"I am the pater familias! "
- Ulysses Everett McGill
Wednesday, October 19, 2005
It's a little confusing because they're titling it the All-Time 100 Best Novels, but then subtitle it "the Best 100 English-Language Novels Since 1923." But here's Time Magazine's list.
Let's meme this sucker. Bold the ones you've read.
---
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
The Great Gatsby
F. Scott Fitzgerald
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
Invisible Man
Ralph Ellison
Light in August
William Faulkner
The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe
C.S. Lewis
Lolita
Vladimir Nabokov
Lord of the Flies
William Golding
The Lord of the Rings
J.R.R. Tolkien
Loving
Henry Green
Lucky Jim
Kingsley Amis
The Man Who Loved Children
Christina Stead
Midnight's Children
Salman Rushdie
Money
Martin Amis
The Moviegoer
Walker Percy
Mrs. Dalloway
Virginia Woolf
Naked Lunch
William Burroughs
Native Son
Richard Wright
Neuromancer
William Gibson
Never Let Me Go
Kazuo Ishiguro
1984
George Orwell
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
Snow Crash
Neal Stephenson
The Sot-Weed Factor
John Barth
The Sound and the Fury
William Faulkner
The Sportswriter
Richard Ford
The Spy Who Came in From the Cold
John le Carre
The Sun Also Rises
Ernest Hemingway
Their Eyes Were Watching God
Zora Neale Hurston
Things Fall Apart
Chinua Achebe
To Kill a Mockingbird
Harper Lee
To the Lighthouse
Virginia Woolf
Tropic of Cancer
Henry Miller
Ubik
Philip K. Dick
Under the Net
Iris Murdoch
Under the Volcano
Malcolm Lowry
Watchmen
Alan Moore & Dave Gibbons
White Noise
Don DeLillo
White Teeth
Zadie Smith
Wide Sargasso Sea
Jean Rhys
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Good to see Lewis and Tolkien in there. Interesting to see The Watchmen, which is a graphic novel (ie. a novel-length comic book) in there.
(HT: Faith in Fiction)
Trackbacks:
Trackback URL: http://thinklings.org/bloo.trackback.php/2598.
Comments on "100 Best Novels":
2. matthew
- 10/19/2005 8:46 am CDT
Man. I never realized how much I disliked 20th century lit until I read that list.
3. jen
- 10/19/2005 9:27 am CDT
I have only read four on the list. I have seen an additional few in movie form.
4. Shrode
- 10/19/2005 10:24 am CDT
I've read 11. And all were required reading for school. (though I read lion, witch and wardrobe on my own first)
At Baylor in my American Classics lit class, where other students where reading Moby Dick, Faulkner, Hemingway, Steinbeck etc... We had a prof. who wanted to intro us to the new classics, so we read many of the same authors on this list, Saul Bellow, Toni Morrison, John Updike, Cormac McCarthy etc... (I highly recomend his border trilogy. It's awesome.)
Animal Farm
George Orwell
Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret
Judy Blume
Beloved
Toni Morrison
Catch-22
Joseph Heller
The Grapes of Wrath
John Steinbeck
The Great Gatsby
F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe
C.S. Lewis
Lord of the Flies
William Golding
1984
George Orwell
The Sun Also Rises
Ernest Hemingway
To Kill a Mockingbird
Harper Lee
5. Jeff the Baptist
- 10/19/2005 11:33 am CDT
I like Lewis and Tolkien, but it's a shame that Aldous Huxley's Brave New World isn't on there. It is a great counterpoint to 1984 if nothing else.
6. Freeespiryt
- 10/19/2005 11:37 am CDT
I have read 7. All while I was in highschool.
4 were required reading:
Catch 22
The Catcher in the Rye
Grapes of Wrath
To Kill a Mockingbird
3 on my own:
Invisible Man
The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe (read again recently)
The Lord of the Rings (read again recently)
10. Darren
- 10/19/2005 5:36 pm CDT
Seven for me:
Animal Farm
The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe
Lord of the Flies
The Lord of the Rings
1984
Things Fall Apart (well, parts of it)
To Kill a Mockingbird
11. Pigwotflies
- 10/20/2005 12:11 am CDT
Any list of 'the best novels' is arbitrary at best and some of those listed are a little new to be called the best. But for what it's worth, I've read 29.
