Wednesday, November 15, 2006

47

Yay! Alvina comes through with more book memes at Bloomabilities for this cold and cloudy November Thursday. Here's the first--adult books.

Instructions are: "In 2005, Time magazine picked the 100 best English-language novels (1923-present). Mark the selections you have read in bold. If you liked it, add a star (*) in front of the title, if you didn't, give it a minus (-). Then, put the total number of books you've read in the subject line. (I'm also adding a question mark (?) to indicate indifference or mixed feelings.)"

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

Some of my favorite writers are on this list. I think I've read everything Evelyn Waugh, Iris Murdoch, Martin Amis, Vladimir Nabokov, and Ian McEwan have written. For each (except, maybe, for McEwan), I would have chosen a different "Best Book."