TIME Magazine Top Novels

Alternate title: My Long-Term Literary List (I would say to-do list, but I like the alliteration).

Sometimes I feel bad that I don't read as much as I used to when I was younger. Maybe I'll go to the library tomorrow and fix that, but to assuage my guilty conscience for now, here's TIME Magazine's list of the top 100 English Novels published after 1923. If I've read or heard of one of them, I'll talk about it.


The Adventures of Augie March (Saul Bellow, 1953)

All the King's Men (Robert Penn Warren, 1946): Read it in my AP Literature class in high school, didn't really enjoy it all that much. It might just be that it was political fiction, which isn't exactly my cup of tea, but there's also the very real possibility that I didn't like it simply because I had to read it for school.

American Pastoral (Philip Roth, 1997)

An American Tragedy (Theodore Dreiser, 1925)

Animal Farm (George Orwell, 1946): This one I also read for school, but I actually read it in middle school. In retrospect, that was a pretty deep book to throw at middle school kids; then again, when I went back and read it later, there were definitely some images and message that I completely missed the first time through.

Appointment in Samarra (John O'Hara, 1934)

Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret (Judy Blume, 1970)

The Assistant (Bernard Malamud, 1957)

At Swim-Two-Birds (Flann O'Brien, 1938)

Atonement (Ian McEwan, 2002): I've seen the movie, but haven't read the book. It was a fantastic movie, so hopefully I'll get around to reading the original at some point. The conclusion is positively gut-wrenching.

Beloved (Toni Morrison, 1987)

The Berlin Stories (Christopher Isherwood, 1946)

The Big Sleep (Raymond Chandler, 1939)

The Blind Assassin (Margaret Atwood, 2000)

Blood Meridian (Cormac McCarthy, 1986)

Brideshead Revisited (Evelyn Waugh, 1946): Again, seen the TV series but haven't read the book. This one would definitely be worth reading, because I'm a big fan of British comedy from this era (primarily Wodehouse).

The Bridge of San Luis Rey (Thornton Wilder, 1927):

Call It Sleep (Henry Roth, 1935)

Catch-22 (Joseph Heller, 1961): I've often heard this book recommended in the same breath as 1984, so I definitely plan on reading it at some point.

The Catcher in the Rye (J.D. Salinger, 1951): Surprisingly, given its reputation, I never read this one in school.

A Clockwork Orange (Anthony Burgess, 1963): I've seen the movie, but not read the book. That movie was.... distinctive. I did enjoy it, but it was pretty jarring at times. Apparently the ending of the book is actually significantly different from the movie, so that would be interesting to see.

The Confessions of Nat Turner (William Styron, 1967)

The Corrections (Jonathan Franzen, 2001)

The Crying of Lot 49 (Thomas Pynchon, 1966)

A Dance to the Music of Time (Anthony Powell, 1951)

The Day of the Locust (Nathanael West, 1939)

Death Comes for the Archbishop (Willa Cather, 1927)

A Death in the Family (James Agee, 1958)

The Death of the Heart (Elizabeth Bowen, 1958)

Deliverance (James Dickey, 1970)

Dog Soldiers (Robert Stone, 1974)

Falconer (John Cheever, 1977)

The French Lieutenant's Woman (John Fowles, 1969)

The Golden Notebook (Doris Lessing, 1962)

Go Tell it on the Mountain (James Baldwin, 1953)

Gone With the Wind (Margaret Mitchell, 1936): I feel bad saying this yet again, but I've seen the movie and not read the book. Frankly, although I know it's a classic and all, but it didn't really grab me, so I don't feel particularly motivated to make my way through the book either.

The Grapes of Wrath (John Steinbeck, 1939): Good riddance. I read this one for school and it bored me to tears.

Gravity's Rainbow (Thomas Pynchon, 1973)

The Great Gatsby (F. Scott Fitzgerald, 1925): A notch against the "school makes you dislike books" theory: I read this one in high school and it's by far one of my absolute favorite books. Fitzgerald's use of English is just plain wonderful to to read. In reference to America, he wrote

For a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder.

God! How can you not love that? I may disagree with him (space travel? The internet? The human brain? There's no shortage of things to wonder at) in theory, but the concept and the way he expresses it are absolutely beautiful.

