Time Magazine's Top 100 Novels

[Jyqm]

In English, that is. And since 1923:

http://www.time.com/time/2005/100boo...lete_list.html

Did I just complain in another thread that top 100 lists are woefully boring? I think I'll amend that to say that book lists are the exception. It usually takes so much longer for literature, as opposed to films or music or entertainers in general, to become remotely "canonized," that these kinds of book lists tend to remain interesting and different year after year. There's always bound to be a bunch of new titles you've never heard of. And on the flip side, of course, it's always fun to see which ones you've already read. I've got 13 under my belt, although there's a lot on there that I'd really love to read at some point:

Atonement, Ian McEwan
The Blind Assassin, Margaret Atwood
The Catcher in the Rye, J.D. Salinger
A Clockwork Orange, Anthony Burgess
The Corrections, Jonathan Franzen
The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck
Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov
Mrs. Dalloway, Virginia Woolf
Naked Lunch, William S. Burroughs
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Ken Kesey
A Passage to India, E.M. Forster
The Sun Also Rises, Ernest Hemingway
To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee

I've also read parts of Gravity's Rainbow and On the Road (and that aloud, with two friends, on a road trip across western America, because, well, there's no shame in being as cliche as possible).

All truly great books, though, I don't think I can argue with any of them being on there. Well, maybe Naked Lunch. Though I suppose it is very important historically.

Interestingly, only 6 of the books on my list (Grapes, Dalloway, Lunch, Cuckoo, Passage and Mockingbird) are books I read for the first time as part of a class in either high school or college.

I originally checked out the list to see if Ulysses was on there. But I suppose it's sort of de facto #1 since they chose to begin their list in 1923. Yes.