All Books Read by Last Thursday Book Club

This Table presents all the books read by the erstwhile-legendary Last Thursday Book Club, in order of quality based on the averaged numerical votes of the club members.  This list is reconstituted at the end of each calendar year, to integrate the most current 12 selections.  In general see the Review Summaries for details on what the Club liked, did not like. When the Book Title is hyperlinked in the table below, it directly takes you to the specific LTBC summary/review for that entry.

We are currently hard at work reading and evaluating books during the year 2008.  Nothing we read in the year 2007 was deemed outstanding enough to make it into our top 30 books.  The preceding year, a selection for 2006 broke into our top 10, the first time this has happened since 2000.  You will have to search deep to find Ulysses on our list.  In 2005, two books made their way into the top 30:  Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson (now) at #30 and The Actual by the late Saul Bellow (now) at #23.  The second column for each book provides the date of the LTBC meeting during which the book was discussed.
Here is our revised table as of 11 April 2008 representing a dozen voters at this time, even more over the past fifteen years of our existence  ...
Order Read on Title Author Notes
1 29-Jan-98 The Grapes of Wrath John Steinbeck (580 pgs) Our choice for best of all
2 29-Apr-93 A River Runs Through It Norman Maclean
3 25-Feb-99 Endurance: Shackleton’s Incredible Voyage Alfred Lansing  
4 29-Oct-98 Lolita Vladimir Nabokov  
5 25-May-00 To Kill a Mockingbird Harper Lee When he was nearly thirteen, my brother Jem got his arm badly broken at the elbow....

6 27-Feb-94 The Killer Angels Michael Sharra (1974)
7 26-May-94 The Good Earth Pearl Buck (1937)
8 27-Jul-06 The Old Man and the Sea Ernest Hemingway Man is not made for defeat. A man can be destroyed but not defeated. Pull the boat, fish.
9 28-Aug-94 Red Badge of Courage Stephan Crane  
10 31-Jul-97 Undaunted Courage Stephen Ambrose  
11 22-Aug-97 All the Pretty Horses Cormac McCarthy  
12 30-Jul-98 A Fan’s Notes Frederick Exley  
13 27-Apr-00 The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn Samuel L. Clemens  
14 28-Jul-94 Monsignor Quixote Graham Greene  
15 28-Jan-99 All The King’s Men Robert Penn Warren  
16 27-May-99 Angela’s Ashes Frank McCourt When I look back on my childhood I wonder how I survived at all. It was, of course, a miserable childhood: the happy childhood is hardly worth your while.
17 25-Mar-04 Life of Pi Yann Martel a transformative novel, an astonishing work of imagination that will delight and stun readers in equal measure.
18 18-Nov-04 Disgrace JM Coetzee the least given to sentimentality of the talented novelists to have come out of South Africa.
19 25-Jul-96 The Great Gatsby F. Scott Fitzgerald “In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I’ve been turning over in my mind ever since.”
20 19-Dec-96 The Spy Who Came In From the Cold John LeCarre  
21 30-Dec-93 The Assault Henry Mulisch  
22 26-Jan-95 Winter of our Discontent John Steinbeck  
  23 29-Sep-05 The Actual Saul Bellow The worldly and clever Harry Trellman, a grand noticer of things, tells the familiar Bellow story of an old adolescent love which is finally admitted to and resumed.
24 27-Jul-95 The Moviegoer Walker Percy  
25 27-Mar-03 Master and Commander Patrick O'Brian the first in the splendid series of Jack Aubrey novels. Title provides links to Smithsonian articles on how this series came to be.
26 31-Aug-95 A Confederacy of Dunces John Kennedy Toole the funniest book on the list; memorable characters
27 25-Jan-01 The Professor and the Madman Simon Winchester Creating the Oxford English Dictionary. One of the major contributors was a US Army surgeon who murdered a man in London and was in a lunatic asylum.
28 31-May-01 The Shipping News E. Annie Proulx From all outward appearances, Quoyle has gone through his first 36 years on earth as a big schlump of a loser.
