The Mookse and the Gripes discussion

Hi everyone. Here in the U.S. some of us are gearing up for spring and March Madness (the college basketball tournament), there are a lot of brackets for all kinds of competitions, including between books. You've probably seen the Tournament of Books that runs with March Madness (here is their latest bracket, with the competition beginning soon).

Well, I was thinking it might be fun to do a March tournament for this group. I'd set up the brackets by region of the world, or perhaps by time of publication, and we'd pit good books against each other, discuss them (even if we haven't read them . . . that's right!). I'm very curious what our forum's winner would be. Something like Middlemarch? Or 2666? Or what?

I am sure this is not for everyone, and many of you probably are not reacting well to this idea. If no one is interested, no worries! I won't put us through watching me talk to myself.

But if anyone is interested, then I could use some help thinking up the list of books. I'll keep the last word on the selection and the seeding, but only because I think it's more efficient and the results are meaningless anyway. It's all just a meaningless, but hopefully fun, excuse to look at a couple of books and pick the winner, sometimes whether you've read them or not. The discussion -- which I hope ranges from solid knowledge of the books to uninformed gut reactions -- is the main point. Hopefully people will be forthcoming with their opinions and blindspots, and this could give us a great opportunity to get to know everyone better. And maybe some of us will be inspired to look more closely at a book we had previously dismissed.

So, I need 64 fictional works from around the world and from various time periods (probably nothing pre-1800 though). While I'll welcome your thoughts on obscure classics, I probably won't select them in the end unless the book has a readership and a bit of a claim; for this game I really am thinking more along the lines of classics that many of us at least pretend to have read. We'll be pitting apples against oranges much of the time, but don't worry about that. Using my example above, I think a discussion looking at both Middlemarch and 2666 would be so much fun!

Anyway, thoughts? Books?

The Master and Margarita

Infinite Jest

Martha Quest

I see that while I've been writing this up, some of you have posted some ideas. Thanks!

Here are some of my early thoughts on books. Again, I don't mind the books being underappreciated and perhaps unknown to many of us, so long as they have some kind of recognizable readership. In other words, while we don't need to pit the top 100 books of all time as per the Modern Library against each other; let's throw in some authors we love and who, but for the strangeness of this life, would be capital World Literature. That said, I also don't think we can do some book that only had a 500 print run in the 1920s and has never been in print since.

Here are 35 that came to mind to me rather quickly. Feel free to suggest other books by the same authors, though I'm going to say now that each author will be represented only once. There are some significant holes in this list because I'm just doing this off the cuff and have many limitations of my own.

-Middlemarch, by George Eliot
-2666, by Roberto Bolano
-The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, by Muriel Spark
-Midnight's Children, by Salman Rushdie
-The Box Man, by Kobo Abe

-A Heart So White, by Javier Marias
-Pride and Prejudice, by Jane Austen
-To the Light House, by Virginia Woolf
-My Antonia, by Willa Cather
-Disgrace, by J.M. Coetzee

-Satantango, by Laszlo Krasznahorkai
-The Blue Flower, by Penelope Fitzgerald
-So Long, See You Tomorrow, by William Maxwell
-Blood Meridian, by Cormac McCarthy
-Gilead, by Marilynne Robinson

-The Rings of Saturn, by W.G. Sebald
-A Wreath of Roses, by Elizabeth Taylor
-Crime and Punishment, by Fyodor Dostoevsky
-Anna Karenina, by Leo Tolstoy
-American Pastoral, by Philip Roth

-100 Years of Solitude, by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
-As I Lay Dying, by William Faulkner
-Remains of the Day, by Kazuo Ishiguro
-Act of the Damned, by Antonio Lobo Antunes
-Madame Bovary, by Gustave Flaubert

-The Name of the Rose, by Umberto Eco
-Tristana, by Benito Perez Galdos
-Daisy Miller, by Henry James
-The Human Comedy, by Honore de Balzac
-The Gate, by Natsume Soseki


There are some authors whose books I still haven't read but who would be welcome, so please let me know which books from the following you'd recommend:
-Jose Saramago
-Thomas Bernhard
-Naguib Mahfouz
-Haruki Murakami
-Other regions I don't represent well above

Still not sure exactly how I'll arrange them: by era (1800s / 1900-1930 / 1931-1960 / 1961-1990 / 1991-now) or by geography (North America and South America / Europe / Asia / Other). I suppose it will depend on what works best with the selection we put together.

