The Project: Top 100 Books of the Last Century

My wife tells me that I can be a little obsessive with my hobbies and projects. She also tells me that I have a serious book problem. This is not going to help either opinion.

The Project, as I’m calling it, is simple: I am going to read and review 100 of the best novels of the last century in, I hope, 100 weeks. My own idiosyncratic top 100.

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This idea had its genesis over my weekly lunch and beer with a good friend a couple of months ago. We were discussing the general state of our literate society and I was lamenting, as a good former English major is apt to do, the ubiquity of piffle that seems to be in everyone’s hands these days… if they bother read at all. I was thinking, I’m sure, of 50 Shades of Grey, which seems to be handed out with train tickets in this country judging by a glance over your average peak-hour carriage. This was particularly sad, I argued, given the swelling contingent of great contemporary novelists. My friend asked for some examples and suggested I name my top five novels and authors of the last 25 years, which I hazarded in an extemporaneous muster that felt rushed and inadequate the moment I closed my mouth.

I went home and spent the next few hours assembling something more satisfying, which succeeded primarily in getting myself excited to get hold of a new book or two.

A few days later I visited the local bookstore and bought a copy of Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy, one of the authors I recommended. I’ve loved his writing for years now and vaguely remembered reading this, his magnum opus, when I was in high school. I’m typically a rather fast reader but working through this took me weeks. (Protracted more than a little, no doubt, by the arrival of our daughter.) But it was predominately the language – the gushing onslaught of esoteric, wicked and oddly biblical verbiage that drags your protesting conscience through one of the most blood-drenched landscapes any novelist has dared paint. McCarthy reminded me of how mindblowingly reeling a good novel could be.

So, like any powerful drug, I wanted another shot.

And so began my quest to compile a list of contemporary must-reads. In the process I stumbled across 101books.net, Robert Bruce’s excellent site which provided the last piece of the puzzle. Robert is blogging his way through Time Magazine’s 100 greatest novels. I think the concept is brilliant and is a perfect excuse for me to read more and finally get back to blogging.

Trouble is the Times List, like the Modern Library’s top 100, didn’t quite satisfy. Among other things the former was too heavily US-centric and where the Modern Library list was slightly more geographically balanced it presented a shameful 8 out of 100 books written by women. Not to mention post-colonialist and ethnically diverse authors writing in English.

Any list that attempts to construct a sort of canon of great literature must by nature of the endeavour also privelege older novels that have established themselves over the more recent. But I have read a lot of classic novels and wanted to read some more recent fiction…

And I didn’t want to read anything that I have read too recently (or that I hated!)…

And I wanted new books for my library…

And I wanted to read Australian authors that I’ve sadly neglected (rare specimens indeed in the prestigious aforementioned lists)…

Ultimately, I wanted a list that met some pretty specific criteria and above all, that I could be excited about each individual book. A list that didn’t exist.

 So I thought it would be fun to create my own using the logic above and the following explicit criteria:

1. Must be a novel (no short stories)
2. Must be originally composed in English (no translations)
3. Must be published within the last 100 years (1913 – 2012)
4. Must be literary fiction (this is inescapably ambiguous, but given that I’m the final arbiter of my list this is an internal argument in my own troubled head)
5. At least 25% of the novels must be written by women
6. At least 10% of the novels must be written by Australians
7. No author can be represented more than twice
8. Attempt an even spread of date of composition

Well, if you’ve waded your way this far, here is The Project:

