Hopefully, by now, our list has upset you. In this section, you may find yourself outraged. Keep calm! First, you may find it useful to reread our mission statement. Remember, this is only Phase 1. In Phase 2 we will compile a list of your favorite 16 books of all time. Surely the Brother’s Karamazov and (we hope) Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita will appear on this list, which will come to combat our own.

The true list will emerge once our list and your reader-generated list face off in an NCAA-style tournament. Each match will be illustrated and the outcome will be determined by your voting. More than a few of you have wined to me in private about Ulysses, Lolita, and even Don DeLillo’s Underworld being kept from the list, and, while this is good, the only way you can change it is by leaving a comment.

Here are numbers 5-8. I hope they can quench your insatiable thirst for the sweet, sweet nectar of literature.

8. Paradise Lost, John Milton

Milton began to conceive Paradise Lost in his early teens. He spent decades conceptually honing and refining it so that it could stand as a neo-epic counter to the masterpieces of antiquity. He and it, by sparking the fire of Romanticism, came to change the entire conception of literature. His Devil conquered, and Adam’s own devilish reply to God (the epigraph of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein) characterized the defiance of the next century of literary achievement:

Did I request thee, Maker, from my clay
To mould me man? Did I solicit thee
From darkness to promote me?

William Blake says that Milton wrote “in fetters” of God and Angels and “at liberty” with the Devil and Hell because he “was a true poet, and of the Devil’s party without knowing it.” Shelley adds that Milton’s “bold neglect” of a direct moral is the most convincing proof of the “supremacy of his Genius.” A “true poet” of supreme genius, Milton might rightfully find himself in the #1 position of a well-formed list. Not ours. He’ll have to make do with #8. —J.F.

7. A Moveable Feast, Ernest Hemmingway

Hemmingway was a born story teller, sometimes rattling off tales all night at Ketchum, Idaho bars. He produced a massive collection of short stories and novels, but this, the story of himself and his literary counterparts in Paris, seems the one he was most destined to tell. A Moveable Feast is a rare glimpse into a literary scene that defined much of what we now call Modernism. To read Hemmingway’s opinion of Ezra Pound and Gertrude Stein, among others, is as close as most of us will ever get to these titans’ everyday lives. The book validates its place on the list by having some of the most fluid and enjoyable prose Hemmingway ever committed to paper. —J.D.

6. In Search of Lost Time, Marcel Proust

Marcel Proust’s 4,300 page In Search of Lost Time is widely regarded as the first modernist novel in any language. Though there is much debate about what this actually means, there are few who would question the scope of its genius. When he began work on it, he lined the walls of his room with cork, as he told Louis de Robert, in order “to yield to [his] demon, to [his] thought, to write on everything to the point of exhaustion.” His goal was to open up the form of the novel and clear in it a space for time, the unconscious, memory, and their decay:

“The places which we have known do not belong only to the world of space, where we locate them for convenience. They have been only a narrow slice among other adjacent impressions which made up our life of that time; the memory of a certain image is only the regret of a certain instant; and the houses, the roads and the avenues are fugitive, alas! like the years.”

There is little doubt that he succeeded. —J.F.

5. As I Lay Dying, William Faulkner

Faulkner’s portrait of the Bundrens’ quest to bury their matriarch is a masterpiece of both black comedy and family tragedy, of absurdity (see the river crossing) and of palpable emotional destruction. Each Bundren is troubled in his or her own way and, as each character is voiced in the fifty-nine monologues that function as chapters, we encounter their emotions, and, sometimes, insanity, as the story progresses. The prose is typical for Faulkner, favoring emotional complexity and gravity over easy comprehension. It also has what Harold Bloom calls “the finest opening section of any twentieth-century American novel.”

“Jewel and I come up from the field, following the path in single file. Although I am fifteen feet ahead of him, anyone watching from the cotton house can see Jewel’s frayed and broken straw hat a full head above my own.”

But even with one of the finest beginnings of the 20th century, As I Lay Dying is only the second highest ranked American novel on our list. —J.D.

Photo by Flickr user Kris Cohen used under the Creative Commons