TIME’s 100 BEST NOVELS (1923-2005)

TIME’s critics Richard Lacayo and Lev Grossman pick the 100 best English-language novels from 1923 to the present. An excellent list of books! However, I thought Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day (1989) is a much stronger novel than Never Let Me Go (2005). There are a couple of books which I thought would look at home on the list: Pat Conroy’s The Prince of Tides, Paula Fox’s Desperate Characters (1970); Shirley Ann Grau’s The House on Coliseum Street (1961), Henry Green’s Living (1929), Alfred Hayes’s The Girl on the Via Flaminia (1949), John Irving’s The World According to Garp and A Prayer for Owen Meaney, Bernard Malamud’s A New Life (1961) and Edward Lewis Wallant’s The Tenants of Moonbloom (1963).

Here’s their complete list:

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 Carré
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
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
White Teeth / Zadie Smith
Wide Sargasso Sea / Jean Rhys