Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter; Melville, Moby-Dick; Stowe, Uncle Tom's Cabin; James, Portrait of a Lady [; Twain, Huckleberry Finn; Cather, My Antonia; Wharton, The Age of Innocence [criminally underrated--glad to see it]; Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby; Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms [ummm, Sun Also Rises?]; Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury; Warren, All the King's Men; Bellow, The Adventures of Augie March; Ellison, Invisible Man; Chandler, The Long Goodbye [please--Hammett owns Chandler and the genre]; Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451; Updike, Rabbit, Run; Barth, The Sot-Weed Factor [apparently they haven't read Pynchon]; Heller, Catch-22; Lee, To Kill A Mockingbird; Nabokov, Pale Fire [not Lolita? prudes]; Roth, The Great American Novel [of all the Roth novels, they pick this?]
I really can't decide which one to vote for; my only criterion is, which book is the least conservative? Now I suppose this may seem like a poor reason for choosing a novel, but hey, I like most of the novels on the list and I don't like PowerLine or conservatives, and I'd like to throw my two cents in a direction that doesn't also help a conservative's choice win. If I were voting straight-up, I'd say Moby-Dick. But somehow I have this queasy feeling that somewhere a conservative is making a comparison between Osama and Ahab or something.
So what should it be? PowerLine likes war a lot--should it be Catch-22? Conservatives seem to enjoy ignoring black people, so should it be Invisible Man? Most conservatives probably can't grasp the complexities of Pale Fire, so should it be that? (To be fair, most people in general can't grasp the complexities of Pale Fire.) Conservatives seem intent on believing women are inferior to men in most occupations, so should it be Cather or Wharton? Or Lee? Does Stowe count in that regard?
I don't know. Maybe I shouldn't vote based on politics. I wish there were a write-in space. I would vote for Blood Meridian.
(via)
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