Top 100 Novels

[vilakins]

The Times 'top 100 novels of the past 83 years', copied from communicator. Bold = read, italics = started but not finished.

The list

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 - Nathaniel 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. Tolkein
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
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

Hmm, 30%. That's better than I thought.

I must put in a plug for Snow Crash. Brilliant, exhilarating, and often very funny.

Comments

[zoefruitcake.livejournal.com]

you did better than me, only 16!

Try Watchmen, I love it and I'm not really into graphic novels. Things fall apart is good too

[azdak.livejournal.com]

I notice that all those you started, you actually finished, which is impressive. If ever I did a list like that, 90% of the ones I had "read" would fall into the started-but-never-finished category.

The Master and Margarita has been dispatched and will wend it's way to me next wednesday when Wolfgang comes back from England!

[jhall1.livejournal.com]

I confess to only having read 6 - or possibly 7, as I have an idea that I may have read one title so long ago that I can no longer be sure. But I can recommend "The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie", the only one on the list that I've read but you haven't.

[reapermum.livejournal.com]

Why 83 years?

[vilakins.livejournal.com]

Thanks for the rec! I'll search the library catalogue. :-) I've borrowed graphic novels from there before. As communicator said, they're respectable now.

[vilakins.livejournal.com]

That should have been on that list. Maybe translated novels didn't count?

I don't always finish what I start; I recently gave up on Oryx and Crake because of disgust at the reality TV programs the characters watched (cruelty to animals) and not really liking anyone in it, and I've often decided that life was too short to be bored with a less than good book. It has to grab or amuse me somehow.

[vilakins.livejournal.com]

I loved the film. Yes, I ought to read that.

[vilakins.livejournal.com]

I have no idea. I just nicked the info from communicator.

[jhall1.livejournal.com]

I initially saw the play, back in the late 1960s. There was a coach trip organised for our sixth form to see it when it was on in the West End. IIRC, Maggie Smith was in the title role (later taken over by Vanessa Redgrave). She gave a brilliant performance. I don't think that the staff who organised the trip realised that there would be a scene featuring one of the girls nude (though those with better eyesight than me reckoned that the girl was actually wearing a flesh-coloured body stocking).

Later on I saw the film on TV, and then read the book. Book, play and film all have rather different endings from one another BTW.

[reapermum.livejournal.com]

I could understand it if it was post WW1 novels, but it isn't.

[vilakins.livejournal.com]

Well, it was either the film or a TV series. Anyway I saw Maggie Smith in the role and she was marvellous.

[reapermum.livejournal.com]

I've read the entire "Dance to the music of time" sequence, if you read one you need the rest for the whole life of the characters. I'm in the same position with C.P. Snow's "Strangers and brothers", about three quarters of the way through that.

It's been thirty years since I read Chinua Achebe's "Things fall apart" so I don't know if I would still think it a good read, but I enjoyed his "Anthills of the savanna" more recently.

[vilakins.livejournal.com]

Thanks for the recs. :-)

[communicator.livejournal.com]

Somebody pointed out that that was 'after Ulysses' which makes sense

[jhall1.livejournal.com]

Yes, I think Maggie Smith was in both the play and the film.