29 22-Nov-01 This House of Sky: Landscapes of a Western Mind Ivan Doig The grandson of homesteaders and the son of a ranch hand and a ranch cook, Ivan Doig was born in Montana in 1939.
  30 28-Apr-05 Housekeeping Marilynne Robinson I have observed that, in the way people are strange, they grow stranger, says Ruth, our narrator. When she was young, her mother returned with her and her sister to Fingerbone, Idaho. Once there, she left the two of them on the front porch of her mother's  house, then committed suicide by driving her car into a nearby lake.
31 24-Jun-04 The Reader Bernhard Schlink the story of a man whose adolescent affair with an older woman returns to haunt him years later.
33 30-Dec-05 The Nigger of the Narcissus Joseph Conrad "The Narcissus came gently into her berth; the shadows of souless walls fell upon her, the dust of all the continents leaped upon her deck, and a swarm of strange men, clambering up her sides, took possession of her in the name of the sordid earth"
34 29-Jun-06 Gilead Marilyn Robinson "I have lived my life on the prairie and a line of oak trees can still astonish me."
35 27-Sep-07 Deliverance James Dickey Dickey's writing is gripping - the rape scene actually hurt to read it. Some of his poetic descriptions were carried away. Provided unspoken interaction between the four guys, most of whom wanted to be macho like Lewis.
36 28-Oct-93 Bless Me Ultima Rudolpho Anaya  
37 22-Dec-94 The Painted Bird Jerzy Kosinski  
38 23-Dec-99 The Sun Also Rises Ernest Hemingway Everyone enjoyed the bull fighting descriptions, wanted more.
39 27-Jul-00 Citizen Soldiers: Normandy to the Bulge Stephen Ambrose combines history and journalism to describe how American GIs battled their way to the Rhineland.
40 26-Feb-04 The Debt to Pleasure John Lanchester If Humbert Humbert had written a cookbook rather than about his nymphet, this would have been the book.
41 25-May-06 As I Lay Dying William Faulkner It takes two people to make you, and one people to die. That's how the world is going to end.
42 28-Sep-06 Blood Meridian or The Evening Redness in the Sky Cormac McCarthy War endures. … Before man was, war waited for him. ... Men are born for games. Nothing else. ... (every child) knows too that the worth or merit of a game is not inherent in the game itself but rather in the value of that which is put at hazard.
43 29-Mar-07 Ironweed William Kennedy Ironweed is only secondarily about Albany. It is primarily about survival - about an ordinary man, a bum by his own admission, whose extraordinarily bad luck has brought him to rock bottom but also to the discovery, within himself, of an inner strength th
44 30-Jun-05 The Kite Runner Khaled Hosseini An epic tale of fathers and sons, of friendship and betrayal, that takes us from the final days of Afghanistan’s monarchy to the atrocities of the present.
45 26-Aug-99 Snow Falling on Cedars David Guterson
46 30-Nov-00 Flashman: From the Flashman Papers George MacDonald Fraser  
47 29-Jul-04 Benjamin Franklin: An American Life Walter Isaacson Transforms marble men into flesh-and-blood figures, complex and admirable if hardly perfect.
48 29-Sep-04 Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress Dai Sijie lot of laughs as well as having our eyes opened again concerning Mao's Cultural Revolution
49 27-Jan-05 Beowulf - the new verse translation Seamus Heaney In the introduction to his translation, Seamus Heaney argues that Beowulf's role as a required text for many English students obscured its mysteries and "mythic potency."  We are treated to a world view in which a thane's allegiance to his lord and to Go
50 25-Aug-05 Beloved Toni Morrison Race, slavery, and the effects and banality of evil. Sethe, Paul D, and Stamp Paid have each endured a furious past, complete with the worst horrors imaginable.