A Handful of Dust (Evelyn Waugh, 1934)

The Heart is A Lonely Hunter (Carson McCullers, 1940)

The Heart of the Matter (Graham Greene, 1948)

Herzog (Saul Bellow, 1964)

Housekeeping (Marilynne Robinson, 1981)

A House for Mr. Biswas (V.S. Naipaul, 1962)

I, Claudius (Robert Graves, 1934)

Infinite Jest (David Foster Wallace, 1996)

Invisible Man (Ralph Ellison, 1952)

Light in August (William Faulkner, 1932)

The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe (C.S. Lewis, 1950): Yep. Not my favorite book in the series – I would give that to The Dawn Treader, by far – but still an excellent book. I suppose this one deserves its place in a best-of list by virtue of being the one that started that it all, the one that you have to read if you're going to read any of them.

Lolita (Vladimir Nabokov, 1955): Lolita is an incredible book, but I would have never made it through if I hadn't gotten the annotated edition. Nabokov's prose is less like language and more like a deliciously and formidably complex puzzle. The annotations explained all of his references to other literary works, species of butterflies, and other points within the text of Lolita itself.

Lord of the Flies (William Golding, 1955): Another book that I read in school and enjoyed. Being young enough to remember elementary school, I can tell you that Golding pretty much nailed it.

The Lord of the Rings (J.R.R. Tolkien, 1954): For once, I read the books before I saw the movies. Tolkien's prose certainly gets heavy at times; he has a tendency to spend whole pages talking about one elven building, or a song that the hobbits are singing, but his ability to create an immersive and complete fictional world is impressive. There's so much more to the LotR world than just the main books, and you only begin to realize the scope of his vision and the place that the novels occupy in his fictional history when you read something like The Silmarillion.

Loving (Henry Green, 1945)

Lucky Jim (Kingsley Amis, 1954): My dad gave me this book for this last summer's drum corps tour; unfortunately, one doesn't get much time to read on tour, and the book itself suffered from some of the rain over the summer. I think it's sitting in my room now, although I did enjoy what little I read.

The Man Who Loved Children (Christina Stead, 1940)

Midnight's Children (Salman Rushdie, 1981)

Money (Martin Amis, 1984)

The Moviegoer (Walker Percy, 1961)

Mrs. Dalloway (Virginia Woolf, 1925)

Naked Lunch (William Burroughs, 1959)

Native Son (Richard Wright, 1940)

Neuromancer (William Gibson, 1984): An absolutely fantastic book, a classic of the cyberpunk genre. I think what I found particularly striking about Neuromancer, besides the interesting plot and characters, was the sheer atmosphere that Gibson creates, with his fascinating descriptions and neologisms. It opens with this little gem of descriptive language:

The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.

Never Let Me Go (Kazuo Ishiguro, 2005)

1984 (George Orwell, 1948): Man, what a book. One of my favorite aspects of 1984 is that Orwell isn't afraid to carry his vision through all the way to the end of the book. I can't say much more without terribly spoiling it, but if you really want to look it up, the last line of the book should speak for itself.

On the Road (Jack Kerouac, 1957)

One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (Ken Kesey, 1962): I read this one for school, too, and I'm not sure how I feel about it. Parts of it I liked, and parts of it I found pretty boring. I think I need to reread it outside of the school context to get a better bead on it.

The Painted Bird (Jerzy Kosinski, 1965)

Pale Fire (Vladimir Nabokov, 1962): This one is actually sitting on my desk as I write this post. I've read part of the beginning, but never really gotten very far in it. The story isn't quite as gripping as Lolita, but hopefully I'll finish it at some point.

A Passage to India (E.M. Forster, 1924)

Play It As It Lays (Joan Didion, 1970)

Portnoy's Complaint (Philip Roth, 1969)

Possession (A.S. Byatt, 1990)

The Power and the Glory (Graham Greene, 1939)

The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (Muriel Spark, 1961)

Rabbit, Run (John Updike, 1960)

Ragtime (E.L. Doctorow, 1975)

The Recognitions (William Gaddis, 1955)

Red Harvest (Dashiell Hammett, 1929)

Revolutionary Road (Richard Yates, 1961)

The Sheltering Sky (Paul Bowles, 1949): I don't know anything about this book, but I know that King Crimson, one of my favorite bands, named a pretty good song after it, so there must be something good to it!

