude), Nabokov (Lolita), Achebe (Things Fall Apart), Kerouac (On the Road).

The unequivocal "winners" of the century, cited by so many of you, are: John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath and Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird. It’s been years since I read either of these, though I remembering loving both when I read them as a teenager. In light of their staying power with so many of you, perhaps it’s time for me to revisit them.

Thanks to all of you for sharing your literary loves so enthusiastically. 
—Ellen

MARTHA FOLEY, NCPR News Director

  • Collected Essays, E.B. White
  • Stuart Little, E.B. White
  • Foundation (series), Isaac Asimov
RICHARD HUNT (NCPR Guest Host)
  • To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee (Pulitzer 1961)
  • Gospel, Wilton Barnhardt
  • A Confederacy of Dunces, John Kennedy Toole (Pulitzer 1981)
  • The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck (Pulitzer 1940)
  • Cannery Row, John Steinbeck
  • A Fine Balance, Rohinton Mistry
  • Bonfire of the Vanities, Tom Wolfe
  • Winesburg, Ohio, Sherwood Anderson
  • Admiral of the Ocean Sea, Samuel Eliot Morison
  • The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love, Oscar Hijuelos (Pulitzer 1990)
  • The Dork of Cork, Chet Raymo
  • Martin Dressler: The Tale of an American Dreamer, Steven Milhauser (Pulitzer 1997)
  • Giants in the Earth: A Saga of the Prairie, O.E. Rolvaag
  • Cry the Beloved Country, Alan Paton
  • John Marshall: Definer of a Nation, Jean Edward Smith
  • A Very Long Engagement, Sebastian Japrisot
  • Corelli’s Mandolin, Louis De Bernieres
  • The Catcher is a Spy: The Moe Berg Story, Nicholas Dawidoff
  • Independent People, Halldor Laxness
  • The Path Between the Seas, David McCullough
  • The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down, Anne Fadiman
  • The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Milan Kundera
  • Palace Walk, Naguib Mahfouz
  • The Citadel, A.J. Cronin
  • Einstein’s Dreams, Alan Lightman
  • All Quiet on the Western Front, Erich Maria Remarque
  • The Old Man and the Sea, Hemingway
  • Amsterdam, Ian McEwan
  • Plus anything by novelists Jane Hamilton, Bret Lott
JACKIE SAUTER (NCPR Program Director)
  • A Hundred Years of Solitude, Gabriel Garcia Marquez (Nobel Prize winning author). THE Latin American novel, that beautifully sums up the political and cultural history of a continent, a fine example of magical realism, great storytelling, and gorgeous writing.
  • Complete Short Stories, Flannery O’Connor. A breathtaking body of work by a Southern woman who had an important impact on 20th century American fiction. She died way too young, at age 39.
  • Catch 22, Joseph Heller. The quintessential modern, ironic novel that everyone should read at least once, preferably in early adulthood.
  • Beloved, Toni Morrison (Pulitzer). A gorgeously written and important novel about the impact of slavery on individuals and on our culture.
  • The Cairo Trilogy: Palace Walk; Palace of Desire; Sugar Street, Naguib Mahfouz (Nobel Prize winning author). Wonderful storytelling from a master of letters.
RUSS JACOBY (NCPR Evening Host)
  • A Brief History of Time, Stephen Hawking
  • The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, William L. Shirer
  • The Civil War: A Narrative, Shelby Foote (3 vols)
  • On the Road, Jack Kerouac
  • A Farewell to Arms, Ernest Hemingway
  • The Second World War, Winston Churchill (5 vols)
  • Tobacco Road, Erskine Caldwell
  • Rabble in Arms, Kenneth Roberts
  • The Naked and the Dead, Norman Mailer
  • The Call of the Wild, Jack London
DONNA WILLIAMSON (NCPR Board Member)
  • How Reading Changed My Life, Anna Quindlen. It is a small book, but let me know that there are others out there just like me. Nothing has sustained me over time like my love of reading—for information, for pleasure, for the pure music of language in the right hands—and I met a book loving friend when I read her descriptions of reading experiences.
  • Biblioholism: The Literary Addiction, Tom Rabe. A hoot. He discusses everything from the varieties of the "disease" and the history of various strains to how a biblioholic packs and how they read in various places.
  • Bookworms: Great Writers and Readers Celebrate Reading, Laura Furman and Elinore Standard, editors. A collection of voices about the reading experience.
  • The Most Wonderful Books: Writers on Discovering the Pleasure of Reading, Michael Dorris and Emilie Buchwald, eds.