51 31-Aug-00 Slaughterhouse Five or the Children's Crusade Kurt Vonnegut Extra Credit: Timequake
52 30-May-02 My Antonia Willa Cather
53 27-Feb-03 Blue Latitudes Tony Horwitz Boldly Going Where Capt. Cook Has Gone Before
54 26-Jul-07 The Things They Carried Tim O'Brien Included The Sweetheart of Song Tra Bong (story of Mary Anne and the Greenies) and On the Rainy River (story of the old man Elroy and The Trip (almost) to Canada).
55 29-Sep-95 The Reivers William Faulkner more great humor
56 25-Jun-98 The Crossing Cormac McCarthy Extra credit: Blood Meridian
57 17-Dec-98 Cities of the Plain Cormac McCarthy  
58 2-Aug-01 The Last Battle Cornelius Ryan Battle for Berlin: Ryan stressed realism and was meticulous in attention to detail and his extensive research notes.
59 30-Dec-04 The Seven Pillars of Wisdom T. E. Lawrence "All men dream: but not equally. Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds wake in the day to find that it was vanity: but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act out their dream with open eyes, to make it possible.
60 28-Dec-06 The Brave Cowboy Edward Abbey Taking place in the fictional town of "Duke City, New Mexico"
61 27-May-93 The Education of Little Tree Forrest Carter  
62 22-Nov-94 Tortuga Rudolpho Anaya  
63 26-Jan-96 Glory Vladimir Nabokov  
64 25-Jun-96 Life on the Mississippi Mark Twain  
65 4-Oct-96 The Best of Edward Abbey [or Slumgullion Stew] Edward Abbey  
66 24-Oct-96 The Warrior Woman Maxine Hong Kingston  
67 26-Jun-97 The Secret Agent Joseph Conrad  
68 22-Sep-97 Recapitulation Wallace Stegner  
69 18-Dec-97 Lie Down in Darkness William Styron  
70 26-Oct-00 Cold Mountain Charles Frazier  
71 31-Mar-05 Flyboys James Bradley Over the remote Pacific island of Chichi Jima, nine American flyers - Navy and Marine pilots sent to bomb Japanese communications towers were shot down. Eight were captured by Japanese soldiers on Chichi Jima and held prisoner. Then they disappeared.
72 27-Oct-05 No Ordinary Time Doris Kearns Goodwin A compelling chronicle of a nation and its leaders during the period when modern America was created.
73 25-Jan-07 Saturday Ian McEwan a novel set within a single day -- 15 February 2003. Henry Perowne is a contented man - a successful neurosurgeon.
74 27-Jan-00 The Perfect Storm Sebastian Junger an extended Reader's Digest true-adventure article, except the heroes don't survive
75 25-Apr-02 Longitude Dava Sobel
76 29-Aug-02 The Chosen Chaim Potok
77 26-Sep-02 Julian Gore Vidal Gore Vidal's fictional recreation of the Roman Empire teetering on the crux of Roman Empire teetering on the crux of Christianity and ruled by an emperor who was an inveterate dabbler in arcane hocus-pocus, a prig, a bigot, and a dazzling and brilliant l
78 23-Oct-03 Love in the Time of Cholera Gabriel Garcia Marquez unrequited passion so strong that it binds three people's lives together for more than fifty years.
79 29-Jan-04 Girl with A Pearl Earring Tracy Chevalier The novel isn't perfect, but provides a view into a fascinating period of history and a portrait of perhaps the world's greatest painter.
81 23-Feb-06 The Plot Against America Phillip Roth A "what-if" historical novel -- the isolationist, Nazi sympathizer, and anti-Semite Charles Lindbergh runs against Roosevelt in 1940 and wins.
82 21-Nov-96 God: A Biography Jack Miles (won Pulitzer Prize in April, 1996)
83 28-Dec-00 Invisible Man Ralph Ellison  
84 26-Apr-01 Crossing to Safety Wallace Stegner [be sure to see the review by the Literary Society of San Diego]
85 27-Jun-02 A Bend in the River V. S. Naipaul Naipaul was 2001's Nobel winner in literature.
86 29-Apr-04 The Maltese Falcon Dashiel Hammett The best known, and considered the best, of Hammett's Sam Spade novels.
