firecat

TIME critics Lev Grossman and Richard Lacayo pick the 100 best English-Language novels from 1923 to the present (article published in 2005)

Bold means I finished it.
Italic means I started it but didn't finish it.
Underline means I love it.
~~Strikethru~~ means I hate it.

Recommendations, disrecommendations, agreements, disagreements, complaints about the choices on the list, etc., welcome.

A - B
1. The Adventures of Augie March (1953), by Saul Bellow

2. All the King's Men (1946), by Robert Penn Warren
3. American Pastoral (1997), by Philip Roth
4. An American Tragedy (1925), by Theodore Dreiser
5. Animal Farm (1946), by George Orwell
6. Appointment in Samarra (1934), by John O'Hara
7. Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret (1970), by Judy Blume
8. The Assistant (1957), by Bernard Malamud
9. At Swim-Two-Birds (1938), by Flann O'Brien
10. Atonement (2002), by Ian McEwan
11. Beloved (1987), by Toni Morrison
12. The Berlin Stories (1946), by Christopher Isherwood
13. The Big Sleep (1939), by Raymond Chandler
14. The Blind Assassin (2000), by Margaret Atwood
15. Blood Meridian (1986), by Cormac McCarthy
16. Brideshead Revisited (1946), by Evelyn Waugh
17. The Bridge of San Luis Rey (1927), by Thornton Wilder
C - D
1. Call It Sleep (1935), by Henry Roth
2. Catch-22 (1961), by Joseph Heller
3. The Catcher in the Rye (1951), by J.D. Salinger
4. A Clockwork Orange (1963), by Anthony Burgess
5. The Confessions of Nat Turner (1967), by William Styron
6. The Corrections (2001), by Jonathan Franzen
7. The Crying of Lot 49 (1966), by Thomas Pynchon
8. A Dance to the Music of Time (1951), by Anthony Powell
9. The Day of the Locust (1939), by Nathanael West
10. Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927), by Willa Cather
11. A Death in the Family (1958), by James Agee
12. The Death of the Heart (1958), by Elizabeth Bowen
13. Deliverance (1970), by James Dickey
14. Dog Soldiers (1974), by Robert Stone
F - G
1. Falconer (1977), by John Cheever
2. The French Lieutenant's Woman (1969), by John Fowles (I seem to recall that I thought it was a good yarn, but one of the 100 best?)
3. The Golden Notebook (1962), by Doris Lessing
4. Go Tell it on the Mountain (1953), by James Baldwin
5. Gone With the Wind (1936), by Margaret Mitchell
6. The Grapes of Wrath (1939), by John Steinbeck
7. Gravity's Rainbow (1973), by Thomas Pynchon
8. The Great Gatsby (1925), by F. Scott Fitzgerald
H - I
1. A Handful of Dust (1934), by Evelyn Waugh
2. The Heart is A Lonely Hunter (1940), by Carson McCullers
3. The Heart of the Matter (1948), by Graham Greene
4. Herzog (1964), by Saul Bellow
5. Housekeeping (1981), by Marilynne Robinson
6. A House for Mr. Biswas (1962), by V.S. Naipaul
7. I, Claudius (1934), by Robert Graves
8. Infinite Jest (1996), by David Foster Wallace
9. Invisible Man (1952), by Ralph Ellison
