For Love of Books: William Faulkner

The cream of the crop of my collection, as it sits on a shelf in the dining room.

“”When Miss Emily Grierson died, our whole town went to her funeral: the men through a sort of respectful affection for a fallen monument, the women mostly out of curiosity to see the inside of her house, which no one save an old manservant – a combined gardener and cook – had seen in at least ten years.”  -  ”A Rose for Emily”

I can blame the Tolkien obsession on my brothers.  But my Faulkner obsession has the blame laid squarely on Carol Mooney, my high school English teacher (both for Freshman and AP).  In AP English we read The Sound and the Fury and I was hooked for life.  And as for the collection, you can actually blame that on Veronica.  It was when she bought the Signet copy of Sanctuary because of how awesome the cover was, in spite of the fact that I already had it, that I started opening myself to collecting various editions of books.  Before I met her I owned precisely 1 copy of Lord of the Rings and 1 copy of The Sound and the Fury.

There is a competition going.  Looking in my Book Register (of course I have a spreadsheet that has all this information – read this and stop asking silly questions), the Faulkner collection currently encompasses 314 books for a total of 114273 pages.  The Tolkien collection only has 188 books for 88201 pages.  Of course, Tolkien only wrote two novels while Faulkner wrote 20.  And the Faulkner collection has probably only grown by about a shelf since we came to Boston, whereas the Tolkien collection has probably doubled in size.  Clearly they are the two collecting passions in my life (if by the two, you don’t count Star Wars, the Modern Library, the Viking Portable Library, Harry Potter or Lego).

 

Top 100 Novels #1: The Sound and the Fury

The Vintage Corrected Text mass market copy of The Sound and the Fury I bought for AP English in 1991. I haven’t parted with it since.

The Sound and the Fury

• Rank:  #1
• Author:  William Faulkner  (1897  -  1962)
• Published:  1929
• Publisher:  Jonathan Cape & Harrison Smith, Inc.
• Pages:  378
• First Line:  ”Through the fence, between the curling flower spaces, I could see them hitting.”
• Last Line:  ”The broken flower drooped over Ben’s fist and his eyes were empty and blue and serene again as cornice and facade flowed smoothly once more from left to right, post and tree, window and doorway and signboard each in its ordered place.”
• ML Version:  #187  (with As I Lay Dying - 1946), #187  (by itself – 1966), P6 (both with As I Lay Dying and by itself), gold dust jacket, new dust jacket
• Acclaim:  Modern Library Top 100 English Language Novels of the 20th Century #6, Le Monde’s 100 Books of the Century, All-TIME List
• Film Version:  1959  (***  -  dir. Martin Ritt)
• First Read:  Fall, 1991

 

The Top 100 Novels: The Complete List

The Top 100 Novels.

Here it is.  My Top 100 Novels – the complete list.

The intro was here.  The second 100 can be found here.  Various statistics and trivia about the list can be found here.

Here is the list:

 

The Top 100 Novels: stats and trivia

Faulkner is the king of the list. Does that really surprise you?

Before I put up the full Top 100 list (and do the post for #1), I am tossing up this bit of various trivia and statistics about the novels on my Top 100 list and on the 101-200 list.

Please note that none of the lists involving 101-200 have numbers attached because I didn’t rank them.

• Longest Top 100 Novel:  In Search of Lost Time  (4651 pages)
• Shortest Top 100 Novel:  Heart of Darkness  (96 pages)
• Earliest Top 100 Novel:  Gulliver’s Travels  (1726)
• Latest Top 100 Novel:  Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrel  (2004)
• Latest Top 200 Novel:  The Night Circus / The Tiger’s Wife  (2011)

 

The Top 100 Novels: #101-200

Sinclair Lewis is king of the second 100, with four books. Here he is on the cover of Time Magazine, 15 years after winning the Nobel Prize, yet now he is mostly forgotten or ignored. Have you ever read anything by him?

This list works a bit differently than the Top 100.  First of all, this is not a ranked list.  Except for the first three listed titles, they are placed on this list chronologically.  Second, I have not been back through each one of these titles the way I have gone through the Top 100.  Some of these I haven’t re-read in years while every one of the Top 100 were re-read before I wrote on them.  There won’t be individual posts on these books.  Think of this list as less the definitive second 100 as 100 great novels that are worth a read.

Don’t mistake me.  These aren’t just books I enjoy reading.  I hope to start a series soon called Great Reads (which will all get individual posts), which are all about the books I really enjoy, but that don’t really belong on a list like this one, let alone the Top 100.  These are all great novels (though some might also end up in Great Reads).

