The Highest Standard: To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee

Everyone had read this book but me. Friends who recently saw me with it in my hands said, "You're reading that again?" and I replied, "Nope, I'm reading it for the first time." Then they'd ask, "Didn't you have to read it in high school?" and I'd say, "No, we didn't read books with female characters" (this is mostly true, though I didn't even realize it myself until years later).

But I wish we'd read "To Kill a Mockingbird." I don't mean to suggest that I was unmoved by what we were required to read, but I was admittedly an atypical case as a total bookworm. "To Kill a Mockinbird" seems to me like the perfect book for high school students to read, and I'm glad that some are still required to. My evidence: At work I'm always getting surly-looking, uninspired teens trudging up to the reference desk asking for it. Now (as in this past week) I tell them, "You're going to love it," and they look at me like I'm approximately 85 years-old and therefore completely unqualified to comment on what they might like. I wish just one of them would come back and tell me that they loved it, because it would at least confirm my suspicion that it's exactly what we're hoping for whenever we open a book. I'm going to repeat that because it's important: I suspect that "To Kill a Mockingbird" is exactly what what we're hoping for whenever we open a book. It is the standard to which I'll now hold everything else I read.

Without going on about the plot and the characters and the themes (I'm sure it's unecessary because, like I said, everyone had read this book but me), I'll just back up my theory by saying that it's a hugely complex book about ugly realities, and it still somehow manages to be the most enjoyable entertainment. It's perfect. Obviously it goes to the top of the list. I can't believe it took me 27 years to pick it up.

"To Kill a Mockingbird" won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1961. Enormously influential, it stirs readers in all directions to this day: It has made the American Library Association's annual list of banned/challenged books almost every year since its publication in 1960. Again, "To Kill a Mockingbird" is exactly what we're hoping for whenever we open a book.

Silk Has a Secret: The Human Stain by Philip Roth

I love Philip Roth, but don't necessarily love reading him. That is, I appreciate his intelligence. I appreciate his ability to weave together a number of incredible stories, each with its own complexity, and link them all thematically. The trouble is that I rarely feel like I'm really enjoying myself. While i'm admiring of his craft, shouldn't he be tricking me into not noticing it? There, I said it, and you can all hate me if you want to.

"The Human Stain" is a fantastic book, no question. It takes on far more than the other books I've reviewed here and handles its massively complicated subject matter wonderfully. It's a novel about political correctness, judgement, aging, race, and the American quest for individualism. Set in 1998, with president Bill Clinton's impeachment hovering in the background, and sanctimoniousness in the air, "The Human Stain" follows protoganist Coleman Silk through his success as an academic, his disgrace as an accused racist, and his bizarre death at the hands of a troubled, jealous, and very violent Vietnam War vet.

What you probably can't see on the cover up there are the words "Everyone Knows." They're scrawled on a piece of paper and tucked inside an envelope, which is seen from above. Get it? It takes a minute to understand what you're looking at. Whoever designed that cover did a great job because those are easily the most important words in the novel. "Everyone knows you're sexually exploiting an abused, illiterate woman half your age" is a message that Coleman Silk receives anonymously in the mail one day. He is, in fact, sleeping with an abused, illiterate woman half his age, but that's not really anyone's business. Everyone loves crucifying a success, and especially one who has already lost his job, wife, and good reputation because of false accusations of racism (Coleman, a respected Classics professor and former dean at a New England liberal arts college, referred to two absent students as "spooks"). But what no one knows is Coleman's biggest secret- a secret he's spent decades worrying that everyone will find out: He has spent almost his entire life passing as a tan-skinned Jew, when he is in fact a light-skinned African American from East Orange, New Jersey. For one thing, this makes his being an accused racist all the more surreal, but it also introduces another layer of complexity to the book. What appeared to be a novel about political correctness and sexual morality in Clinton-era America, is actually much bigger. It's a novel about the American impulse to shed one's skin, start over, and succeed based on one's merits, despite the fact that it's nearly impossible to do so.

