One hundered greaterst books.... Sorry, that really should be One Hundred Greatest Books...

[rhythmaning]

There has been a meme about the hundred greatest books since 1923 as rated by Time magazine – I picked it up from munchkinstein.

Thing is, I have read nearly half of them – forty six; and if you count A Dance to the Music of Time as twelve (which you should, since it was published over thirty years in twelve different novels) – well, then I have read more than half of them.

From what I have seen (and I haven’t trawled desperately through LJ comparing scores like some nerdy bibliophile who has nothing better to do with his time), I have read more than most LJ users. This may be because I have had a bit longer to read them than the average user… frankie_ecap, the gauntlet is thrown down…

I don’t actually agree with all their choices – there are definitely excellent, essential books missing.

If you really want to see which ones I have read…


Animal Farm, George Orwell

Atonement, Ian McEwan

Beloved, Toni Morrison

The Big Sleep, Raymond Chandler

Brideshead Revisited, Evelyn Waugh

Catch-22, Joseph Heller

The Catcher in the Rye, J.D. Salinger

A Clockwork Orange, Anthony Burgess

The Corrections, Jonathan Franzen

The Crying of Lot 49, Thomas Pynchon

A Dance to the Music of Time, Anthony Powell
Dog Soldiers, Robert Stone

The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck

Gravity's Rainbow, Thomas Pynchon

A Handful of Dust, Evelyn Waugh

The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter, Carson McCullers

The Heart of the Matter, Graham Greene

Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison
Read the Original Review

The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe, C.S. Lewis

Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov

Lord of the Flies, William Golding

Lucky Jim, Kingsley Amis

Midnight's Children, Salman Rushdie

Money, Martin Amis

Mrs. Dalloway, Virginia Woolf

Naked Lunch, William Burroughs

1984, George Orwell

On the Road, Jack Kerouac

One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Ken Kesey

A Passage to India, E.M. Forster

Portnoy's Complaint, Philip Roth

Possession, A.S. Byatt

The Power and the Glory, Graham Greene

The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, Muriel Spark

Rabbit, Run, John Updike

Ragtime, E.L. Doctorow

Slaughterhouse-Five, Kurt Vonnegut

The Sportswriter, Richard Ford

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

To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee

To the Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf

Under the Net, Iris Murdoch

Under the Volcano, Malcolm Lowry

White Noise, Don DeLillo

White Teeth, Zadie Smith

Comments

[frankie-ecap.livejournal.com]

No, you win. I've only read 33, although I have read DMT (and loved it).

[rhythmaning.livejournal.com]

So is that 33 or 42?

[frankie-ecap.livejournal.com]

However, we might need to have a conversation about the spelling in your title.

[f4f3.livejournal.com]

I had a feeling you would say that...

[rhythmaning.livejournal.com]

What? Don't you know what greaterst means?

[f4f3.livejournal.com]

yes, I am a nerd. 53, and I'm delighted to see Watchmen, Snowcrash and Neuromancer in there, although there's far too much High Toned American Tosh.

I haven't read DTTMOT though.

[rhythmaning.livejournal.com]

Yo! We declare a winner.

I keep meaning to read Watchmen, but then I get snobbish about comics. Strange given that I lived for the weekly comic I was allowed as a child!

[f4f3.livejournal.com]

Comics and Science Fiction came into my life about the same time, and I still enjoy them both (although I don't read as much as I used to of either). I should post sometime about the influence Marvel Comics had on my ethical education back in the 70's (before they became respectable). Watchmen and Frank Miller's The Dark Knight had a lot to do with redefining comics, although my longest joy was Dave Sim's Cerebus, from about 1979 to 2005, 300 issues and it never bored me once.

[rparvaaz.livejournal.com]

Watchmen is excellent. Don't think of it as a novel - think of it as a graphic novel, and a really good one at that. :)

V for Vendetta is another great one.

Oh, hi there. :)

Dropped in for a visit as Frankie recommended you highly. :)