One Down...

I have officially finished All the King's Men by Robert Penn Warren. I'm not quite sure, but I think it was the longest 660 pages I've ever read. It might have been worse then Gone With the Wind. Don't get me wrong, it was a great book, it just took me a lot longer to read it then I thought.

*SPOILERS AHEAD*

But I'm finished! I must say, the one thing that made me adore this book was Warren's raw writing style. That honest storytelling told with a simple, raw and, at times, vulgar point of view. Warren is amazing at making you hate the "hero" in this book. The other thing is the hero and the villain are the same person, Willie, and his story is being narrated by his right-hand man, Jack. So as you watch Willie's transformation your opinion of him changes as Jack's opinion changes. You start with the hero facade of the villain and then backtrack to when the hero really was the hero. And after that you get to watch him slide into the grasp of corruption where he finally ends up as a villain pretending to be a hero. And all the while your opinion is being driven by Jack's opinion even though you, as the reader, know more about Willie then he does! It's twisted and exciting, as well as an interesting take on what starts out as a look at morality and personal identity and ends up being a real life portrait of modern day political corruption and deceit.

And I loved every minute of it. I would recommend All the King's Men to most...not all, but most.

1 down, 99 to go. Tomorrow I start The Adventures of Augie March by Saul Bellow. More tomorrow!

Out of Order...

I've hit a snag. I'm an unemployed college student and I can't afford to buy all these wonderful books on my list (and yes, I'm calling it "my" list from now on even though it's Time's list. Please forgive me), so I'm spending a lot of time at the library. The problem with the library is, while the library has an amazing selection, they don't always have the books I need when I need them.

So I've come to my first problem: my wonderful library doesn't have The Adventures of Augie Marsh, the first book on my list, so they've had to order it from another library and it won't be here until the end of next week. I refuse to push my project back, mainly because I'm bored and want something to read, so I'm going to be reading All the King's Men first. I know it doesn't really matter what order I read them in as long as I read them all, but once I have a plan or a list, I like to follow it exactly. Oh well. I know now that I need to be more prepared and get to the library sooner or get a job so I can buy the books I need. And seeing as neither of those things will be happening anytime soon, this might end up being a very long project...

For every book I start I'll share the description or synopsis of the book, if I've read it before, a little something about the author and anything I've heard about it. So, here we go. Ready? And we're off!

All the King's Men by Robert Penn Warren

"Robert Penn Warren's All the King's Men is generally considered the finest novel ever written on American Politics. Set in the 1930s, this beloved book traces the rise and fall of Willie Stark, who resembles the real-life Huey 'Kingfish' Long of Louisiana. Stark begins his political career as an idealistic man of the people but soon becomes corrupted by success. First published in 1946, All the King's Men won the Pulitzer Prize in 1947 and was made into an Academy Award-winning film in 1949. One of the classics of American literature, All the King's Men is as relevant today as ever."

Robert Penn Warren (1905-1989): was born in Guthrie, Kentucky. In his lifetime he won three Pulitzer Prizes, the National Book Award, the National Medal for Literature, and the Presidential Medal of Freedom. In 1986 he was named the country's first Poet Laureate.

There we are. I'm planning on posting as I get through the book and please be prepared for spoilers! I'll be discussing what's happening to the characters, major plot points and the like, so if you want to read any of the books on the list and don't want to know what happens, skip the parts of the postings that begin with SPOILER.

I'm off to read.

[The description and review of the book as well as the information about the author were both taken from the back and inside of the book. No author or person could be credited for either.]

The List

I love to read. My problem is that there's so much out there I want to read, I just can't keep track. I've read most of the classics, all of Shakespeare and most of the major series. The Time 100 list not only gives me a nice solid list of great works to read, but it's a list, so I can easily keep track. I'm going down the list in alphabetical order, posting each time I've started and finished a book, as well as while I'm reading it. Monday we begin!

The List

1. The Adventures of Augie Marsh-Saul Bellow

2. All the King's Men-Robert Penn Warren

3. American Pastoral-Philip Roth

4. An American Tragedy-Theodore Dreiser

5. Animal Farm- George Orwell

6. Appointment in Samarra- John O'Hara

7. Are You There God, It's Me, Margaret- Judy Blume

8. The Assistant- Bernard Malamud

9. At Swim-Two-Birds- Flann O'Brien

10. Atonement- Ian McEwan

11. Beloved- Toni Morrison

12. The Berlin Stories- Christopher Isherwood

13. The Big Sleep- Raymond Chandler

14. The Blind Assassin- Margaret Atwood

15. Blood Meridian- Cormac McCarthy

16. Brideshead Revisited- Evelyn Waugh

17. The Bridge of San Luis Rey- Thornton Wilder

18. Call It Sleep- Henry Roth

19. Catch-22- Joseph Heller

20. The Catcher in the Rye- J.D. Salinger

21. A Clockwork Orange- Anthony Burgess

22. The Confessions of Nat Turner- William Styron

23. The Corrections- Jonathan Franzen

24. The Crying of Lot 49- Thomas Pynchon

25. A Dance to the Music of Time- Anthony Powell

26. The Day of the Locust- Nathanael West

27. Death Comes for the Archbishop- Willa Cather

28. A Death in the Family- James Agee

29. A Death of the Heart- Elizabeth Bowen

30. Deliverance- James Dickey

31. Dog Soldiers- Robert Stone

32. Flaconer- John Ceever

33. The French Lieutenant's Woman- John Fowles

34. The Golden Notebook- Doris Lessing

35. Go Tell it on the Mountain- James Baldwin

36. Gone With the Wind- Margaret Mitchell

37. The Grapes of Wrath- John Steinbeck

38. Gravity's Rainbow- Thomas Pynchon

39. The Great Gatsby- F. Scott Fitzgerald

40. A Handful of Dust- Evelyn Waugh

41. The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter- Carson McCullers

42. The Heart of the Matter- Graham Greene

43. Herzog- Saul Bellow

44. Housekeeping- Marilynne Robinson

45. A House for Mr. Biswas- V.S. Naipaul

46. I, Claudius- Robert Graves

47. Infinite Jest- David Foster Wallace

48. Invisible Man- Ralph Ellison

49. Light in August- WIlliam Faulkner

50. The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe- C.S. Lewis

51. Lolita- Vladimir Nabokov

52. Lord of the Flies- William Golding

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

54. Loving- Henry Green

55. Lucky Jim- Kingsley Amis

56. The Man Who Loved Children- Christina Stead

57. Midnight's Children- Salman Rushdie

58. Money- Martin Amis

59. The Moviegoer- Walker Percy

60. Mrs. Dalloway- Virginia Woolf

61. Naked Lunch- William Burroughs

62. Native Son- Richard Wright

63. Neuromancer- William Gibson

64. Never Let Me Go- Kazuo Ishiguro

65. 1984- George Orwell

66. On the Road- Jack Kerouac

67. One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest- Ken Kesey

68. The Painted Bird- Jerzy Kosinski

69. Pale Fire- Vladimir Nabokov

70. A Passage to India- E.M. Forster

71. Play It As It Lays- Joan Didion

72. Portnoy's Complaint- Philip Roth

73. Possession- A.S. Byatt

74. The Power and the Glory- Graham Greene

75. The Prime of MIss Jean Brodie- Muriel Spark

76. Rabbit, Run- John Updike

77. Ragtime- E.L. Doctorow

78. The Recognitions- William Gaddis

79. Red Harvest- Dashiell Hammett

80. Revolutionary Road- Richard Yates

81. The Sheltering Sky- Paul Bowles

82. Slaughterhouse-Five- Kurt Vonnegut

83. Snow Crash- Neal Stephenson

84. The Sot-Weed Factor- John Barth

85. The Sound and the Fury- William Faulkner

86. The Sportswriter- Richard Ford

87. The Spy Who Came in From the Cold- John le Carre

88. The Sun Also Rises- Ernest Hemingway

89. Their Eyes Were Watching God- Zora Neale Hurston

90. Things Fall Apart- Chinua Achebe

91. To Kill A Mockingbird- Harper Lee

92. To the Lighthouse- Virginia Woolf

93. Tropic of Cancer- Henry Miller

94. Ubik- Philip K. Dick

95. Under the Net- Iris Murdoch

96. Under the Volcano- Malcolm Lowry

97. Watchmen- Alan Moore & Dave Gibbons

98. White Noise- Don DeLillo

99. White Teeth- Zadie Smith

100. Wide Sargasso Sea- Jean Rhys

So there it is! Time's 100 best novels. I've certainly got my work cut out for me...wish me luck.