Time's 100 greatest Novels of all time...

Kingfish · **Posted:** Mon Oct 17, 2005 2:18 pm

1923 to present

A - B
The Adventures of Augie March
Saul Bellow

All the King's Men
Robert Penn Warren
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American Pastoral
Philip Roth
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An American Tragedy
Theodore Dreiser

Animal Farm
George Orwell
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Appointment in Samarra
John O'Hara
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Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret
Judy Blume

The Assistant
Bernard Malamud
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At Swim-Two-Birds
Flann O'Brien

Atonement
Ian McEwan
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Beloved
Toni Morrison
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The Berlin Stories
Christopher Isherwood
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The Big Sleep
Raymond Chandler
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The Blind Assassin
Margaret Atwood
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Blood Meridian
Cormac McCarthy

Brideshead Revisited
Evelyn Waugh
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The Bridge of San Luis Rey
Thornton Wilder
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C - D
Call It Sleep
Henry Roth
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Catch-22
Joseph Heller
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The Catcher in the Rye
J.D. Salinger
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A Clockwork Orange
Anthony Burgess
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The Confessions of Nat Turner
William Styron
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The Corrections
Jonathan Franzen
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The Crying of Lot 49
Thomas Pynchon
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A Dance to the Music of Time
Anthony Powell
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The Day of the Locust
Nathanael West
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Death Comes for the Archbishop
Willa Cather

A Death in the Family
James Agee

The Death of the Heart
Elizabeth Bowen
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Deliverance
James Dickey
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Dog Soldiers
Robert Stone
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F - G
Falconer
John Cheever
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The French Lieutenant's Woman
John Fowles
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The Golden Notebook
Doris Lessig
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Go Tell it on the Mountain
James Baldwin
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Gone With the Wind
Margaret Mitchell
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The Grapes of Wrath
John Steinbeck
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Gravity's Rainbow
Thomas Pynchon
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The Great Gatsby
F. Scott Fitzgerald
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H - I
A Handful of Dust
Evelyn Waugh
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The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter
Carson McCullers
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The Heart of the Matter
Graham Greene

Herzog
Saul Bellow
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Housekeeping
Marilynne Robinson
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A House for Mr. Biswas
V.S. Naipaul
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I, Claudius
Robert Graves
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Infinite Jest
David Foster Wallace
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Invisible Man
Ralph Ellison
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L - N
Light in August
William Faulkner
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The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe
C.S. Lewis

Lolita
Vladimir Nabokov
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Lord of the Flies
William Golding

The Lord of the Rings
J.R.R. Tolkein
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Loving
Henry Green
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Lucky Jim
Kingsley Amis
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The Man Who Loved Children
Christina Stead
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Midnight's Children
Salman Rushdie

Money
Martin Amis
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The Moviegoer
Walker Percy
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Mrs. Dalloway
Virginia Woolf

Naked Lunch
William Burroughs
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Native Son
Richard Wright
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Neuromancer
William Gibson

Never Let Me Go
Kazuo Ishiguro
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1984
George Orwell
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O - R
On the Road
Jack Kerouac
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One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
Ken Kesey
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The Painted Bird
Jerzy Kosinski

Pale Fire
Vladimir Nabokov
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A Passage to India
E.M. Forster

Play It As It Lays
Joan Didion

Portnoy's Complaint
Philip Roth
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Posession
A.S. Byatt
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The Power and the Glory
Graham Greene

The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie
Muriel Spark
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Rabbit, Run
John Updike
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Ragtime
E.L. Doctorow
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The Recognitions
William Gaddis
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Red Harvest
Dashiell Hammett

Revolutionary Road
Richard Yates

S - T
The Sheltering Sky
Paul Bowles
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Slaughterhouse-Five
Kurt Vonnegut
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Snow Crash
Neal Stephenson

The Sot-Weed Factor
John Barth

The Sound and the Fury
William Faulkner

The Sportswriter
Richard Ford
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The Spy Who Came in From the Cold
John LeCarre
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The Sun Also Rises
Ernest Hemingway
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Their Eyes Were Watching God
Zora Neale Hurston
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Things Fall Apart
Chinua Achebe

To Kill a Mockingbird
Harper Lee
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To the Lighthouse
Virginia Woolf
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Tropic of Cancer
Henry Miller
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U - W
Ubik
Philip K. Dick

Under the Net
Iris Murdoch

Under the Volcano
Malcolm Lowrey
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Watchmen
Alan Moore & Dave Gibbons

White Noise
Don DeLillo
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White Teeth
Zadie Smith
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Wide Sargasso Sea

Billzebub · **Joined:** Mon Oct 25, 2004 10:26 pm **Posts:** 6459

Reading is sooooo last century.

