Time’s 100 Best: I’ve Read 13
Posted By Ardellis on November 10, 2006
Yes, another book meme. This one I picked up from Twenty Sided. (The intend-to-read category is my own addition.)
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 (-). If you feel totally indifferent or just can’t remember, give it a question mark (?). If you haven’t read it but intend to, mark it with a plus (+). Then, put the total number of books you’ve read in the subject line.
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
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 Carré
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
I actually wasn’t going to to do this meme, but then I saw Watchmen on the list, and I just had to. Yay for the folks at Time, for realizing that graphic novels can be as important/meaningful/enjoyable as prose-only novels!
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