Time Top 100 Novels Since 1923
About a week ago, Time released its list of the best one hundred novels of the last eighty two years. Personally, I thought it was an excellent list, as the critics were wise enough to expand their horizons and include stuff like Neuromancer, Snow Crash and a PKD novel on the list. The bloggy thing to do, of course, is to list the novels and bold the ones I've read, so who am I to flout the customs of the blogosphere? Actually, I'm embarassed by the number of books on the list I've not read, so if I haven't read the specific book, but have at least read something else by the same author, I'll bold the author's name.
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 - Graeme 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
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 - Graeme 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
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 - Graeme 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
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 - Graeme 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
13 Comments:
Have you noticed how many have been made into movies?
Now...if I could only get a book on that list!
Hey, your site is pretty cool. I'd be interested in exchanging blog links (my blog is humor based). I'm at www.billsbitterpills.blogspot.com.
Check it out and let me know.
You haven't read A Clockwork Orange... you should go do that...it is pretty cool.
I've read:
Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret - Judy Blume
Catch-22 - Joseph Heller
The Catcher In the Rye - J.D. Salinger
The Crying of Lot 49 - Thomas Pynchon
The French Lieutenant's Woman - John Fowles
Gone With the Wind - Margaret Mitchell
Pale Fire - Vladimir Nabokov
Snow Crash - Neal Stephenson (great book)
Ubik - Philip K. Dick
The Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
Gravity's Rainbow - Thomas Pynchon
Lord of the Flies - William Golding
Lord of the Rings - J.R.R. Tolkien
Neuromancer - William Gibson
I think the selection is the private opinion of Time.
I have my own list.
And it is different.
I've read so many of these! One of my recent favorites is 'Their Eyes were Watching God.'
Oh how embarressing. I couldn't see one on that list that i've actually read!
I've heard of a few of them though!
Also embarassed, I've only read two of them, (lol) and I didn't like either.
You may safely avoid Infinite Jest. In fact, avoid it at any cost.
*Animal Farm - George Orwell
*Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret - Judy Blume
*The Big Sleep - Raymond Chandler
*The Catcher In the Rye - J.D. Salinger
*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
*Slaughterhouse-Five - Kurt Vonnegut
*To Kill A Mockingbird - Harper Lee
*Watchmen - Alan Moore & Dave Gibbons
*Lord of the Rings - J.R.R. Tolkien
*1984 - George Orwell
Also embarassed, I've only read two of them, (lol) and I didn't like either.
My list is a little longer than two, but I've never gotten past the first page of Neuromancer, giving this geek no SF-cred whatsoever.
So many books, so little time. I've read 14/100 on that list. I have to agree with Orikinla and say that it's more likely someone's personal faves than any kind of serious attempt to present a 'best of'.
Not sure how many of those 14 I would have included in my personal top 100, though I'd have given serious consideration to 1984 and Lord of the Flies. I'd have included something by Yukio Mishima, probably The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea. And Maus.
I find it very odd that a few sci-fi and fantasy novels are thrown in, but little else in the way of genre fiction.
Don't get me wrong, I genuinely like the work of both Neal Stephenson and William Gibson. But in terms of their effect on the public imagination, contemporary fiction and popular culture, neither comes close to the influence of Ray Bradbury, who is conspicuously absent from a list that includes sci-fi.
I'd probably have included a Clive Barker novel as well, either The Great and Secret Show or Imagica.
Thanks for the post. Used your idea on my blog -- Q's Wire...
Cool to see Don Delillo get on.
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