Bookplanet: Time Magazine's 100 best English novels since 1923; and two other essential lists

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

IT'S INTERESTING that the canon seems pretty settled, even though this list has a few pop moments along with literary monumentality: Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret by Judy Blume; Ubik by Philip K. Dick; the graphic novel Watchmen by Alan Moore & Dave Gibbons (voted #1 readers favorite); The Sportswriter by Richard Ford; Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson; Possession by A.S. Byatt; Play it as it Lays by Joan Didion; Neuromancer by William Gibson; Money by Martin Amis; The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe by C.S. Lewis; and Gone With the Wind by Margaret Mitchell. It also has some very current books: The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen, Atonement by Ian McEwan, Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace, Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro, White Teeth by Zadie Smith. I was happy to see John Le Carre there with The Spy who Came in from the Cold. This book, a popular spy novel, blew my mind when I read it -- so sour, bitter and tragic.

The Time list was chosen by two guys. They first picked their own top 100 lists, and found that more than 80 of them overlapped. Here one of them writes about:

How We Picked the List -- by Richard Lacayo

Welcome to the massive, anguished, exalted undertaking that is the ALL TIME 100 books list. The parameters: English language novels published anywhere in the world since 1923, the year that TIME Magazine began, which, before you ask, means that Ulysses (1922) doesn't make the cut. In May, Time.com posted a similar list, of 100 movies picked by our film critics, Richard Corliss and Richard Schickel. This one is chosen by me, Richard Lacayo, and my colleague Lev Grossman, whom we sometimes cite as proof that you don't need to be named Richard to be hired as a critic at TIME, though apparently it helps. Just ask our theater critic, Richard Zoglin.

For the books project, Grossman and I each began by drawing up inventories of our nominees. Once we traded notes, it turned out that more than 80 of our separately chosen titles matched. (Even some of the less well-known ones, like At-Swim Two Birds.) We decided then that we would more or less divide the remaining slots between us. That would allow each of us to include books that the other might not have chosen. Or might not even have read. (Ubik? What's an Ubik?) And that would extend the list into places where mere agreement wouldn't take it.

Even so, there are many titles we couldn't fit here that we're still anguishing over. Djuna Barnes' Nightwood dropped in and out. Aldous Huxley's Point Counter Point hovered for a while at the edges. There were writers we had to admit we love more for their short stories than their novels—Donald Barthelme, Annie Proulx, Flannery O'Connor, Eudora Welty. We could agree that some of Gore Vidal's novels are an essential pleasure, but it's his non-fiction that's essential period. Then there was the intellectual massif of Norman Mailer, indisputably one of the great writers of our time, but his supreme achievements are his headlong reconfigurations of the whole idea of non-fiction, books like Armies of the Night and The Executioner's Song. Dawn Powell, Mordechai Richler, Thomas Wolfe, Peter Carey, J.F. Powers, Mary McCarthy, Edmund White, Larry McMurtry, Katherine Ann Porter, Amy Tan, John Dos Passos, Oscar Hijuelos—we looked over our bookcases and many more than 100 names laid down a claim. This means you, Stephen King.

This project, which got underway in January, was not just a reading effort. It was a re-reading effort. It meant revisiting a lot of novels both of us had not looked into for some time. A few titles that seemed indispensable some years ago turned out on a second tasting to be, well, dispensable. More common was the experience I had with Saul Bellow's Herzog, about a man coming to terms with the disappointments of midlife by directing his questions everywhere. It was one of the first adult novels I attempted in late adolescence. It left its treadmarks on me even then, but this time his experienced heart spoke to me differently.

There were also first time discoveries. Having heard for years that Richard Yates' Revolutionary Road was one of the great but underappreciated American novels, I searched it out. I have spent the months since then pressing it into the hands of anybody who will take it, including yours. Their Eyes Were Watching God, Zora Neale Hurston's great story of a black woman surviving whatever God and man throws at her, was not part of the required reading list when I was in school. It is now part of my personal canon. Henry Green? Hadn't read Henry Green. Finally read Loving. Loved it.

Lists like this one have two purposes. One is to instruct. The other of course is to enrage. We're bracing ourselves for the e-mails that start out: "You moron! You pathetic bourgeoise insect! How could you have left off...(insert title here)." We say Mrs. Dalloway. You say Mrs. Bridge. We say Naked Lunch. You say Breakfast at Tiffanys. Let's call the whole thing off? Just the opposite—bring it on. Sometimes judgment is best formed under fire. But please, no e-mails about Ulysses. Rules are rules.

