Time Top 100 Novels

In 2005, Time Magazine published a list of 100 Top Novels published since 1923, the year Time Magazine began. Richard Lacayo and Lev Grossman were responsible for undertaking such a huge list, each having to read (or in some cases read a second time) well over 100 novels to nominate for the list. After each of their list of nominations were created, 80 novels appeared on both lists. The remainder of the list was divided between the two men, who each chose their own novels to include on their list.

Jody, a former student teacher in my school, created a book club, whose goal is to read the entire list (or at least the first 50 books on the list). I thought this was a fantastic idea, because who doesn't want to at least familiarize themselves with "classic literature." As soon as I found out about the book club, I told them that I was game. I'm not sure how long this will take, but I am determined to read the entire list (and provide commentary on my personal opinion of each book). 

The List (in alphabetical order)

1. The Adventures of Augie March by Saul Bellow
2. All the King's Men by Robert Penn Warren
3. American Pastoral by Phillip Roth
4. An American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser
5. Animal Farm by George Orwell
6. Appointment in Samarra by John O'Hara
7. Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret by Judy Blume
8. The Assistant by Bernard Malamud
9. At Swim-Two Birds by Flann O'Brien
10. Atonement by Ian McEwan
11. Beloved by Toni Morrison
12. The Berlin Stories by Christophere Isherwood
13. The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler
14. The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood
15. Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy
16. Bridsehead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh
17. The Bride of San Luis Rey by Thorton Wilder
18. Call It Sleep by Henry Roth
19. Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
20. The Catcher in the Rye by JD Sallinger
21. A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess
22. The Confessions of Nat Turner by William Styron
23. The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen
24. The Crying Lot of 49 by Thomas Pynchon
25. A Dance to the Music of Time by Anthony Powell
26. The Day of the Locust by Nathanael West
27. Death Comes for the Archbishop by Willia Cather
28. A Death in the Family by James Agee
29. The Death of the Heart by Elizabeth Bowen
30. Deliverance by James Dickey
31. Dog Soldiers by Robert Stone
32. Falconer by John Cheever
33. The French Lieutenant's Woman by John Fowles
34. The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing
35. Go Tell it on the Mountain by James Baldwin
36. Gone With the Wind by Margaret Mitchell
37. The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
38. Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon
39. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
40. A Handful of Dust by Evelyn Waugh
41. The Heart is A Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers
42. The Heart of the Matter by Graham Greene
43. Herzog by Saul Bellow
44. Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson
45. A House for Mr. Biswas by V.S. Naipaul
46. I, Claudius by Robert Graves
47. Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace
48. Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
49. Light in August by William Faulkner
50. The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe by CS Lewis
51. Lolita by Vladimer Nabokov
52. Lord of the Flies by William Golding
53. The Lord of the Rings by JRR Tolkien
54. Loving by Henry Green
55. Lucky Jim by Kingsley Amis
56. The Man Who Loved Children by Christina Stead
57. Midnight's Children by Salman Rushdie
58. Money by Martin Amis
59. The Moviegoer by Walker Percy
60. Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf
61. Naked Lunch by William Burroghs
62. Native Son by Richard Wright
63. Neuromancer by William Gibson
64. Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro
65. 1984 by George Orwell
66. On the Road by Jack Kerouac
67. One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest by Ken Kesey
68. The Painted Bird by Jerzy Kosinski
69. Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov
70. A Passage to India by E.M. Forster
71. Play It As It Lays by Joan Didion
72. Portnoy's Complaint by Phillip roth
73. Possession by AS Byatt
74. The Power and the Glory by Graham Greene
75. The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Spark
76. Rabbit, Run by John Updike
77. Ragtime by EL Doctorow
78. The Recognitions by William Gaddis
79. Red Harvest by Dashiell Hammett
80. Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates
81. The Sheltering Sky by Paul Bowles
82. Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut
83. Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson
84. The Sot-Weed Factor by John Barth
85. The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner
86. The Sportswriter by Richard Ford
87. The Spy Who Came in From the Cold by John le Carre
88. The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway
89. Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston
90. Things Fall Apart by Chinua Archebe
91. To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
92. To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf
93. Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller
94. Ubik by Phillip K. Dick
95. Under the Net by Iris Murdoch
96. Under the Volcano by Malcolm Lowry
97. Watchmen by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons
98. White Noise by Don DeLilo
99. White Teeth by Zadie Smith
100. Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys