The Beginning

Here’s the deal: I’m going to read all 100 of Time Magazine’s Top 100 novels since 1923. (Why 1923? That’s the year Time Magazine was first published.) Join me if you would like. Come back every now and then and see which novel I’m reading and what I thought of it. Or don’t. You won’t hurt my feelings.

This crazy idea started when I was researching some good fiction books for a late summer trip to the beach. As a former English major, I’m quite fond of a good book.

But since graduating years ago, I’ve strayed away from the classics—really, almost all fiction—while spending my time reading about golf, running, cooking, you name it. Those are all well and good subjects—I love ‘em—but I need a little fiction in my life. Who doesn’t?

While browsing online, I stumbled across Time Magazine’s list of the Top 100 novels. As I scanned the list, I realized I had read very few, only 12 of the 100. All of which I read during college or shortly thereafter. That was a sad discovery for an English major who is supposed to be in the know when it comes to great books.

That list sparked a little burst of creativity in my head—why not read through the entire list? I love to read, and I love a good challenge.

So that’s what I am going to do here. That’s what this blog is about. I don’t have a time table. I’m not out to read 100 novels in two years or something ridiculous like that.

While I considered that briefly, I decided placing a time limit on myself would probably take the fun out of the process, making me speed read through books in order to meet the time goal, instead of sitting back and enjoying them.

Time had a couple of rules in choosing the list. Basically, the books had to be English-speaking novels published since 1923—the year Time first hit the shelves.

Sadly, this means Ulysses (1922) didn’t make the cut, although many people consider it be the greatest novel of all time. That’s why I’ve added one extra book–Ulysses– to the list. I actually read Ulysses in a James Joyce class in college, but I hope to understand it a little more this time around. To find out more about Time’s selection process, click here.

If all goes well, I should be publishing a review, a commentary, a hopefully-inspirational thought—to be honest, I don’t know what it will be, but I promise it will be about the book—a couple of times per month. But since all of the books are varying lengths, who knows how long it might take?

The entire list is below. In my next post, I’ll dig a little deeper into the list and try and figure out what I’ve got before me. Maybe analyze it a little bit. The only thing I can say is that my first read will be J.D. Salingers’ The Catcher in the Rye .

Wish me luck.

• The Adventures of Augie March (1953) by Saul Bellow
• All the King’s Men (1946) by Robert Penn Warren
• American Pastoral (1997) by Philip Roth
• An American Tragedy (1925) by Theodore Dreiser
• Animal Farm (1946) by George Orwell
• Appointment in Samarra (1934) by John O’Hara
• Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret (1970) by Judy Blume
• The Assistant (1957) by Bernard Malamud
• At Swim-Two-Birds (1938) Flann O’ Brien
• Atonement (2002) by Ian McEwan
• Beloved (1987) by Toni Morrison
• The Berlin Stories (1946) by Christopher Isherwood
• The Big Sleep (1939) by Raymond Chandler
• The Blind Assassin (2000) by Margaret Atwood
• Blood Meridian (1986) by Cormac McCarthy
• Brideshead Revisited (1946) by Evelyn Waugh
• The Bridge of San Luis Rey (1927) by Thornton Wilder
• Call it Sleep (1935) by Henry Roth
• Catch 22 (1961) by Joseph Heller
• The Catcher in the Rye (1951) by J.D. Salinger
• A Clockwork Orange (1963) by Anthony Burgess
• The Confessions of Nat Turner (1967) by William Styron
• The Corrections (2001) by Jonathan Franzen
• The Crying of Lot 49 (1966) by Thomas Pynchon
• A Dance to the Music of Time (1951) by Anthony Powell
• The Day of the Locust (1939) by Nathanael West
• Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927) by Willa Cather
• A Death in the Family (1958) by James Agee
• The Death of the Heart (1958) by Elizabeth Bowen
• Deliverance (1970) by James Dickey
• Dog Soldiers (1974) by Robert Stone
• Falconer (1977) by John Cheever
• The French Lieutenant’s (1969) by John Fowles
• The Golden Notebook (1962) by Doris Lessing
• Go Tell it on the Mountain (1953) by James Baldwin
• Gone With The Wind (1936) by Margaret Mitchell
• The Grapes of Wrath (1939) by John Steinbeck
• Gravity’s Rainbow (1973) by Thomas Pynchon
• The Great Gatsby (1925) by F. Scott Fitzgerald
• A Handful of Dust (1935) by Evelyn Waugh
• The Heart is a Lonely Hunter (1940) by Carson McCullers
• The Heart of the Matter (1948) by Graham Greene
• Herzog (1964) by Saul Bellow
• Housekeeping (1981) by Marilynne Robinson
• A House for Mr. Biswas (1962) by V.S. Naipaul
• I, Claudius (1934) by Robert Graves
• Infinite Jest (1996) by David Foster Wallace
• Invisible Man (1952) by Ralph Ellison
• Light in August (1932) by William Faulkner
• The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe (1950) by C.S. Lewis
• Lolita (1955) by Vladimir Nabokov
• Lord of the Flies (1955) by William Golding
• The Lord of the Rings (1954) by J.R.R. Tolkien
• Loving (1945) by Henry Green
• Lucky Jim (1954) by Kingsley Amis
• The Man Who Loved Children (1940) by Christina Stead
• Midnight’s Children (1981) by Salman Rushdie
• Money (1984) by Martin Amis
• The Moviegoer (1964) by Walker Percy
• Mrs. Dalloway (1925) by Virginia Woolf
• Naked Lunch (1959) by William Burroughs
• Native Son (1940) by Richard Wright
• Neuromancer (1984) by William Gibson
• Never Let Me Go (2005) by Kazuo Ishiguro
• 1984 (1948) by George Orwell
• On the Road (1957) by Jack Kerouac
• One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest (1962) by Ken Kesey
• The Painted Bird (1965) by Jerzy Kosinski
• Pale Fire (1962) by Vladimir Nabokov
• A Passage to India (1924) by E.M. Forster
• Play It As It Lays (1970) by Joan Didion
• Portnoy’s Complaint (1969) by Philip Roth
• Possession (1990) by A.S. Byatt
• The Power and the Glory (1939) by Graham Greene
• The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1961) by Muriel Spark
• Rabbit, Run (1960) by John Updike
• Ragtime (1975) E.L. Doctorow
• The Recognitions (1955) by William Gaddis
• Red Harvest (1929) by Dashiell Hammett
• Revolutionary Road (1961) by Richard Yates
• The Sheltering Sky (1949) by Paul Bowles
• Slaughterhouse Five (1969) by Kurt Vonnegut
• Snow Crash (1992) by Neal Stephenson
• The Sot-Weed Factor (1960) by John Barth
• The Sound and the Fury (1929) by William Faulkner
• The Sportswriter (1986) by Richard Ford
• The Spy Who Came In From The Cold (1964) by John Le Carre
• The Sun Also Rises (1926) by Ernest Hemingway
• Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937) by Zora Neale Hurston
• Things Fall Apart (1959) by Chinua Achebe
• To Kill A Mockingbird (1960) by Harper Lee
• To The Lighthouse (1927) by Virginia Woolf
• Tropic of Cancer (1934) by Henry Miller
• Ubik (1969) by Philip K. Dick
• Under the Net (1954) by Iris Murdoch
• Under the Volcano (1947) by Malcom Lowry
• Watchmen (1986) by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons
• White Noise (1985) by Don DeLillo
• White Teeth (2000) by Zadie Smith
• Wide Sargasso Sea (1966) Jean Rhys