| Time's Greatest 100 English Language Novels |
[May. 25th, 2008|08:24 pm] |
Via ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) joellevand, who got the idea from ashton_blaze...
Time magazine's one hundred best English language novels: the ones I've read are struck through. With commentary where appropriate.
The Adventures of Augie March - Saul Bellow
All the King's Men - Robert Penn Warren
American Pastoral - Philip Roth
An American Tragedy - Theodore Dreiser
Animal Farm - George Orwell
Appointment in Samarra - John O'Hara
Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret - Judy Blume
The Assistant - Bernard Malamud
At Swim-Two-Birds - Flann O'Brien
Atonement - Ian McEwan
Beloved - Toni Morrison
The Berlin Stories - Christopher Isherwood
The Big Sleep - Raymond Chandler
The Blind Assassin - Margaret Atwood
Blood Meridian - Cormac McCarthy
Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
The Bridge of San Luis Rey - Thornton Wilder
Call It Sleep -Henry Roth
Catch-22 - Joseph Heller
The Catcher in the Rye - J.D. Salinger
A Clockwork Orange - Anthony Burgess
The Confessions of Nat Turner - William Styron
The Corrections - Jonathan Franzen
The Crying of Lot 49 - Thomas Pynchon
A Dance to the Music of Time - Anthony Powell
The Day of the Locust - Nathanael West
Death Comes for the Archbishop - Willa Cather
A Death in the Family - James Agee
The Death of the Heart - Elizabeth Bowen
Deliverance - James Dickey
Dog Soldiers - Robert Stone
Falconer - John Cheever
The French Lieutenant's Woman - John Fowles
The Golden Notebook - Doris Lessing
Go Tell it on the Mountain - James Baldwin
Gone With the Wind - Margaret Mitchell
The Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
Gravity's Rainbow - Thomas Pynchon
(Started, didn't finish. Need to re-read.)
The Great Gatsby - F. Scott Fitzgerald
(always meant to read this)
A Handful of Dust - Evelyn Waugh
The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter - Carson McCullers
The Heart of the Matter - Graham Greene
Herzog - Saul Bellow
Housekeeping - Marilynne Robinson
A House for Mr. Biswas - V.S. Naipaul
I, Claudius - Robert Graves
Infinite Jest - David Foster Wallace
(started, didn't finish)
Invisible Man - Ralph Ellison
Light in August- William Faulkner
The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe - C.S. Lewis
Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
(Lolita is one of my favourite books. Nabokov understands obsession and psychosis better than most.)
Lord of the Flies - William Golding
(the best book they made us read in school.)
The Lord of the Rings - J.R.R. Tolkien
(liked The Hobbit as a kid; read the first book of LotR and never bothered picking up the others. fuck it; drive on.)
Loving - Henry Green
Lucky Jim - Kingsley Amis
The Man Who Loved Children - Christina Stead
Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie
(Want to read this. Nearly bought it last year in Vegas for the flight home.) (FURTHER EDIT 11/2008: actually did buy this just before Vegas this year. Read half of it on the flight there/back, the other half during commutes.)
Money- Martin Amis
The Moviegoer - Walker Percy
Mrs. Dalloway - Virginia Woolf
Naked Lunch - William Burroughs
(read. don't remember much about it.)
Native Son - Richard Wright
Neuromancer - William Gibson
Never Let Me Go - Kazuo Ishiguro
1984 - George Orwell
(if you haven't read this one, you need to do it. RIGHT NOW.)
On the Road - Jack Kerouac
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest - Ken Kesey
The Painted Bird - Jerzy Kosinski
Pale Fire - Vladimir Nabokov
A Passage to India - E.M. Forster
Play It As It Lays - Joan Didion
Portnoy's Complaint - Philip Roth
Possession - A.S. Byatt
The Power and the Glory - Graham Greene
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie - Muriel Spark
Rabbit, Run - John Updike
Ragtime - E.L. Doctorow
The Recognitions - William Gaddis
Red Harvest - Dashiell Hammett
Revolutionary Road - Richard Yates
The Sheltering Sky - Paul Bowles
Slaughterhouse-Five - Kurt Vonnegut
(Need to read this. Only read Breakfast of Champions.)
Snow Crash - Neal Stephenson
(Has been on my wishlist for a while: I've heard good things and bad.)
The Sot-Weed Factor - John Barth
The Sound and the Fury - William Faulkner
(Possibly the only novel where as soon as I got to the end, I flipped back to the start and read it again.)
The Sportswriter - Richard Ford
The Spy Who Came in From the Cold - John le Carre
The Sun Also Rises - Ernest Hemingway
(The book was short. So were the sentences. I drank beer in bed while I read. I walked back to the library in the rain.)
Their Eyes Were Watching God - Zora Neale Hurston
Things Fall Apart - Chinua Achebe
To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
(Um. This is the one book I really don't know why I haven't read.)
To the Lighthouse - Virginia Woolf
Tropic of Cancer - Henry Miller
Ubik - Philip K. Dick
(Ubik? Where's VALIS???)
Under the Net - Iris Murdoch
Under the Volcano - Malcolm Lowry
Watchmen - Alan Moore & Dave Gibbons
(I never understood why a superhero miniseries from the '80s was so highly regarded by comic book fans. Then I read it in a single sitting.)
White Noise - Don DeLillo
White Teeth - Zadie Smith
Wide Sargasso Sea - Jean Rhys
Where's freakin' Ulysses?!? Ah, wait, that'll be why the list is 1923 to the present. Ulysses was published in 1922. Ulysses also wrecks the grade curve.
Incidentally: currently re-reading Ulysses, which has temporarily arrested my three-books-a-week habit made possible by an hour's commute on public transport to and from work five days a week. At this point I'm not even sure I could remember all the things I read since I started working at the state in February. |
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| Comments: |
Only read three on that list.
Lord of the Flies because of the English class.
Lord of the Rings.
And of course, The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe.
Bah.
I'm pretty sure I lent you my copy of '1984' once...
Ah yes! Didnt see it on the list ^^
I presume its morning and no work? | |