Animal Farm
Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret
Atonement
The Big Sleep
The Blind Assassin
Brideshead Revisited
Catch-22
The Catcher in the Rye
A Clockwork Orange
A Dance to the Music of Time
Gravity's Rainbow
The Great Gatsby
A Handful of Dust
The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe
Lolita
The Lord of the Rings
Lucky Jim
Midnight's Children
Mrs. Dalloway
Naked Lunch
1984
On the Road
A Passage to India
Possession
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie
Slaughterhouse-Five
To the Lighthouse
White Teeth
Wide Sargasso Sea
12. Wallo World » Blog Archive »
- 10/20/2005 3:32 am CDT
[...] Okay, so this is probably going to amount to an admission against interest, but one of the suggestions floating around out there is that we all fess up and actually publicly acknowledge which of the Time magazine Top 100 Novels we’ve actually read (apparently, I have Jared here to thank for the suggestion). So, after taking a deep breath - here goes. [...]
13. Michele
- 10/20/2005 3:57 am CDT
Beloved, Catcher in the Rye? The former is the most mindless script I've ever read, and I think the latter only made the list because it was considered "cutting edge teen angst" and was shocking for it's time. I hate when stupid books are considered classics when noone really loves the.
14. Pigwotflies
- 10/20/2005 4:28 am CDT
Michele, I think you'd be wrong in saying that no-one loves Catcher in the Rye. Novels aren't considered classics because of their impact at the time of publication, but because of standing the test of time and still having an impact years later. Yes, Catcher in the Rye is teen angst, that's why it continues to appeal to angst-ridden teenagers and those who remember being angst-ridden teenagers. You may not like it, but it isn't stupid.
15. Evan
- 10/20/2005 4:42 am CDT
I've read 13, and my quick opinion of each:
1) Animal Farm (great)
2) Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret (hard to remember)
3) Catch-22 (good)
4) The Catcher in the Rye (still think it to be very good)
5) The Corrections (can't really explain it, but absolutely despise this book)
6) Invisible Man (good)
7) The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe (very good)
8) Lord of the Flies (was better as a child)
9) The Lord of the Rings (great and classic)
10) 1984 (not nearly as good as Animal Farm)
11) One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (great)
12) Slaughterhouse-Five (used to love Vonnegut as a teen, now indifferent to him)
13) The Spy Who Came in From the Cold (le Carre same as Vonnegut)
I also have in my possession A Clockwork Orange, which is quite easily the most unreadable book I have ever encountered.
16. Jared
- 10/20/2005 6:26 am CDT
10) 1984 (not nearly as good as Animal Farm)
Lewis wrote this in his essay "George Orwell":
What puzzles me is the marked preference of the public for 1984. For it seems to me (apart from its magnificent, and fortunately detachable, Appendix on "Newspeak") to be merely a flawed, interesting book; but Animal Farm is a work of genius which may well outlive the particular and (let us hope) temporary conditions that provoked it.
Of course, Lewis always had a predeliction for talking animal stories.
17. Scott
- 10/20/2005 10:07 am CDT
I loved CITR but I was an angsty teen at the time. And Beloved (the book) is a pretty good ghost story if I recall.
20. books are our friends » Blog Archi
- 11/16/2006 9:31 am CST
[...] Let’s talk books again, shall we? According to Time magazine , these are the best English novels (from 1923 to the present). The ones in bold type are the ones I’ve read. Thanks to Brandwine Books and The Thinklings, The Adventures of Augie March Saul Bellow [...]
Read:
Animal Farm
George Orwell
Beloved
Toni Morrison
Catch-22
Joseph Heller
The Catcher in the Rye
J.D. Salinger
The Grapes of Wrath
John Steinbeck
The Great Gatsby
F. Scott Fitzgerald
Invisible Man
Ralph Ellison
The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe
C.S. Lewis
Lord of the Flies
William Golding
The Lord of the Rings
J.R.R. Tolkien
Native Son
Richard Wright
Neuromancer
William Gibson
1984
George Orwell
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
Ken Kesey
The Sound and the Fury
William Faulkner
The Sun Also Rises
Ernest Hemingway
Their Eyes Were Watching God
Zora Neale Hurston
To Kill a Mockingbird
Harper Lee