Top 100 Novels to Read Before I Die
- compiled from Modern Library Board & Readers, NPR and Time Magazine’s Top 100 Novels
Light In August, William Faulkner
Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov
Lord of the Flies, William Golding
The Catcher in the Rye, J.D. Salinger
The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck
The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Moviegoer, Walker Percy
The Sun Also Rises, Ernest Hemingway
To The Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf
Catch-22, Joseph Heller
Deliverance, James Dickey
Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad
I, Claudius, Robert Graves
Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison
Midnight’s Children, Salman Rushdie
Of Human Bondage, W. Somerset Maugham
On the Road, Jack Kerouac
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Ken Kesey
Portnoy’s Complaint, Philip Roth
Slaughterhouse Five, Kurt Vonnegut
The Day of the Locust, Nathanael West
The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, Carson McCullers – September 11, 2010*
The Sheltering Sky, Paul Bowles
The Sound and The Fury, William Faulkner
To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee
Tropic of Cancer, Henry Miller
Under the Volcano, Malcolm Lowry
A Dance to the Music of Time, Anthony Powell
A Farewell to Arms, Ernest Hemingway
A Handful of Dust, Evelyn Waugh
A House for Mr. Biswas, V.S. Naipaul
American Pastoral, Philip Roth
An American Tragedy, Theodore Dreiser
Angle of Repose, Wallace Stegner
As I Lay Dying, William Faulkner
At-Swim-Two-Birds, Flann O’Brien
Atonement, Ian McEwan
Brave New World, Aldous Huxley
Death Comes for the Archbishop, Willa Cather
Go Tell it on the Mountain, James Baldwin
Gone with the Wind, Margaret Mitchell
Gravity’s Rainbow, Thomas Pynchon
Howard’s End, E.M. Forster
Ironweed, William Kennedy
Loving, Henry Green
Lucky Jim, Kingley Amis
My Antonia, Willa Cather
Naked Lunch, William Burroughs
Native Son, Richard Wright
Pale Fire, Vladimir Nabokov
Rabbit, Run, John Updike
Ragtime, E.L. Doctorow
Scoop, Evelyn Waugh
Sons and Lovers, D.H. Lawrence
Sophie’s Choice, William Styron
Tender is the Night, F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Adventures of Augie March, Saul Bellow
The Big Sleep, Raymond Chandler
The Bridge of San Luis Rey, Thornton Wilder
The Call of the Wild, Jack London
The Death of the Heart, Elizabeth Bowen
The French Lieutenant’s Woman, John Fowles – July 26, 2010*
The Ginger Man, J.P. Donleavy
The Good Soldier, Ford Maddox Ford
The Heart of the Matter, Graham Greene
The Lord of the Rings (3 parts), J.R.R. Tolkien – August 21, 2010*
The Magus, John Fowles
The Maltese Falcon, Dashiell Hammett
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, Muriel Spark
The Recognitions, William Gaddis
The Sportswriter, Richard Ford
The Spy Who Came in From the Cold, John le Carre
U.S.A. Trilogy, John Dos Passos
Ulysses, James Joyce
Under the Net, Iris Murdoch
Wide Sargasso Sea, Jean Rhys
Winesburg, Ohio, Sherwood Anderson
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Robert Pirsig
A Coffin for Dimitrios, Eric Ambler
A Room with a View, E.M. Forster
Breakfast of Champions, Kurt Vonnegut
City Boy, Herman Wouk
Dune, Frank Herbert
Fabulous Small Jews, Joseph Epstein
Finnegan’s Wake, James Joyce
Possession, A.S. Byatt
The Age of Innocence, Edith Wharton
The Bell Jar, Sylvia Plath
The Caine Mutiny, Herman Wouk
The English Patient, Michael Ondaatje
The Godfather, Mario Puzo
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams
The Jungle, Upton Sinclair
The Man Who Loved Children, Christina Stead
Satanic Verses, Salman Rushdie
A Prayer for Owen Meany, John Irving
Seize the Day, Saul Bellow
Something Wicked This Way Comes, Ray Bradbury
The Confessions of Nat Turner, William Styron
100. Killer Angels, Michael Shaara
*date novel finished