  • Ex Libris, Anne Fadiman.
  • A Gentle Madness: Bibliophiles, Bibliomanes and the Eternal Passion for Books, Basbanes.
BOB MARSHALL, Burlington, VT
  • On the Road, Jack Kerouac. This is my pick for book of the century. I first read it in 1957 and about every 10 years or so, reread it. I also loved Kerouac’s first book, The Town and The City, the ending being an introduction to the BEAT GENERATION.
KATE WHALEN, Potsdam, NY (high school junior)
  • Angela’s Ashes, Frank McCourt
  • The Little Prince, Antoine de Saint-Exupery
  • The Phantom Tollbooth, Norton Juster
  • The 13 Clocks, James Thurber
  • Matilda, Roald Dahl
  • The Westing Game, Ellen Raskin
  • Harry Potter (series), J.K. Rowling
  • The Moorchild, Eloise McCraw
  • The Master Puppeteer, Katherine Paterson
  • The Midwife’s Apprentice/Catherine, Called Birdy, Karen Cushman
  • The Giver, Lois Lowry
  • Plus, a vote for these authors’ works: Erma Bombeck, Dave Barry, David Eddings (fantasy), J.R.R. Tolkien, Lloyd Alexander (the Black Cauldron series especially), Bruce Coville, P.G. Wodehouse, Agatha Christie, John Steinbeck, Ernest Hemingway.
HEIDI KRETSER, Paul Smith’s (Adirondack Communities and Conservation Program)
  • The Hobbit (et al), J.R.R. Tolkien
  • Sand County Almanac, Aldo Leopold
  • Silent Spring, Rachel Carson
  • East of Eden, John Steinbeck
  • To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee
  • One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Ken Kesey
  • A Prayer for Owen Meany, John Irving
  • Plus, a vote for authors Barbara Kingsolver and Milan Kundera
DIAHANN NADEAU, Sutton, Quebec
  • Immortality/The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Milan Kundera.
  • The Great Gatsby/Tender is the Night, F.S. Fitzgerald. In my opinion, he towers above his contemporaries in American fiction; neither Hemingway nor Steinbeck nor anyone else writing at that time wrote as beautifully and poignantly as Fitzgerald.
  • Lolita, V.Nabokov. He is my favorite writer of this century; I love all his material. I agree with the caller who suggested he was the best writer working in the English language. He is an amazing stylist.
  • The Master and Margarita, Mikhail Bulgakov. This is an early Soviet writer with a wicked satirical ability; some of his short works are brilliant. This is a longer book, imaginative, filled with fascinating ideas and characters. Just pure pleasure to read.
  • Portrait of a Marriage, Nigel Nicholson. An incredible work of non-fiction about the author’s parents, Harold N. and Vita Sackville-West. He uses material from Vita’s diaries which reveals her passionately intense love affair with Violet Trefusis. I cannot recommend this book highly enough.
  • The White Hotel/Swallow, D.M. Thomas. Both novels are unusual, the first about a patient of Freud’s whose dreams anticipate the Holocaust, and the second about a storytelling Olympics set in Finland. Wonderful imagination at work in both.
  • Appointment in Samarra, John O’Hara. A novella that is exquisitely precise in its account of the downfall of an upper middle class man. No word is wasted, and the ending is as inevitable as the sunset. The best from a very fine American writer who has been unustifiably ignored for decades.
  • Running in the Family/The English Patient, Michael Ondaatje. The first is his marvelous memoir of growing up in Ceylon (Sri Lanka); his family makes great material for a book, though living with them could not have been too easy.