I'd like to get the bracket put together next week so people can see it. Shortly thereafter, I'll put the polls out for a few in the first round.

Crime and Punishment

The Lord of the Rings

Don Quixote

Bleak House

Mason & Dixon

Life A User's Manual (Perec)

either War & Peace (prefer) or Anna Karenina

Midnight's Children

Beloved

Austerlitz

[Shall we exclude huge works that are effectively series, like Proust or Anthony Powell?]

(okay, yeah, I looked through my 1001 Books (read) shelf...)

One I haven't read that popped into my head:
The Good Soldier Svejk - I think this could be interesting for something to do with depictions of different wars, different places, comic v serious

Okay, after tallying what I have so far, including the ones suggested above, I think it's only going to work to organize the brackets by date and not by geography. I will still try hard to keep it geographically diverse, but there really are just too many European and North/South American novels that fit with this group.

Antonomasia wrote: "Shall we exclude huge works that are effectively series, like Proust or Anthony Powell?"

I'd say list them and I'll see where we are when the selection comes along. Thanks for the suggestions!

let's throw in some authors we love and who, but for the strangeness of this life, would be capital World Literature.

Some read, some not.

Street of Crocodiles or Complete Stories - Bruno Schulz
Kristin Lavransadatter - Sigrid Undset
Confessions of a Justified Sinner - James Hogg
Lanark - Alisdair Gray
The Unbearable Lightness of Being (or whatever else someone may think Kundera's best)
Monkey: The Journey to the West
something by Thomas Mann
Independent People - Halldor Laxness
The Book of Disquiet - Fernando Pessoa
The Doll - Boleslaw Prus
They Were Counted (+ sequels?) - Miklos Banffy


I think it would be fun to include older stuff that's very well known, whether it's Homer, or Tristram Shandy. And also poetry, because of the strangeness of having to compare it with novels, which these tournaments don't usually do.

(If can include epic poetry I'd also include The Kalevala)

Trevor wrote: "I see that while I've been writing this up, some of you have posted some ideas. Thanks!

Here are some of my early thoughts on books. Again, I don't mind the books being underappreciated and perhap..."

Bernhard and Mahfouz should definitely be on there.

Nicole wrote: "Bernhard and Mahfouz should definitely be on there."

I haven't read enough of either to know which ones. Please let me know which ones! :-)

Trevor wrote: "Nicole wrote: "Bernhard and Mahfouz should definitely be on there."

I haven't read enough of either to know which ones. Please let me know which ones! :-)"

How does Palace Walk and Gargoyles sound?

Okay, I spent my lunchtime putting together a full list of 64, including those above. The list has 25 books in translation, which is almost half, and about where I'm happy. It is divided in the following categories:

-The 1800s
-1900-1950
-1951-1990
-1991-now

I'd love to sub out some of the books on my list with your suggestions, if you'll keep them coming. In a few days I'll want to start seeding them, but until I say it's done feel free to let me know what I should put in.

This is already a very impressive list! A few that are unfamiliar to me, but that is inspiring...

Trevor wrote: "Okay, I spent my lunchtime putting together a full list of 64, including those above. The list has 25 books in translation, which is almost half, and about where I'm happy. It is divided in the fol..."

I'm probably being dense, but where is your list of 64, Trevor?

Not being dense at all, Deborah! I didn't post it. I'll post it here.
This is just tentative, so please keep suggestions coming if a worthy book needs to go in. To make it interesting, let me know what book you'd take off to make room for your suggestion.

1800s
-Pride and Prejudice
-The Human Comedy
-The Count of Monte Cristo
-The Scarlet Letter
-Bleak House
-Villette
-Madame Bovary
-Crime and Punishment
-Middlemarch
-Anna Karenina
-Daisy Miller
-La Regenta
-The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
-Tristana
-Dracula
-Heart of Darkness

1900-1949
-The Gate
-The Home and the World
-A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
-My Antonia
-Diary of a Madman
-The Age of Innocence
-The Good Soldier Svejk
-The Great Gatsby
-To the Light House
-A Farewell to Arms
-As I Lay Dying
-A Handful of Dust
-The Grapes of Wrath
-The Master and Margarita
-Loving
-A Wreath of Roses

