Here are Time magazine’s “All-TIME” 100 best novels. I’m gonna bold the ones I’ve read, which is going to be at least equally depressing as the movie list I did last week.
- The Adventures of Augie March (1953) by Saul Bellow
- All The King’s Men (1946) by Robert Penn Warren
- American Pastoral (1997) by Philip Roth
- An American Tragedy (1925) by Theodore Dreiser
- Animal Farm (1946) by George Orwell
- Appointment in Samarra (1934) by John O’Hara
- Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret (1970) by Judy Blume
- The Assistant (1957) by Bernard Malamud
- At Swim-Two-Birds (1938) by Flann O’Brien
- Atonement (2002) by Ian McEwan
- Beloved (1987) by Toni Morrison
- The Berlin Stories (1946) by Christopher Isherwood
- The Big Sleep (1939) by Raymond Chandler
- The Blind Assassin (2000) by Margaret Atwood
- Blood Meridian (1985) by Cormac McCarthy
- Brideshead Revisited (1945) by Evelyn Waugh
- The Bridge of San Luis Rey (1927) by Thornton Wilder
- Call It Sleep (1934) by Henry Roth
- Catch-22 (1961) by Joseph Heller
- The Catcher in the Rye (1951) by J. D. Salinger
- A Clockwork Orange (1962) by Anthony Burgess
- The Confessions of Nat Turner (1967) by William Styron
- The Corrections (2001) by Jonathan Franzen
- The Crying of Lot 49 (1966) by Thomas Pynchon
- A Dance to the Music of Time (1951-1975) by Anthony Powell
- The Day of the Locust (1939) by Nathanael West
- Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927) by Willa Cather
- A Death in the Family (1956) by James Agee
- The Death of the Heart (1939) by Elizabeth Bowen
- Deliverance (1970) by James Dickey
- Dog Soldiers (1974) by Robert Stone
- Falconer (1977) by John Cheever
- The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1969) by John Fowles
- The Golden Notebook (1962) by Doris Lessing
- Go Tell it on the Mountain (1953) by James Baldwin
- Gone With the Wind (1936) by Margaret Mitchell
- The Grapes of Wrath (1939) by John Steinbeck
- Gravity’s Rainbow (1973) by Thomas Pynchon
- The Great Gatsby (1925) by F. Scott Fitzgerald
- A Handful of Dust (1934) by Evelyn Waugh
- The Heart is a Lonely Hunter (1940) by Carson McCullers
- The Heart of the Matter (1948) by Graham Greene
- Herzog (1964) by Saul Bellow
- Housekeeping (1980) by Marilynne Robinson
- A House for Mr. Biswas (2001) by V. S. Naipaul
- I, Claudius (1934) by Robert Graves
- Infinite Jest (1996) by David Foster Wallace
- Invisible Man (1952) by Ralph Ellison
- Light in August (1932) by William Faulkner
- The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (1950) by C. S. Lewis
- Lolita (1955) by Vladimir Nabokov
- Lord of the Flies (1954) by William Golding
- The Lord of the Rings (1954-1955) by J. R. R. Tolkien
- Loving (1945) by Henry Green
- Lucky Jim (1954) by Kingsley Amis
- The Man Who Loved Children (1940) by Christina Stead
- Midnight’s Children (1981) by Salman Rushdie
- Money (1984) by Martin Amis
- The Moviegoer (1961) by Walker Percy
- Mrs. Dalloway (1925) by Virginia Woolf
- Naked Lunch (1959) by William Burroughs
- Native Son (1940) by Richard Wright
- Neuromancer (1984) by William Gibson
- Never Let Me Go (2005) by Kazuo Ishiguro
- 1984 (1949) by George Orwell
- On the Road (1957) by Jack Kerouac
- One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1962) by Ken Kesey
- The Painted Bird (1967) by Jerzy Kosinski
- Pale Fire (1962) by Vladimir Nabokov
- A Passage to India (1924) by E. M. Forster
- Play It As It Lays (1970) by Joan Didion
- Portnoy’s Complaint (1969) by Philip Roth
- Possession: A Romance (1990) by A. S. Byatt
- The Power and the Glory (1940) by Graham Greene
- The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1961) by Muriel Spark
- Rabbit, Run (1960) by John Updike
- Ragtime (1975) by E.L. Doctorow
- The Recognitions (1955) by William Gaddis
- Red Harvest (1929) by Dashiell Hammett
- Revolutionary Road (1961) by Richard Yates
- The Sheltering Sky (1949) by Paul Bowles
- Slaughterhouse-Five (1969) by Kurt Vonnegut
- Snow Crash (1992) by Neal Stephenson
- The Sot-Weed Factor (1960) by John Barth
- The Sound and the Fury (1929) by William Faulkner
- The Sportswriter (1986) by Richard Ford
- The Spy Who Came in From the Cold (1963) by John le Carré
- The Sun Also Rises (1926) by Ernest Hemingway
- Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937) by Zora Neale Hurston
- Things Fall Apart (1959) by Chinua Achebe
- To Kill a Mockingbird (1960) by Harper Lee
- To the Lighthouse (1927) by Virginia Woolf
- Tropic of Cancer (1934) by Henry Miller
- Ubik (1969) by Philip K. Dick
- Under the Net (1954) by Iris Murdoch
- Under the Volcano (1947) by Malcolm Lowry
- Watchmen (serial, 1986-87) by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons
- White Noise (1985) by Don DeLillo
- White Teeth (2000) by Zadie Smith
- Wide Sargasso Sea (1966) by Jean Rhys
13 out of a hundred. Depressing.
kalafudra's Stuff 
Mine is, too. :(
Isn’t that what school was supposed to be for?
… this sucks. I was sooo sure that my book list would be much better than my film list. Well, it isn’t.
The only thing I can say (to make all of us feel slightly better) is that this is a very Anglosaxon list. Which could provide a little excuse for us.
Nine.
*sobs*
There, there…
Which ones did you read?
Animal Farm; Catcher in the Rye; I, Claudius; The Lion, The Witch And The Wardrobe; Lord Of The Flies; Lord Of The Rings; 1984; Possession; Watchmen;
And 12 out of that other list you mentioned below. Woefully undereducated, aren’t I?
Barely literate, really ^_^”
Aren’t we all woefully undereducated?
At least you read your Goethe… ;)
five.
*sobs*
“Their eyes were watching god” is an ingenious title…..
Yes, it is a very Anglosaxon list. But I’m afraid that it wouldn’t change for the better if the list were different.
Take this one, for example, with a more internationally European focus: http://www.abebooks.de/docs/ReadingRoom/BesteBuecher/besteBuecher.shtml
I’ve read 17 out of that list. Okay, that’s a little better. :)
… 24. Slightly better. Still, the cultuer-gap deepens.
We HAVE to start this club. September. Right? I mean it. I want to catch up on this.
September is fine by me. We always succeed in doing the club meetings at least once, so that’s one more book off the list, right? ;)
I agree with some of this list. Here are some other great book lists