The Hundred Book Challenge: The List

Republished here, the original post for my Hundred Book Challenge, original here from May 15, 2013.


Also, I will link the story to my reactions as I read them.


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I love to read like I love to breathe and eat. Lately, however, I haven’t been reading as much or as well as I used to.


I’m the kind of guy who walks into a bookstore, stares at the wall of “Classic Literature” and beams in internal pride of having read everything on the shelves. I’ve read every novel by Charles Dickens, Ernest Hemingway, Jane Austin, John Steinbeck, Douglas Adams, J.R.R. Tolkien, and half a dozen other prominent and important writers. I’ve almost read all the Stephen King novels which is, if I do say so myself, pretty darn impressive.


But still, I realized a large hole in my reading world existed- mostly of English language novels written in the last hundred years that weren’t J.K. Rowling, Stephen King, Neil Gaiman, Terry Pratchet or Chuck Palahniuk- not that there’s anything wrong with these writers- I’ve just been feasting on them almost exclusively for a while and need something else.


In my quest to quench my literary thirst, I stumbled upon TIME’s list of the best “100 novels of all TIME”- meaning the best novels written since TIME magazine was a thing.


I’m usually wary of such lists, but a glance over the books chosen by book critics Lev Grossman and Richard Lacayo I found a number of books I have always classified as “I should read that someday.” These aren’t the most popular books and almost none of them are included when I make a random Facebook query as to “what should I read next?” After looking into every book on the list I realized that all of them piqued my curiosity so I decided to read them all. Some are young adult, some are mystery and some are science fiction or fantasy. There’s even a graphic novel in the mix.


The best thing about this list is I’ve never read the vast majority of them. I’ll be honest and say that this is one of the few “best books” lists where I haven’t even heard of more than half of them.


A few caveats: First, I have read some of these books before and I will read them again. Yes, Tolkien’s “Lord of the Rings” is on the list and I have great swaths of that book memorized, but I will still re-read it. Second, my subscription to Audible.com will come in handy as I listen to the audio version of whatever books I can find. I listen when I walk my dog, when I drive in the car and whenever the physical act of reading is not ideal. This will allow me to be reading several books at the same time. I won’t touch abridged versions of books. Third, I’m not giving myself a time limit. Most of these are dense novels and demand to be savored slowly. Others are monstrously long. Fifth, I am not a literature critic, but I will be blogging my reading experience here on the Nerd’s Eye View blog as I go along. Sixth, I’ll be reading them in order of when I find them or when I want to read them.


Sound good? Here are the books in alphabetical order:

1. The Adventures of Augie March – Saul Bellow
2. All the King’s Men – Robert Penn Warren
3. American Pastoral –Philip Roth
4. An American Tragedy – Theodore Dreiser
5. Animal Farm – George Orwell
6. Appointment in Samarra – John O’Hara
7. Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret – Judy Blume
8. The Assistant –Bernard Malamud
9. At Swim-Two-Birds –Flann O’Brien
10. Atonement – Ian McEwan
11. Beloved – Toni Morrison
12. The Berlin Stories- Christopher Isherwood
13. The Big Sleep- Ramond Chandler
14. The Blind Assassin –Margaret Atwood
15. Blood Meridian –Cormac McCarthy
16. Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh
17. The Bridge of San Luis Rey –Thornton Wilder
18. Call It Sleep –Henry Roth
19. Catch-22 –Joseph Heller
20. The Catcher in the Rye – J.D. Salinger
21. A Clockwork Orange –Anthony Burgess
22. The Confessions of Nat Turner –William Styron
23. The Corrections – Jonathon Franzen
24. The Crying of Lot 49 – Thomas Pynchon
25. A Dance to the Music of Time- Anthony Powell
26. The Day of the Locust –Nathanael West
27. Death Comes for the Archbishop –Willa Cather
28. A Death in the Family –James Agee
29. The Death of the Heart –Elizabeth Bowen
30. Deliverance –James Dickey
31. Dog Soldiers –Robert Stone
32. Falconer –John Cheever
33. The French Lieutenant’s Woman –John Fowles
34. The Golden Notebook – Doris Lessing
35. Go Tell it on the Mountain –James Baldwin
36. Gone With the Wind –Margaret Mitchell
37. The Grapes of Wrath –John Steinbeck
38. Gravity’s Rainbow - Thomas Pynchon
39. The Great Gatsby - F. Scott Fitzgerald
40. A Handful of Dust - Evelyn Waugh
41. The Heart is A Lonely Hunter - Carson McCullers
42. The Heart of the Matter - Graham Greene
43. Herzog - Saul Bellow
44. Housekeeping - Marilynne Robinson
45. A House for Mr. Biswas - V.S. Naipaul
46. I, Claudius - Robert Graves
47. Infinite Jest - David Foster Wallace
48. Invisible Man - Ralph Ellison
49. Light in August - William Faulkner
50. The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe - C.S. Lewis
51. Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
52. Lord of the Flies - William Golding
53. The Lord of the Rings - J.R.R. Tolkien
54. Loving - Henry Green
55. The Moviegoer - Walker Percy
56. Lucky Jim - Kingsley Amis
57. The Man Who Loved Children - Christina Stead
58. Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
59. Money - Martin Amis
60. Mrs. Dalloway - Virginia Woolf
61. Naked Lunch - William Burroughs
62. Native Son - Richard Wright
63. Neuromancer - William Gibson
64. 1984 - George Orwell
65. Never Let Me Go- Kazuo Ishiguro
66. On the Road - Jack Kerouac
67. One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest - Ken Kesey
68. The Painted Bird - Jerzy Kosinski
69. Pale Fire - Vladimir Nabokov
70. A Passage to India - E.M. Forster
71. Play It As It Lays - Joan Didion
72. Portnoy’s Complaint - Philip Roth
73. Possession - A.S. Byatt
74. The Power and the Glory - Graham Greene
75. The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie - Muriel Spark
76. Rabbit, Run - John Updike
77. Ragtime - E.L. Doctorow
78. The Recognitions - William Gaddis
79. Red Harvest - Dashiell Hammett
80. Revolutionary Road - Richard Yates
81. The Sheltering Sky - Paul Bowles
82. Slaughterhouse Five - Kurt Vonnegut
83. Snow Crash - Neal Stephenson
84. The Sot-Weed Factor - John Barth
85. The Sound and the Fury - William Faulkner
86. The Sportswriter - Richard Ford
87. The Sun Also Rises - Ernest Hemingway
88. Their Eyes Were Watching God - Zora Neale Hurston
89. Things Fall Apart - Chinua Achebe
90. To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
91. To the Lighthouse - Virginia Woolf
92. Tropic of Cancer - Henry Miller
93. Ubik - Philip K. Dick
94. Under the Net - Iris Murdoch
95. Under the Volcano - Malcolm Lowry
96. Watchmen - Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons
97. White Noise - Don DeLillo
98. White Teeth - Zadie Smith
99. Wide Sargasso Sea - Jean Rhys
100. The Spy Who Came in From the Cold - John leCarre