68 english-language novels

[piranha]

In 2005, Time magazine picked the 100 best English-language novels. mark the selections you have read in bold. If you liked it, add a star (*) in front of the title, if you didn't, give it a minus (-). Then, put the total number of books you've read in the subject line.

i didn't bother with the liked/disliked marking; i can in fact not remember it about quite a number of these books, which i read more than 30 years ago.  and while this list may make me look well-read, it's a picture of my past.  in the last 10 years i've read very little mainstream fiction, embarrassingly little.  some of the names on this list i don't recognize, and posting it will remind me to look those up.

i'm happy to see some SF here, and even a graphic novel. 

[ETA] thanks to king_tirian i can give links to the original article, and to how they determined the list.

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 Carré
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

via nex0s.

Comments

[dr-brat.livejournal.com]

Wow. I've only read 13. That's a bit of an eye-opener. I wonder what goes in to making such a determination about these works, though. How does one actually decide that one novel is better than another? I mean, I liked _Remains of the Day_ better than _Never Let Me Go_, but I suppose it's not about what any one person liked. Interesting that _Wide Sargasso Sea_ made it, but not _Jane Eyre_.... And they count _The Lord of The Rings_ as one book, but separate out the first book of _The Chronicles of Narnia_. Hmmmmm... *wandering off pondering*

[novazembla.livejournal.com]

I didn't count, but prolly I'm in the same neighborhood -- and I've got an MA in English. This list is very heavily slanted toward the American.

@%<

[pir-anha.livejournal.com]

yes it is. well, "time magazine", ya know. it's kinda amazing that there's some non-american authors on the list at all.

how to determine the better novel

[pir-anha.livejournal.com]

oh yeah -- i don't take such lists seriously at all, even if the creators were to list their criteria (which they might've done at the time; i didn't see the original).

Re: how to determine the better novel

[king-tirian.livejournal.com]

I blogged about it when the list came out at http://king-tirian.livejournal.com/58546.html. Long story short, it is the current book editors' list of the top 100 English language books written in the history of _Time_ (i.e. since 1923). If you follow my link through to Time's pages, you can see the editors' apologias.

Re: how to determine the better novel

[pir-anha.livejournal.com]

oh, cool! and how prescient of you, too. :) thanks! i'll edit my OP to add this info.

[mayaknife.livejournal.com]

I'm either 10 or 11 depending upon whether I read more than just a few pages of 'Under the Volcano'. I remember starting it but that's about it.

It seems odd that no Dickens at all made it onto the list.

It doesn't surprise me that I've read so few of these but what does surprise me is how few of them (6) are on the list of "classics" that I want to read.

[daev.livejournal.com]

It seems odd that no Dickens at all made it onto the list.

I notice they're all 20th century books, although that qualification wasn't mentioned in the meme description.

[firecat]

68! impressive, even if it was a while ago.