Yes, it is true: I am appallingly ill-read. But in my defense, the list of 100 Best Novels of the 20th Century was made up almost entirely of...well, of 20th century novels, which are as a rule mad, bad, and deadly dull to read. We're working off the Radcliffe Publishing List; which follows, should you have any desire to check my illiteracy. Bolded, I've read.
1. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
2. The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger
3. The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
4. To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
5. The Color Purple by Alice Walker
6. Ulysses by James Joyce
7. Beloved by Toni Morrison
8. The Lord of the Flies by William Golding
9. 1984 by George Orwell
10. The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner
11. Lolita by Vladmir Nabokov
12. Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck
13. Charlotte's Web by E. B. White
14. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce
15. Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
16. Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
17. Animal Farm by George Orwell
18. The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway
19. As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner
20. A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway
21. Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
22. Winnie-the-Pooh by A. A. Milne
23. Their Eyes are Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston
24. Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
25. Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison
26. Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell
27. Native Son by Richard Wright
28. One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest by Ken Kesey
29. Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut
30. For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway
31. On the Road by Jack Kerouac
32. The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway
33. The Call of the Wild by Jack London
34. To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf
35. Portrait of a Lady by Henry James
36. Go Tell it on the Mountain by James Baldwin
37. The World According to Garp by John Irving
38. All the King's Men by Robert Penn Warren
39. A Room with a View by E. M. Forster
40. The Lord of the Rings by J. R. R. Tolkien
41. Schindler's List by Thomas Keneally
42. The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton
43. The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand
44. Finnegans Wake by James Joyce
45. The Jungle by Upton Sinclair
46. Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf
47. The Wonderful Wizard of Oz by L. Frank Baum
48. Lady Chatterley's Lover by D. H. Lawrence
49. A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess
50. The Awakening by Kate Chopin
51. My Antonia by Willa Cather
52. Howards End by E. M. Forster
53. In Cold Blood by Truman Capote
54. Franny and Zooey by J.D. Salinger
55. The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie
56. Jazz by Toni Morrison
57. Sophie's Choice by William Styron
58. Absalom, Absalom! by William Faulkner
59. A Passage to India by E. M. Forster
60. Ethan Frome by Edith Wharton
61. A Good Man Is Hard to Find by Flannery O'Connor
62. Tender Is the Night by F. Scott Fitzgerald
63. Orlando by Virginia Woolf
64. Sons and Lovers by D. H. Lawrence
65. Bonfire of the Vanities by Tom Wolfe
66. Cat's Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut
67. A Separate Peace by John Knowles
68. Light in August by William Faulkner
69. The Wings of the Dove by Henry James
70. Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe
71. Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier
72. A Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams
73. Naked Lunch by William S. Burroughs
74. Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh
75. Women in Love by D. H. Lawrence
76. Look Homeward, Angel by Thomas Wolfe
77. In Our Time by Ernest Hemingway
78. The Autobiography of Alice B. Tokias by Gertrude Stein
79. The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett
80. The Naked and the Dead by Norman Mailer
81. Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys
82. White Noise by Don DeLillo
83. O Pioneers! by Willa Cather
84. Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller
85. The War of the Worlds by H. G. Wells
86. Lord Jim by Joseph Conrad
87. The Bostonians by Henry James
88. An American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser
89. Death Comes for the Archbishop by Willa Cather
90. The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame
91. This Side of Paradise by F. Scott Fitzgerald
92. Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand
93. The French Lieutenant's Woman by John Fowles
94. Babbitt by Sinclair Lewis
95. Kim by Rudyard Kipling
96. The Beautiful and the Damned by F. Scott Fitzgerald
97. Rabbit, Run by John Updike
98. Where Angels Fear to Tread by E. M. Forster
99. Main Street by Sinclair Lewis
100. Midnight's Children by Salman Rushdie
This is not a meme, should such things even exist. This is a conscious thought and free-will blog (with occasional slips).
6 comments:
if you had taken books-on-tape senior year, you would have had more ... Toni Morrison and Zora Neale Hurston are *clearly* better when heard than read
odious, read brideshead revisited and sophie's choice immediately!! that is an order! -Larissa
Rarissa-chan: Yes'm.
Anonymous previous: The custom of reading silently is a modern one, and I think it's done a lot of harm to prose. Reading aloud, to oneself or to an audience, requires an engagement I often lack, and demands an euphony and clarity modern literature seldom supplies.
But, from long habit, I prefer my own internal cadences to another's. And reading aloud means reading so slowly....
Which senior year, by the way?
sorry ... 1996 - 1997 :)
and, really, we're not talking high quality books on tape. and the discussion was, umm, lacking. In quality and quantity
Ah, but you are apaprently better-read than I, if this list is any indication; I was feeling smug until I totalled my hits and misses.
Movie versions don't count, right?
This is what happens when you spend your entire childhood reading science fiction. If LeGuin or Heinlein were on that list (although I'm not suggesting that the latter should be, reactionary old coot) I would ace this particular test.
Instead, I have Made A List. We'll see how it goes. I even own some of the works in question, so I have no excuse.
I love Making A List, but I suffer from what I refer to as Mathematician's Fallacy Syndrome, which causes me to believe that, once an action is conceived, it might as well be done. Thus, my List becomes reality (to me), whilst remaining unactualized.
I have the same problem with essays (hoo boy).
I read a lot of LeGuin when I was younger, since I loved Earthsea and thought that the rest of her works would be like that.
Heinlein, not so much. I did like Starman Jones, which is an excellent example of science-fiction being overtaken by events.
Mostly, I read fantasy. And, Heavens, what bad fantasy. I've read more David Eddings than I care to admit.
I own a shocking number of the works as well, mostly because mine is a mixed library (my books + my wife's). At one point I intended to read all the books on the shelves that I hadn't. I didn't even make it out of the A's.
(I didn't even make it out of Richard Adams.)
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