BookGuide - Lincoln City Libraries - Booklist: Time Magazine's All-Time 100 Novels



In 2005, Time® magazine's literary critics, Lev Grossman and Richard Lacayo selected what they considered to be the top 100 English-language novels published from 1923 to 2005 (1923 being the year Time® began publishing). As usual, with any "top 100" list, these were their subjective choices, and obviously do not reflect the views of any other reader. However, their list inarguably includes numerous works of influential English-languge literature. To see their original online list, including detailed plot descriptions, visit Time's Critics Pick the 100 Best Novels on the Time® website. [Note: The Lincoln City Libraries own 99 of these 100 titles -- listed in alphabetical order below. Click on the titles or book covers to connect directly to our catalog and check on the availability of each of these books.] The Adventures of Augie March by Saul Bellow 1953 All the King's Men by Robert Penn Warren 1946 American Pastoral by Philip Roth 1997 An American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser 1925 Animal Farm by George Orwell 1946 Appointment in Samarra by John O'Hara 1934 Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret by Judy Blume 1970 The Assistant by Bernard Malamud 1957 At Swim-Two-Birds by Flann O'Brien 1938 Atonement by Ian McEwan 2002 Beloved by Toni Morrison 1987 The Berlin Stories by Christopher Isherwood 1946 The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler 1939 The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood 2000 Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy 1986 Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh 1946 The Bridge of San Luis rey by Thornton Wilder 1927 Call It Sleep by Henry Roth 1935 Catch-22 by Joseph Heller 1961 The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger 1951 A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess 1963 The Confessions of Nat Turner by William Styron 1967 The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen 2001 The Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon 1966 A Dance to the Music of Time by Anthony Powell 1951 The Day of the Locust by Nathaniel West 1939 Death Comes for the Archbishop by Willa Cather 1927 A Death in the Family by James Agee 1958 The Death of the Heart by Elizabeth Bowen 1938 Deliverance by James Dickey 1970 Dog Soldiers by Robert Stone 1974 Falconer by John Cheever 1977 The French Lieutenant's Woman by John Fowles 1969 The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing 1962 Go Tell It on the Mountain by James Baldwin 1953 Gone With the Wind by Margaret Mitchell 1936 The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck 1939 Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon 1973 The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald 1925 A Handful of Dust by Evelyn Waugh 1934 The Heart is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers 1940 The Heart of the Matter by Graham Greene 1948 Herzog by Saul Bellow 1964 Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson 1981 A House for Mr. Biswas by V.S. Naipaul 1962 I, Claudius by Robert Graves 1934 Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace 1996 Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison 1952 Light in August by William Faulkner 1932 The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe by C.S. Lewis 1950 Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov 1955 Lord of the Flies by William Golding 1955 The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien 1954 *Loving* by Henry Green 1945 Lucky Jim by Kingsley Amis 1954 The Man Who Loved Children by Christina Stead 1940 Midnight's Children by Salman Rushdie 1981 Money: A Suicide Note by Martin Amis 1984 The Moviegoer by Walker Percy 1961 Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf 1925 Naked Lunch by William Burroughs 1959 Native Son by Richard Wright 1940 Neuromancer by William Gibson 1984 Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro 2005 1984 by George Orwell 1948 On the Road by Jack Kerouac 1957 One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest by Ken Kesey 1962 The Painted Bird by Jerzy Kosinski 1965 Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov 1962 A Passage to India by E.M. Forster 1924 Play It As It Lays by Joan Didion 1970 Portnoy's Complaint by Philip Roth 1969 Possession by A.S. Byatt 1990 The Power and the Glory by Graham Greene 1939 The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Spark 1961 Rabbit, Run by John Updike 1960 Ragtime by E.L. Doctorow 1975 The Recognitions by William Gaddis 1955 Red Harvest by Dashiell Hammett 1929 Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates 1961 The Sheltering Sky by Paul Bowles 1949 Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut 1969 Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson 1992 The Sot-Weed Factor by John Barth 1960 The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner 1929 The Sportswriter by Richard Ford 1986 The Spy Who Came In From the Cold by John le Carre 1964 The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway 1926 Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston 1937 Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe 1959 To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee 1960 To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf 1927 Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller 1934 Ubik by Philip K. Dick 1969 Under the Net by Iris Murdoch 1954 Under the Volcano by Malcolm Lowry 1947 Watchmen by Alan Moore & Dave Gibbons 1986 White Noise by Don DeLillo 1985 White Teeth by Zadie Smith 2000 Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys 1966