While Coleman's decision to abandon his ancenstry and live as a white man is enormous and shocking, other characters are reinventing themselves: Faunia Farley, a damaged, abused, and illiterate janitor who Coleman is sleeping with; Les Farley, a deeply traumatized, unpredictably violent war vet; and Delphine Rioux, a French academic who despises Coleman and leads all charges against him for her own personal reasons.

Roth's writing is expert (Faunia, for example, has "the laugh of a barmaid who keeps a baseball bat at her feet in case of trouble") and at times infectiously frantic. The gradual unravelling of Coleman's past, narrated by Nathan Zuckerman (a recurring Roth character), is slow, detailed, and gripping. The final scene, in which Nathan Zuckerman is both threatened and a threat, is exquisitely imagined, tense as hell, and probably more visual than any other scene in the book.

Writing this is making me love the book, and I know it's the smartest book I've read so far for this award. It's without a doubt the most ambitious. I just didn't have a great experience reading it, so I'm not sure what to do with it. I'm putting it on top. Roth is risking more than every other author on this list so far, and he still comes through with a novel that I can't find a single specific complaint about. It would be crazy to put him below Natsuo Kirino, and maybe I just read it at the wrong time.

"The Human Stain" won the PEN/Faulkner Award in 2000.

Whatta Guy: Engleby by Sebastian Faulks

Which cover is better? I'm partial to the one on the left. The one on the right is a bit too tra-la-la for my taste, and is totally misleading in light of the book itself. The book is not, after all, about a loveable, wholesome English farmer who cycles between villages selling eggs from a basket. It is about a madman who-- and I sincerely hope I'm not the only one to have found this-- is enormously charming.

By the time we find out that Mike Engleby is a freak and a murderer, Faulks has made quite sure that we're in a position where we'll find this difficult to accept. Engleby is our narrator, after all: He's the fictional author of the fictional "autobiography" we're reading. Unreliable narrators are nothing new to the literary landscape, but this one is so confessional to begin with, so intensely likeable, that when we figure out his true nature, we're disappointed, embarrassed, and worried by the fact that we fell for him hook, line, and sinker.

By the time we find out that Mike Engleby is suffering from "schizoid personality disorder...will elements of narcissism and antisocial personality disorder", we've learned about his difficult, impoverished childhood (no self-pity, though!). We've accepted his snobbish, blasé outlook of academia ("'The Crucible'...is about a group of American Puritans called Goody this and Good that; it has self-righteousness and modern parallels. Students like it because it makes them feel enfranchised") as typically adolescent. We've accepted his shoplifting and pickpocketing to be a result of class resentment and basic need. The way he describes his drug and alcohol addiction is actually kind of hilarious and anyhow, it's the seventies, and he's an undergraduate and Cambridge. In a voice-driven book, Engleby's voice is welcome, appreciated, and enjoyed. He's unintentionally hilarious and hugely entertaining.

Gradually, things get suspicious. Engleby has only one friend, and it becomes painfully clear that they're not even that close. There's a girl, too, and Engleby describes her as being close to him, even a girlfriend, but she can't really be more than a casual acquaintance. When she disappears and is presumed to be dead, the gaps in Engleby's memory, coupled with his dillusional view of their relationship, and his occasional rages, become worrisome, but the case goes cold, and Engleby is accused of nothing. Later, as an adult, we see him settle into life as a journalist ("It's basically quite unbelievably easy"), and are distracted by his success. We're charmed again by his cleverness. Even though he's a suspicious oddball, we still want to hear his opinion about everything: Inane dinner parties, English politicians, journalism, you name it.

It isn't until close to the end of the book that we get a portrait of Engleby from another character's point of view. The dissonance is very disconcerting, perhaps partly because it's been right under our noses- albeit between the lines- the whole time.

That "Engleby" is dark goes without saying. I was reminded instantly of Ian McEwan, although to my knowledge McEwan has never written a fictional "autobiography." Who has? William Boyd, apparently, but I've never read it. "Engleby" is like nothing I've ever read before. I spilled beer all over the library's copy of this book, and will probably have to buy it, but I don't really mind.