I love to read, but I find myself more often than not reading a lot of twaddle. I’d like to stop that and read some substantial works for awhile. So I’m going to read my way through the Modern Library’s 100 Best Novels. I’m not going to start with the first one, though, because it’s James Joyce’s “Ulysses.” And “Ulysses” intimidates me.

Instead, I started with Paul Bowles’ “The Sheltering Sky,”which I’d never heard of before I decided to start this project. It’s the story of two jaded Americans and their seemingly without-a-care pal traveling aimlessly around North Africa, and boy howdy, it is bleak. Bowles was born in New York but lived most of his life in Morocco, and he nailed the unhinged feeling of being a stranger in a strange land.

It took me quite a while to get into the story, and then suddenly I couldn’t put it down. I even took it to the dentist, where I read it in the waiting room while everyone else watched “One Life to Live.” It was a well-written and very effective story (“The Sheltering Sky.” Not “1L2L”.) Reading it, though, left me with the hope that the Modern Library didn’t make “disconcerting and depressing” essential qualities in their list.

And, in yet another reason to love the internet, here’s a bit of what Tennessee Williams said about the book:

In this external aspect the novel is, therefore, an account of startling adventure. In its interior aspect, “The Sheltering Sky” is an allegory of the spiritual adventure of the fully conscious person into modern experience. This is not an enticing way to describe it. It is a way that might suggest the very opposite kind of a novel from the one that Paul Bowles has written. Actually this superior motive does not intrude in explicit form upon the story, certainly not in any form that will need to distract you from the great pleasure of being told a first-rate story of adventure by a really first-rate writer.

I suspect that a good many people will read this book and be enthralled by it without once suspecting that it contains a mirror of what is most terrifying and cryptic within the Sahara of moral nihilism, into which the race of man now seems to be wandering blindly.

The full Williams piece contains a big ‘ol spoiler, so don’t read it if you don’t want to know. Here is a much more thorough assessment of “The Sheltering Sky” than mine, written by someone who’s also reading the Modern Library 100.