Tuesday, January 06, 2009

Nerd Notes on Literary Lunacy -- the 100 Greatest English-Language Novels of the 20th Century

This list ranks Ulysses by James Joyce as #1. My response is: ARE YOU KIDDING ME? Ulysses was an 800-page morass of incomprehensible word slush. I read it, yes I did, and I don't see what the big deal is. Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man was much better.

Anyway, here are the top 20 supposedly greatest English-language novels of the 20th century. All rankings and selections are (naturally) up for fierce debate (the fiercer and more acrimonious, the better?). How many have you read?

1. (1922) Ulysses, James Joyce
2. (1925) The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald
3. (1916) A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, James Joyce
4. (1955) Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov

5. (1932) Brave New World, Aldous Huxley
6. (1929) The Sound and the Fury, William Faulkner
7. (1961) Catch-22, Joseph Heller
8. (1940) Darkness at Noon, Arthur Koestler
9. (1913) Sons and Lovers, D. H. Lawrence
10. (1939) The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck
11. (1947) Under the Volcano, Malcolm Lowry
12. (1903) The Way of All Flesh, Samuel Butler
13. (1949) Nineteen Eighty-Four, George Orwell
14. (1934) I, Claudius, Robert Graves
15. (1927) To the Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf
16. (1925) An American Tragedy, Theodore Dreiser
17. (1940) The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, Carson McCullers
18. (1969) Slaughterhouse-Five, Kurt Vonnegut
19. (1952) Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison
20. (1940) Native Son, Richard Wright

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

these lists might appease your literary scorn a bit.

I'm still only at 20 of the RH top 100. Time's top 100 since 1923 is a better list, I think. As is the BBC's Big Read, though that was a popular vote one.

Mad Minerva said...

Thanks, Greg!