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.