BETSY FOLWELL & TOM WARRINGTON, Blue Mountain Lake
  • Peterson’s Field Guides
KAREN DAWSON, Burlington
  • Magic Mountain, Thomas Mann
  • Man Without Qualities, Robert Musil
  • The Master and Margarita, Mikhail Bulgakov
  • Cancer Ward, Alexander Solzhenitsyn
  • Dr. Zhivago, Boris Pasternak
  • Things Fall Apart, Chinua Achebe
  • The Last Gentleman, Walker Percy
  • The Crossing, Cormac McCarthy
  • A People’s History of the United States, Howard Zinn
  • Poetry, Language, Thought, Martin Heidegger
  • The Hedgehog and the Fox, Isaiah Berlin
  • Art as Experience, John Dewey
  • The Art Spirit, Robert Henri
  • The Political Unconscious, Fredric Jameson
SUE WILSON, Ogdensburg
  • Watership Down, Richard Adams
  • The Stand, Stephen King
  • Jonathan Livingston Seagull, Richard Bach
  • Jane Eyre, Charlotte Bronte
ROSALIE SMITH, Massena
  • Endurance: Shackleton’s Legendary Antarctic Expedition, Caroline Alexander
  • The River Midnight, Lilian Nattel
  • I Heard the Owl Call My Name, M. Craven
JILL RUBIO, Potsdam
Literacy (via mandatory school attendance and a modern Western economy) greatly expanded in the 20th century, and books written for young readers have had a wide impact, and an emotional appeal to many. So much that we love to share these books with our kids as soon as they’re old enough to appreciate them. Here are some of my favorites:
  • Anne of Green Gables (series), Lucy Maud Montgomery
  • Chronicles of Narnia (series), C.S. Lewis
  • The Hobbit/Lord of the Rings trilogy, J.R.R. Tolkien
  • The Secret Garden/A Little Princess, Frances Hodgson Burnett
  • Winnie the Pooh collection, A.A. Milne
  • In the Night Kitchen/Where the Wild Things Are etc., Maurice Sendak. (As much for the literary content as for his artwork!)
My favorite grownup books of the century include:
  • The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Tom Wolfe
  • Dr. Zhivago, Boris Pasternak
  • The Womanly Art of Breastfeeding, La Leche League. A pioneering book which helped millions of women to nurse their babies, despite the trend of artificial feeding which ws so in vogue after WWII.
  • No Ordinary Time, Doris Kearns Goodwin (Pulitzer)
THE BELLINGER FAMILY, Ogdensburg
Jake, age 10:
  • Dinotopia/The World Beneath, James Gurney
  • The Dragons are Singing, Jack Prelutsky
  • Harry Potter (series), J.K. Rowling
Tom, age 16:
  • The Once and Future King, T.H. White
  • The Dragonriders of Pern, Anne McCaffery
  • Cry the Beloved Country, Alan Paton
  • Guards, Guards, Terry Pratchett
Pete, dad:
  • One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Ken Kesey
  • Winesburg, Ohio, Sherwood Anderson
Andrea, mom:
  • To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee
  • The Poisonwood Bible, Barbara Kingsolver
  • Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, Walker Evans and James Agee
  • The Doomsday Book, Connie Willis
  • Gaudy Night, Dorothy Sayers
Grandma Bellinger, age 84:
  • The Foundation (series), Isaac Asimov
  • Reaper Man, Terry Pratchett
  • The Postman, David Brin
  • Ender’s War, Orson Scott Card
MARY ANN CAWLEY, Potsdam
  • Wuthering Heights, Emily Bronte
  • Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck
  • To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee
  • Rebecca, Daphne Du Maurier
  • Short Stories, Ernest Hemingway
  • The Yearling, Marjorie Rawlings
  • The Good Earth, Pearl S. Buck
  • The Hobbit/Lord of the Rings, J.R.R. Tolkien
  • Lonesome Dove, Larry McMurtrey
  • Dune, Frank Herbert
KATE PALERMO, Potsdam (high school student)
  • To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee
  • The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, Carson McCullers
  • Jane Eyre, Charlotte Bronte
  • Short Stories, Ernest Hemingway
  • Short Stories, Flannery O’Connor
  • Catcher in the Rye, J.D. Salinger
  • Of Mice and Men, John Steinbeck
  • The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck
  • A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, Betty Smith
  • The Good Earth, Pearl S. Buck
KATHY BOUTON, Peace & Justice Bookstore, Burlington
  • Solar Storms, Linda Hogan
NORA HARRINGTON, Indian Lake
  • To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee
  • A Prayer for Owen Meany, John Irving
  • Raise High the Roofbeam, Carpenters, J.D. Salinger (and everything else by this author)
  • The Stand, Stephen King
MARTHA VINING, Fletcher, NC (following this list business via our website)
  • Snowflake Bentley, Jacqueline Briggs Martin. A Caldecott Medal Book for children. True story about Wilson Bentley, a Vermont farm boy who spent his life photographing and studying snowflakes.
  • Between Silk and Cyanide: A Codemakers War, 1941-45, Leo Marks. Autobiographical account of making codes for England during WWII.
  • Murder at the Library of Congress, Margaret Truman. Good read with lots of interesting facts about the Library.
