My Reading Challenge

One of my "100 Things to Do" is to read the 100 greatest books of our time.  Since that list is by nature subjective, I chose to pick one that was already compiled by a reputable source: Time magazine's "100 best English-language novels from 1923 to the present".  I started from scratch, meaning I am rereading any- and everything that I have previously read, in order to make sure that I truly appreciate it this time around.  I have been going strong since summer '07.  Titles in purple have been read.

1.  The Adventures of Augie March by Saul Bellow

2.  All the King's Men by Robert Penn Warren

3.  American Pastoral by Philip Roth

4.  An American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser

5.  Animal Farm by George Orwell

6.  Appointment in Samarra by John O'Hara

7.  Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret by Judy Blume

8.  The Assistant by Bernard Malamud

9.  At Swim-Two-Birds by Flann O'Brien

10.  Atonement by Ian McEwan

11.  Beloved by Toni Morrison

12.  The Berlin Stories by Christopher Isherwood

13.  The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler

14.  The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood

15.  Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy

16.  Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh

17.  The Bridge of San Luis Rey by Thornton Wilder

18.  Call It Sleep by Henry Roth

19.  Catch-22 by Joseph Heller

20.  The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger

21.  A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess

22.  The Confessions of Nat Turner by William Styron

23.  The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen

24.  The Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon

25.  A Dance to the Music of Time by Anthony Powell

26.  The Day of the Locust by Nathanael West

27.  Death Comes for the Archbishop by Willa Cather

28.  A Death in the Family by James Agee

29.  The Death of the Heart by Elizabeth Bowen

30.  Deliverance by James Dickey

31.  Dog Soldiers by Robert Stone

32.  Falconer by John Cheever

33.  The French Lieutenant's Woman by John Fowles

34.  The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing

35.  Go Tell It on the Mountain by James Baldwin

36.  Gone With the Wind by Margaret Mitchell

37.  The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck

38.  Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon

39.  The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald

40.  A Handful of Dust by Evelyn Waugh

41.  The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers

42.  The Heart of the Matter by Graham Greene

43.  Herzog by Saul Bellow

44.  Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson

45.  A House for Mr. Biswas by V.S. Naipaul

46.  I, Claudius by Robert Graves

47.  Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace

48.  Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison

49.  Light in August by William Faulkner

50.  The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe by C.S. Lewis

51.  Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov

52.  Lord of the Flies by William Golding

53.  The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien

54.  Loving by Henry Green

55.  Lucky Jim by Kingsley Amis

56.  The Man Who Loved Children by Christina Stead

57.  Midnight's Children by Salman Rushdie

58.  Money by Martin Amis

59.  The Moviegoer by Walker Percy

60.  Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf

61.  Naked Lunch by William Burroughs

62.  Native Son by Richard Wright

63.  Neuromancer by William Gibson

64.  Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro

65.  1984 by George Orwell

66.  On the Road by Jack Kerouac

67.  One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest by Ken Kesey

68.  The Painted Bird by Jerzy Kosinski

69.  Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov

70.  A Passage to India by E.M. Forster

71.  Play It As It Lays by Joan Didion

72.  Portnoy's Complaint by Philip Roth

73.  Possession by A.S. Byatt

74.  The Power and the Glory by Graham Greene

75.  The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Spark

76.  Rabbit, Run by John Updike

77.  Ragtime by E.L. Doctorow

78.  The Recognitions by William Gaddis

79.  Red Harvest by Dashiell Hammett

80.  Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates

81.  The Sheltering Sky by Paul Bowles

82.  Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut

83.  Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson

84.  The Sot-Weed Farmer by John Barth

85.  The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner

86.  The Sportswriter by Richard Ford

87.  The Spy Who Came in From the Cold by John le Carre

88.  The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway

89.  Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston

90.  Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe

91.  To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee

92.  To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf

93.  Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller

94.  Ubik by Philp K. Dick

95.  Under the Net by Iris Murdoch

96.  Under the Volcano by Malcolm Lowry

97.  Watchmen by Alan Moore & Dave Gibbons

98.  White Noise by Don DeLillo

99.  White Teeth by Zadie Smith

100.  Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys

How much does a man live, after all? Does he live a thousand days, or one only?
For a week, or for several centuries?
How long does a man spend dying?
What does it mean to say "for ever"?

                                                           -P.N.

Housekeeping

" - the wind blows a milkweed puff and two seeds do not fly."


The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter

"The song was sad as a question without words."


The Heart of the Matter

"Innocence must die young if it isn't to kill the souls of men."