1950-1989
-Martha Quest
-Lolita
-Palace Walk
-To Kill a Mockingbird
-The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie
-100 Years of Solitude
-Gargoyles
-Life: A User's Manual
-So Long, See You Tomorrow
-The Name of the Rose
-Midnight's Children
-Blood Meridian
-Satantango
-Act of the Damned
-Beloved
-Remains of the Day

1990-now
-A Heart So White
-The Blue Flower
-The Rings of Saturn
-Infinite Jest
-American Pastoral
-Mason & Dixon
-Disgrace
-Atonement
-Out Stealing Horses
-The Known World
-2666
-Gilead
-Cloud Atlas
-Wolf Hall
-My Brilliant Friend
-The End of Days

After seeing the reactions in the 1980 Booker thread, I'd like to see how A Month in the Country fares in this battle.

Trevor wrote: "Trevor wrote: "Nicole wrote: "Bernhard and Mahfouz should definitely be on there."

I haven't read enough of either to know which ones. Please let me know which ones! :-)"

How does Palace Walk and..."

Sounds good to me. In selfish mode, I also have Arabian Nights and Days unread on my shelves right now, and would welcome the deadline....

I would be pretty happy with this list as it is, though I would rather see Dostoyevsky represented by The Brothers Karamazov or The Idiot...

I was also wondering whether we could squeeze The Line of Beauty in, since that is currently topping our own poll for the best Booker winner, but I am not sure what it should replace, maybe Atonement...

Hugh wrote: "I would be pretty happy with this list as it is, though I would rather see Dostoyevsky represented by The Brothers Karamazov or The Idiot... "

I'm a big fan of The Brothers Karamazov, but I thought more people will have read Crime and Punishment. But two of us want Karamazov, and so it shall be!

I'm also good adding The Line of Beauty. I'll see what can be taken out.

Sara wrote: "After seeing the reactions in the 1980 Booker thread, I'd like to see how A Month in the Country fares in this battle."

I'll see how it fits!

Another vote for adding The Line of Beauty.

I also love A Month in the Country, but it's a book that elicits such emotional reactions rather than intellectual ones, I wouldn't vote to include it in something like this.

Nicole wrote: "Sounds good to me. In selfish mode, I also have Arabian Nights and Days unread on my shelves right now, and would welcome the deadline...."

I'll might keep Palace Walk since it's in another bracket, but I'll look at this and see what can be done.

No Kafka? Feel free to delete any other book on the list to make space for him.

Very African light list - have to at least find room on here for:
Things Fall Apart ( Chinua Achebe) and Wizard of the Crow (Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o).

For 2 to delete to make space: well American Pastoral is one of my few 1 star ratings and Prime of Miss Jean Brodie is a much better movie than a book. But then that's all fighting talk for when the tournament begins and so an argument for keeping them both on!

Think we ought to have The Tin Drum by Grass rather than Name of the Rose (jazzed up genre fiction) as representative of Europe 1950-1989.

Few others I would have suggested but more wild cards / personal favourites (from the 5% of books I give 5 stars):
The Adventures and Misadventures of Maqroll by Mutis
The Notebook by Agota Kristof
If on a Winter's Night a Traveler by Calvino
Silent Cry, Kenzaburo Oe
Dictionary of the Khazars by Pavić
Death and the Dervish by Selimović

As for choices by authors:

Correction by Thomas Bernhard (or The Loser or Extinction or ... - don't think Gargoyles would be in my top 10 of his)

There are a few others where I wonder if we'd be better with the better known book (Goodreads shelved numbers are a good guide) e.g. The Golden Notebook rather than Martha Quest for Lessing (14,585 plays 1,671) simply as more likely people will have read it.

Agree with Paul that it would be a good idea to have more from other parts of the world.

I think we should keep this open for a good few days - maybe to the end of the week? - as not everyone will have time to contribute ASAP.

Old Masters, Concrete, Correction and The Loser are the Bernhards I see people reading most often on GR.

Yeah, I meant to say Things Fall Apart, but at that point I was still trying to think of interesting book pairings off the top of my head and hadn't found one to go with it.

The Palm Wine Drinkard is very enjoyable, another West African classic of similar stature. I would vote for Tutuola over Achebe if it was between the two

Paul wrote: "No Kafka? Feel free to delete any other book on the list to make space for him.

Very African light list - have to at least find room on here for:
Things Fall Apart ( Chinua Achebe) and Wizard of the Crow."

Agree with all of this. And with other parts of the world. That said, a good contingent of readers here are Booker folks, and I want the split between it all to be about 50% English and 50% translation.