2. There's an overlap here too, with this next list, the top 100 English-language 20th century novels from the editorial board of the Modern Library, a division of Random House, chosen by Gore Vidal, A.S. Byatt, etc. and ranked. I've asterisked the overlaps, which total 40 (remember, the other list leaves out books before 1923):

1. Ulysses by James Joyce
2. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald*
3. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce
4. Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov*
5. Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
6. The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner*
7. Catch-22 by Joseph Heller*
8. Darkness at Noon by Arthur Koestler
9. Sons and Lovers by D.H. Lawrence
10. The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck*
11. Under the Volcano by Malcolm Lowry*
12. The Way of All Flesh by Samuel Butler
13. 1984 by George Orwell*
14. I, Claudius by Robert Graves*
15. To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf*
16. An American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser*
17. The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers*
18. Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut*
19. Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison*
20. Native Son by Richard Wright*
21. Henderson the Rain King by Saul Bellow
22. Appointment in Samarra by John O’Hara*
23. U.S.A. (trilogy), John Dos Passos
24. Winesburg, Ohio by Sherwood Anderson
25. A Passage to India by E.M. Forster*
26. The Wings of the Dove by Henry James
27. The Ambassadors by Henry James
28. Tender Is the Night by F. Scott Fitzgerald
29. The Studs Lonigan Trilogy by James T. Farrell
30. The Good Soldier by Ford Maddox Ford
31. Animal Farm by George Orwell*
32. The Golden Bowl by Henry James
33. Sister Carrie by Theodore Dreiser
34. A Handful of Dust by Evelyn Waugh*
35. As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner
36. All the King’s Men by Robert Penn Warren*
37. The Bridge of San Luis Rey by Thornton Wilder*
38. Howards End by E.M. Forster
39. Go Tell It on the Mountain by James Baldwin*
40. The Heart of the Matter by Graham Greene*
41. Lord of the Flies by William Golding*
42. Deliverance by James Dickey*
43. A Dance to the Music of Time (series), Anthony Powell*
44. Point Counter Point by Aldous Huxley
45. The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway*
46. The Secret Agent by Joseph Conrad
47. Nostromo by Joseph Conrad
48. The Rainbow by D.H. Lawrence
49. Women in Love by D.H. Lawrence
50. Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller*
51. The Naked and the Dead by Norman Mailer
52. Portnoy’s Complaint by Philip Roth*
53. Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov*
54. Light in August by William Faulkner*
55. On the Road by Jack Kerouac*
56. The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett
57. Parade’s End by Ford Maddox Ford
58. The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton
59. Zuleika Dobson by Max Beerbohm
60. The Moviegoer by Walker Percy*
61. Death Comes for the Archbishop by Willa Cather*
62. From Here to Eternity by James Jones
63. The Wapshot Chronicles by John Cheever
64. The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger*
65. A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess*
66. Of Human Bondage by W. Somerset Maugham
67. Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
68. Main Street by Sinclair Lewis
69. The House of Mirth by Edith Wharton
70. The Alexandria Quartet by Lawrence Durrell
71. A High Wind in Jamaica, Richard Hughes
72. A House for Mr. Biswas by V.S. Naipaul*
73. The Day of the Locust by Nathanael West*
74. A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway
75. Scoop by Evelyn Waugh
76. The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Spark*
77. Finnegans Wake by James Joyce
78. Kim by Rudyard Kipling
79. A Room With a View by E.M. Forster
80. Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh*
81. The Adventures of Augie March by Saul Bellow*
82. Angle of Repose by Wallace Stegner
83. A Bend in the River by V.S. Naipaul
84. The Death of the Heart by Elizabeth Bowen*
85. Lord Jim by Joseph Conrad
86. Ragtime by E.L. Doctorow*
87. The Old Wives’ Tale by Arnold Bennett
88. The Call of the Wild by Jack London
89. Loving by Henry Green*
90. Midnight's Children by Salman Rushdie*
91. Tobacco Road by Erskine Caldwell
92. Ironweed by William Kennedy
93. The Magus by John Fowles
94. Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys*
95. Under the Net by Iris Murdoch*
96. Sophie's Choice by William Styron
97. The Sheltering Sky by Paul Bowles*
98. The Postman Always Rings Twice by James M. Cain
99. The Ginger Man by J.P. Donleavy
100. The Magnificent Ambersons by Booth Tarkington

