TIME Magazine picks 100 Best Novels, 1923-Present

http://www.time.com/time/2005/100books/the_complete_list.html

TIME book critics Lev Grossman and Richard Lacayo pick the 100 Best English-Language Novels from 1923 to the present of 2006. A good list with some traditionals(ALL THE KING'S MEN, THE CATCHER IN THE RYE, CATCH-22, ON THE ROAD) and some alternatives that truely do deserve their place on this Greatest List(NAKED LUNCH, WATCHMEN(yes, the Alan Moore masterpiece graphic novel), even the cyberpunk sci-fi classics of SNOW CRASH and NEUROMANCER). Check out the list:

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

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


Thoughts? Opinions? Criticisms?

No Stranger ?

I don't know much about novels but I think that should be on there. [elitist] It defines existentialist literature for christ sake. [/elitist]

Books I have read on the list:

The Catcher In The Rye - J.D. Salinger
1984 - George Orwell
On The Road - Jack Kerouac
To Kill A Mockingbird - Harper Lee
White Noise - Don DeLillo

Books I need to read on the list:

ALL OF THEM!

Is there a significance to 1923 that I'm missing?

Don Jasani - Congrats! - 3k

Thanks a lot MistaMista! Only took me what, let's see, 5 years more or less!lol!

Yeah, 1923 was what, 83 years ago? How old is TIME magazine? Why is the 83rd anniversary of any thing important and why for this list?

Thanks again, MistaMista Tom Hagen.

1923 was when TIME came to being, and its been basically the "beginning" in terms of their lists usually. Notice how even GREAT GATSBY and the early 20's/30s works, TIME supplied the original reviews from the time of their original publishings.

Note they did this as well on their 100 Greatest Films List.

Really, nobody else has read WATCHMEN? A fucking pity...

The Great Gatsby, that I've read. In high school, but I did read it. The Watchmen? No, can't say as I have. However my to read list is very long.

I'm embarrased to say I've only read a small handful of these. The list is interesting though. I think I'll save it. I actually have more time to read now that the kids are getting a bit older.

For some reason, The Great Gatsby gets all the attention. I mean, other books by Fitzgerald are SO much better. The Beautiful and Damned beats The Great Gatsby

I've only read 2 books on this list. I've always considered myself well-read. What happened to Ben-Hur, The Silver Chalice, books by Hawthorne and The Godfather? Have these 2 guys read all of the books they picked? What system did they use to pick the top 100?

It seems a little light on humor:

Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
Night Life of the Gods - Thorne Smith

The Godfather as one of the 100 Best Novels ever? Umm, it was good, but not great. It certainley had it's flaws, and alot of filler (Fontane/Lucy).

Not to mention Sonny !!

Apple

THE GODFATHER book can kiss my ass. I know many are fans of it, but fuck it. However, I do admit that Mario Puzo had a good story and premise with it, to which Coppola simply took and crafted a damn great movie out of it.

Though folks, I hear that if TIME ever has a Top 1,000 Books List, THE GODFATHER is a possible candidate for it.

Books I've read:

Animal Farm
George Orwell


The Catcher in the Rye
J.D. Salinger

A Clockwork Orange
Anthony Burgess

The Grapes of Wrath
John Steinbeck

The Great Gatsby
F. Scott Fitzgerald

Invisible Man
Ralph Ellison

Lord of the Flies
William Golding


The Lord of the Rings
J.R.R. Tolkien

1984
George Orwell

On the Road
Jack Kerouac

One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
Ken Kesey

Their Eyes Were Watching God
Zora Neale Hurston


I'm an English Major, what do you expect? :p

Books that are not on there making this list horrible:

FEAR AND LOATHING IN LAS VEGAS
Hunter S. Thompson

Hell's Angels
Hunter S. Thompson

The Old Man and the Sea
Hemingway

Dharma Bums
Jack Kerouac

Requiem For A Dream
Hubert Selby Jr.

Home to Harlem
Claude McKay

Tar Baby
Toni Morrison


The list has a few good ones, but not enough to be considered a good list.

Ferro has basically summed up my feelings as to what should've made the list. :p

In about fifty years time (if not sooner) people will recognize at least half of those books as absolute brilliance.

And maybe some Palahniuk too.

Animal Farm was good... 1984 was great. But, I don't consider Animal Farm to be top 100. 1984 deserves more notice than it recieves though.

Wow wow wow.

I must must must read Herzog. It sounds like the best novel I have never read.

Currently reading The French Lieutenant's Woman. It is mesmerising.

Disappointed to note the absence of Fowles' The Magus. Any list without it is unjust.

I'm not a huge fan of novels. I'm mainly a visual learner, which is why any form of art that doesn't contain pictures or sound comes off as extremely dull to me.

The list probably needed at least one of Patrick O'Brian's books, a tiny portion of which was the basis for the movie "Master and Commander". The twenty or so books in the series form what is virtually a single novel that is 7000 pages long, and probably the greatest pure adventure fiction of the century.

Of the books that are on the list, I think Lord of the Rings and Animal Farm are the ones that are most likely still to be read 500 years from now. Tolkien and Orwell managed to create worlds largely detached from time and place.

Animal Farm
George Orwell


The Big Sleep
Raymond Chandler

Catch-22
Joseph Heller

The Catcher in the Rye
J.D. Salinger

Gone With the Wind
Margaret Mitchell

The Grapes of Wrath
John Steinbeck

The Great Gatsby
F. Scott Fitzgerald

1984
George Orwell

One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
Ken Kesey

Red Harvest
Dashiell Hammett

The Sound and the Fury
William Faulkner

Their Eyes Were Watching God
Zora Neale Hurston

To Kill a Mockingbird
Harper Lee

the ones I've read.

Also Nick Hornby, a great writer:

High Fidelity
About a Boy
How to Be Good
A Long Way Down