JOE DUEMER, Colton
  • Understanding Vietnam, Neil Jamieson
  • Vietnam: A History, Stanley Karnow
  • Distant Road: Selected Poems, Nguyen Dey (trans: Kevin Bowen)
  • The Women Carry River Water, Quang Thieu Nguyen (trans: Martha Collins)
TIM BROOKES, (NCPR commentator), Burlington
  • Gravity’s Rainbow/Mason & Dixon, Thomas Pynchon
  • Dispatches, Michael Herr
  • The Third Policeman, Flann O’Brien
  • Shame/Midnight’s Children, Salman Rushdie
  • Lampriere’s Dicitionary, Lawrence Norfolk
  • Worlds in Collision, Immanuel Velikovsky
TOM DUDONES, Saranac Lake
  • All Quiet on the Western Front, Erich Maria Remarque
  • I, Claudius, Robert Graves
  • A Separate Peace, John Knowles
  • The Secret of Santa Vittoria, Robert Crichton
  • The Right Stuff, Tom Wolfe
  • Day of the Jackal, Fredrick Forsythe
  • One Day in the Life of Ivan Dienisovich, Alexander Solzhenitzen
  • Hiroshima, John Hersey
  • The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, William Shirer
  • The Second World War, Sir Winston Churchill (6 vols)
FRED GOSS
I’m a civil war buff...best single book:
The Battle Cry of Freedom, James McPherson
I love baseball, if you could have only one book:
The Glory of Their Times, Lawrence Ritter
My wife and I love mysteries, two all time favorites:
Gaudy Night, Dorothy Sayers
The Daughter of Time, Josephine Tey
I used to love BIG long series of novels, my two favorites:
Strangers and Brothers, C.P. Snow (11 vols)
The Dance to the Music of Time, Anthony Powell (13 vols)
I collect books about presidents and the presidency, one very good one:
The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt, Edmund Morris (and, hey, Dutch was fun)
And, as a long ago American Civilization major, I used to be asked "what is the Great American Novel?" The answer is easy:
Rally Round the Flag Boys, Max Shulman
To finish the list, the two books I had the most fun reading in 1999:
Zero Tolerance, Toller Cranston (autobiography by the Canadian skater)
Last Train to Memphis, Peter Goralnick (biography of Elvis, the early years)

CHRIS DUNN, Potsdam

  • Discworld (series), Terry Pratchett. Pratchett is the best I know for humor and humanity, and unlikely characters mixing into psychological Rube Goldberg machines that grind out--are--solutions somehow a perfect fit for the predicaments in question. (Chris also highly recommends audio versions of some selected material, including the Recorded Books’ release of 184, Charing Cross Road by Helene Hanff, and the Penguin Audiobook collection of English poetry from the Elizabethans to the early 20th century.)
LINDA UPPER
  • Authors Nevil Schute and Erich Maria Remarque
NANCY KNOX, Burlington
  • Animal Dreams, Barbara Kingsolver
  • The Hobbit/Fellowship of the Ring Trilogy, J.R.R. Tolkien
  • Never Cry Wolf, Farley Mowat
  • A Field Guide to Birds, Roger Tory Peterson
  • The Elements of Style, Strunk and White
  • Your Baby and Child, Penelope Leach
MIKE FARLEY, Canton (St. Lawrence University Music Professor)
  • Fear of Flying, Erica Jong. Set my world on its ear, opened me up to future readings that treated women more profoundly (e.g., The Bell Jar, Slouching Toward Bethlehem, The Awakening).
  • Beneath the Underdog, Charles Mingus
  • Music of the Common Tongue, Christopher Small. In terms of my life as someone who talks and writes about African-American music, no book has been as important. It’s gives the best description of black music in the U.S. that I know.
  • The Jazz Text, Charles Nanry
  • The Soul of Black Folk, W.E.B. DuBois
  • My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, Amos Tutuola. The book that led me to understand that folks from different places really DO see the world differently.
  • The Big Sleep, Raymond Chandler. No book has shaped my "escape life" more than this one.
  • [Suggestions from pre-20th century literature: Great Expectations, Charles Dickens, Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain, The Bible, particularly the Psalms.]