Antonomasia wrote: "Agree with Paul that it would be a good idea to have more from other parts of the world.

I think we should keep this open for a good few days - maybe to the end of the week? - as not everyone will..."

My plan is to keep it open for most of this week, though probably will try to get the brackets finalized at the end of this week. I can only handle so much contribution to something like this where pretty soon someone's choice will really only serve to knock out someone else's choice.

We'll let folks argue about what books were left out in some kind of general thread that will go up when the bracket battle is up and going.

Thanks for the great suggestions so far everyone. I want to keep a few of the stranger choices in because I need to be able to seed the darn thing :-) . But I don't know how I missed Things Fall Apart, for example, and I appreciate help clarifying which books are perhaps a bit more representative of an author or era/region. I'll do a bit of polishing here and post a revised list that you can continue to pick apart!

Okay, the biggest changes are to the 1950-1989 section, which doesn't surprise me given our group :-) . These are laid out by date of publication, not by ranking within the group. Do feel free to make an extra effort at suggestions for the 1800s and 1900-1949 as those are pretty much the way I originally drew them up.

1800s
-Pride and Prejudice
-The Human Comedy
-The Count of Monte Cristo
-The Scarlet Letter
-Bleak House
-Villette
-Madame Bovary
-Middlemarch
-Anna Karenina
-Daisy Miller
-The Brothers Karamazov
-La Regenta
-The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
-Tristana
-Dracula
-Heart of Darkness

1900-1949
-The Gate
-The Home and the World
-A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
-My Antonia
-Diary of a Madman
-The Age of Innocence
-The Good Soldier Svejk
-The Great Gatsby
-To the Light House
-A Farewell to Arms
-As I Lay Dying
-A Handful of Dust
-The Grapes of Wrath
-The Master and Margarita
-Loving
-A Wreath of Roses

1950-1989
-Lolita
-Palace Walk
-Things Fall Apart
-The Tin Drum
-To Kill a Mockingbird
-The Golden Notebook
-100 Years of Solitude
-Life: A User's Manual
-If on a winter's night a traveler
-Correction
-So Long, See You Tomorrow
-Midnight's Children
-Blood Meridian
-Satantango
-Beloved
-Remains of the Day

1990-now
-A Heart So White
-The Blue Flower
-The Rings of Saturn
-Infinite Jest
-American Pastoral
-Mason & Dixon
-Disgrace
-Atonement
-Out Stealing Horses
-2666
-Gilead
-The Line of Beauty
-Wizard of the Crow
-Wolf Hall
-My Brilliant Friend
-The End of Days

C19th
Hunger - Knut Hamsun, one of the first signs of modernism
Thomas Hardy?

1900-49
deleted unobservant remark about absence of Virginia Woolf when To the Lighthouse was there all along. Ditto Edith Wharton. And Evelyn Waugh. Sorry!
George Orwell


I've not been much good at suggesting them myself, but I suspect it would be possible to include more female writers without any tokenism/shoehorning.

Leg over Leg for Tristana?
Going Native for...(would love to see it in there but strong list...)?

Other shouts

Don DeLillo. Underworld.
Saul Bellow. Herzog.
Philip Roth. The Ghost Writer.
Eleanor Catton. The Luminaries
Nicola Barker. The Yips/Darkmans
Joan Didion. Play it as it Lays.

Lolita is in the wrong section - it was published in 1955, but I think most of Nabokov's best known works belong in the 1950-1989 section so I can't think of a straight substitution.

Whilst I'm no fan of Margaret Atwood, she does belong in a list of modern classics like this.

I agree that DeLillo's Underworld would be a good fit.

American Pastoral is getting a fair bit of recent commentary for current relevance* - as well as regarded as one of his best - so would vote for that one over The Ghost Writer


Lolita is in the wrong section - it was published in 1955, but I think most of Nabokov's best known works belong in the 1950-1989 section so I can't think of a straight substitution.

I reckon it needs something that signals the shift towards more scandalous/shocking books or social liberalism. Something with similar status to On the Road but which has more substance & stature when read by people way beyond their student years.


Wondering about the pairing. Imagine getting Infinite Jest v The Brothers Karamazov, having previously read neither...
There are several huge books here.


* ETA the next day: nope, that's The Plot Against America.

You asked for Saramago. I suggest Blindness or Death at Intervals.

