Jane Smiley's "13 Ways of Looking at the Novel"
"My list is not and was never intended to be a ‘Hundred Greatest,’ only a list of individual novels that would illuminate the whole concept of the novel…I didn’t conceive the list as being any sort of ‘best of’ list, because in order to understand the nature of the novel, sometimes the reader has to read novels that don’t work for her and think about why they don’t work—representative lists, unlike ‘my favorite’ lists have to include uncongenial works…As my list shaped up, it became a little arbitrary, and that came to seem like a necessary feature of any reading list that takes three years to complete, but not a fault in a list of novels because random variety is part of the nature of the novel."
—Jane Smiley, from 13 Ways of Looking at the Novel
Note: There are more books on this list than the source list because she chose more than one book for some authors.
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