87 28-Jun-07 Bang the Drum Slowly Mark Harris “It might or might not probably ever happen” - Good story, clever dialogue held true throughout the 243 pages (even the doctors talked like baseball players), minor league characters working toward teamwork.
88 28-Oct-04 Invitation to a Beheading Vladimir Nabokov Cincinnattus lives.
89 26-Oct-06 White Noise Don DeLillo Captures the particular strangeness of life in a time where humankind has finally learned enough to kill itself. Naturally, it's a terribly funny book, and the prose is as beautiful as a sunset through a particulate-filled sky.
90 25-Mar-99 The Day of the Locust Nathanael West [#73; movie c. 1975]
91 30-Oct-99 A Walk in the Woods Bill Bryson Katz!
92 19-Dec-02 Founding Brothers Joseph Ellis non-fiction
93 25-Jun-03 the works of Edgar Allan Poe Edgar Allan Poe any poem, short story, work
94 30-Mar-00 Ceremony Leslie Marmon Silko  
95 28-Sep-00 Of Love and Shadows Isabel Allende  
96 31-Jan-02 Kim Rudyard Kipling
97 20-Nov-03 Atonement Ian McEwan  
98 3-May-07 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time Mark Haddon Focuses on one character and gives the character more autistic traits than are normally seen in one individual.
99 27-Oct-95 Mozart Marcia Davenport [extra credit: view Amadeus]
100 29-Feb-96 Death Comes for the Archbishop Willa Cather not at all the compelling book it's made out to be
101 29-Aug-96 I Heard the Owl Call My Name Margaret Craven The Indian knows his village and feels for his village as no white man for his country, his town, or even for his own bit of land.
102 27-Feb-97 Heart of Darkness Joseph Conrad (novella, 1902)
103 29-May-97 Roughing It Mark Twain  
104 28-May-98 Dandelion Wine Ray Bradbury  
105 19-Nov-98 Hiroshima John Hersey  
106 24-Feb-00 Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man James Joyce extra credit: Dubliners
107 27-Sep-01 A Rumor of War Philip Caputo What the experience of Vietnam meant to a young college graduate, a 'gung-ho' lieutenant in the marine corps who enlisted for the 'heroic experience' of war.
108 22-Dec-01 Band of Brothers Stephen E. Ambrose The saga of Easy Company, whose 147 members Ambrose calls the nonpareil combat paratroopers on earth circa 1941-45.
109 29-May-03 In the Electric Mist with Confederate Dead James Lee Burke The restless specters wait in the shadows for cajun cop Dave Robicheaux
110 18-Dec-03 All the Little Live Things Wallace Stegner many consider one of his three best.
111 27-May-04 The Map That Changed the World Simon Winchester In the early years of the nineteenth century, William Smith created the first geological map of Great Britain, a time-consuming, solitary project.
112 26-Aug-04 Reading Lolita In Tehran Azar Nafisi a memoir based on an underground book club in Tehran.
113 24-Feb-05 The Ornament of the World María Rosa Menocal The history of medieval Spain under the Muslims, from the eighth through the fifteenth centuries.This was a rare period in history, when Christianity, Judaism, and Islam flourished side by side, borrowing language, art, and architecture from each other.
114 26-Feb-95 Farewell to Arms Ernest Hemingway  
115 6-Jun-96 Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep Philip K. Dick  
116 28-Feb-02 Bend Sinister Vladimir Nabokov
117 21-Nov-02 The Heart of the Matter Graham Greene
118 1-Nov-07 The Friends of Eddie Coyle George V. Higgins When Higgins wrote this, his first novel, he was a federal prosecutor for the Boston district.
119 19-Feb-98 Laughing Boy Oliver La Farge (187 pgs)
120 23-Aug-01 The Time Machine H. G. Wells 1894 novel (his first) describes the adventures of his hero, the time-traveler, mostly in the year A.D. 802,701, when he encounters a class-ridden battle between the decadent Eloi and the primitive Morlocks.
