Saturday, December 17, 2005

Time Magazine's all-time best novels

(all-time...since 1923)

What I've read is in bold:
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
A must-read for all 12-year-old girls. Can't believe it's on the list!

The Assistant -- Bernard Malamud
I haven't read this one, but "The Fixer" was great.

At Swim-Two-Birds -- Flann O'Brien
(never heard of this!)

Atonement -- Ian McEwan
I may have read this; I'm pretty sure I've read something by McEwan.

Beloved -- Toni Morrison
A totally weird book.

The Berlin Stories -- Christopher Isherwood

The Big Sleep -- Raymond Chandler

The Blind Assassin -- Margaret Atwood

Blood Meridian -- Cormac McCarthy
No, thanks.

Brideshead Revisited -- Evelyn Waugh

The Bridge of San Luis Rey -- Thornton Wilder

Call It Sleep -- Henry Roth

Catch-22 -- Joseph Heller
I should reread this.

The Catcher in the Rye -- J.D. Salinger
I've tried, oh, have I. Just don't care about this annoying little twit at all.

A Clockwork Orange -- Anthony Burgess
There's a long story here, but no, I haven't read it.

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
Nope. Haven't seen the movie, either.

Dog Soldiers -- Robert Stone
(never heard of this one)

Falconer -- John Cheever

The French Lieutenant's Woman -- John Fowles
Saw the movie too.

The Golden Notebook -- Doris Lessing

Go Tell it on the Mountain -- James Baldwin

Gone With the Wind -- Margaret Mitchell
Multiple times partway, once all the way.

The Grapes of Wrath -- John Steinbeck
I think I'd rather eat the Dust Bowl.

Gravity's Rainbow -- Thomas Pynchon

The Great Gatsby -- F. Scott Fitzgerald
Love this book.

A Handful of Dust -- Evelyn Waugh

The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter -- Carson McCullers
I've started it, never finished it

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
To quote Amy, from whom I stole this list: I'd rather fall on a grenade.

The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe -- C.S. Lewis
Many many times.

Lolita -- Vladimir Nabokov

Lord of the Flies -- William Golding
Read it in the Soviet Union, a surreal experience.

The Lord of the Rings -- J.R.R. Tolkien

Loving -- Henry Green
(haven't heard of this one either)

Lucky Jim -- Kingsley Amis

The Man Who Loved Children -- Christina Stead
(never heard of it)

Midnight's Children -- Salman Rushdie

Money -- Martin Amis

The Moviegoer -- Walker Percy

Mrs. Dalloway -- Virginia Woolf
I don't like Woolf's writing.

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
A couple of times

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
Started it. Hated it.

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
[see above]

The Sportswriter -- Richard Ford

The Spy Who Came in From the Cold -- John le Carre

The Sun Also Rises -- Ernest Hemingway
...hate Hemingway...

Their Eyes Were Watching God -- Zora Neale Hurston

Things Fall Apart -- Chinua Achebe

To Kill a Mockingbird -- Harper Lee
Great book.

To the Lighthouse -- Virginia Woolf
Yish. See above.

Tropic of Cancer -- Henry Miller

Ubik -- Philip K. Dick
(another I haven't heard of)

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
This makes it clear, in case it wasn't already, that I don't like "Classic Modern Literature" and I'm woefully poorly read. {{shrug}}

Final total = 16 read for sure.

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