{"id":741,"date":"2006-11-03T17:00:04","date_gmt":"2006-11-03T22:00:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=741"},"modified":"2006-11-04T05:59:08","modified_gmt":"2006-11-04T10:59:08","slug":"8-out-of-100","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=741","title":{"rendered":"8 out of 100"},"content":{"rendered":"

beckyzoole<\/a> has an interesting meme<\/a>:<\/p>\n

In 2005, Time magazine picked the 100 best English-language novels. 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 (-). [I’ve added, if you feel totally indifferent or just can’t remember, mark it with a question mark (?).] Then, put the total number of books you’ve read in the subject line.<\/em><\/p>\n

I’m using red \/ green<\/strong> to denote disliked \/ liked<\/strong> for read books, because it seems to scan a little easier:<\/p>\n


\nThe Adventures of Augie March – Saul Bellow
\nAll the King’s Men – Robert Penn Warren
\nAmerican Pastoral – Philip Roth
\nAn American Tragedy – Theodore Dreiser
\n–Animal Farm – George Orwell<\/font><\/strong>
\nAppointment in Samarra – John O’Hara
\nAre You There God? It’s Me, Margaret – Judy Blume
\nThe Assistant – Bernard Malamud
\nAt Swim-Two-Birds – Flann O’Brien
\nAtonement – Ian McEwan
\nBeloved – Toni Morrison
\nThe Berlin Stories – Christopher Isherwood
\nThe Big Sleep – Raymond Chandler
\nThe Blind Assassin – Margaret Atwood
\nBlood Meridian – Cormac McCarthy
\nBrideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh
\nThe Bridge of San Luis Rey – Thornton Wilder
\nCall It Sleep – Henry Roth
\n–Catch-22 – Joseph Heller<\/font><\/strong>
\n–The Catcher in the Rye – J.D. Salinger<\/font><\/strong>
\nA Clockwork Orange – Anthony Burgess
\nThe Confessions of Nat Turner – William Styron
\nThe Corrections – Jonathan Franzen
\nThe Crying of Lot 49 – Thomas Pynchon
\nA Dance to the Music of Time – Anthony Powell
\nThe Day of the Locust – Nathanael West
\nDeath Comes for the Archbishop – Willa Cather
\nA Death in the Family – James Agee
\nThe Death of the Heart – Elizabeth Bowen
\nDeliverance – James Dickey
\nDog Soldiers – Robert Stone
\nFalconer – John Cheever
\nThe French Lieutenant’s Woman – John Fowles
\nThe Golden Notebook – Doris Lessing
\nGo Tell it on the Mountain – James Baldwin
\nGone With the Wind – Margaret Mitchell
\nThe Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck
\nGravity’s Rainbow – Thomas Pynchon
\nThe Great Gatsby – F. Scott Fitzgerald
\nA Handful of Dust – Evelyn Waugh
\nThe Heart Is A Lonely Hunter – Carson McCullers
\nThe Heart of the Matter – Graham Greene
\nHerzog – Saul Bellow
\nHousekeeping – Marilynne Robinson
\nA House for Mr. Biswas – V.S. Naipaul
\nI, Claudius – Robert Graves
\nInfinite Jest – David Foster Wallace
\nInvisible Man – Ralph Ellison
\nLight in August – William Faulkner
\n+The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe – C.S. Lewis<\/font><\/strong>
\nLolita – Vladimir Nabokov
\n+Lord of the Flies – William Golding<\/font><\/strong>
\n+The Lord of the Rings – J.R.R. Tolkien<\/font><\/strong>
\nLoving – Henry Green
\nLucky Jim – Kingsley Amis
\nThe Man Who Loved Children – Christina Stead
\nMidnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie
\nMoney – Martin Amis
\nThe Moviegoer – Walker Percy
\nMrs. Dalloway – Virginia Woolf
\nNaked Lunch – William Burroughs
\nNative Son – Richard Wright
\n+Neuromancer – William Gibson<\/font><\/strong>
\nNever Let Me Go – Kazuo Ishiguro
\n1984 – George Orwell
\nOn the Road – Jack Kerouac
\nOne Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest – Ken Kesey
\nThe Painted Bird – Jerzy Kosinski
\nPale Fire – Vladimir Nabokov
\nA Passage to India – E.M. Forster
\nPlay It As It Lays – Joan Didion
\nPortnoy’s Complaint – Philip Roth
\nPossession – A.S. Byatt
\nThe Power and the Glory – Graham Greene
\nThe Prime of Miss Jean Brodie – Muriel Spark
\nRabbit, Run – John Updike
\nRagtime – E.L. Doctorow
\nThe Recognitions – William Gaddis
\nRed Harvest – Dashiell Hammett
\nRevolutionary Road – Richard Yates
\nThe Sheltering Sky – Paul Bowles
\nSlaughterhouse-Five – Kurt Vonnegut
\n+Snow Crash – Neal Stephenson<\/font><\/strong>
\nThe Sot-Weed Factor – John Barth
\nThe Sound and the Fury – William Faulkner
\nThe Sportswriter – Richard Ford
\nThe Spy Who Came in From the Cold – John le Carré
\nThe Sun Also Rises – Ernest Hemingway
\nTheir Eyes Were Watching God – Zora Neale Hurston
\nThings Fall Apart – Chinua Achebe
\nTo Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee
\nTo the Lighthouse – Virginia Woolf
\nTropic of Cancer – Henry Miller
\nUbik – Philip K. Dick
\nUnder the Net – Iris Murdoch
\nUnder the Volcano – Malcolm Lowry
\nWatchmen – Alan Moore & Dave Gibbons
\nWhite Noise – Don DeLillo
\nWhite Teeth – Zadie Smith
\nWide Sargasso Sea – Jean Rhys<\/p>\n

Yeah, only 8 books on the list. Sort of shabby. I certainly don’t read as much as some people I could mention<\/a>.<\/p>\n

I agree with beckyzoole that the list seems a bit odd. Not that I love Dickens, but I can’t believe he didn’t make the list. Her suggestion of The Caine Mutiny<\/em> would have been nice as well. The omission of Mark Twain is grotesque.<\/p>\n

I might toss a token technothriller on the list. I’m sure most “serious readers” look down on those books as the male equivalent of romance novels, but despite the derisive laughter it would earn me I’d still suggest Hunt for Red October<\/em>.<\/p>\n

I’d put Stevenson’s Cryptonomicon<\/em> in there long before Snow Crash<\/em>. Snow Crash was a fine book and it made him famous, but just about everything he’s written since then has been better.<\/p>\n

Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy<\/em> should be on there, without a doubt.<\/p>\n

Atlas Shrugged<\/em> would be another I would suggest for the list. I’ve never read it myself, and I hesitate to even mention it for fear of the flames it may incite, but the book has a wide reach and a lot of influence. People quote it and cite it often, which is more than I can say for about half of Time’s list. <\/p>\n

The facination with Catcher in the Rye<\/em> has always escaped me. It must have spoken to baby boomers in some way that I just miss. The book stikes me as incoherant, ugly, and pointless. Although, I can understand why it made the list. I just thought I’d get my digs in since I have the chance.<\/p>\n

Edit: The list is from 1923 to present<\/a>, which explains why Dickens and Twain didn’t make it. <\/p>\n

MORE LATER: Added – and + signs for Firefox users, because the Red \/ Green isn’t showing up in FF.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

beckyzoole has an interesting meme: In 2005, Time magazine picked the 100 best English-language novels. 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 (-). [I’ve added, if you feel totally indifferent or just can’t remember, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-741","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-nerd-culture"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/741","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=741"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/741\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=741"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=741"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=741"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}