NANCY MURPHY, Malone
  • Stones From the River, Ursula Hegi
CHRIS BIGELOW, Massena
  • Crossing to Safety, Wallace Stegner (and other titles by this author)
HOLLAND FITTS
  • Iowa Baseball Confederacy, A.J. Kinsella
  • The Killer Angels, Michael Shaara
STELLA (via email)
  • Trauma and Recovery, Judith Herman, MD
JUDY GIBSON, Canton
  • Ironweed, Kennedy
  • Postcards, Proulx
  • The Fifth Business, R. Davies
  • Love in the Time of Cholera, Marquez
  • Beloved, Morrison
  • A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Joyce
  • Mrs. Dalloway, Woolf
  • The Age of Innocence, Wharton
  • Death Comes for the Archbishop, Cather
  • Huckleberry Finn, Twain
GEORGE GIBSON
  • Ulysses, Joyce
  • A Death in the Family, Agee
  • Possession, Byatt
  • Angle of Repose, Stegner
  • The English Patient, Ondaatje
  • Eva Luna, Allende
  • A Lesson Before Dying, Gaines
  • Last Orders, Swift
  • Lolita, Nabokov
  • The Catcher in the Rye, Salinger
FRAN COLLIER, Tupper Lake
  • Reservation Blues, Sherman Alexis
  • Rule of the Bone, Russell Banks
  • World’s End, T.C. Boyle
  • Cosmicomics, Italo Calvino
  • Tracks, Louise Erdrich
  • Fear of Flying, Erica Jong
  • Pigs in Heaven, Barbara Kingsolver
  • Martha Quest series, Doris Lessing
  • Stone Diaries, Carol Shields
  • Alias Grace, Margaret Atwood
LAURA CORDTS, Potsdam
  • Cold Mountain, Frazier
  • To Kill a Mockingbird, Lee
  • Cry, the Beloved Country, Paton
  • Grapes of Wrath, Steinbeck
  • The Joy Luck Club, Tan
  • My Antonia, Cather
  • How Green Was My Valley, Llewellyn
  • Crime and Punishment, Dostoyevsky
  • Siddhartha, Hesse
  • Walden, Thoreau
LINDA NELSON, Potsdam
  • The House of the Spirits, Isabel Allende
  • The Master and Margarita, Mikhail Bulgakov
  • The Stranger, Albert Camus
  • Zlata’s Diary, Filipovich Zlata
  • The Women’s Room, Marilyn French
  • The Coming of Age in Mississippi, Anne Moody
  • Servant of the Bones, Anne Rice
  • Night, Elie Wiesel
  • One Day in the Life of Alexander Denisovitch, Alexander Solzhenitsyn
  • Siddhartha, Hermann Hesse
BEVERLY KEIM, Middlebury, VT
  • Things Fall Apart, Chinua Achebe
  • Moby Dick, Herman Melville
  • Tao Te Ching
MARK JONES, Canton
  • Harold and the Purple Crayon, Crockett Johnson (great existential book)
  • No Drama, Gary Snyder
  • Big Sur, Jack Kerouac
  • Moby Dick, Herman Melville
  • Divine Comedy, Dante (as translated by John Ciardi)
  • Paradise Lost, John Milton
  • Anything by William Shakespeare
REESE HERSEY, Burlington
  • The Practice of the Wild, Gary Snyder
  • Collected Poems, 1957-82, Wendell Berry
  • The Gastronomical Me, M.F.K. Fisher
  • Essential Haiku: Basho, Buson and Issa, Robert Hass, ed.
  • Honey From a Weed, Patience Grey
  • Caught Inside: A Surfer’s Year on the California Coast, Dan Duane
  • The Spell of the Sensuous, David Abram
  • Selected Poems, Derek Mahon
  • Desert Solitaire, Ed Abbey
  • The Man Who Planted Trees, Jean Giono
MARK AND ELSA SCHISLER, Indian Lake
First, for young readers:
  • Sarah Plain and Tall, McLaughlin
  • Frog and Toad series, Arnold Lobel
  • The Loras/The Butter Battle Book, Suess
  • Knots on a Counting Rope, John Archambault
  • Pink and Say, Patricia Polacco
  • The Monument/Winter Room, Gary Paulsen
Elsa’s picks for young adult/adult:
  • Ishi in Two Worlds, Theodora Kroeber
  • Pilgrim at Tinker Creek/ Teaching a Stone to Talk, Annie Dillard
  • Clabbered Dirt Sweet Grass, Gary Paulsen
  • To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee
  • Plus, the poetry of Robert Frost, Wendell Berry, Jeannie Robert Foster
Mark’s picks:
  • French Louie, Harvey L. Dunham
  • The Tracker, Tom Brown
  • Sea Wolf, Jack London
  • Plus, the short stories, The Damn Thing, Ambrose Bierce, and To Build a Fire, Jack London
DAVID DEMAREST, Canton
  • The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck
  • Catcher in the Rye, J.D. Salinger
  • Fear Strikes Out, Jimmy Piersall. This was my first introduction to people with mental disease. A different kind of sports book.