L - N
1. Light in August (1932), by William Faulkner
2. The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe (1950), by C.S. Lewis
~~3. Lolita (1955), by Vladimir Nabokov~~ (Yes, even though I haven't read it)
~~4. Lord of the Flies (1955), by William Golding~~
5. The Lord of the Rings (1954), by J.R.R. Tolkien
6. Loving (1945), by Henry Green
7. Lucky Jim (1954), by Kingsley Amis
8. The Man Who Loved Children (1940), by Christina Stead
9. Midnight's Children (1981), by Salman Rushdie
10. Money (1984), by Martin Amis
11. The Moviegoer (1961), by Walker Percy
12. Mrs. Dalloway (1925), by Virginia Woolf
13. Naked Lunch (1959), by William Burroughs
14. Native Son (1940), by Richard Wright
15. Neuromancer (1984), by William Gibson (I am never quite sure why people think this is a great novel.)
16. Never Let Me Go (2005), by Kazuo Ishiguro
17. 1984 (1948), by George Orwell
O - R
1. On the Road (1957), by Jack Kerouac
2. One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1962), by Ken Kesey ("Loved it" isn't quite correct, but it made a big impression on me.)
3. The Painted Bird (1965), by Jerzy Kosinski
4. Pale Fire (1962), by Vladimir Nabokov
5. A Passage to India (1924), by E.M. Forster
6. Play It As It Lays (1970), by Joan Didion
~~7. Portnoy's Complaint (1969), by Philip Roth~~ (I liked it at the time I read it, so it's a retrospective strike-out.)
8. Possession (1990), by A.S. Byatt
9. The Power and the Glory (1939), by Graham Greene
10. The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1961), by Muriel Spark
11. Rabbit, Run (1960), by John Updike
12. Ragtime (1975), by E.L. Doctorow
13. The Recognitions (1955), by William Gaddis
14. Red Harvest (1929), by Dashiell Hammett
15. Revolutionary Road (1961), by Richard Yates
S - T
1. The Sheltering Sky (1949), by Paul Bowles
2. Slaughterhouse Five (1969), by Kurt Vonnegut (I loved it when I first read it, but the sexism ruined it for me on re-reading.)
3. Snow Crash (1992), by Neal Stephenson
4. The Sot-Weed Factor (1960), by John Barth
5. The Sound and the Fury (1929), by William Faulkner
6. The Sportswriter (1986), by Richard Ford
7. The Spy Who Came in From the Cold (1964), by John le Carre
8. The Sun Also Rises (1926), by Ernest Hemingway
9. Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), by Zora Neale Hurston
10. Things Fall Apart (1959), by Chinua Achebe
11. To Kill a Mockingbird (1960), by Harper Lee
12. To the Lighthouse (1927), by Virginia Woolf
13. Tropic of Cancer (1934), by Henry Miller
U - W
1. Ubik (1969), by Philip K. Dick (I just finished this.)
2. Under the Net (1954), by Iris Murdoch
3. Under the Volcano (1947), by Malcolm Lowry
~~4. Watchmen (1986), by Alan Moore & Dave Gibbons~~
5. White Noise (1985), by Don DeLillo
6. White Teeth (2000), by Zadie Smith
7. Wide Sargasso Sea (1966), by Jean Rhys

