Sunday, February 1, 2009

Bibliophile, bookworm, and proud of it ....

The editors of Random House's Modern Library put together a list of the one hundred novels they consider to be the best of the 20th Century.

I've read 37 of them, the majority within the first 50 listed, and all but one of the top ten. I have no idea how that would stack up against the average reader. There are a number of other instances where I have not read the book listed here as "one of the great ones" by a particular author, but I have read one or more other books written by that individual. More interesting to me is the fact that I do not recall even ever hearing the name of 14 of the authors mentioned here, mostly listed among the last 50.

These are the novels in the order selected. How do you fare? Are you a bibliophile, a bookworm? If so, I hope you are proud of it. Blame Random House for any spelling errors.

1. Ulysses by James Joyce
2. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
3. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce
4. Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
5. Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
6. The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner
7. Catch 22 by Joseph Heller
8. Darkness at Noon by Arthur Koestler
9. Sons and Lovers by D.H. Lawrence
10. The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
11. Under the Volcano: A Novel by Malcolm Lowry
12. The Way of All Flesh by Samuel Butler
13. 1984 by George Orwell
14. I, Claudius by Robert Graves
15. To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf
16. An American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser
17. The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers
18. Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut
19. Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
20. Native Son by Richard Wright
21. Henderson the Rain King by Saul Bellow
22. Appointment in Samarra by John O'Hara
23. U.S.A.: The 42nd Parallel / 1919 / The Big Money by John Dos Passos
24. Winesburg, Ohio by Sherwood Anderson
25. A Passage to India by E. M. Forster
26. The Wings of the Dove by Henry James
27. The Ambassadors by Henry James
28. Tender Is the Night by F. Scott Fitzgerald
29. Studs Lonigan by James T. Farrell
30. The Good Soldier: A Tale of Passion by Ford Madox Ford
31. Animal Farm by George Orwell
32. The Golden Bowl by Henry James
33. Sister Carrie by Theodore Dreiser
34. A Handful of Dust by Evelyn Waugh
35. As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner
36. All the King's Men by Robert Penn Warren
37. The Bridge of San Luis Rey by Thornton Wilder
38. Howards End by E.M. Forster
39. Go Tell It on the Mountain by James Baldwin
40. The Heart of the Matter by Graham Greene
41. Lord of the Flies by William Golding
42. Deliverance by James Dickey
43. A Dance to the Music of Time (series) by Anthony Powell
44. Point Counter Point by Aldous Huxley
45. Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway
46. The Secret Agent: A Simple Tale by Joseph Conrad
47. Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard by Joseph Conrad
48. The Rainbow by D.H. Lawrence
49. Women in Love by D.H. Lawrence
50. Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller
51. The Naked and the Dead by Norman Mailer
52. Portnoy's Complaint by Philip Roth
53. Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov
54. Light in August by William Faulkner
55. On the Road by Jack Kerouac
56. The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett
57. Parade's End by Ford Madox Ford
58. The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton
59. Zuleika Dobson by Max Beerbohm
60. The Moviegoer by Walker Percy
61. Death Comes for the Archbishop by Willa Cather
62. From Here to Eternity by James Jones
63. The Wapshot Chronicle by John Cheever
64. The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger
65. A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess
66. Of Human Bondage by W. Somerset Maugham
67. Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
68. Main Street by Sinclair Lewis
69. The House of Mirth by Edith Wharton
70. Alexandria Quartet by Lawrence Durrell
71. High Wind in Jamaica by Richard Arthur Warren Hughes
72. A House for Mr. Biswas by V.S. Naipaul
73. The Day of the Locust by Nathanael West
74. A Farewell To Arms by Ernest Hemingway
75. Scoop by Evelyn Waugh
76. The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Spark
77. Finnegans Wake by James Joyce
78. Kim by Rudyard Kipling
79. A Room with a View by E.M. Forster
80. Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh
81. The Adventures of Augie March by Saul Bellow
82. Angle of Repose by Wallace Stegner
83. A Bend in the River by V.S. Naipaul
84. The Death of the Heart by Elizabeth Bowen
85. Lord Jim by Joseph Conrad
86. Ragtime by E.L. Doctorow
87. The Old Wives' Tale by Arnold Bennett
88. The Call Of The Wild by Jack London
89. Loving (A novel by Henry Green) by Henry Green
90. Midnight's Children by Salman Rushdie
91. Tobacco Road by Erskine Caldwell
92. Ironweed by William J. Kennedy
93. The Magus by John Fowles
94. Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys
95. Under the Net by Iris Murdoch
96. Sophie's Choice by William Styron
97. The Sheltering Sky by Paul Bowles
98. The Postman Always Rings Twice by James M. Cain
99. The Ginger Man by J.P. Donleavy
100. The Magnificent Ambersons by Booth Tarkington

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