Hugh wrote: "Lolita is in the wrong section - it was published in 1955, but I think most of Nabokov's best known works belong in the 1950-1989 section so I can't think of a straight substitution."

That was my bad in formatting. I've got Lolita in the 1950-1989 section on my spreadsheet, but when I transferred it here I just hit the hard return one spot too late. I'm editing that post so it's correct.

Antonomasia wrote: "I've not been much good at suggesting them myself, but I suspect it would be possible to include more female writers without any tokenism/shoehorning."

I would like to try to balance this a bit better if possible. Right now there are fifteen female authors on the list, or 23.4% :-(

So I think you're right that I need to get Atwood in there. I have no problem putting her in for The Handmaid's Tale, which I love.

Lee wrote: "Leg over Leg for Tristana?
Going Native for...(would love to see it in there but strong list...)?"

I like a lot of these kinds of suggestions, but I'm also trying to keep it consistent with what we as a group may generally know and have access to. I think Leg over Leg is a very important work, but it was only translated a couple of years ago, and in multiple volumes. A dilemma!

Lee wrote: "Other shouts

Philip Roth. The Ghost Writer.

My personal favorite Roth novel, but, despite Paul's hatred of it, how can I not have American Pastoral on the list?! It's Roth's Pulitzer winner, and definitely one of his most known and lauded. And I love it almost as much as The Ghost Writer, so . . . Can't wait to see what book(s) it goes up against to hear Paul destroy it!

Yes, didn't really consider that factor...

Personally I'd boot out Atonement in favour of something else. (Also Javier Marias, but absolutely no one here is going to agree on that one, and he is at least translated/)

Is So Long See You Tomorrow perhaps quite American in its appeal (must admit had not heard of it till recently) and not the sort of world lit the list is aiming for? With apologies to those of you who love this book.

Boot out Marias - sacrilege! I'm assuming he's already won and the only question is who comes 2nd.

1800s books - well if you want some more suggestions (as usual I tend to vere away from the anglosphere):

Diderot's Jacques la Fataliste (Kundera's inspiration)
Stendhal Red & the Black
Hugo Les Miserables
Gogol Dead Souls
de Queirós the Maias
Machado de Assis The Posthomous Memoirs of Brad Cubas
Hamsun Hunger
Fontaine Effi Briest

I would tentatively agree that Atonement looks vulnerable on that list...

Antonomasia wrote: "Personally I'd boot out Atonement in favour of something else. (Also Javier Marias, but absolutely no one here is going to agree on that one, and he is at least translated/)"

Keep in mind that this is not a list of our favorites but rather a not-definitive list of some heavy hitters and books with fervent following, whether we agree with their esteem or not. I'd not keep Atonement on the list either if it were a personal best-of list, but it definitely comes up a lot when reasonable readers talk about the best books of the last 30 years.

As for So Long, See You Tomorrow, I hear it come up (and I always welcome it) often in British podcasts, so I don't think it's limited to American appeal. It's actually a huge reason why I don't like Atonement as much as others. Hmm.

This has been fun already. Thanks to you all for your thoughts. I'll surely disappoint you each by leaving off a title or ten that you think belongs on this list every day of the week, but I'm not doing that deliberately. I'm also not trying to come up with an objective "best" list. We need some dark horses in the race, a team that comes along and may get trounced in the first round by 50 points but that, hey, might take out a number 2 seed.

Seeding, well, now that's where I'm sure to disappoint and upset you all the most . . . yikes!

By the way, definitely finding a place for Stendhal and de Assis. Also going to put in Lispector's Hour of the Star, which balances things nicely without tokenism (thanks for phrasing that so well Anto!).

Antonomasia wrote: "Personally I'd boot out Atonement in favour of something else."

Seconded. Possibly anything else.

I was excited to add a whole bunch of works but this post went up while I was sleeping and it seems like the list is mostly settled. :( I'm always for more lit in translation, though, so I'll suggest The Woman in the Dunes by Kōbō Abe.

Nicole wrote: "Antonomasia wrote: "Personally I'd boot out Atonement in favour of something else."

Seconded. Possibly anything else."

Rather like Roth he's been the great white male hope in the UK for the last 30 years so I can see the argument for putting him up if only to be knocked down.

But we are light on gender parity - and oddly light on Booker winners for a forum that was originally Booker inspired - so how about Possession by AS Byatt as a replacement: the first great book of the 1990s.