121 24-Oct-02 It's Not About The Bike Lance Armstrong
122 31-Aug-06 The Devil in the White City Erik Larson Their fates were linked by the magical Chicago World’s Fair of 1893, nicknamed the “White City” for its majestic beauty. Architect Daniel Burnham built it; serial killer Dr. H. H. Holmes used it to lure victims to his World’s Fair Hotel, designed for murder.
123 28-Aug-03 seldom disappointed: a memoir Tony Hillerman  
124 25-Sep-03 The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon Stephen King When a young girl finds herself lost in the woods, she tunes her Walkman to a Boston Red Sox game
125 29-Jul-93 The House at Otowi Bridge P. P. Church  
126 26-Aug-93 Sidhartha Herman Hesse  
127 28-Aug-98 On the Road Jack Kerouac  
128 28-Jun-01 The Sparrow Mary Doria Russell Religion-based framework for First Contact with clever clashing of ideas, humor & pathos.
129 30-Mar-06 Hard Line: Life and Death on the U.S.-Mexico Border Ken Ellington It's a timely issue, a local issue, a political issue, and a human issue of major proportions.
130 7-Dec-06 The World is Flat Thomas L. Friedman . . . A Brief History of the 21st Century
131 30-Mar-95 If Morning Ever Comes Anne Tyler  
132 28-Dec-95 A Thousand Acres Jane Smiley [extra credit: King Lear by W. Shakespeare] Iowa farmers really get down in the dirt. Jane should have left it to the bard.
133 29-Mar-01 Sons and Lovers    
134 28-Jul-05 Florence of Arabia Christopher Buckley They handed her a pamphlet titled 'What American Women Should Understand When They Marry a Wasabi National.' The State Department's reflexive response to any American in extremis overseas is to hand them a pamphlet…"
135 29-Nov-07 That Old Ace in the Hole Annie Proulx Proulx presents the Texas Panhandle through the eyes of 25-year-old Bob Dollar, a newcomer arriving by car.
136 24-Jun-99 The Life of Samuel Johnson Robert Boswell Most read the 430 page version, abridged from the 1799 edition. One of the most-frequently quoted men of the 18th Century. One should at least become familiar with it, but don't read every word.
137 27-Apr-06 The Year of Magical Thinking Joan Didion Writer Joan Didion's best-selling memoir, "The Year of Magical Thinking" is about the death of her husband and her daughter's ultimately fatal illness.
138 17-Nov-05 Things Fall Apart Chinua Achebe First published in 1958, a relentlessly unsentimental rendering of Nigerian tribal life before and after the coming of colonialism.
139 24-Jun-93 Talking God Tony Hillerman  
140 30-Sep-93 The City at the Edge of the World V. B. Price  
141 29-Mar-94 Hard Choices: Health Care at What Cost? Mark Jaffe et al  
142 31-Mar-96 Kingsblood Royal Sinclair Lewis  
143 30-Jan-97 The Thief of Time Tony Hillerman  
144 22-Oct-97 MidAir Frank Conroy [short stories]
145 20-Nov-97 The Bean Trees Barbara Kingsolver  
146 26-Mar-98 Brave New World Aldous Huxley (270 pgs)
147 29-Apr-99 The Sea of Grass Conrad Richter the triangle of rancher Colonel Jim Brewton, his unstable Eastern wife Lutie, and the ambitious Brice Chamberlain.
148 23-Sep-99 Tropic of Cancer Henry Miller
149 29-Jun-00 Tuesdays with Morrie - Life's Greatest Lesson Mitch Albom  
150 25-Oct-01 Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone J.K. Rowling Harry Potter knows a miserable life with the Dursleys, his horrible aunt and uncle, and their abominable son, Dudley. Then an owl arrives.
151 31-Jul-03 To The Lighthouse Virginia Woolf  
152 22-Feb-07 Young Men and Fire Norman Maclean Studying the Missouri River fire of 1949 was his passion for over two decades, and the book is still used as training material in firefighting schools.