  • This Perfect Day, Ira Levin
  • Men at Work, George Will. A great book on baseball.
  • Moby Dick, Herman Melville
  • Caine Mutiny, Herman Wouk
  • Red Badge of Courage, Stephen Crane
NANCI VINEYARD, via email
  • The Magus, John Fowles
  • A Prayer for Owen Meany, John Irving
  • Silent Spring, Rachel Carson
  • The End of Nature, Bill McKibben
  • Plus, everything by Alice Hoffman and Anita Shreve
DUNCAN CUTTER, Nicholville
  • The Adirondack Reader, Paul Jamieson
  • A Clearing in the Wilderness, Hugh Fosburgh. For teen-aged readers.
  • Chinese Handcuffs, Chris Coutcher
  • The Once and Future King, E.B. White
  • My Sweet Charlie, David Westheimer
  • The Mozart Season, Virginia Wolff
  • How Does a Poem Mean?, John Ciardi
  • Animal Farm, George Orwell
BETSY TISDALE, Potsdam
  • Snow Falling on Cedars, David Guterson
  • Growing Up, Russell Baker
  • My Antonia, Willa Cather
  • The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald
  • Animal Dreams, Barbara Kingsolver
  • The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, Carson McCullers
  • The Yearling, Marjorie K. Rawlings
  • Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain
  • How Green Was My Valley, Richard Llewellyn
Betsy sent me the above list last year. Here are some additional titles she called in during this year’s program:
  • Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck
  • Dakota, Kathleen Norris
  • Ethan Frome, Edith Wharton
  • To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee
  • I Heard the Owl Call My Name, Margaret Craven
  • I know Why the Caged Bird Sings, Maya Angelou
  • A Girl of the Limberlost, Gene Stratton-Porter
  • Out of Africa, Isak Dinesen
  • Stuart Little, E.B. White
  • The Narnia series, C.S. Lewis
  • Freddy the Pig series, Walter Brooks
MINA ISHAM, Burlington
  • Land Girls, Angela Huth
  • Cat of Many Tails, Ellery Queen
  • Blue Highways, William Least Heat Moon
  • The Long Loneliness: An Autobiography, Dorothy Day
  • House/Old Friends, Tracy Kidder
  • La Place de la Concorde/Oranges/Looking for a Ship, John McPhee
  • The Education of Hyman Kaplan, Leonard Q. Ross
  • Requiem for a Woman’s Soul, Omar Rivabella
  • 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea/Around the World in 80 Days, Jules Verne
  • Robinson Crusoe, Daniel Defoe
PAUL, Potsdam
  • The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York, Robert A. Caro
  • A Fan’s Notes, Fred Exely
DON PURCELLL, Potsdam
(After last winter’s (1999) call-in requesting suggestions for favorite or best books, I received the following ditty from Don, who is a long-time station friend, bookstore proprietor, and generally well-read and knowledgeable listener.)

As a pledgee of the title-talk tribe
With you, Den-Mother, I share a vibe;
Here--take six, or five,
Or a few that got me through the year alive:

  • Tolstoy, Henry Troyat. Biography of a novelist whose life was a novel.
  • Angela’s Ashes, Frank McCourt. A thoughtful good man’sunshielded life, so far.
  • Dreams of My Russian Summer, Andre Makine. A really beautiful book, about growing up in a revolutionary Russian backland with, in mind, a French foreground.
  • Voyage of the Narwhal/Ship Fever, Andrea Barrett. You come to know some persons, not as examples, but as of your own interior company. And you learn medical and arctic matters.
  • Nice Work, David Lodge. Smarty, chuckleworthy exterior that also rests on a concrete foundation. Scene: academe and bizness interwoven.
  • The Long Walk, Slvomin Rawicz. After a few pages, you’ll jog, then trot, then run and won’t be able to stop. And feel you’ve learned something about human strength.
  • The Scarlet Letter, Nathaniel Hawthorne. No, it really isn’t about sex.
(Don is one of the few people I know who still uses a manual typewriter. I think his whimsical email address is worth sharing with you…it’s how he signed his letter.)

