My friend Elly posted this on her blog, and I thought it would be an interesting goal. Especially since I'll be spending alot of time indoors reading this winter. Those in bold, I've already read. Some of these books, I've read halfway through, those are in italics. Sometimes, I start a book, and then find one I'm more interested in at the time. I really need to finish them. I also understand that this is a list generated by Time magazine, but there's some I've been meaning to read for a while on this list.
Time's 100 Best American Novels post-1923
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 (I refuse to read this book. Someone should convince me otherwise)
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 Moviego
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 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
4 comments:
I just noticed there are two Pynchon novels on there. That should make this good and tough...
DEFINITELY finish 1984! It's so wonderful. And The Sound and the Fury is one of my all time favorites - one of two books that made me want to be a writer (the other is Jazz by Toni Morrison).
And don't waste your time with The Corrections. It was...well...a waste of time.
P.S. Wanna see who can finish first? ha! I should concede now.
Oh! Almost forgot: Money is my favorite book ever. I'll read Ragtime if you read Money. Let's start there. :)
Zadie Smith "White Teeth" is an American novel? She's British..
And to give you an alternate perspective on "The Corrections:" I think it will turn out to be one of the greatest books written this decade. It is one of my favorite books and probably one of the greatest artistic statements about modern American life.
If there's something to put off- anything by Cather. However, I think they included one of her better novels on this list.
I will not be the one to convince you to read "The Corrections." Although I do think you should give Evelyn Waugh a go. For myself, I need to be convinced to give Faulkner another go after giving up on multiple novels of his in high school.
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