Customer Reviews

99 Novels: The Best in English Since 1939

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I found this book in the early eighties, while living in New York. I loved Anthony Burgess for his erudition, his musical background, his love of Joyce, his brilliant, playful writing (Clockwork Orange) his knowledge of history and his ability to go on talk shows in the seventies and be smarter then anybody else but also completely down to earth. In the pages of 99 Novels are just those qualities.

This book -- a kind of "minute history" of literature since 1939 -- sent me scurrying into used book stores like a field mouse. His brief, paragraph long summaries of the "most influential" books since WW2 (starting with Finnegan's Wake) are provocative,funny, opinionated with a look to the long view as well. How broad was his taste? The Joyce scholar makes an argument for Raymond Chandler's Long Goodbye as the best American Novel of the nineteen fifties. He also covers Norman Mailer, Brian Aldiss, Mary McCarthy, Brian Moore, Ian Flemming, Orwell, Ballard, Huxley, Murdoch, Roth, Greene...etc.

In short, you can take this as a brilliant and unpretentious field guide from a writer who loved and knew literature and the English language quite unlike anybody else around. Burgess never lost sight of the fact that the novel is one of mankind's greatest inventions,and he proves it with this book.

Burgess' book is valuable not because it is anything like an authoratative or comprehensive study of the English-language novel over the 2nd half of the 20th century -- but because it is a very personal glimpse at some of the ideas and stories that helped to shape one of the better novelists of the century, and because it is well-written and fun. He starts off with a nice introduction where he explains fairly clearly what a "novel" is to him, some of his aesthetic prejudices which lead him towards certain examples and away from others, and just enough of his personal history - years of being a book critic - to give you a sense as to why he undertook this project.

The author may limit himself to his own language, and mostly to the UK and USA, but he finds a wide number of genres and themes, picks lengthy series and very short works, books that are quite famous and others that are obscure and now hard to find. This is one of my favorite such books and I return to it often, though I confess I haven't yet read many of the books he covers. Some personal favorites of mine that are often ignored in such surveys are Mervyn Peake's "Titus Groan" and T.H. White's "The Once And Future King"; Burgess has more tolerance for fantasy, whimsy and fabulation than many of his contemporaries in the Ivory Tower and also includes such oddities as Alasdair Gray's "Lanark" and Keith Roberts' "Pavane."

Short and pithy paragraphs on each book - a bit more on longer and more difficult works like "Finnegans Wake" or the various novel-series like Anthony Powell's "Dance to the Music of Time". Enough, in other words, to incite interest but not too much to make the book lengthy or unwieldy in any way. In short, if you like Burgess at all - or even if you don't but want just some brief snippets on the English-language novel from WWII through the early 1980s, you could do worse. This also seems to be a significant influence on a couple of excellent genre surveys (fantasy, science fiction) by David Pringle.

Worth looking for.

I truly love this book. My favorite author has left us with a 100 book reading list of the best novels in English from 1939 (*Finnegans Wake*) and 1984 (because of *1984*, of course - which was published in 1949). I say 100 books because he leaves an empty space for one of his novels - I'd place *Earthly Powers* in that slot.

This list became a semi-obsessive project for me and so far I have read 77 out of 100 (or 76 out of 99). Its been a while since I read anything from the list. By reading this way I have discovered some absolutely wonderful novels I may have never read otherwise (and of course I have slogged through a couple of dogs as well) - it has been an enriching experience and I'd recommend it to anybody who loves 20th century literary fiction.

This is Burgess doing busywork. He is fast and quick and he covers the ninety- nine novels he selects with his usual, intelligence and verve. But the work as another Amazon reviewer pointed out lacks depth and conviction. This is the kind of work read for a brilliant remark here or a laugh there, but not for any kind of great understanding of the works involved. It is something like reading an almanac only with the almanac writer not being anonymous and grey, but rather interesting and original.

Burgess is always worth a look, but this slim volume is not among his better works. He names 99 novels, from Joyce to Mailer, that he claims exemplify the best in the English language since 1939. Some of the selections are predictable (Finnegans Wake, Gravity's Rainbow), others may raise eyebrows (Goldfinger, Giles Goat Boy).

Like all lists, Burgess' makes you wonder why one book is included while another is not. This is generally not a fruitful way of judging these works. Rather, the fault in Burgess' list is that his reviews of each book (usually less than a page each) are too brief to be of much value. In this volume we get to hear only the faintest murmur of what I'm sure was a great din of opinions on this outspoken writer's mind.

I'm not sure how to feel about this short book of burgess. i admire the man and his work, but you have to wonder about some of his choices. there are so many great books and authors that aren't included in his choices, though i could see the difficulty in picking one book a year. it is interesting to see how burgess' mind works, and the choices he makes, but it is only of interest of a burgess scholar.