My next large goal for being 32 is working through someone’s big list of top 100 novels everyone should read in his/her life. After finding that a bunch of people have made such lists, I opted for a mainstream one, just to get me started. This is also another effort to continue being more openminded about trying other books again. I read a tremendous amount of modern novels in college as a part of my ol’ English major, but I stopped b/c I’m more drawn to sci-fi/fantasy lit.
So here is where I’m starting: Time’s Top 100
I thought I’d go alphabetical, but considering I’m in the middle of a new sci-fi series that I’m reading (vs. listening to) and the first book The Adventures of Augie March by Saul Bellow isn’t available at my library on audio, I’m skipping to All The King’s Men by Robert Penn Warren because it is available on audio.
Heck, let’s review the list and see what I’ve already read. The titles with stars are those that I’ve already read. Some of them are questionable; for example I’ve only gotten through book 1 and half of book two of The Lord of the Rings. So the plan is to go through the books I’m positive I haven’t read and then re-read the ones I’m not 100% positive on. Actually, All The King’s Men is one of those books I think I’ve already read, but since I already am reserving the audio recording, why not again?
The Complete List
In Alphabetical Order
A - B
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
C - D
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
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
F - G
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
H - I
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
L - N
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 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
O - R
On the Road
Jack Kerouac
*One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
Ken Kesey
Read the Original Review
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
S - T
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
U - W
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