Yail Bloor · **Posted:** Mon Oct 17, 2005 2:28 pm

Something is wrong. I've actually read a good many of those books.

no guru · **Posted:** Mon Oct 17, 2005 2:28 pm

I like that one with the repressed victorian sensuality.

And that one about man's struggle to "know."

MontyTheMongoose · **Posted:** Mon Oct 17, 2005 2:33 pm

I'm psyched that The Big Sleep made it.

Hardboiled novels aren't so pulpy, really.

ayah · **Joined:** Mon Oct 25, 2004 12:03 pm **Posts:** 6402

no garcia marquez?
this list is bullshit.
white noise and the corrections were good and white teeth was very,very good but not to the omission of 100 years of solitude.

2 nabokov novels?
far too many glaring omissions.
i hate time magazine anyway.

Kingfish · **Posted:** Mon Oct 17, 2005 2:36 pm

I was kind of surprised the watchmen made it.

Dusty Chalk · **Posted:** Mon Oct 17, 2005 2:46 pm

Disappointed: no Clive Barker.

Also: how come no Heinlein?

Quote:

Snow Crash
Neal Stephenson

Glad to see this made the list.

two guns holla · **Posted:** Mon Oct 17, 2005 2:50 pm

ayah Wrote:

no garcia marquez?
this list is bullshit.
white noise and the corrections were good and white teeth was very,very good but not to the omission of 100 years of solitude.

I was looking for Marquez on the list as well.

mutty · **Posted:** Mon Oct 17, 2005 2:51 pm

ayah Wrote:

no garcia marquez?
this list is bullshit.
white noise and the corrections were good and white teeth was very,very good but not to the omission of 100 years of solitude.

2 nabokov novels?
far too many glaring omissions.
i hate time magazine anyway.

They are ENGLISH LANGUAGE books only. Garcia Marquez writes in Spanish, methinks.

mutty · **Posted:** Mon Oct 17, 2005 2:53 pm

Dusty Chalk Wrote:

Disappointed: no Clive Barker.

Also: how come no Heinlein?

Quote:

Snow Crash
Neal Stephenson

Glad to see this made the list.

Yea, Snow Crash is a great book.

What Heinlein book would you choose? Stranger in a Strange Land? Starship Troopers? I love Heinlein, but just don't consider his stuff 'great'.

Dusty Chalk · **Posted:** Mon Oct 17, 2005 2:54 pm

Max Wrote:

What Heinlein book would you choose? Stranger in a Strange Land? Starship Troopers? I love Heinlein, but just don't consider his stuff 'great'.

Well, yeah, if you gotta ask, then you obviously don't agree with me, but I would have picked Stranger in a Strange Land -- I mean, do you know anyone who has not read that book.

ayah · **Joined:** Mon Oct 25, 2004 12:03 pm **Posts:** 6402

Max Wrote:

They are ENGLISH LANGUAGE books only. Garcia Marquez writes in Spanish, methinks.

if that's the case--along with the seemingly arbtrary year of 1923 (i haven't read the article) the concept of the list is lame,proves nothing and seems like a marketing ploy for a series of time life books perhaps?

Kabob · **Posted:** Mon Oct 17, 2005 3:00 pm

Of all time... since 1923.....????

Any talk of novels that excludes the 19th c. is utter wankery.

mutty · **Posted:** Mon Oct 17, 2005 3:01 pm

ayah Wrote:

Max Wrote:

They are ENGLISH LANGUAGE books only. Garcia Marquez writes in Spanish, methinks.

if that's the case--along with the seemingly arbtrary year of 1923 (i haven't read the article) the concept of the list is lame,proves nothing and seems like a marketing ploy for a series of time life books perhaps?

