Okay, so… There used to be a pretty good Wikipedia page of the 100 books but it looks like it was deleted in June, 2025, which is a shame. I don’t understand why The NYT has the book page behind a paywall? I know their subscription is basically peanuts but eventually, a lot of peanuts makes a whole big bag of nuts if you get my gist? And, it’s books. Why not promote the list for free? Provide some nice advertisements for authors…? No? Sigh… I just hate having to create a gazillion accounts for every little thing only for advertisers and whatever third party snoopers to scrape them cookies and do the algorithm dance. I’m so fucking sick of the internet some days. It’s a pit. And, yes, I am in a mood today.

Anyway… Back when the Wikipedia page still DID exist, I was lucky enough to get the book details into an Excel of my own. It came in handy for me, because that list gave me an idea for a Uni project where I had to write a Python programme of some sort. So, I wrote a piece of code that asks me how many pages minimum should the next book from the list be, enter the number, and the programme returns a list of books equal to or greater the number inserted. That little bit of coding saved my grade from failing, by the way! Greetings to Joz here, my occasional buddy-reader, colleague extraordinaire, overall superhuman and an excellent Python teacher! Anyway, I have the 100 books listed here in the blog too… here… I will update the list as I read and add my ratings.

You could ask why not simply go by the Goodreads list? Absolutely can do that… Here! But sometimes folk add books into the list that aren’t the original 100 and just keep an eye out for that, yes? 😉

Moving swiftly on!

As of today, I have read a whopping 2 books from the list! 😀 Hahaha… yep. 2… But, it’s a start!

I decided to jump on Jon Fosse’s Septology first as I saw a few people in the Estonian online book club reading it, so I went with the flow. Ordered myself a nice fat paperback off Amazon and there’s just something nice fondling a nicely soft and chonky book.

What makes us who we are? And why do we lead one life and not another? Asle, an ageing painter and widower who lives alone on the southwest coast of Norway, is reminiscing about his life. His only friends are his neighbour, Åsleik, a traditional fisherman-farmer, and Beyer, a gallerist who lives in the city. There, in Bjørgvin, lives another Asle, also a painter but lonely and consumed by alcohol. Asle and Asle are doppelgängers – two versions of the same person, two versions of the same life, both grappling with existential questions about death, love, light and shadow, faith and hopelessness.

Jon Fosse’s ​Septology is a transcendent exploration of the human condition, and a radically other reading experience – incantatory, hypnotic, and utterly unique.

This book was hard. I mean. Hard. Here is my Goodreads summary with added comments:

Actually cannot believe I read this. It’s a really difficult read, at least it was for me… But even though it was difficult and I was wondering why I kept reading, I couldn’t NOT read. Did I get it? I mean, I certainly FELT it. But the technicalities of the book, the structure? I cannot sing ode to the book… Did I say it was difficult, yet? Maybe I don’t have a high-cultured enough brain. The more I think of it, the more I think this is the case, indeed. Just like I perhaps wouldn’t be able to TRULY appreciate a good opera piece, or a classical concert, or appreciate the nuances of paintings... Anyway… The trilogy of seven parts is one long stream of consciousness. And it’s start to finish emotional turmoil… The two Asles are doppelgängers living different lives yet battling a lot of similar mental anguish. It was a bit like being thrown around 2 dimensions, or 2 different potential branches of one person’s life. Just like the Asles were stuck in their personal hells, the reader gets stuck in the vortex, too.
The comma as the only punctuation throughout the 800+ pages most certainly helped with creating the feeling and emotion. I truly felt like I was in Asle’s head and it was real difficult to step out of the maze of his reflections and thoughts.

[…]and I look around The Alehouse, sitting with their beer and tobacco in front of them like a fragile line of defence against the world, clinging to their cigarettes, their pints, as they sit there, and the sea inside them is large, whether stormy or calm, as they sit there and wait for the next and last crossing they’ll set out on, the one that will never end, that they’ll never come back from, and they don’t feel fear, it’ll be how it is and how it has to be, it must have meaning, yes, […]

Septology gets 3.75 stars from me, rounded to 4 on Goodreads.

The second book in the long list of 100 that I dove into was Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel. I had it on my Kindle and it was an easy choice for “what next?”

An audacious, darkly glittering novel set in the eerie days of civilization’s collapse—the spellbinding story of a Hollywood star, his would-be savior, and a nomadic group of actors roaming the scattered outposts of the Great Lakes region, risking everything for art and humanity.

