Tuesday, August 28, 2007

Elly's List

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:

Anonymous said...

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.

Anonymous said...

Oh! Almost forgot: Money is my favorite book ever. I'll read Ragtime if you read Money. Let's start there. :)

Lauren said...

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.

Anonymous said...

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.