Donpurcl.antinetuncyber.WPOTSDWebpaper-print@@Peace

RUN DUNNING, Tupper Lake

  • The Once and Future King, E.B. White
  • Flashman series, G.S. MacDonald (11 vol)
  • The Good Red Road, Kenneth Lincoln
  • The AA Big Book, Alcoholics Anonymous
  • Collected Poems, Dylan Thomas
  • Lord of the Rings trilogy, J.R.R. Tolkien
  • The Camerons, Robert Crichton
  • Malevil, Robert Merle
  • The Essential Earthman, Henry Mitchell
  • Plus, Huckleberry Finn and the complete works of Mark Twain, Shakespeare’s Macbeth, Black Elk Speaks, edited by Neihardt, and Little Flowers of Assisi, St. Francis of Assisi.
DOUG, Potsdam
  • One Hundred Years of Solitude, Gabriel Garcia Marquex
  • Song of Solomon, Toni Morrison
  • Lolita, Nabokov
  • Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values, Robert M. Pirsig
  • The Power of Myth, Joseph Campbell
JIM, Potsdam
  • The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Thomas Kuhn
  • How the Irish Saved Civilization: The Untold Story of Ireland’s Heroic Role from the
  • Fall of Rome to the Rise of Medieval Europe, Thomas Cahill
  • Travels of Jaimie McPheeters, Robert Taylor
DAN, Old Forge
  • Sometimes a Great Notion, Ken Kesey
JAMES C. DAWSON, Plattsburgh (NYS Regent and SUNY faculty member)
  • The Perfect Storm, Sebastian Junger
  • Longitude, Dava Sobel
  • Cod: A Biography of a Fish that Changed the World, Mark Kurlansky
  • Animal Farm, George Orwell
CHRIS BIGELOW, Massena
  • Crossing to Safety/The Spectator Bird, Wallace Stegner
  • Autobiography of a Face, Lucy Grealy
  • A Woman of Independent Means, Elizabeth Forsythe Hailey
  • The House of Spirits, Isabel Allende
  • A Lesson Before Dying, Ernest J. Gaines
  • One Hundred Years of Solitude, Gabriel Garcia Marquez
  • When Did You Last See Your Father?, Blake Morrison
  • Trinity Fields, Bradford Morrow
BILL MCKIBBEN, Johnsburg, NY/Boston, MA
  • Down and Out in Paris and London/Homage to Catalonia, George Orwell
  • Home Economics, Wendell Berry
  • Desert Solitaire, Edward Abbey
  • The Book of Job, as translated by Stephen Mitchell
  • Sand County Almanac, Aldo Leopold
  • Walden, Henry Thoreau
  • My First Summer in the Sierras, John Muir
  • The Narnia series, C.S. Lewis
CAROL SCOFIELD, Lake Placid
  • Night Talk, Elizabeth Cox. This has gotten little attention, but is superb.
FORREST BROWNELL, South Colton
Forrest indicated that he had eliminated works translated into English. Had he not, included in his list would have been works by Lenin, Einstein, Keynes, Hitler, and Crick and Watson.
  • Shooting an Elephant and Other Essays, George Orwell. Some of the best writing of one of the century’s best writers. Wonderfully clear and delightfully free of cant.
  • Good-bye to All That, Robert Graves. A stark and honest account of the experience of war, written by a most unusual warrior. Witty and sobering by turns. A model autobiography.
  • Survival, Evasion and Escape (FM 21-76). This Department of Army field Manual is a browser’s delight. Good advice for every occasion and contingency.
  • Old Glory, Jonathan Raban. The author takes a small boat down the Mississippi. A droll and acerbic tour of America’s heartland of darkness.
  • The American Language, H.L. Mencken. Not the last word, of course, but a good beginning . Proof that a book can be both scholarly and readable.
  • Collected Poems, Philip Larkin. My candidate for the voice of the twentieth century -- romantic and lacerating, a sort of cannibal Candide. Larkin’s poems are truth distilled to a bitter, intoxicating liquor. Not for the squeamish. Not for children. You’ve been warned.
  • American Visions, Robert Hughes. A history of visual art in America, from the first years of European settlement to the present day, by a man who is an engaging mix of historian, critic and polemicist.
  • Collected Speeches, Winston S. Churchill. The English language in its finest hour. Churchill up on his hind legs, bullying, entreating, persuading and inspiring. His robust and resonant words are far from the boneless and denatured idiom of today’s political speech as it is possible to get.
  • Scoop, Evelyn Waugh. Written 1937, this hilarious send-up of contemporary journalism rings just as true today as it did then.