Slaughterhouse Five (Kurt Vonnegut, 1969):

Snow Crash (Neal Stephenson, 1992): I haven't read this one, but I did read Cryptonomion, another one of Stephenson's novels. Cryptonomicon looks less like a book and more like an encyclopedia, and it took a number of tries for me to actually get all the way through, but it was quite worth it.

The Sot-Weed Factor (John Barth, 1960)

The Sound and the Fury (William Faulkner, 1929)

The Sportswriter (Richard Ford, 1986)

The Spy Who Came in From the Cold (John le Carre, 1964)

The Sun Also Rises (Ernest Hemingway, 1926)

Their Eyes Were Watching God (Zora Neale Hurston, 1937)

Things Fall Apart (Chinua Achebe, 1959)

To Kill a Mockingbird (Harper Lee, 1960): Not only have I read this one, but I acted in a production of it in middle school! I haven't read it in years though, so I bet I'd get a lot more out of it if I went back and reread it.

To the Lighthouse (Virginia Woolf, 1927)

Tropic of Cancer (Henry Miller, 1934)

Ubik (Philip K. Dick, 1969)

Under the Net (Iris Murdoch, 1954)

Under the Volcano (Malcolm Lowry, 1947)

Watchmen (Alan Moore & Dave Gibbons, 1986): Huge props to TIME for including this on their list! Watchmen is a graphic novel (don't call it a comic book!), a medium that's still struggling to find acceptance as a legitimate medium. Let me tell you, Watchmen sure deserves it. There's easily enough depth to it to fill a legitimate novel, and the wonderful art just adds another dimension to it. It seems at the beginning like just another superhero story, but it's really more of a deconstruction of the whole genre.

Unfortunately, I don't feel like the movie was a very good adaptation of it, specifically because it was such a literal adaptation! What works well on the comics page doesn't always work well on the silver screen. It wasn't bad per se, but I would direct aspiring fans to the graphic novel first.

White Noise (Don DeLillo, 1985)

White Teeth (Zadie Smith, 2000)

Wide Sargasso Sea (Jean Rhys, 1966)





What I found most interesting going through this list wasn't so much the books that I hadn't read, but the books that I hadn't heard of at all! A huge portion of the list was books whose titles rang zero bells in my head, which I found kind of surprising. A few books whose omission I found surprising:

• Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone: I know it's just Harry Potter and all, but it still takes a lot of work and skill to make a story and characters so wonderfully engaging; not only that, but I think the fact that Harry Potter appeals to people of all ages is hugely impressive. I think these lists sometimes get biased towards "big" works of "serious" literature and neglect books that may be less "intellectual" but are nonetheless works of immense skill. On that note....

• Anything P.G. Wodehouse: This is a criminal omission. P.G. Wodehouse is an absolute master of the humor of the English language, and of how to concoct and resolve incredibly complex situations in a hilarious way. Yes, yes, Brideshead Revisited was on there, and that's in a similar category, but I can't believe that none of the Jeeves and Wooster stories made it on here.

• Dune: Scifi, much like graphic novels, is a medium that often struggles to get serious acceptance. So, while it's great that Neuromancer was on here, I still think that scifi books were sorely underrepresented, and Dune would be a great addition. Much like Lord of the Rings, Dune is a book that creates a lush, fictional world of unbelievable complexity. There are no nice glossaries or explanations, because that would make the universe of Paul Atreides, the Fremen, and the Bene Gesserit less real than ours. Rather, Herbert throws you into it right at the beginning, with references to all sorts of obscure things that you won't understand until hundreds of pages later, if you even understand them at all. After all, that's how a real world would work. It gives the book a little bit of a learning curve, but once you get into it, it's incredibly engrossing. Dune also touches on complex issues of politics, environmentalism, and religion, all woven together in ways that make it so much more than just some fluffy space action book. Herbert wrote a number of sequels to Dune, each one further expanding the universe, but the original is the one that stands best as a self-contained novel, and the one that started it all.

There are some other books that I really enjoyed that weren't in this list (Ender's Game, the His Dark Materials trilogy) that I might argue for later, but it's getting late here.