[AT] All-TIME 100 Novels

All-TIME 100 Novels [AT]

Published in 2005

A very popular best novels list, though eccentric. It limits itself to 100 English language novels written since TIME began publishing in 1923, with a preference for works that received contemporary reviews from TIME. Despite these hangups, it is surprisingly refreshing. Sci-fi and children’s lit, post-modern pioneers, even a graphic novel. There’s still plenty of yawn-inducing entries. (It’s in alphabetical order and my money’s on G being the most predictable six entries you’re going to find in a row.) There are a few clunkers (Richard Ford’s Sportswriter is the inferior of an overrated pair of shoegazing blubber books, and I don’t get the rage over Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping. For me it was a snore.) But a reader trapped on a desert island with these hundred books could do a lot worse. They are punchy, thoughtful and daring books without straying into excesses you’ll see in Larry McCaffery’s [LM] selections.

Click here to see the full TIME list.  Also listed below. Items marked in RED appear on the Master List.

A – B

• The Adventures of Augie March
• All the King’s Men
• American Pastoral
• An American Tragedy
• Animal Farm
• Appointment in Samarra
• Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret
• The Assistant
• At Swim-Two-Birds
• Atonement
• Beloved
• The Berlin Stories
• The Big Sleep
• The Blind Assassin
• Blood Meridian
• Brideshead Revisited
• The Bridge of San Luis Rey

C – D

• Call It Sleep
• Catch-22
• The Catcher in the Rye
• A Clockwork Orange
• The Confessions of Nat Turner
• The Corrections
• The Crying of Lot 49
• A Dance to the Music of Time
• The Day of the Locust
• Death Comes for the Archbishop
• A Death in the Family
• The Death of the Heart
• Deliverance
• Dog Soldiers

F – G

• Falconer
• The French Lieutenant’s Woman
• The Golden Notebook
• Go Tell it on the Mountain
• Gone With the Wind
• The Grapes of Wrath
• Gravity’s Rainbow
• The Great Gatsby

H – I

• A Handful of Dust
• The Heart is A Lonely Hunter
• The Heart of the Matter
• Herzog
• Housekeeping
• A House for Mr. Biswas
• I, Claudius
• Infinite Jest
• Invisible Man

• L – N

  • Light in August
  • The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe
  • Lolita
  • Lord of the Flies
  • The Lord of the Rings
  • The Moviegoer
  • Loving
  • Lucky Jim
  • The Man Who Loved Children
  • Midnight’s Children
  • Money
  • Mrs. Dalloway
  • Naked Lunch
  • Native Son
  • Neuromancer
  • Never Let Me Go
  • 1984

  O – R

  • On the Road
  • One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
  • The Painted Bird
  • Pale Fire
  • A Passage to India
  • Play It As It Lays
  • Portnoy’s Complaint
  • Possession
  • The Power and the Glory
  • The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie
  • Rabbit, Run
  • Ragtime
  • The Recognitions
  • Red Harvest
  • Revolutionary Road

  S – T

  • The Sheltering Sky
  • Slaughterhouse Five
  • Snow Crash
  • The Sot-Weed Factor
  • The Sound and the Fury
  • The Sportswriter
  • The Spy Who Came in From the Cold
  • The Sun Also Rises
  • Their Eyes Were Watching God
  • Things Fall Apart
  • To Kill a Mockingbird
  • To the Lighthouse
  • Tropic of Cancer

  U – W

  • Ubik
  • Under the Net
  • Under the Volcano
  • Watchmen
  • White Noise
  • White Teeth
  • Wide Sargasso Sea