Saturday, January 21, 2012

EW's 20 Classic Closing Lines

It seems to me that if I was going to take on Entertainment Weekly’s 20 Best Opening Lines as a reading challenge, maybe I should also consider taking on the 20 Best Closing Lines as well.  That having been said, I’m going to back-pedal on trying to complete both lists in a single year.  I could absolutely do it, but it pre-supposes that I won’t be reading other books, those of the Not-On-These-Lists variety, and I just don’t think that’s reasonable.

Like the other list, some of these I’ve read, and some I haven’t.  Even more interesting, is that two of the books appear on both lists.  I will say, there are more books on this list that I have read and loved, and that I look forward to re-reading than the other.

So, here I go, with eyes bigger than my stomach for reading – let get going on another endeavor!  

1.  Under the Volcano, by Malcolm Lowry (1947)
2.  The Unnamable, by Samuel Beckett (1953)
3.  Goodnight Moon, by Margaret Wise Brown (1947)
4.  The Handmaid’s Tale, by Margaret Atwood (1986)
5.  Sabbath’s Theater, Philip Roth (1995)
6.  Gone With the Wind, by Margaret Mitchell (1936)
7.  Rebecca, Daphne du Maurier (1938)
8.  A Tale of Two Cities, by Charles Dickens (1859)
9.  Invisible Man, by Ralph Ellison (1952)
10.  Charlotte’s Web, by E.B. White (1952)
11.  Ulysses, by James Joyce (1922)
12.  Wuthering Heights, by Emily Bronte (1847)
13.  Sula, by Toni Morrison (1973)
14.  Animal Farm, by George Orwell (1945)
15.  The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, by Mark Twain (1885)
16.  The Long Goodbye, by Raymond Chandler (1953)
17.  Rabbit, Run, by John Updike (1960)
18.  The Sun Also Rises, by Ernest Hemingway (1926)
19.  Catch-22, by Joseph Heller (1961)
20.  The Great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzgerald (1925)

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