Friday, March 25, 2011

Greatest Novels of 20th Century

So there's this list that's been going around the blogosphere lately...I caught it at Your Move, Dickens and What Red Read and felt compelled to post it here as well. Apparently it's from the publishing students at Radcliffe College. I guess they got together and compiled what they felt was the best 100 novels of this last century. So let's take a look...

Key: Bold means I've read it; Italics means I've read it but didn't finish; ** means it's on my massive TBR pile.

1. "The Great Gatsby," F. Scott Fitzgerald
2. "The Catcher in the Rye," J.D. Salinger
3. "The Grapes of Wrath," John Steinbeck
4. "To Kill a Mockingbird," Harper Lee

5. "The Color Purple," Alice Walker **
6. "Ulysses," James Joyce
7. "Beloved," Toni Morrison
8. "The Lord of the Flies," William Golding
9. "1984," George Orwell

10. "The Sound and the Fury," William Faulkner **

11. "Lolita," Vladmir Nabokov
12. "Of Mice and Men," John Steinbeck

13. "Charlotte's Web," E.B. White
14. "A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man," James Joyce
15. "Catch-22," Joseph Heller

16. "Brave New World," Aldous Huxley
17. "Animal Farm," George Orwell

18. "The Sun Also Rises," Ernest Hemingway
19. "As I Lay Dying," William Faulkner **
20. "A Farewell to Arms," Ernest Hemingway
21. "Heart of Darkness," Joseph Conrad
22. "Winnie-the-Pooh," A.A. Milne
23. "Their Eyes Were Watching God," Zora Neale Hurston
24. "Invisible Man," Ralph Ellison **
25. "Song of Solomon," Toni Morrison
26. "Gone with the Wind," Margaret Mitchell
27. "Native Son," Richard Wright
28. "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest," Ken Kesey

29. "Slaughterhouse Five," Kurt Vonnegut **
30. "For Whom the Bell Tolls," Ernest Hemingway
31. "On the Road," Jack Kerouac
32. "The Old Man and the Sea," Ernest Hemingway
33. "The Call of the Wild," Jack London
34. "To the Lighthouse," Virginia Woolf
35. "Portrait of a Lady," Henry James
36. "Go Tell it on the Mountain," James Baldwin
37. "The World According to Garp," John Irving
38. "All the King's Men," Robert Penn Warren
39. "A Room with a View," E.M. Forster
40. "The Lord of the Rings," J.R.R. Tolkien
41. "Schindler's List," Thomas Keneally
42. "The Age of Innocence," Edith Wharton
43. "The Fountainhead," Ayn Rand **
44. "Finnegans Wake," James Joyce
45. "The Jungle," Upton Sinclair **
46. "Mrs. Dalloway," Virginia Woolf **
47. "The Wonderful Wizard of Oz," Frank L. Baum
48. "Lady Chatterley's Lover," D.H. Lawrence

49. "A Clockwork Orange," Anthony Burgess
50. "The Awakening," Kate Chopin **

51. "My Antonia," Willa Cather
52. "Howard's End," E.M. Forster
53. "In Cold Blood," Truman Capote
54. "Franny and Zooey," J.D. Salinger
55. "Satanic Verses," Salman Rushdie
56. "Jazz," Toni Morrison
57. "Sophie's Choice," William Styron
58. "Absalom, Absalom!" William Faulkner
59. "Passage to India," E.M. Forster
60. "Ethan Frome," Edith Wharton **
61. "A Good Man is Hard to Find," Flannery O'Connor
62. "Tender is the Night," F. Scott Fitzgerald **
63. "Orlando," Virginia Woolf
64. "Sons and Lovers," D.H. Lawrence
65. "Bonfire of the Vanities," Thomas Wolfe

66. "Cat's Cradle," Kurt Vonnegut
67. "A Separate Peace," John Knowles

68. "Light in August," William Faulkner **
69. "The Wings of the Dove," Henry James
70. "Things Fall Apart," Chinua Achebe **
71. "Rebecca," Daphne du Maurier
72. "A Hithchiker's Guide to the Galaxy," Douglas Adams
73. "Naked Lunch," William S. Burroughs
74. "Brideshead Revisited," Evelyn Waugh
75. "Women in Love," D.H. Lawrence
76. "Look Homeward, Angel," Thomas Wolfe
77. "In Our Time," Ernest Hemingway
78. "The Autobiography of Alice B. Tokias," Gertrude Stein
79. "The Maltese Falcon," Dashiell Hammett
80. "The Naked and the Dead," Norman Mailer
81. "The Wide Sargasso Sea," Jean Rhys
82. "White Noise," Don DeLillo
83. "O Pioneers!" Willa Cather
84. "Tropic of Cancer," Henry Miller
85. "The War of the Worlds," HG Wells
86. "Lord Jim," Joseph Conrad
87. "The Bostonians," James Henry
88. "An American Tragedy," Theodore Dreiser **
89. "Death Comes for the Archbishop," Willa Cather
90. "The Wind in the Willows," Kenneth Grahame
91. "This Side of Paradise," F. Scott Fitzgerald
92. "Atlas Shrugged," Ayn Rand **
93. "The French Lieutenant's Woman," John Fowles
94. "Babbitt," Sinclair Lewis **
95. "Kim," Rudyard Kipling
96. "The Beautiful and the Damned," F. Scott Fitzgerald
97. "Rabbit, Run," John Updike
98. "Where Angels Fear to Tread," EM Forster
99. "
Main Street," Sinclair Lewis
100. "Midnight's Children," Salman Rushdie

Oh my god! I've done a HORRIBLE job so far! I mean, I guess I could almost count All the King's Men because I'm going to finish that by the weekend but still, then I've only finished 20?!?! Ridiculous! I was doing pretty well there in the beginning of the list but geeze louise! I need to hit the books...

How many have you read? What are your favorites on the list? And I'm sorry, I've tried and tried to finish Catch 22 but it ain't happening!

10 comments:

Red said...

I'm sorry Catch 22 wasn't doing it for you. Admittedly I couldn't get through it on my first try so I switched to Slaughterhouse 5 (my dad had given me both one year for my birthday). A few years later I went back and loved Catch.

Wall-to-wall books said...

WOW! I surprised myself - I've read a startling 17!!!
That's pretty good for someone who doesn't like "classics".

Wall-to-wall books said...

Sorry forgot the second part -
My favorites -
O' Pioneers
Gone with the Wind
Of Mice and Men

anarmchairbythesea said...

I've read 33! Quite proud :-) favourites ... To Kill a Mockingbird for sure, and probably Catcher in the Rye, Gone with the Wind, and Hitchiker's Guide to the Galaxy :-)

anarmchairbythesea said...

Also I agree completely about Catch 22. Tried so much but just can't get into it!

Anonymous said...

I've managed 38. I was saying to Red that Hemingway is a huge gap for me.
My current fave would be Henry James.

llevinso said...

@Red, I need to read some Vonnegut...

@W2W, really liked Of Mice and Men!

@Bex, 33 that's awesome! Loved Catcher and TKAMB :)

@Inknchai, I like Henry James but I haven't read his work listed here.

Wall-to-wall books said...

Of Mice and Men is one of my all time favorite books!!! I would love to re-read it.

llevinso said...

Well it couldn't take too long since it's so short :)

Perri said...

32!!! Of course, some of these were required reading somewhere along the line and some were the result of obsessions (Oddly, I went through both a Toni Morrison phase and a Joseph Conrad phase) (I counted a few that I didn't finish such as "To the Lighthouse")