153 31-May-07 A Question of Loyalty Douglas Waller Plunges into the seven-week Washington trial of Gen. William "Billy" Mitchell, the hero of the U.S. Army Air Service during World War I and the man who proved in 1921 that planes could sink a battleship.
154 22-Feb-01 Timeline    
155 30-Jan-03 A Little Yellow Dog Walter Mosley an Easy Rawlins Mystery
156 27-Oct-94 You Just Don’t Understand Deborah Tannen  
157 4-Feb-94 The Children of Men P. D. James  
158 28-Apr-94 Einstein’s Dreams Alan Lightman (fiction)
159 26-Jan-06 The March of Folly Barbara Tuchman From Troy to Vietnam. "no experience of the failure of his policy could shake his belief in its essential excellence."
160 26-May-05 Acqua Alta Donna Leon Complex, moral, gracious, and fiercely loyal, Commissario Guido Brunetti is a husband, father, detective, and, above all, a proud resident of the enchanted floating city of Venice.
161 4-May-95 Hole in the Sky - A Memoir William Kittredge a life examined that shouldn't have been
162 2-Apr-02 Man and Superman George Bernard Shaw
163 29-Sep-94 The Devil at Home Oliver Lange  
164 23-Apr-98 Rabbit is Rich John Updike extra credit: Rabbit Run and Rabbit Redux
165 23-Sep-98 Buffalo Girls Larry McMurtry (350 pgs)
166 24-Apr-03 Ulysses James Joyce the major imaginative work in English prose of the 20th century.
LTBC Warning:    Please consider carefully before reading any books below this line.    This is not an idle threat. 
167 22-Jun-95 Magister Ludi: The Glass Bead Game Herman Hesse intellectual life vs. real life: choose one
168 22-Apr-97 Ride With Me Mariah Montana Ivan Doig  
169 30-Aug-07 The Castle Franz Kafka the new translation by the Kafka scholar, Mark Harman, who, according to the The New York Times, has "made it more faithful to Kafka's dreamlike style."
170 25-May-95 The Witches of Eastwick John Updike  
171 18-Jul-02 Swift as Desire Laura Esquivel LAURA ESQUIVEL is the award-winning and bestselling author of Like Water for Chocolate.
172 22-Nov-93 One Richard Bach  
173 25-Apr-96 Bluefeather Fellini in the Sacred Realm Max Evans My eternal source of shame, but not as bad as my brothers claim
174 27-Mar-97 One Hundred Years of Solitude Gabriel Garcia-Marquez  
175 25-Jul-99 Jonathan Livingstone Seagull Richard Bach  
176 30-Jun-94 Alburquerque Rudolpho Anaya   

Table Notes:  Only two books in the history of the LTBC have received "perfect scores" - all 
5s - from the voting members:  Grapes of Wrath, and A River Runs Through It (aka ARRTI).
 
Our Founder had us re-read ARRTI in 1995, so it naturally entered the balloting 
cycle (again) for that year.  This time it did not receive a perfect score.  (is 
there a lesson here?)

The traditional lack of by-laws provide the webetary with the sagacity to decide how to 
handle such matters.  Plus he be the only brother what care.  
His resolution was to average the two scores for ARRTI, which gave it 
a 4.875, and slipped it to 2nd place.

Over time (or at least when Ken noticed) this average score was lost and ARRTI 
reverted to its (original) 5.0 score.   That placed it up in first place, as the 
tiebreaker algorithm clearly states that when books receive identical scores, 
the oldest score dominates.  (Rationale:  Members had more brain cells and 
thus were considerably smarter in the past.  Or at least at breakfast this morning.)

Any of the brothers would probably agree that GOW and ARRTI are two of the best, 
and should be near the top of any list.  Complaints?  Questions? Polite suggestions?
Contact e-mail listed below.


Last Updated on 4/12/2008
By Michael A. Blackledge
Email: mike@Blackledge.com
Return to: Lolita
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