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

From:

eagle

I always get grumbly about The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, since it makes a lot of lists like this as the first book, but I think it's one of the weakest of the Narnia books. IMO, it's inferior to The Voyage of the Dawn Treader in pretty much every way.

I absolutely adored To Kill a Mockingbird.

Watchmen I loved when I read it, but I was deep into superhero comics at the time, so it was speaking directly to (against) a genre that I was starting to get tired of, which doubtless added something.

I'm very glad I read Catch-22, but I found it rather repetitive. Memorable, though.

These lists make me feel vaguely guilty since I've read so few of the books on them, since most of what I've read is genre and few genre books tend to make the list. But I do have a pile of these on my shelves, so it's just a matter of making time for them.

From:

firecat

I liked LWW better than the other Narnia books when I was a kid, so if the list were "100 best kids' books," I might argue with you. But given that the list is intended for adults...

From:

lilacsigil

I suspect that "The French Lieutenant's Woman" made it in for being metafiction that was both literary and a best-seller!

Anti-recs: If you like Waugh, Johnathan Franzen *wishes* he was a modern-day Waugh. But he's definitely not!

"Watchmen" is a favourite of mine, but I think reader reaction is hugely dependent on when in your comics-reading life you get to it. It was one of my first steps out of pure superhero comics, so to me it was important in both personal analysis of what I was reading, and as an indictment of the entire idea of the superhero. I think that a lot of what Moore said has been incorporated into modern comics, though, so people who have come from the more complex (not always better, though!) comics that Moore inspired see the flaws in "Watchmen" - which are many - first.

From:

firecat

I forgot about FLW being metafiction! (I'm so bad at remembering what I've read, I might as well never buy another book again.)

I hadn't read many superhero comics when I read Watchmen, so I didn't really get it.

From:

shanaqui

Raymond Chandler! ♥! ♥!

*ahem*

From:

firecat

He is great. I just finished Farewell, My Lovely.

From:

shanaqui

I read The Big Sleep for my crime fiction class and fell in love with his writing and just devoured all the rest, one each day, and then mourned that there was no more.

From:

outlier_lynn

I have never heard of most of these books and many of these writers. And many of my favorite books aren't on the list.

There seem to be many criteria for deciding if a novel is worthy. Did it have significant cultural impact and of what kind? Was it widely read? Did it expose some deep secrets about human emotion or the human condition? Does the reader find themselves in the book (as either a character or as an observer)?

Well, I nearly always disagree with the criteria that causes books to be on lists like these. I also disagree with the criteria that determines if something is good art or good music. I used to think it meant something bad about me. Then, for a (long) while, I thought it meant something bad about the list makers. Then (and now) I think it doesn't mean anything about anybody. :)

My criteria about any entertainment (writing, visual and performing arts, music, etc) is just this: Does it entertain me? I am not saying "Did it cause an emotional response?" Many books have jerked me around emotionally without entertaining me.

As and example, once I get passed the serious sexism in Shakespeare, I find I only like the comedies. I am decidedly not entertained by Romeo and Juliet, nor Hamlet, nor Othello. Skilled film makers can entertain me with material that did not entertain me when in book form. I've read Hunt for Red October and I've seen the movie. The movie was vastly more entertaining and doesn't take as long.

I want my entertainment to entertain me. And for that, it has to depart from reality. I am seldom entertained by the suffering of humanity. And I want a hero. And I want the hero to win. I escape into books (and movies, art, music).

Edited Date: 4 May 2010 04:55 pm (UTC)

From:

firecat

I have never heard of most of these books and many of these writers.

I've heard of most of them, but primarily from reading book lists. ;-)

I nearly always disagree with the criteria that causes books to be on lists like these.

I disagree with the concept of "[n] best" lists because I think what people like is so culturally dependent and subjective. Also the lists reinforce cultural prejudices and discrimination. The English-speaking West the authors on "best books" lists are disproportionately white males.

However, I do respond to some of what the cultural consensus is about what is "good writing," so I tend to find a few more books I enjoy in a "best list" than by picking up books at random in a bookstore.

Many books have jerked me around emotionally without entertaining me.

Yeah, that's an important distinction. I like stories that give space for my emotions develop on their own. (I actually find that Hamlet does that, but Romeo and Juliet doesn't—my primary response to R&J tends to be "they were stoopid.")

I tend to prefer stories that are not set in my own time and culture, Many stories seem to rely on the expectation that I will respond in a culturally typical way, and I often don't.

From:

outlier_lynn

I tend to prefer stories that are not set in my own time and culture, Many stories seem to rely on the expectation that I will respond in a culturally typical way, and I often don't.</>

This is true for me, too. In a college Lit class, I argued loudly that the "meaning" of the various "symbols" didn't mean those things to me. And that by insisting that the symbols where symbols and that they meant those things, he was negating my experience of life which was just as (in)valid as anyone's or any group's experience. I still got an A in that class. :)

From:

flarenut

I've got a lot of titles in italics on that list. And a lot of things I read for some class or other. One of the things that seems to connect most of these is that they're not really enjoyable. Very high quality, but not necessarily as if they wanted to be read.

From:

firecat

I was surprised to find that I read only 9 of them as class assignments.

I think some people find "high quality" in itself more enjoyable than others.