Been busy with work! I’ll tell y’all about it very soon. But for now, here is a post, jacked from Molly. Apparently, Time magazine has listed their group of the best novels ever. So I adopted Molly’s post (and her notations- bold for read, italics as explained below, “I tried” for the ones I part-read) and I ask you the same question: what should I have read from this list that I have not?
[--Bold equals read. Italicized equals read something by the author, but not this particular title.--]
The Adventures of Augie March / Saul Bellow {I Tried.}
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 {I Tried.}
Call It Sleep / Henry Roth
Catch-22 / Joseph Heller {I Tried.}
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 {I Tried.}
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 {I Tried.}
Money / Martin Amis {I Tried.}
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 {I Tried.}
Possession / A.S. Byatt
The Power and the Glory / Graham Greene
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie / Muriel Spark
Rabbit, Run / John Updike {I Tried.}
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 {I Tried.}
The Sportswriter / Richard Ford
The Spy Who Came in From the Cold / John LeCarre
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 {I Tried.}
Ubik / Philip K. Dick
Under the Net / Iris Murdoch
Under the Volcano / Malcolm Lowry
Watchmen / Alan Moore & Dave Gibbons
White Noise / Don DeLillo {I Tried.}
White Teeth / Zadie Smith
Wide Sargasso Sea / Jean Rhys
6 comments:
Try midnight's children again. It is my favorite book.
of the ones that you haven't read that i have, i would suggest the corrections (which i have, so you could borrow) and the heart is a lonely hunter.
Midnight's Children is SOO thick. that's a project like pynchon's a project (p.s., crying of lot 49 is one of my faves). The Corrections doesn't turn me on but I will try it at some point. The Heart is a Lonely Hunter and the Blind Assassin are now on my to-do list. Maybe I should finish the intuitionist first, hm, Dora?
plus, my comments from molly's blog:
the bestest: crying of lot 49, white teeth, sun also rises, slaughterhouse 5, lolita.
the next bestest: invisible man, what i read of midnight's children, grapes of wrath.
best while in school: to kill a mockingbird, native son.
wtf?!: where is george eliot's middlemarch? or voltaire's candide? is this only 20th c lit?
i read instead:
james' baldwin's another country (one of the best books ever, even with his stiff writing); david foster wallace's short stories; hanry miller's quiet days in clichy (an awesome book about nothing); don delillo's underworld. also, paul beatty's the white boy shuffle, tobias wolff's old school, russell banks' cloudsplitter (which a lot of people don't like. i understand).
wtf?!: the sportswriter is a quick read and great prose but not great. john cheever can lick my-- naked lunch was read to me when i was drunk and high and just wanted to pass out on the floor in a cabin in the arizona mountains so that just is not a good memory. infinite jest was painful. the wide sargasso sea was pretty but boring.
FYI, the list is only the greatest novels since 1923, which is as long as Time has been publishing. (I was originally bemoaning the omission of Of Human Bondage). And I'm with you on the Crying of Lot 49. I love that book...
i think i read the crying of lot 49 many years ago on your recommendation, and it took a long time but was worth it - like rusdhie. and i'll admit that i'm having a hard time starting shalimar the clown, but it's only because i feel like i need to dedicate a large chunk of time to it, that i don't have right now. but my point = midnight's children = love and the corrections = hate.
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