Friday, January 29, 2010

Time's 100 Best Novels...but I respectfully disagree

Here's the list of what they say. I'm working on mine.

http://www.time.com/time/2005/100books/the_complete_list.html

The Complete List
In Alphabetical Order
PRINT

A - B
The Adventures of Augie March
Saul Bellow

All the King's Men
Robert Penn Warren

American Pastoral
Philip Roth


An American Tragedy
Theodore Dreiser

Animal Farm
George Orwell


Appointment in Samarra
John O'Hara


Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret
Judy Blume

The Assistant
Bernard Malamud


At Swim-Two-Birds
Flann O'Brien

Atonement
Ian McEwan


Beloved
Toni Morrison


The Berlin Stories
Christopher Isherwood


The Big Sleep
Raymond Chandler


The Blind Assassin
Margaret Atwood


Blood Meridian
Cormac McCarthy

Brideshead Revisited
Evelyn Waugh


The Bridge of San Luis Rey
Thornton Wilder


C - D
Call It Sleep
Henry Roth


Catch-22
Joseph Heller


The Catcher in the Rye
J.D. Salinger


A Clockwork Orange
Anthony Burgess


The Confessions of Nat Turner
William Styron


The Corrections
Jonathan Franzen


The Crying of Lot 49
Thomas Pynchon


A Dance to the Music of Time
Anthony Powell


The Day of the Locust
Nathanael West


Death Comes for the Archbishop
Willa Cather

A Death in the Family
James Agee

The Death of the Heart
Elizabeth Bowen


Deliverance
James Dickey


Dog Soldiers
Robert Stone


F - G
Falconer
John Cheever


The French Lieutenant's Woman
John Fowles


The Golden Notebook
Doris Lessing


Go Tell it on the Mountain
James Baldwin


Gone With the Wind
Margaret Mitchell


The Grapes of Wrath
John Steinbeck


Gravity's Rainbow
Thomas Pynchon


The Great Gatsby
F. Scott Fitzgerald


H - I
A Handful of Dust
Evelyn Waugh


The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter
Carson McCullers


The Heart of the Matter
Graham Greene

Herzog
Saul Bellow


Housekeeping
Marilynne Robinson


A House for Mr. Biswas
V.S. Naipaul


I, Claudius
Robert Graves


Infinite Jest
David Foster Wallace


Invisible Man
Ralph Ellison


L - N
Light in August
William Faulkner


The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe
C.S. Lewis

Lolita
Vladimir Nabokov


Lord of the Flies
William Golding

The Lord of the Rings
J.R.R. Tolkien


Loving
Henry Green


Lucky Jim
Kingsley Amis


The Man Who Loved Children
Christina Stead


Midnight's Children
Salman Rushdie

Money
Martin Amis


The Moviegoer
Walker Percy


Mrs. Dalloway
Virginia Woolf

Naked Lunch
William Burroughs


Native Son
Richard Wright


Neuromancer
William Gibson

Never Let Me Go
Kazuo Ishiguro


1984
George Orwell


O - R
On the Road
Jack Kerouac


One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
Ken Kesey


The Painted Bird
Jerzy Kosinski

Pale Fire
Vladimir Nabokov


A Passage to India
E.M. Forster

Play It As It Lays
Joan Didion

Portnoy's Complaint
Philip Roth


Possession
A.S. Byatt


The Power and the Glory
Graham Greene

The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie
Muriel Spark


Rabbit, Run
John Updike


Ragtime
E.L. Doctorow


The Recognitions
William Gaddis


Red Harvest
Dashiell Hammett

Revolutionary Road
Richard Yates

S - T
The Sheltering Sky
Paul Bowles


Slaughterhouse-Five
Kurt Vonnegut


Snow Crash
Neal Stephenson

The Sot-Weed Factor
John Barth

The Sound and the Fury
William Faulkner

The Sportswriter
Richard Ford


The Spy Who Came in From the Cold
John le Carre


The Sun Also Rises
Ernest Hemingway


Their Eyes Were Watching God
Zora Neale Hurston


Things Fall Apart
Chinua Achebe

To Kill a Mockingbird
Harper Lee


To the Lighthouse
Virginia Woolf


Tropic of Cancer
Henry Miller


U - W
Ubik
Philip K. Dick

Under the Net
Iris Murdoch

Under the Volcano
Malcolm Lowry


Watchmen
Alan Moore & Dave Gibbons

White Noise
Don DeLillo


White Teeth
Zadie Smith


Wide Sargasso Sea
Jean Rhys

Tuesday, January 19, 2010

Losing Spenser


This link is really good...provides an appreciation for Robert B. Parker. Parker was like an old friend. I felt like he'd been around for so long--his books, the TV show, the movies. I even got to meet him once. Plus he reminds me so much of Boston, a place I love. So take a minute and read on...

http://blogs.wsj.com/speakeasy/tag/robert-b-parker

Robert B. Parker, the crime writer best known for his Spenser detective series, died today at the age of 77. Fittingly for a writer who published several books a year — many of which routinely made best-sellers lists — Parker is said to have died at his desk...

Sunday, January 10, 2010

Recipe Fun

I'm a huge Mark Bittman fan. His books are great and easy to use. His articles are always interesting. I've been making a lot of potato leek soup lately. My recipe fav is from the NY Times cookbook using the Vichyssoise recipe but not chilling it. While I was searching to see if it was online, I found this Bittman recipe and sounded so good, I decided to post instead.

Grilled White-and-Sweet-Potato Salad
Mark Bittman
Yield 4 to 6 servings

Time About 40 minutes

Ingredients
2 large waxy (new) potatoes, about 1 pound
1 or 2 sweet potatoes, about 1 pound
4 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil
Salt and pepper
1 tablespoon grainy mustard
1 tablespoon sherry or other vinegar, or to taste
1 bunch scallions, both white and green parts, chopped

Method
1. Start a gas or charcoal grill, or heat the oven to 450 degrees. Peel potatoes and cut them into slices 1/2-inch thick. Toss them with half the olive oil and sprinkle them with salt and pepper. Grill potatoes over direct but not-too-hot heat, turning them as they brown. Or roast them on nonstick baking sheet, turning once or twice.
2. Potatoes will cook in about 10 to 15 minutes; remove them as they become tender. When they are done and fairly cool, toss them with remaining ingredients. Taste and adjust seasoning and serve. Or the salad can be covered and refrigerated; bring to room temperature before serving.