3. HERE'S THE BEST LIST EVER. The Norwegian Book Clubs 100 best works of fiction ever, alphabetically by author, as determined by 100 noted writers from 54 countries (they named Don Quixote the top book in history):

Chinua Achebe Things Fall Apart
Hans Christian Andersen Fairy Tales and Stories
Jane Austen Pride and Prejudice
Honore de Balzac Old Goriot
Samuel Beckett Trilogy: Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable
Giovanni Boccaccio Decameron
Jorge Luis Borges Collected Fictions
Emily Bronte Wuthering Heights
Albert Camus The Stranger
Paul Celan Poems
Louis-Ferdinand Celine Journey to the End of the Night
Miguel de Cervantes Don Quixote
Geoffrey Chaucer Canterbury Tales
Joseph Conrad Nostromo
Dante Alighieri The Divine Comedy
Charles Dickens Great Expectations
Denis Diderot Jacques the Fatalist and His Master
Alfred Doblin Berlin Alexanderplatz
Fyodor Dostoyevsky Crime and Punishment; The Idiot; The Possessed; The Brothers Karamazov
George Eliot Middlemarch
Ralph Ellison Invisible Man
Euripides Medea
William Faulkner Absalom, Absalom; The Sound and the Fury
Gustave Flaubert Madame Bovary; A Sentimental Education
Federico Garcia Lorca Gypsy Ballads
Gabriel Garcia Marquez One Hundred Years of Solitude; Love in the Time of Cholera
Anon The Epic of Gilgamesh
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Faust
Nikolai Gogol Dead Souls
Günter Grass The Tin Drum
Joao Guimaraes Rosa The Devil to Pay in the Backlands
Knut Hamsun Hunger
Ernest Hemingway The Old Man and the Sea
Homer The Iliad; The Odyssey
Henrik Ibsen A Doll's House
Anon The Book of Job
James Joyce Ulysses
Franz Kafka The Complete Stories; The Trial; The Castle
Kalidasa The Recognition of Sakuntala
Yasunari Kawabata The Sound of the Mountain
Nikos Kazantzakis Zorba the Greek
DH Lawrence Sons and Lovers
Halldor K Laxness Independent People
Giacomo Leopardi Complete Poems
Doris Lessing The Golden Notebook
Astrid Lindgren Pippi Longstocking
Lu Xun Diary of a Madman and Other Stories
Anon Mahabharata
Naguib Mahfouz Children of Gebelawi
Thomas Mann Buddenbrooks; The Magic Mountain
Herman Melville Moby Dick
Michel de Montaigne Essays
Elsa Morante History
Toni Morrison Beloved
Murasaki Shikibu The Tale of Genji
Robert Musil The Man Without Qualities
Vladimir Nabokov Lolita; Njal's Saga
George Orwell 1984
Ovid Metamorphoses
Fernando Pessoa The Book of Disquiet
Edgar Allan Poe The Complete Tales
Marcel Proust Remembrance of Things Past
Francois Rabelais Gargantua and Pantagruel
Juan Rulfo Pedro Paramo
Jalalu'l-Din Rumi The Mathnawi
Salman Rushdie Midnight's Children
Sheikh Saadi of Shiraz The Bostan of Saadi (The Orchard)
Tayeb Salih A Season of Migration to the North
Jose Saramago Blindness
William Shakespeare Hamlet; King Lear; Othello
Sophocles Oedipus the King
Stendhal The Red and the Black
Laurence Sterne The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy
Italo Svevo Confessions of Zeno
Jonathan Swift Gulliver's Travels
Leo Tolstoy War and Peace; Anna Karenina; The Death of Ivan Ilyich and Other Stories
Anton Chekhov Selected Stories
Thousand and One Nights
Mark Twain The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Valmiki Ramayana
Virgil The Aeneid
Walt Whitman Leaves of Grass
Virginia Woolf Mrs Dalloway; To the Lighthouse
Marguerite Yourcenar Memoirs of Hadrian