1	Sons and Lovers	DH Lawrence	1913	UK
2	Of Human Bondage	W Somerset Maugham	1915	UK
3	A Portrait of the Artist as the Young Man	James Joyce	1916	UK
4	Ulysses	James Joyce	1922	UK
5	A Passage to India	EM Foster	1924	UK
6	The Great Gatsby	F Scott Fitzgerald	1925	US
7	An American Tragedy	Theodore Dreiser	1925	US
8	Mrs Dalloway	Virginia Woolf	1925	UK
9	The Sun Also Rises	Ernest Hemingway	1926	US
10	Death Comes for the Archbishop	Willa Cather	1927	US
11	The Bridge of San Luis Rey	Thornton Wilder	1927	US
12	To The Lighthouse	Virginia Woolf	1927	US
13	The Sound and the Fury	William Faulkner	1929	US
14	As I Lay Dying	William Faulkner	1930	US
15	Brave New World	Aldous Huxley	1932	UK
16	I, Claudius	Robert Graves	1934	UK
17	Appointment in Samarra	John O’Hara	1934	US
18	Their Eyes Were Watching God	Zora Neal Hurston	1937	US
19	The Big Sleep	Raymond Chandler	1939	UK
20	The Grapes of Wrath	John Steinbeck	1939	US
21	The Day of the Locust	Nathanael West	1939	US
22	The Man Who Loved Children	Christina Stead	1940	AUS
23	Darkness at Noon	Arthur Koestler	1940	HUN-UK
24	The Heart is a Lonely Hunter	Carson McCullers	1940	US
25	The Power and the Glory	Graham Greene	1942	UK
26	Brideshead Revisited	Evelyn Waugh	1945	UK
27	All The Kings Men	Robert Penn Warren	1946	US
28	Under the Volcano	Malcolm Lowry	1947	CA
29	The Heart of the Matter	Graham Greene	1948	UK
30	The Harp in the South	Ruth Park	1948	AUS
31	Nineteen Eight-Four	George Orwell	1949	UK
32	The Catcher in the Rye	JD Salinger	1951	US
33	Invisible Man	Ralph Ellison	1952	US
34	Wise Blood	Flannery O’Connor	1952	US
35	The Adventures of Augie March	Saul Bellows	1953	CA-US
36	Go Tell it on the Mountain	James Baldwin	1953	US
37	Fahrenheit 451	Ray Bradbury	1953	US
38	Lord of the Flies	William Golding	1954	UK
39	Lucky Jim	Kingsley Amis	1954	UK
40	Lolita	Vladimir Nabakov	1955	RUS-US
41	On the Road	Jack Kerouac	1957	US
42	Voss	Patrick White	1957	AUS
43	Things Fall Apart	Chinua Achebe	1958	NIG
44	Rabbit Angstrom Tetrology	John Updike	1960	US
45	To Kill a Mocking Bird	Harper Lee	1960	US
46	Revolutionary Road	Richard Yates	1961	US
47	A House for Mr. Biswas	V. S. Naipul	1961	TRIN
48	Catch-22	Joseph Heller	1961	US
49	A Clockwork Orange	Anthony Burgess	1962	UK
50	One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest	Ken Kesey	1962	US
51	Pale Fire	Vladimir Nabakov	1962	RUS-US
52	The Golden Notebook	Doris Lessing	1962	UK
53	The Spy Who Came in From the Cold	John le Carré	1963	UK
54	Herzog	Saul Bellows	1964	CA-US
55	The Crying of Lot 49	Thomas Pynchon	1966	US
56	Wide Sargasso Sea	Jean Rhys	1966	DOM-UK
57	Slaughterhouse Five	Kurt Vonnegut	1969	US
58	Gravity’s Rainbow	Thomas Pynchon	1973	US
59	Sophie’s Choice	William Styron	1979	US
60	Earthly Powers	Anthony Burgess	1980	UK
61	Housekeeping	Marilyn Robinson	1980	US
62	Waiting for the Barbarians	JM Coetzee	1980	SA
63	Midnight’s Children	Salman Rushdie	1981	IND-UK
64	Schindler’s Ark	Thomas Kenneally	1982	AUS
65	The Color Purple	Alice Walker	1983	US
66	Money	Martin Amis	1984	UK
67	Blood Meridian	Cormac McCarthy	1985	US
68	White Noise	Don DeLillo	1985	US
69	The Handmaid’s Tale	Margaret Atwood	1985	CA
70	Beloved	Toni Morrison	1987	US
71	The Satanic Verses	Salman Rushdie	1988	IND-UK
72	Oscar and Lucinda	Peter Carey	1989	AUS
73	Possession	A.S.Byatt	1990	UK
74	American Psycho	Bret Easton Ellis	1991	US
75	Cloudstreet	Tim Winton	1991	AUS
76	Border Trilogy	Cormac McCarthy	1992	US
77	The Blue Flower	Penelope Fitzgerald	1995	UK
78	Infinite Jest	David Foster Wallace	1996	US
79	The God of Small Things	Arundhati Roy	1997	IND
80	American Pastoral	Phillip Roth	1997	US
81	Underworld	Don DeLillo	1997	US
82	Amsterdam	Ian McEwan	1998	UK
83	Disgrace	JM Coetzee	1999	SA
84	Drylands	Thea Astley	1999	AUS
85	Human Stain	Phillip Roth	2000	US
86	White Teeth	Zadie Smith	2000	UK
87	The Blind Assassin	Margaret Atwood	2000	CA
88	The Corrections	Jonathan Franzen	2001	US
89	Journey to the Stone Country	Alex Miller	2002	AUS
90	The Kite Runner	Khaled Hosseini	2003	AFG-US
91	Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell	Susanna Clarke	2004	UK
92	Never Let Me Go	Kazuo Ishiguro	2005	JAP-UK
93	Gilead	Marilyn Robinson	2005	US
94	Carpentaria	Alexis Wright	2006	AUS
95	The Brief Wonderful Life of Oscar Wao	Junot Diaz	2008	DOM-US
96	The Finkler Question	Howard Jacobsen	2010	UK
97	A Sense of An Ending	Julian Barnes	2011	UK
98	A Visit From the Goon Squad	Jennifer Egan	2011	US
99	The Deadman Dance	Kim Scott	2011	AUS
100	Foal’s Bread	Gillian Mears	2012	AUS

If you are a book lover I’d love for you to read any of these along with me and share your thoughts as I blog. I will pick books in groups of five and announce them ahead of time to give the opportunity for anyone interested to be involved.

I would love to hear from you. What do you think of the project? What books did I miss that you would include on your list?

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