Saturday, August 04, 2007

Best Novels - The Bellini 100

[ Click Here for Bellini's Personal Reading List ]

A Reader's Guide to Great Novels

In 1998, Random House created the Modern Library list of the 100 Best Novels written in the English language. Alongside their compilation, they also included the top 100 titles chosen by readers. Their hope in spearheading this controversial project was to create a new wave of dialogue for literature. To help achieve this goal, Random House then requested a third list to be created by the world-renowned Radcliffe Publishing Course. Later, in 2003, the BBC conducted The Big Read, a survey among British readers, asking them for their favorite novels. List-Mania had gone global. While, certainly, there can never be one definitive answer for the best 100 novels, this page contains an itemized table of the 77 books that appeared on at least two of these lists. I added 23 more notable one-timers to round things off.

[ Books That I Have Read ]

The Following Books Appear on All Four Lists

1984 by George Orwell
Ulysses by James Joyce
Catch-22 by Josephy Heller
The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger
Animal Farm by George Orwell
The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
Lord of the Flies by William Golding
On the Road by Jack Kerouac
Brideshead Revisted by Evelyn Waugh

The Following Books Appear on Three Lists

To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell
The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolien
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams
A Portrain of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce
Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner
To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf
Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut
Invisible Man by Ralph Eillison
As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner
The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemmingway
Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller
Light in August by William Faulkner
A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess
Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemmingway
The Call of the Wild by Jack London
Midnight's Children by Salman Rushdie
The Magus by John Fowles

The Following Books Appear on Two Lists

A Prayer for Owen Meany by John Irving
A Town Like Alice by Nevil Shute
Dune by Frank Herbert
Watership Down by Richard Adams
The Stand by Stephen King
Beloved by Toni Morrison
Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck
Winnie-the-Pooh by A.A. Milne
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest by Ken Kesey
The World According to Garp by John Irving
The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand
My Antonia by Willa Cather
The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie
Absalom, Absalom! by William Faulkner
Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier
Naked Lunch William S. Burroughs
The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame
Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand
The French Lieutenant's Woman by John Fowles
Sons and Lovers by D.H. Lawrence
Under the Volcano by Malcolm Lowry
I, Claudius by Robert Graves
An American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser
The Heart is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers
Native Son by Richard Wright
A Passage to India by E.M. Forster
The Wings of the Dove by Henry James
Tender is the Night by F. Scott Fitzgerald
All the Kings Men by Robert Penn Warren
Howards End by E.M. Forster
Go Tell it on the Mountain by James Baldwin
Women in Love by D.H. Lawrence
The Naked and the Dead by Norman Mailer
The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett
The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton
The Moviegoer by Walker Percy
Death Comes for the Archbishop by Willa Cather
Of Human Bondage by W. Somerset Maugham
Main Street by Sinclair Lewis
Finnegans Wake by James Joyce
Kim by Rudyard Kipling
A Room with a View by E.M. Forster
Lord Jim by Joseph Conrad
Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys
Sophie's Choice by William Styron
The Sheltering Sky by Paul Bowles

Notable Books Appearing on One List

For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemmingway
In Cold Blood by Truman Capote
Bonfire of the Vanities by Tom Wolfe
A Separate Peace by John Knowles
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert Pirsig
Sometimes a Great Notion by Ken Kesey
The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemmingway
Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte
Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte
Farenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
Great Expectations by Charles Dickens
War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien
We the Living by Ayn Rand
David Copperfield by Charles Dickens
Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson
Anne of Green Gables by LM Montgomery
A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens
I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith
The Godfather by Mario Puzo
Darkness at Noon by Arthur Koestler
The Way of All Flesh by Samuel Butler