Best books of the 20th century - a challenge ...

[tinto]

Hi,
A couple of years ago my sister and I compiled the following list with the aim to read all the books on it by the time we dropped dead.
The list was compiled from a couple of different sources, so no - we didn't actually do the research ourselves!
So, here is the challenge - read all of these books! There are 176 of them.
In the meantime;

1. How many have you read?
2. What is missing and should be on this list?
3. What is on the list and shouldn't be? (I know, I don't get the Delia Smith cookbook either)
4. What are your favourites/what did you hate?

Disclaimer: The sources of this list are American and British, so you will find that reflected in the choices. Oh - and don't forget its only 20th century

Title
1984. George Orwell
2001 - a space odyssey. Arthur C. Clarke
A BEND IN THE RIVER by V.S. Naipaul
A brief history of time. Stephen Hawking
A clockwork orange. Anthony Burgess
A DANCE TO THE MUSIC OF TIME (series) by Anthony Powell
A day in the life of Ivan Denisovich. Alexander Solzhenitsyn
A FAREWELL TO ARMS by Ernest Hemingway
A HANDFUL OF DUST by Evelyn Waugh
A HIGH WIND IN JAMAICA by Richard Hughes
A HOUSE FOR MR BISWAS by V.S. Naipaul
A la recherche du temps perdu. Marcel Proust
A PASSAGE TO INDIA by E.M. Forster
A PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS A YOUNG MAN by James Joyce
A prayer for Owen Meany. John Irvine
A ROOM WITH A VIEW by E.M. Forster
A suitable boy. Vikram Seth
All quiet on the western front. Erich Maria Remarque
ALL THE KING'S MEN by Robert Penn Warren
American psycho. Bret Easton Ellis
AN AMERICAN TRAGEDY by Theodore Dreiser
An evil cradling. Brian Keenan
ANGLE OF REPOSE by Wallace Stegner
ANIMAL FARM by George Orwell
APPOINTMENT IN SAMARRA by John O'Hara
AS I LAY DYING by William Faulkner
Beloved. Toni Morrison
Birdsong. Sebastian Faulks
BRAVE NEW WORLD by Aldous Huxley
BRIDESHEAD REVISITED by Evelyn Waugh
Brighton Rock. Graham Greene
Captain Corelli´s Mandolin. Louis de Bernières
CATCH-22 by Joseph Heller
Charlie and the chocolate factory. Roald Dahl
Cider with Rosie. Laurie Lee
Complete cookery course. Delia Smith
Cry the beloved country. Alan Paton
DARKNESS AT NOON by Arthur Koestler
DEATH COMES FOR THE ARCHBISHOP by Willa Cather
DELIVERANCE by James Dickey
Doctor Zhivago. Boris Pasternak
Down and out in Paris and London. George Orwell
Dune. Frank Herbert
Earthly powers. Anthony Burgess
Fear and loathing in Las Vegas. Hunter S. Thompson
FINNEGANS WAKE by James Joyce
FROM HERE TO ETERNITY by James Jones
GO TELL IT ON THE MOUNTAIN by James Baldwin
Gone with the wind. Margaret Mitchell
Gormenghast. Mervyn Peake
HEART OF DARKNESS by Joseph Conrad
HENDERSON THE RAIN KING by Saul Bellow
High fidelity. Nick Hornby
HOWARDS END by E.M. Forster
I, CLAUDIUS by Robert Graves
If this is a man. Primo Levi
INVISIBLE MAN by Ralph Ellison
IRONWEED by William Kennedy
It. Stephen King
James and the Giant Peach. Roald Dahl
Jurassic Park. Michael Crichton
KIM by Rudyard Kipling
Lady Chatterley´s Lover. D.H. Lawrence
LIGHT IN AUGUST by William Faulkner
LOLITA by Vladimir Nabokov
Long walk to freedom. Nelson Mandela
LORD JIM by Joseph Conrad
LORD OF THE FLIES by William Golding
Love in a time of cholera. Gabriel Garcia Marquez
LOVING by Henry Green
Lucky Jim. Kingsley Amis
MAIN STREET by Sinclair Lewis
Matilda. Roald Dahl
MIDNIGHT'S CHILDREN by Salman Rushdie
NATIVE SON by Richard Wright
NOSTROMO by Joseph Conrad
OF HUMAN BONDAGE by W. Somerset Maugham
Of mice and men. John Steinbeck
