Berman, Chudzie, Sharpie, and myself were ready to throw in the towel after encountering the first book on the list, The Adventures of Augie March by Saul Bellow. Berman and I were more determined than ever to continue our adventure of reading a list of classic literature. At the end of last week, Berman and I had homework: to find a different list of the top 100 novels.
Over the weekend, I found three lists published by the Modern Library, The Top 100 Novels, The Reader's List of the Top 100 Novels, and Radcliffe's Rival 100 Best Novels List. After analyzing these three lists, and comparing them with the Time Magazine list, I found 28 books that appeared on each list:
- 1984 by George Orwell
- All the King's Men by Robert Penn Warren
- An American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser
- Animal Farm by George Orwell
- Beloved by Toni Morrison
- Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy
- Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh
- Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
- Catcher in the Rye by JD Sallinger
- Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess
- Death Comes for the Archbishop by Willia Cather
- Deliverance by James Dickey
- The French Lieutenant's Woman by John Fowles
- Go Tell it on the Mountain by James Baldwin
- Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
- Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
- I, Claudius by Robert Graves
- Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
- Lolita by Vladimer Nabokov
- Lord of the Flies by William Golding
- Lord of the Rings by JRR Tolkien
- Native Son by Richard Wright
- Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut
- The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway
- Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neal Hurston
- To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
- To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf
- Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller
Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon, Ulysses by James Joyce, Brave New World by Aldous Huxley, Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest by Ken Kesey, Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie, and War of the World by HG Wells all appeared on each of the Modern Library's lists so we added those seven books to the list. Berman also worked hard, finding a list published by The Telegraph (a British newspaper), and added Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Frankenstein by Mary Shelley, Tess of the D'Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy, Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte, Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austin, and Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf.
During our weekly ladies lunch this week, the four of us got together and finalized the list. Chudzie and Sharpe each added several books to the list. In addition to the recommended books from the five lists, we also each imputed our own recommendations. For example, we removed To Kill a Mockingbird, since it has become a required reading book in our school and most of us have read the book way too many times. We also removed The Lord of the Rings and replaced it with The Hobbit.
After everything was said and done, we had a list of 69 novels that ranged from classic literature such as Ulysses to mashup literature such as Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Killer and Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. I plan to post the entire list on a separate page an will continue to update the progress of our book list periodically.
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