Also Rans and Never Rans

Here are some of the also-rans for the seven spots. You can see that there was stiff competition for those few spaces. These books are also favorites of mine, arranged in three ranks from those which are most memorable and re-readable to those which are least.

• Mark Twain. A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court.
• Charles Dickens. Bleak House.
• Charles Dickens. Oliver Twist.
• Charles Dickens. A Christmas Carol.
• Joseph Conrad. Typhoon.
• Arthur Conan Doyle. The Hound of the Baskervilles.
• Josephine Tey. The Franchise Affair.
• C.S. Lewis. Screwtape Letters.
• Dorothy Sayers. Strong Poison.
• J.R.R. Tolkien. The Hobbit.
• C. S. Forester. Hornblower series.
• Thomas Hardy. Mayor of Casterbridge.
• Thomas Hardy. Tess of the D’Urbervilles.
• Joseph Conrad. Lord Jim.
• Jonathan Swift. Gulliver’s Travels.
• Anna Sewall. Black Beauty.
• Eric Knight. Lassie Come-Home.
• Sir Walter Scott: Ivanhoe.

 

 

• H. G. Wells. War of the Worlds
• Alfred Bester. The Stars My Destination.
• Rudyard Kipling. Kim.
• Elizabeth Gaskell. Wives and Daughters.
• Geoffrey Household. Rogue Male.
• Ayn Rand. Atlas Shrugged.
• C.S. Lewis. Till We Have Faces.
• C.S. Lewis. Space Trilogy.
• Robert A. Heinlein. Starship Troopers.

Never Rans.

• You won’t see Austen here. I love the movies made from her books, but the books are not in a style I enjoy. Pride and Prejudice is the only one I ever finished, and only because it was a talking book.
• Most of Dicken’s books will bear re-reading.
• H. Rider Haggard wrote King Solomon’s Mines and some other good yarns.
• Lew Wallace’s Ben Hur is over-rated.
• Many of Sir Walter Scott’s books are worth the time. They certainly build one’s vocabulary if nothing else, but I think Ivanhoe is the only one I liked well enough to re-read.
• Tom Brown’s School Days by Thomas Hughes was interesting enough I once reread it, mostly because of the character of Dr. Thomas Arnold, headmaster of Rugby, but it was no masterpiece.
• James Baldwin and Toni Morrison wrote novels of interest, but none that I’ve ever wanted to re-read.
• Kipling’s Stalkey and Co. is a ripping good school-days yarn. He wrote several worthwhile novels, but none of first rank.
• Jack London is too much a propagandist for socialism to be first rank, although interesting enough that I've read most of his best-known works and some lesser-known such as the Star Rover.
• Kingsley takes too long to get rolling and his characters don’t engage me. I think the Water Babies was the only one of his novels I finished.
• Fielding’s Joseph Andrews was a good read and gave me an appetite to peruse Amelia and Tom Jones, but none of these ever called me back.
• I was never able to stick with Faulkner or Hemingway. Both felt monstrous and ponderous to me.
• Paul Maier wrote Pontius Pilate, which may be the best Christian historical novel ever penned, but too scholarly for most tastes.
• Marryat and Ballantine I’ve read, but they feel forced. Henty is rather silly.
• Wodehouse is too flippant to take a top spot.
• I have read Goldsmith’s single novel, The Vicar of Wakefield, twice and cannot for the life of me recall it.
• Richardson and Smollet never got past my door; they seemed to be bores.
• H. G. Wells must have written a dozen books worth re-reading, but none that commend themselves as timeless. The science is pretty bad.
• Bellamy’s Looking Backward always serves to remind me how short-sighted socialist schemes are.
• Francis Burney’s Evelina, had some good stuff in it.
• Lewis Carroll’s Alice stories quickly get wearisome.
• Barrie’s Peter Pan likewise.
• I was never able to finish a Disraeli novel; the things he cares about, I don’t.
• Although I read a couple Thackeray, including Vanity Fair, none interested me enough to repeat.
• I found Bowen’s Death of the Heart good while engaged in reading it, but it did not stick to my ribs.
• F. Scott Fitzgerald, Meredith, D. H. Lawrence, James Joyce, Galesworthy, Upton Sinclair, Henry James—none of them struck a spark with me. I struggled through books by each of them.
• Sinclair Lewis did some pretty good work in Arrowsmith, Elmer Gantry, and a couple other novels, but the science in the one and the religion in the other were caricatures.
• Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath was good for a read. The story has stuck with me for years, but I’ve never wanted to revisit it.
• Theodore Dreiser and Howells did not stick with me.
• John Masefield’s Midnight Folk drew me back again and again as a boy, but I could not see why when I reread it in middle age.
• Thornton Wilder’s Bridge of San Luis Rey made a strong impression on me, too, at the time of reading.
• George Gissing’s New Grubb Street made a strong impression.
• George Barrow’s Romany Rye was a fascinating one-time read.
• Almost everything Hardy did that is not mentioned above is worth a read although he is too fatalistic.
• Wilkie Collin’s Moonstone and Woman in White were both top-notch, but not the kind of thing I would reread if I had something new lying by.
• Washington Irving’s books are not novels, but he produced a number of excellent yarns, including those gathered in Tales of the Alhambra.
• Robert Louis Stevenson’s The New Arabian Nights is not a novel, but certainly pulls me back. Many of his novels are almost first-rank, but not quite. I’ve read several more than once, including Prince Otto.
• And here I will end, or the list could go on forever with examples from James Michener, John Buchan, G. K. Chesterton, William Godwin, Arnold Bennett, Elizabeth Gaskell, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and others, including a number of science fiction and fantasy authors.