ON THE ROAD by Jack Kerouac
One hundred years of solitude. Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Paddy Clarke ha ha ha. Roddy Doyle
PALE FIRE by Vladimir Nabokov
PARADE'S END by Ford Madox Ford
Perfume. Patrick Süskind
POINT COUNTER POINT by Aldous Huxley
PORTNOY'S COMPLAINT by Philip Roth
Possession. A.S. Byatt
RAGTIME by E.L. Doctorow
Rebecca. Daphne du Maurier
SCOOP by Evelyn Waugh
SISTER CARRIE by Theodore Dreiser
SLAUGHTERHOUSE-FIVE by Kurt Vonnegut
SONS AND LOVERS by D.H. Lawrence
Sophie´s world. Jostein Gaarder
SOPHIE'S CHOICE by William Styron
Tales from the city. Armistead Maupin
TENDER IS THE NIGHT by F. Scott Fitzgerald
Testament of youth. Vera Brittain
THE ADVENTURES OF AUGIE MARCH by Saul Bellow
THE AGE OF INNOCENCE by Edith Wharton
THE ALEXANDRIA QUARTET by Lawrence Durell
THE AMBASSADORS by Henry James
The bell jar. Sylvia Plath
The BFG. Roald Dahl
The bonfire of the vanities. Tom Wolfe
THE BRIDGE OF SAN LUIS REY by Thornton Wilder
THE CALL OF THE WILD by Jack London
THE CATCHER IN THE RYE by J.D. Salinger
The colour purple. Alice Walker
THE DAY OF THE LOCUST by Nathanael West
THE DEATH OF THE HEART by Elizabeth Bowen
The diary of Anne Frank. Anne Frank
The French Lieutenant´s woman. John Fowles
THE GINGER MAN by J.P. Donleavy
THE GOLDEN BOWL by Henry James
THE GOOD SOLDIER by Ford Madox Ford
THE GRAPES OF WRATH by John Steinbeck
THE GREAT GATSBY by F. Scott Fitzgerald
The handmaid´s tale. Margaret Atwood
THE HEART IS A LONELY HUNTER by Carson McCullers
The heart of darkness. Joseph Conrad
THE HEART OF THE MATTER by Graham Greene
The hitchhiker´s guide to the galaxy. Douglas Adams
The hobbit. J.R.R. Tolkien
The horse whisperer. Nicholas Ev
THE HOUSE OF MIRTH by Edith Wharton
The lion, the witch and the wardrobe. C.S. Lewis
The lord of the rings. J.R.R. Tolkien
THE MAGNIFICENT AMBERSONS by Booth Tarkington
THE MAGUS by John Fowles
THE MALTESE FALCON by Dashiell Hammett
The master and Margarita. Mikhail Bulgakov
THE MOVIEGOER by Walker Percy
THE NAKED AND THE DEAD by Norman Mailer
The name of the rose. Umberto Eco
THE OLD WIVES' TALE by Arnold Bennett
The outsider. Albert Camus
THE POSTMAN ALWAYS RINGS TWICE by James M. Cain
The power and the glory. Graham Greene
THE PRIME OF MISS JEAN BRODIE by Muriel Spark
THE RAINBOW by D.H. Lawrence
The ragged-trousered philanthropists. Robert Tressell
The remains of the day. Kazuo Ishiguro
THE SECRET AGENT by Joseph Conrad
The selfish gene. Richard Dawkins
THE SHELTERING SKY by Paul Bowles
THE SOUND AND THE FURY by William Faulkner
The stand. Stephen King
THE STUDS LONIGAN TRILOGY by James T. Farrell
THE SUN ALSO RISES by Ernest Hemingway
The tin drum. Günter Grass
The trial. Franz Kafka
The unbearable lightness of being. Milan Kundera
The van. Roddy Doyle
THE WAPSHOT CHRONICLES by John Cheever
The wasp factory. Iain Banks
THE WAY OF ALL FLESH by Samuel Butler
The wind in the willows. Kenneth Grahame
THE WINGS OF THE DOVE by Henry James
To kill a mockingbird. Harper Lee
TO THE LIGHTHOUSE by Virginia Woolf
TOBACCO ROAD by Erskine Caldwell
Trainspotting. Irvine Welsh
TROPIC OF CANCER by Henry Miller
U.S.A. (trilogy) by John Dos Passos
ULYSSES by James Joyce
UNDER THE NET by Iris Murdoch
UNDER THE VOLCANO by Malcolm Lowry
Watership down. Richard Adams
WIDE SARGASSO SEA by Jean Rhys
Wild swans. Jung Chang
WINESBURG, OHIO by Sherwood Anderson
Winnie the Pooh. A.A. Milne
WOMEN IN LOVE by D.H. Lawrence
Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance. Robert Pirsig
ZULEIKA DOBSON by Max Beerbohm