Kirsten Raymonde will never forget the night Arthur Leander, the famous Hollywood actor, had a heart attack on stage during a production of King Lear. That was the night when a devastating flu pandemic arrived in the city, and within weeks, civilization as we know it came to an end.

Twenty years later, Kirsten moves between the settlements of the altered world with a small troupe of actors and musicians. They call themselves The Traveling Symphony, and they have dedicated themselves to keeping the remnants of art and humanity alive. But when they arrive in St. Deborah by the Water, they encounter a violent prophet who will threaten the tiny band’s existence. And as the story takes off, moving back and forth in time, and vividly depicting life before and after the pandemic, the strange twist of fate that connects them all will be revealed.

Station Eleven… Well, I wasn’t sure what to expect from it, but what I imagined the book to be was quite far from what I actually read. What did I expect, then? Well… first of all, the blurb sort of promises to be “audacious” and a “spellbinding” story of a Hollywood star. I didn’t really feel either.

So… yes, I absolutely liked the way this dystopian, post-apocalyptic story focused less on the actual apocalyptic event and wanted to show the human condition pre- and post event, but for some reason, I did not get the “audacious” nor the “spellbinding” element. It just didn’t go deep enough for me. It was just normal, for me. Am I desensitized by my usual grimdark fantasy books that deliver horrible events but with more emotional buy in? What the heck did I expect then? Because, everything in the book made sense. It was what you would expect to go down in the world when the world came to a sort of a “restart” but with slightly more every day nitty-gritty detail than I would care to read about. Not often but in places, the descriptions of events or happenings were delivered as if by a 15 year old teenager who is so hyped about this thing that happened to them and makes you painfully listen to them list every.minute.detail… It takes away from the impact. Do you know what I mean?

I KNOW that great stories have parts to them that make the reader settle into the setting… into the moment, the place. How everything looks, what it feels like, smells like, sounds like etc. Station Eleven does this too and I can understand the why of it. Perhaps it’s meant to highlight the normalcy of human life and how it fits in and around an apocalyptic event, but… Sigh. I find it so difficult to express myself, the why it felt flat.

But I am willing to dig deeper.. let’s see. It appears that the typical criticisms for the book are timeline jumps and pace? Two things that I have no criticisms towards when it comes to the book. I did not mind the timeline jumps, they worked out pretty well for me, structurally and the pace was fine too.

So.. writing? No… Writing itself was fine. As one would expect. Nothing too frilly, nothing too simplified, nothing out of place.

Yes, the apocalypse itself is something that has been done a million times over. Only 6 years after release of Station Eleven, we got COVID19, and when the market was saturated before with world dying of superflu, then… Yes. So, am I saying the book hasn’t aged well, the flu as apocalypse has died a death in literature and we can blame it on Covid? Weeeellll… not really. I mean, Bethany Clift published “Last One at the Party” in 2021 and whilst it doesn’t even pretend to put effort into cramming some Shakespeare and other high cultural elements into it, it sure as shit is very brutally human. Which is my way of saying, I *do not* blame Station Eleven in being too cliché.

Thus, it boils down to characters?! I think, yes? Maybe? I feel like there was a “bit” where Mandel tried to make Kirsten more than 2-dimensional (yes, I am referring to the two black knives tattoo) but it was so after the fact, or a little too late, or… pfft. Enough pussyfooting around the topic – the characters felt flat to me. There. I said it. I am going to be dramatic and say that the character emotions DIDN’T POP OFF THE PAGE! And that’s the truth. Without character buy-in, the book has lost me as a reader. I mean, we all know they all had bad things happen to them, sadness in their souls and longing in their hearts and wishes but I just didn’t feel any of it. So, it wasn’t for the lack of stakes in the game.

Station Eleven, to me, was just okay. 2 stars. “Absolutely extraordinary” – I would not call it. But that’s me.

And my final complaint… my Kindle copy got a cover update (I had the one I linked in the blurb above and it is my favourite!) and now I ended up with this one (below) and, please, what is this and why??? Okay.. sorry, I know one should not argue over taste.

However!!!

I do like and agree with and support Mandel’s idea that post-apocalypse, humans would set culture on high pedestal in society. The written word, the spoken word, singing, dancing, theatre, the absolute shenanigans of human imagination acted out to the masses – we have done this through generations. We have told stories to teach a lesson, to pass on morals and traditions and entertainment through the ages. And I firmly believe humans will always continue to do so in any event. Yes.

Have you read either of these books? Any thoughts? Want to argue? 🙂