Top 100 Novels #43: The Crying of Lot 49

Thomas Pynchon's amazing and hilarious The Crying of Lot 49

The Crying of Lot 49

• Author:  Thomas Pynchon  (b. 1937)
• Rank:  #43
• Published:  1966
• Publisher:  J.B. Lippincott Company
• Pages:  183
• First Line:  “One summer afternoon Mrs Oedipa Maas came home from a Tupperware party whose hostess had put perhaps too much kirsch in the fondue to find that she, Oedipa, had been named executor, or she supposed executrix, of the estate of one Pierce Inverarity, a California real estate mogul who had once lost two million dollars in his spare time but still had assets numerous and tangled enough to make the job of sorting it all out more than honorary.”
• Last Lines:  “Passerine spread his arms in a gesture that seemed to belong to the priesthood of some remote culture; perhaps to a descending angel.  The auctioneer cleared his throat.  Oedipa settled back, to await the crying of lot 49.”
• ML Edition:  none
• Film:  none
• Acclaim:  All-TIME List
• First Read:  July, 2000

 

Top 100 Novels #67: Gravity’s Rainbow

the Bantam mass-market version of Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow (1973) that I own

Gravity’s Rainbow

• Author:  Thomas Pynchon  (b. 1937)
• Rank:  #67
• Published:  1973
• Publisher:  Viking
• Pages:  887
• First Line:  “A screaming comes across the sky.”
• Last Line:  “Now everybody -”
• ML Edition:  none
• Acclaim:  All-TIME Top 100 Novels; National Book Award; Pulitzer Prize  (voted unanimously by fiction jury; over-turned by board and no award given)
• Film:  none
• First Read:  Fall, 2000

 

Beyond the Modern Library: The 25 Greatest Novels of the 21st Century (so far) (2010 update)

Brilliant!

A quick note: the following 10 novels will not appear on

Drivel!

this list. It’s not your list. You might think these are great. I think they are overrated, whether because they are simply badly written (The Historian, The Memory Keeper’s Daughter), pretentious McSweeney’s-esque prattle (Absurdistan, Special Topics in Calamity Physics, Everything is Illuminated), boring (Life of Pi), overrated due to serious subject matter (Lovely Bones), well written but uninteresting (Bee Season, Wickett’s Remedy), or fatally flawed due to oversimplification of a truly horrid situation (The Kite Runner). They’re not here so don’t ask for them. Also not here are the Thursday Next books by Jasper Fforde, which are fantastic, but, like Douglas Adams, not quite great writing, or the Jump 225 Trilogy, which I love and was written by a friend of mine, but isn’t quite up there and isn’t done yet. I have done away with the English language requirement for this list, because my previous list was done to Modern Library standards to match up against their list. Only two of these are foreign language novels anyway. Here’s my list:

Before I get to the list, I feel I should point out that it’s now up to 29 books.  That’s because I have added some updates over the last couple of years and didn’t feel the need to delete the books at the bottom of the list.