I've read 110 (compulsive reader, eng lit graduate, well that's my excuse)

Odd inclusions
Anything by Stephen King
Delia's book of cooking
Nick Hornby (boak)
A la recherche du temps perdu. Marcel Proust (you said American and British???)
Ditto Solzenitsyn and Pasternak
Watership Down

Surprising ommissions
Christopher Isherwood
Daphne du Maurier
Atonement

Anorak - just noticed your post - the list is meant to be 20th Century - which prob explains lack of Shakespeare Dickens Hardy Eliot Thackeray Bronte et al

39 ... cool list - good luck on the joyce i can only ever manage a couple of pages although Dubliners is a great read esp. The Dead.

OOOh, Disgrace by Coetzee - definitely MUST be on the list. A fantastic book!

Hi,
Just been reading the posts. Some of you are seriously well read and that is something that I aspire to. Thanks for some of the suggestions.
I should clarify the source of the lists. It was a few years ago - one was a BBC list - the other was a list from an American publishing house (Random House??). There was a fair bit of crossover but we wanted to use two sources to get a wider perspective. So the actual authors can be from anywhere. I'm def not guilty for the Horse Whisperer! Was it really that bad?

Great list, haven't counted how many I have read. Probably not that many, I don't read much modern literature and should so this is a great reading list for me to start.

Couple of obvious omissions- no Truman Capote - Breakfast at Tiffany's is a great novella, and I think there should be one Agatha Christie (probably Murder on the Orient Express) if there is a Stephen King, as like him she was/is pretty much the master of a 20th century genre.

Too much Roald Dahl, I think BFG or Charlie and the Chocolate Factory should be there and forget the rest, they are good but not "literature".

Room for a Nancy Mitford? If you like chicklit you will love them - The Pursuit of Love is the best one.

My favourites of those on the list are Brideshead Revisited, To Kill a Mockingbird and The Great Gatsby.

Some I definitely need to read, such as A La Recherche du Temps Perdu and The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie.

Isn't The Age of Innocence 19th century?

Loved Death comes for the Archbishop, so glad it made it!! Agree with Quattrocento that there should be something by Isherwood. Also pleased to see Arnold Bennet there, because he's fing brilliant and no one seems to talk about him. Riceyman steps is just fantastic.

44. Tho I'm not aspiring to read quite a lot of them (and I only read Cal Corelli because it was raining on holiday and thought it was rubbish), I love lists like this and shall print it out for further ideas of what to read on the train!

Thank you!

43 - i didn't count any of james joyce's which i have tried to read on numerous occasions and never finished!

favourites from that list would include

portnoy's complaint by philip roth (laugh out loud funny)
the handmaid's tale by margaret atwood
slaughterhouse 5 by kurt vonnegut
lolita by nabokov

might add

lanark by alisdair gray
a disaffection by james kelman

41. Several more on the shelves but still unread. Several on the OP's list that I haven't even heard of which is worrying.

Some more lists to choose from:

Time magazine's top 100

Random House Modern Library's 100 best

50 literary translations from the last 50 years

Can't now remember where these came from originally but I have had them bookmarked for ages and not quite got round to going through them...

more to the point, whats the prize?

15 -

You lot are really well read! This is my first post on the site as reading is a love of mine, but wow, I never heard of half these books.

Agree with Lucifer - the Regeneration Trilogy is thought provoking and also agree with Badgermoose - Philip Pullman's Dark Matters Trilogy is one I have read severla times.

Would add The Blind Assassin - Margaret Attwood, The Time Travellers Wife - Audry Niffenegger and a bit of chick lit (though I'm sure the author wouldn't agree with that description) The Burning Blue - James Holland.

33

It by Stephen King should not be on, is the worst book of his that i've read.

Should be on: more Marg Atwood

31 off the big list and 27 from BBC with some overlap. There's a great little book called The Modern Library which is a list of 200 novels in English published after 1950 that got me out of a reading rut recently. It has synopses in, without them being spoilers. Not sure where my copy is at the moment.

A very memorable one from there was: Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart.

Around 85 or so .. but I think much of that stems from concerted efforts for some of the big important books during my teenage years .. its interesting what is left out but what is always on these lists .. some of which I really haven't liked at all.