Literati Score? 15 of 100

Via Dave:
In 2005, Time magazine picked the 100 best English-language novels (1923-present). Mark the selections you have read in bold. If you liked it, add a star (*) in front of the title, if you didn’t, give it a minus (-). Then, put the total number of books you’ve read in the subject line.

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
Call It Sleep – Henry Roth
* Catch-22 – Joseph Heller (Possibly the only book my dad and I have both read and talked about, and precious to me for that reason.)
* The Catcher in the Rye – J.D. Salinger
– A Clockwork Orange – Anthony Burgess (I admire what it was doing, but I didn’t *like* it.)
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
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
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
Light in August – William Faulkner
* The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe – C.S. Lewis (I adored all these books, even after I got to the last one and realized it was all just a religious… thing.)
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
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 (It hated too strong a word? Updike is my Stephen R. Donaldson of lit fiction, for me… automatic rejection by association… entirely due to this book.)
Ragtime – E.L. Doctorow
The Recognitions – William Gaddis
* Red Harvest – Dashiell Hammett
Revolutionary Road – Richard Yates
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 Carré
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
Ubik – Philip K. Dick
Under the Net – Iris Murdoch
Under the Volcano – Malcolm Lowry
– Watchmen – Alan Moore & Dave Gibbons (I lose geek-cred for this, but man I didn’t like that book at all.)
White Noise – Don DeLillo
White Teeth – Zadie Smith
Wide Sargasso Sea – Jean Rhys

I think it’s telling how many of these classics I read in my pre-20 years, both as an indicator of my willingness to ready ANYTHING (not much to do in the midwest, otherwise) and how little reading I actually get done today. :P

3 Replies to “Literati Score? 15 of 100”

  1. Eight total, I’ve not read alot of your “classic” English language novels. I feel that The Man in the High Castle is better than Ubik.
    All except for Ubik and The Spy Who Came in From the Cold, I read in high school. Oh as for William Gibson, I just don’t understand how he gets in the 100 best.
    I read alot more now than I used too, but it is almost all history. Lots and lots of history, no time for fiction.
    Updike is terrible.

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