Island, by Aldous Huxley
Last year, one of my awesome subscribers was interested in a top 100 novels list from yours truly. I was happy to oblige, but with the understanding that such a list should in fact be longer than 100 and would certainly change in order as I discovered new favorites. Assuming I could discover an order in the first place.
For that reason, I won’t share the whole list here. But since I can keep up a steady output of the same types of posts all of you like with less planning and more time management from my end, I thought I’d write a few posts from now on about novels I shared on this list. Plus a few more I expanded to bring the list to about 115 favorites. (All novels, though I include one cohesive short story collection as an honorary inclusion)
Still: for those curious, I will share the top fifteen from that list. Let me know in the comments if you want me to share my thoughts on them (I’ve already gotten a request for Dumas):
The Count of Monte Cristo, by Alexandre Dumas
The Castle, by Franz Kafka
The Master & Margarita, by Mikhail Bulgakov
Anna Karenina, by Leo Tolstoy
Don Quixote, by Miguel de Cervantes
Crime & Punishment, by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
With Fire & Sword, by Henryk Sienkiewicz
Steppenwolf, by Hermann Hesse
Cannery Row, by John Steinbeck
Ferdydurke, by Witold Gombrowicz
Fathers & Sons, by Ivan Turgenev
The Skin, by Curzio Malaparte
The Hobbit + Lord of the Rings, by J.R.R. Tolkien
Too Loud a Solitude, by Bohumil Hrabal
The Good Soldier Svejk, by Jaroslav Hasek
Irrespective of what order these books (and other favorites) should be listed in, I can say without a doubt that when it comes to my literary vision - including Substack posts - these novels play a crucial role. Even if I don’t mention many of them directly.
For this first post, I basically spun the globe. My finger landed upon Island, by Aldous Huxley. Number 71 on my list.
While Island is Huxley’s best-known novel after Brave New World, it was also the most distanced from the concerns and even the style that defined most of his successful career. Island is both very similar and very different from Brave New World, having been written in very different epochs in very different times, one before WWII and one after. But fascinatingly, both are also the most similar if we put aside the obvious relationship between Brave New World and Brave New World: Revisited. To many, Island is considered a continuation of that very same experiment but with charity toward the utopian impulse as well as the relationship with science, an unhealthy one in Brave New World. In a way, Island is an attempt by Huxley to resolve the deeper issue that is a “brave new world.”