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Mon 17 Oct, 2005 07:39 am
The Complete List
In Alphabetical Order
A - B
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
C - D
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
F - G
Falconer
John Cheever
The French Lieutenant's Woman
John Fowles
The Golden Notebook
Doris Lessig
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
H - I
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
L - N
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. Tolkein
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
O - R
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
Posession
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
S - T
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 LeCarre
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
U - W
Ubik
Philip K. Dick
Under the Net
Iris Murdoch
Under the Volcano
Malcolm Lowrey
Watchmen
Alan Moore & Dave Gibbons
White Noise
Don DeLillo
White Teeth
Zadie Smith
Wide Sargasso Sea
Jean Rhys
Ubik? Phillip K. Dick did some nice work, but Ubik is pretty, um..., pedestrian.
interesting, I also agree with many of the choices.
Oh, definitely. I was just wondering about their reasoning on that one. Maybe a sop to the Dick fans, but not the one I'd have chosen.
actually I was delighted to see Clockwork Orange on the list as it is one of my top 10. (the other 9 are not on the list)
dyslexia wrote:actually I was delighted to see Clockwork Orange on the list as it is one of my top 10.
damn, i knew i liked you
i assume you've read both versions, the one that ends like the film and then has a nadsat dictionary at the end, and the version with the extra chapter that takes place a few years later
This must be the 100 "greatest" of the last century. I love Snow Crash by Stephenson, but it might not even be his best novel. (here's a tidbit for Snow Crash fans: checkout Interface by Stephen Bury, which was co-written by Stephenson & his uncle. it may not be as "great," but it's at least as entertaining).
Atlas Shrugged was omitted? the sacrilege! 
I do like these count downs, they are fantastic inspiration when you don't know what to read.
Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret
Judy Blume
Fer real?
I 'member reading that trilogy of crap by Judy Blume as a kid.
Somebody is on drugs here.
Sure, some good books listed, but some real crapper too.
How could Herman Hesse have been excluded?
The day I take reading tips from Time, is the day I tear my eyes out with my bony fingers.
There are a few of my faves here, but not many.
At Swim-Two-Birds
Flann O'Brien ... Anything by Flann O'Brien is worth reading.
The Big Sleep
Raymond Chandler ...Ditto
A Death in the Family
James Agee ...Ditto
A Handful of Dust
Evelyn Waugh ...Yup
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie
Muriel Spark ...Spark is one of my all time favorite authors, IMNSHO, "Robinson" is her best book, followed by "Memento Mori."
Red Harvest
Dashiell Hammett...The Maltese Falcon is his best work, but it's all good.
Under the Volcano
Malcolm Lowrey ...A toughie, but worth it.
White Noise
Don DeLillo ...Prolly my favorite fictional work from my twenties, but hasn't held up with later readings.
Obviously, it's a list of 100 XX Century authors in the English language and what's considered to be their best novel.
I'm surprised not to find Nadine Gordimer or Wole Soyinka on the list. Not James Joyce, either!
They're not the 100 best novels, by any instance. I'd take any Graham Greene over any John Updike, for example.
But I do agree on "Ubik".
Dick may not be the most careful of authors, but he's deep and enthraling. "Ubik" is Dick's novel I like best: I got real onthological fear while reading it.
actually, a bunch of writers are represented by more than one novel. besides Roth, Bellow, Orwell, Waugh, Pynchon, Greene, Faulkner, Nabakov, and Woolf also had 2 novels listed. that makes the omissions a little harder to justify.
gustavratzenhofer wrote:How could Herman Hesse have been excluded?
Honestly! The nerve of some of these people! Magister Ludi should have been the very first! and Siddhartha!
Withches of Eastwick is still good but Graham Greene is still probably better (though i have read none)
I don't know about The Corrections. I found it written
in a boring, drawn out style that puts the poor reader
into a worse state of depression than the married son
in the story who can't get his family to spend one holiday
with his family of origin. I can't understand how it could
possibly warrant being a best seller, let alone one of the
best 100 books of a century.
yes i agree animal farm is smashing good
Quote:Honestly! The nerve of some of these people! Magister Ludi should have been the very first! and Siddhartha!
Magister Ludi reads like a history book... not that I hate history books, but I just couldn't get into it; maybe one day I will.
Siddharta, now that was well written.
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