  • The American Way of Death, Jessica Mitford
THE GILBORN FAMILY, Blue Mountain Lake
Alice:
  • The Dollmaker, Harriet Arno
  • The Shipping News, Annie Proulx
  • A Thousand Acres, Jane Smiley
  • Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant, Ann Tyler
  • Cat’s Eye, Margaret Atwood
  • Family Pictures, Sue Miller
  • The Sunlight Dialogues, John Gardner
  • Portrait of a Lady, Henry James
  • Tender is the Night, F. Scott Fitzgerald
  • Light in August, William faulkner
  • To the Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf
  • Lord Jim, Joseph Conrad
Amanda:
  • The Little Prince, Antoine de St. Exupery
  • A Portrait of the Artist, James Joyce
  • The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald
  • The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck
  • As I Lay Dying, William Faulkner
  • Catcher in the Rye, J.D. Salinger
  • The Color Purple, Alice Walker
  • Siddharta, Hermann Hesse
  • The World According to Garp, John Irving
  • Ceremony, Leslie Marmon Silko
Craig:
  • Light in August, William Faulkner
  • Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, James Joyce
  • Pale Horse, Pale Rider, Katherine Ann Porter
  • The Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison
  • Henderson the Rain King, Saul Bellow
  • The Rabbit series, John Updike
  • Mrs. Dalloway, Virginia Woolf
  • A Farewell to Arms, Ernest Hemingway
  • Call It Sleep, Henry Roth
  • Plus, lifetime contribution of E.B. White and Edith Wharton


ELLEN ROCCO, NCPR manager/Readers & Writers host
Okay, I’ve admired your choices and tip my hat to all of you who bit the bullet and narrowed down those lists. How cruel of me to ask that of you. Well, I guess I must submit my list to the axe, too. Here’s what I’ve done: rather than try to pick the "best" books of the century (seems a bit presumptuous anyway), I’ve picked the ones that changed my life or world view at the time I read them.

  • Tom Sawyer and EVERYTHING else written by Mark Twain. I know, I know, Twain did most of his writing in the 19th century, but I read everything by him, including the last books, and that’s why he’s on my list. I can still remember the gray Sunday when I was about 10 or 11 years old, bored, and looking for something to do, and my mother suggested Tom Sawyer. My parents owned the complete works of Twain, and from Tom Sawyer I moved on to all the subsequent volumes. I loved Twain, but I also loved immersing myself in a single author’s voice. It began a habit I have had ever since of reading everything I can get my hands on by authors whose initial work I enjoy. I followed Twain with Steinbeck, Hemingway, Dos Passos and so on. But Tom Sawyer started it all for me.
  • Cry the Beloved Country, Alan Paton. Shocked as I was by this story of apartheid, the parallels between South Africa and the South of my own country were glaring and set the stage for my youthful involvement in the civil rights movement.
  • The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, William Shirer. I read this shortly after its publication in the early ‘60s. I had read several personal and harrowing accounts of holocaust survival and holocaust death. This comprehensive history somehow made it all real, horrifyingly real.
  • Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison. Whether you were a black man in white America, a Jew in Nazi Germany, or outside the circle of any society’s power and dominant culture, Ellison reached inside the experience and made the reader squirm.
  • The Golden Notebook, Doris Lessing. While others were reading the widely popular feminist theorists of the ‘60s and early ‘70s, I discovered Lessing…and myself.
  • The Sotweed Factor, John Barth. This book taught me that I could love difficult writing. Barth pulled me in and wouldn’t let go. (Soon after, I read Thomas Mann’s Magic Mountain and loved that too.)
  • Fire in the Lake, Francis Fitzgerald. Written in the mid-‘60s, this book did for my understanding of the Vietnam War what Shirer did for my understanding of WWII.
  • Sophie’s Choice, William Styron. After all the books I read about the Holocaust, after all the conversations with survivors and their children, after getting to a point where I thought I’d heard it all, along comes this one. Talk about direct hits to the solar plexus.
  • A Prayer for Owen Meany, John Irving. The heart and spirituality in this book touched me in a place that is beyond words. (I’ve liked virtually everything Irving has written, but the one book I never read is, yup, The World According to Garp.)
  • A Hundred Years of Solitude, Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Aside from being one of the most beautiful and haunting books of the century, this book began a journey for me through the literature of so many incredible authors who hail from places far beyond the boundaries of North American and Western Europe; Marquez inspired me to explore.
So, that’s ten books. But, oh no, what about the poets? The poets who I would sound like if only I could sing: T.S. Eliot, Ginsberg, Lorca, Willie Dixon, Bob Dylan, Ferlinghetti, DiPrima…so many more than ten.