EW Top 100 Novels of All Time

Ah, you gotta love it when magazines put out their 'top 100' lists of various categories. This week EW featured listings for the 'top 100 of all time' in movies, books, albums, etc.

You know me....I had to see what was featured as the top 100 novels of all time. I thought it would be fun to italicize the novels on the list that I have read.

1. Anna Karenina By Leo Tolstoy
2. The Great Gatsby By F. Scott Fitzgerald
3. Pride and Prejudice By Jane Austen
4. Great Expectations By Charles Dickens
5. One Hundred Years of Solitude By Gabriel Garcia Marquez
6. My Antonia By Willa Cather
7. The Harry Potter series By J.K. Rowling
8. The Rabbit quartet By John Updike
9. Beloved By Toni Morrison
10. Charlotte's Web By E.B. White
11. Mrs. Dalloway By Virginia Woolf
12. The Sound and the Fury By William Faulkner
13. To Kill a Mockingbird By Harper Lee
14. Crime and Punishment By Fyodor Dostoevsky
15. Ragtime By E.L. Doctorow
16. Jane Eyre By Charlotte Bronte
17. The Road By Cormac McCarthy
18. Moby-Dick By Herman Melville
19. Lolita By Vladimir Nabokov
20. Lonesome Dove By Larry McMurtry
21. An American Tragedy By Theodore Dreiser
22. Wuthering Heights By Emily Bronte
23. The Brothers Karamazov By Fyodor Dostoevsky
24. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man By James Joyce
25. Bleak House By Charles Dickens
26. Invisible Man By Ralph Ellison
27. A Wrinkle in Time By Madeleine L'Engle
28. War and Peace By Leo Tolstoy
29. The Handmaid's Tale By Margaret Atwood
30. Native Son By Richard Wright
31. Blindness By Jose Saramago
32. The Catcher in the Rye By J.D. Salinger
33. Maus By Art Spiegelman
34. The World According to Garp By John Irving
35. A Personal Matter By Kenzaburo Oe
36. Atlas Shrugged By Ayn Rand
37. The Sun Also Rises By Ernest Hemingway
38. The Regeneration trilogy By Pat Barker
39. Middlesex By Jeffrey Eugenides
40. A Suitable Boy By Vikram Seth
41. Go Tell It on The Mountain By James Baldwin
42. The Stand By Stephen King
43. A Confederacy of Dunces By John Kennedy Toole
44. His Dark Materials By Philip Pullman – only read first book in series
45. The Color Purple By Alice Walker
46. The Age of Innocence By Edith Wharton
47. The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle By Haruki Murakami
48. The Talented Mr. Ripley By Patricia Highsmith
49. Ender's Game By Orson Scott Card
50. Snow By Orhan Pamuk
51. The Corrections By Jonathan Franzen
52. Song of Solomon By Toni Morrison
53. Gone With the Wind By Margaret Mitchell
54. Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk By Ben Fountain
55. A Fine Balance By Rohinton Mistry
56. Sophie's Choice By William Styron
57. The Children of Men By P.D. James
58. Midnight's Children By Salman Rushdie
59. Dracula By Bram Stoker
60. Their Eyes Were Watching God By Zora Neale Hurston
61. Love in the Time of Cholera By Gabriel Garcia Marquez
62. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn By Mark Twain
63. Portnoy's Complaint By Philip Roth
64. Infinite Jest By David Foster Wallace
65. Herzog By Saul Bellow
66. Howards End By E.M. Forster
67. The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay By Michael Chabon
68. Middlemarch By George Eliot
69. Money By Martin Amis
70. Neuromancer By William Gibson
71. The Hobbit By J.R.R. Tolkien
72. The Remains of the Day By Kazuo Ishiguro
73. The Spy Who Came in From the Cold By John le Carre
74. Cold Mountain By Charles Frazier
75. Madame Bovary By Gustave Flaubert
76. The Golden Notebook By Doris Lessing
77. Tom Jones By Henry Fielding
78. A House for Mr. Biswas By V.S. Naipaul
79. Bring Up the Bodies By Hilary Mantel
80. Swann's Way By Marcel Proust
81. Frankenstein By Mary Shelley
82. Disgrace By J.M. Coetzee
83. The Stone Diaries By Carol Shields
84. Clockers By Richard Price
85. Catch-22 By James Heller
86. A Home at the End of the World By Michael Cunningham
87. White Teeth By Zadie Smith
88. The Bonfire of the Vanities By Tom Wolfe
89. Tristram Shandy By Laurence Sterne
90. The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter By Carson McCullers
91. The Leopard By Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa
92. The Glass Bead Game By Hermann Hesse
93. Bastard Out of Carolina By Dorothy Allison
94. The Moonstone By Wilkie Collins
95. The Poisonwood Bible By Barbara Kingsolver
96. If on a Winter's Night a Traveler By Italo Calvino
97. The Big Sleep By Raymond Chandler
98. Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret By Judy Blume
99. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy By Douglas Adams
100. The Joy Luck Club By Amy Tan

So what do you think? I have never read Anna Karenina completely. I attempted to read the gargantuan novel in high school but could never get through the first couple of chapters. Do I think it should have been given the number 1 spot? Hmm......I would say no.....I could think of more influential novels in the grand scheme of things than that one, but it does deserve to be on the list.

The Great Gatsby as number 2????? That one is a puzzler for me. I didn't enjoy the novel in high school. I blame the fact that we analyzed the book to an inch of its life.........and I don't find that a good way to enjoy a book. I don't think my classmates enjoyed it either......

Pride and Prejudice as number 3? I can see it in the top ten novels, but I have my misgivings about its placement. If Jane Austen wasn't so popular during the last couple of years I don't think it would have been placed as number 3.

I was glad to see several of Charles Dickens' works on the list, but was mystified as to why David Copperfield wasn't on the list.....???

Speaking of novels not on the list, why weren't these on the list:

1) Arthur Conan Doyle's The Hound of the Baskervilles
2) Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray
3) Louisa May Alcott's Little Women

sigh............I could keep going...........

As you can tell, a lot of my italicized books are 19th century novels............sorry..........*cough cough*......I will admit that I'm more partial to that century than any other when it comes to novels.

What do you guys think of the top 100 novels of all time? Does it meet your approval? What novels do you think should have been on the list?   Until next time ^____^