100 books.

[omnia_mutantur]

Time's posted a list of top 100 books since 1923. I've included it under the cut, and bolded what I've read. Part for something to refer back to, but the more important part is so that if you, gentle reader, click this link and see something unemboldened that you think i simply Must Read, you should let me know. Yes, another plea for recommendations.

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 (own, unread)
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 (own, unread)
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

Comments

[safirerings.livejournal.com]

The Blind Assassin and I Claudius are definate musts. Really. I'm not just saying that because "I, Claudius" is indirectly responsible for my major and my boyfriend.

[58hrs.livejournal.com]

♥

[grinninfoole.livejournal.com]

I haven't read Ubik, but if you haven't read any Phil Dick, you should. He's really good (all about the relativity of reality and the hollowness of objectivity.) Red Harvest by Hammett is good, though I don't know if I liked it better than Maltese Falcon or Thin Man, but it is the only novel about the Continental Op, and those stories are really good.

Do yourself a big favor and avoid Portnoy's Complaint and Rabbit, Run. White guys have it tough, apparently.

[oya-yansa.livejournal.com]

Light in August is fantastic. Lucky Jim is a quick read and utterly hilarious, in that way-too-close-to-home fashion. Midnight's Children is the best thing Rushdie ever wrote. I adored Pale Fire but know people who hated it.

I would continue to avoid The Sound and the Fury and Things Fall Apart.

[creed-of-hubris.livejournal.com]

Well, I had to read Light in August in high school and found it awful. I concur about Pale Fire and Midnight's Children, they are great and worthy works.

I also recommend everything by Pynchon. And Chandler, though Chandler was not complimentary to women.

Franzen is a Swattie. His book is not nearly as good as some of the others, but it's still a good time.

[kiwikat.livejournal.com]

a clockwork orange and one flew over the cuckoo's nest were pretty good, not my all time favorites, but worth a read. i have a copy of white teeth, but i can't seem to make myself read it. i get a few pages in and still don't care, so i end up putting it down.

they missed a few that i found surprising. where's "the bell jar"? "the catcher in the rye"? it seems the closest thing to contemporary that's on there appears to be "white noise" (excellent book, btw).... it's disproportionately weighted towards the first part of the century, in my opinion.

of course, any list like this is bound to be largely opinion. there's no real way to measure how good a book is. to quote ani difranco "what kind of scale compares the weight of two beauties? the gravity of duties? or the ground speed of joy? tell me what kind of gauge and quanify elation, what kind of equation could i possibly employ?"

beats me kids.

[kiwikat.livejournal.com]

er, CAN not and in that second to last paragraph..... i suck this early in the morning