What about your book, the one you were surprised didn’t make the Top 100 and are even more surprised didn’t make this list?  Well, I had to pare it down (I originally typed out over 125 novels and considered far more).  Just imagine that whatever book you’re thinking of that didn’t make the list was one of the last ones I cut.  Well, unless your book is Infinite Jest, Middlemarch, On the Road or anything by Jane Austen or Henry James.  If you thought those might ever make the list you have clearly never read anything else I have ever posted on literature and are probably brand new to the site.  Welcome!

Now, as for those first three titles.  Well, I made the decision not to re-approach my list while in the process of doing these posts (of course I didn’t know it would take over three years to get the whole list done).  Because of that, sometimes things come up that I realized belonged on the list.  The first of them was something I had somehow never read and as soon as I read it (mid-2011), I realized it should have been on the list.  The second was one I went back and re-read in the summer of 2012 after re-watching the film with Veronica and I realized I had long under-estimated it and it should have been on the list.  The third of them I have the best excuse for – it hadn’t even been written when I did the list.  But it belongs on it.  So those are the de facto other Top 100 books.

 

Top 100 Novels #12: Absalom, Absalom!

The 1st Edition dust jacket of William Faulkner’s Absalom Absalom (1936)

Absalom, Absalom!

• Author:  William Faulkner  (1897  -  1962)
• Published:  1936
• Publisher:  Random House
• Pages:  384
• First Line:  “From a little after two oclock until almost sundown of the long still hot weary dead September afternoon they sat in what Miss Coldfield still called the office because her father had called it that.”
• Last Lines:  “I dont hate it he thought, panting in the cold air, the iron New England dark: I dont.  I dont!  I dont hate it!  I dont hate it!“
• ML Edition:  #271  (two dust jackets – 1951, 1963); gold Modern Library, Modern Library College Edition
• Film:  None, thankfully
• First Read:  Spring, 1996

 

Top 100 Novels #19: As I Lay Dying

My copies of As I Lay Dying (clockwise from top left - Vintage trade, British hardcover, Vintage mass, Modern Library gold, First Edition facsimile, Norton, Modern Library hardcover, Penguin British paperback, Vintage mass, Modern Library hardcover (combined with The Sound and the Fury))

As I Lay Dying

• Author:  William Faulkner  (1897  -  1962)
• Rank:  #19
• Published:  1930
• Publisher:  Jonathan Cape & Harrison Smith
• Pages:  267
• First Line:  “Jewel and I came up from the field, following the path in single file.”
• Last Line:  ” ‘Meet Mrs Bundren,’ he says.”
• ML Edition:  #187  (published with The Sound and the Fury; also as a paperback #6); #378; Gold Hardcover
• Acclaim:  Modern Library Top 100 English Language Novels of the 20th Century #35
• Film:  none
• First Read:  Spring, 1994

 

Top 100 Novels #27: Light in August

Light in August

first edition cover of Light in August (1932)

• Author:  William Faulkner  (1897  -  1962)
• Rank:  #27
• Published:  1932
• Publisher:  Harrison Smith and Robert Haas
• Pages:  507  (Vintage Corrected Text)
• First Line:  “Sitting beside the road, watching the wagon mount the hill toward her, Lena thinks, ‘I have come from Alabama: a fur piece.”
• Last Lines:  ” ‘My, my.  A body does get around.  Here we aint been coming from Alabama but two months, and now it’s already Tennessee.’ “
• Acclaim:  Modern Library Top 100 English-Language Novels of the 20th Century (#54); All-TIME List
• ML edition:  #88 (two dust jackets – 1950, 1966); College Edition; Gold  (2002)
• Series:  Yoknapatawpha County
• Film:  none
• First Read:  Summer, 1996

 

For Love of Books: Norton Critical Editions

my Norton Critical Editions

They are indispensable for serious literature students.  They are also great to have for those who love individual works.  Either way, they offer an amazing amount of information with each individual title.  They are a good addition to any library.

You can see a good selection of them here.  You can also find the full current list at the Norton website.

 

Top 100 Novels #62: Sanctuary

the Signet version of Sanctuary that Veronica bought because she liked the cover and really opened the door to my Faulkner collection

Sanctuary

• Author:  William Faulkner  (1897  -  1962)
• Rank:  #62
• Published:  1931
• Publisher:  Jonathan Cape and Harrison Smith
• Pages:  341  (Vintage Corrected Text)
• First Line:  “From beyond the screen of bushes which surrounded the spring, Popeye watched the man drinking.”
• Last Line:  “She closed the compact and from beneath her smart new hat she seemed to follow with her eyes the waves of music, to dissolve into the dying brasses, across the pool and the opposite semi-circle of trees where at sombre intervals the dead tranquil queens in stained marble mused, and on into the sky lying prone and vanquished in the embrace of the season of rain and death.”
• ML Edition:  #61  (three dust jackets  -  1932, 1959, 1967)
• Film:  1933  (***), 1961
• First Read:  July, 1994