23

[serene]

Quoting firecat, "I hate the concept of canonical lists of 'the N best' of something, but I like filling out surveys about what I've seen/read."

(Actually, I only hate the concept if it's taken seriously as being definitive. "Good/better/best" is subjective, but I like this list anyway, as a suggestion of what to read if I want to take a shot at good literature.)

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. [My note: I don't see the point of bolding it if I'm already going to say if I liked it or not. I am unlikely to have an opinion on something I haven't read. Thus, no bolding from me, just * if I liked it, and - if I didn't.]



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 (Liked, but bleak and too close to the truth.)
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 (Read the first chapter and got so annoyed with it I put it down.)
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 (le Carré is one of my favorite authors...I can only listen to his books on audio though, I can't seem to read them. I should try again to read one, one of these days.)
The Sun Also Rises - Ernest Hemingway
++++ Their Eyes Were Watching God - Zora Neale Hurston (This and "Beloved" are two of my favorites of all time.)
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