I think Time began publication in 1923. I agree, 100 years of solitude, love in the time of cholera, The autumn of the Patriarch and maybe the General in his Labrynth would all be on my top 100.

These lists always have strange qualifications, omissions and selections. That doesn't mean they're useless.

Cotton · **Joined:** Mon Oct 25, 2004 6:12 pm **Posts:** 17155

these lists are ALWAYS bullshit.

Kabob · **Posted:** Mon Oct 17, 2005 3:07 pm

Also. A question-

Is Toni Morrison really any good? Should I not be avoiding simply because Oprah goes ga-ga over her? I find that 40-year old housewives and I have much different tastes in books.

Ah... which makes me think of something else.. Is Oprah pandering to that demographic's already suspect taste? Or is she trying to enlighten and raise their taste? Her selection of G.G. Marquez a while back might suggest this. Hm...

ayah · **Joined:** Mon Oct 25, 2004 12:03 pm **Posts:** 6402

time strted publishing in 1923.
i started to read the article but it was all too arbitrary.
like i said, i'm sure it was an idea to pull in "literary" advertising for that week.

mutty · **Posted:** Mon Oct 17, 2005 3:08 pm

I've read 26 of them. Only a few of them I'd remove from a list like this - Lucky Jim by Kingsley Amis, White Teeth by Zadie Smith, and The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen wouldn't make the cut.

Dunwoody Dude · **Joined:** Wed Nov 03, 2004 11:20 am **Posts:** 2869

Yeah, I've read about 1/4 of them. Pretty cool that they didn't ignore speculative fiction.

Steve

Senator LooGAR · **Posted:** Mon Oct 17, 2005 4:04 pm

I've read 16 and own about 25 or 30 of these. Many of them wouldn't even be in contention. I'll give you a dollar if THE EDITOR of Infinite Jest even made it through that. Franzen must suck a MEAN cock to be on this list already.

1923, while being the year Time published is also almost from the end of WWI, which kind of works. I mean, it has the Depression and WWII (aka what made last century interesting).

And to answer the question, no Toni Morrison isn't any good, no Nabokov shouldn't have 2 books on the list.

And really, no list is complete without Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas...I know its not a novel, but it is fiction

DumpJack · **Posted:** Mon Oct 17, 2005 4:07 pm

Cripes, I've only read about 5 books off that list. Gotta put down the Archie comics once in awhile.

Kingfish · **Posted:** Mon Oct 17, 2005 4:08 pm

Senator LooGAR's #9 Dream Wrote:

I've read 16 and own about 25 or 30 of these. Many of them wouldn't even be in contention. I'll give you a dollar if THE EDITOR of Infinite Jest even made it through that. Franzen must suck a MEAN cock to be on this list already.

1923, while being the year Time published is also almost from the end of WWI, which kind of works. I mean, it has the Depression and WWII (aka what made last century interesting).

And to answer the question, no Toni Morrison isn't any good, no Nabokov shouldn't have 2 books on the list.

And really, no list is complete without Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas...I know its not a novel, but it is fiction

I think Toni Morrison writes to a specific audience that few of us can relate to. I have a hard time believeing that white men really enjoy her work.

Senator LooGAR · **Posted:** Mon Oct 17, 2005 4:10 pm

oldbulee Wrote:

Senator LooGAR's #9 Dream Wrote:

I've read 16 and own about 25 or 30 of these. Many of them wouldn't even be in contention. I'll give you a dollar if THE EDITOR of Infinite Jest even made it through that. Franzen must suck a MEAN cock to be on this list already.

1923, while being the year Time published is also almost from the end of WWI, which kind of works. I mean, it has the Depression and WWII (aka what made last century interesting).

And to answer the question, no Toni Morrison isn't any good, no Nabokov shouldn't have 2 books on the list.

And really, no list is complete without Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas...I know its not a novel, but it is fiction

I think Toni Morrison writes to a specific audience that few of us can relate to. I have a hard time believeing that white men really enjoy her work.

Which is *ahem* why she's considered good...although I don't particularly enjoy any female authors, and generally read a lot more nonfiction these days...most newer fiction is so contrived its unreadable.

Evil Dr. K · **Joined:** Mon Oct 25, 2004 11:51 am **Posts:** 6327

No Joseph Conrad or Fjodor Dostoevsky? What a fucking joke.

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