Quote: richie_d, Wednesday, 9 Jul 2008 12:54Oh, well done, MJ26--just when I'd calmed Leigh down!!!

Quote: MJ26, Wednesday, 9 Jul 2008 12:49This is a list of the 100 Best Modern Novels. The list was compiled by the editorial board of the Modern Library, which is a division of Random House Publishers. I came across it on John Baker's blog.
1. “Ulysses,” James Joyce
2. “The Great Gatsby,” F. Scott Fitzgerald
3. “A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man,” James Joyce
4. “Lolita,” Vladimir Nabokov
5. “Brave New World,” Aldous Huxley
6. “The Sound and the Fury,” William Faulkner
7. “Catch-22,” Joseph Heller
8. “Darkness at Noon,” Arthur Koestler
9. “Sons and Lovers,” D. H. Lawrence
10. “The Grapes of Wrath,” John Steinbeck
11. “Under the Volcano,” Malcolm Lowry
12. “The Way of All Flesh,” Samuel Butler
13. “1984,” George Orwell
14. “I, Claudius,” Robert Graves
15. “To the Lighthouse,” Virginia Woolf
16. “An American Tragedy,” Theodore Dreiser
17. “The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter,” Carson McCullers
18. “Slaughterhouse Five,” Kurt Vonnegut
19. “Invisible Man,” Ralph Ellison
20. “Native Son,” Richard Wright
21. “Henderson the Rain King,” Saul Bellow
22. “Appointment in Samarra,” John O’ Hara
23. “U.S.A.” (trilogy), John Dos Passos
24. “Winesburg, Ohio,” Sherwood Anderson
25. “A Passage to India,” E. M. Forster
26. “The Wings of the Dove,” Henry James
27. “The Ambassadors,” Henry James
28. “Tender Is the Night,” F. Scott Fitzgerald
29. “The Studs Lonigan Trilogy,” James T. Farrell
30. “The Good Soldier,” Ford Madox Ford
31. “Animal Farm,” George Orwell
32. “The Golden Bowl,” Henry James
33. “Sister Carrie,” Theodore Dreiser
34. “A Handful of Dust,” Evelyn Waugh
35. “As I Lay Dying,” William Faulkner
36. “All the King’s Men,” Robert Penn Warren
37. “The Bridge of San Luis Rey,” Thornton Wilder
38. “Howards End,” E. M. Forster
39. “Go Tell It on the Mountain,” James Baldwin
40. “The Heart of the Matter,” Graham Greene
41. “Lord of the Flies,” William Golding
42. “Deliverance,” James Dickey
43. “A Dance to the Music of Time” (series), Anthony Powell
44. “Point Counter Point,” Aldous Huxley
45. “The Sun Also Rises,” Ernest Hemingway
46. “The Secret Agent,” Joseph Conrad
47. “Nostromo,” Joseph Conrad
48. “The Rainbow,” D. H. Lawrence
49. “Women in Love,” D. H. Lawrence
50. “Tropic of Cancer,” Henry Miller
51. “The Naked and the Dead,” Norman Mailer
52. “Portnoy’s Complaint,” Philip Roth
53. “Pale Fire,” Vladimir Nabokov
54. “Light in August,” William Faulkner
55. “On the Road,” Jack Kerouac
56. “The Maltese Falcon,” Dashiell Hammett
57. “Parade’s End,” Ford Madox Ford
58. “The Age of Innocence,” Edith Wharton
59. “Zuleika Dobson,” Max Beerbohm
60. “The Moviegoer,” Walker Percy
61. “Death Comes to the Archbishop,” Willa Cather
62. “From Here to Eternity,” James Jones
63. “The Wapshot Chronicles,” John Cheever
64. “The Catcher in the Rye,” J. D. Salinger
65. “A Clockwork Orange,” Anthony Burgess
66. “Of Human Bondage,” W. Somerset Maugham
67. “Heart of Darkness,” Joseph Conrad
68. “Main Street,” Sinclair Lewis
69. “The House of Mirth,” Edith Wharton
70. “The Alexandria Quartet,” Lawrence Durrell
71. “A High Wind in Jamaica,” Richard Hughes
72. “A House for Ms. Biswas,” V. S. Naipaul
73. “The Day of the Locust,” Nathaniel West
74. “A Farewell to Arms,” Ernest Hemingway
75. “Scoop,” Evelyn Waugh
76. “The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie,” Muriel Spark
77. “Finnegans Wake,” James Joyce
78. “Kim,” Rudyard Kipling
79. “A Room With a View,” E. M. Forster
80. “Brideshead Revisited,” Evelyn Waugh
81. “The Adventures of Augie March,” Saul Bellow
82. “Angle of Repose,” Wallace Stegner
83. “A Bend in the River,” V. S. Naipaul
84. “The Death of the Heart,” Elizabeth Bowen
85. “Lord Jim,” Joseph Conrad
86. “Ragtime,” E. L. Doctorow
87. “The Old Wives’ Tale,” Arnold Bennett
88. “The Call of the Wild,” Jack London
89. “Loving,” Henry Green
90. “Midnight’s Children,” Salman Rushdie
91. “Tobacco Road,” Erskine Caldwell
92. “Ironweed,” William Kennedy
93. “The Magus,” John Fowles
94. “Wide Sargasso Sea,” Jean Rhys
95. “Under the Net,” Iris Murdoch
96. “Sophie’s Choice,” William Styron
97. “The Sheltering Sky,” Paul Bowles
98. “The Postman Always Rings Twice,” James M. Cain
99. “The Ginger Man,” J. P. Donleavy
100. “The Magnificent Ambersons,” Booth Tarkington

Quote: richie_d, Wednesday, 9 Jul 2008 16:05I've never read anything by Rushdie. I think it's the smug look on his face that puts me off.

Quote: leighvtwersky, Wednesday, 9 Jul 2008 12:02I loathe these lists with a vengeance. Of course classics are classics, but there are more than a hundred of them and how does one discriminate??
Who makes these stupid lists up? They're just Saturday night TV coffee-table shallow entertainment rubbish. I love shallow entertainment btw before anyone jumps down my throat, but i just don't think these things can be quantified.
There are as many 'tastes' as there are individuals, and even a change of mood can dictate a change of taste. I loved Harry Potter, I loved Pride and Prejudice, I did not rate Zorba the Greek. I suspect it's only there cos it's the best known modern Greek novel, or probably the only well-known one to the people voting.
What a load of bollocks!

Quote: leighvtwersky, Wednesday, 9 Jul 2008 22:24And who would be the literary equivalent of Diana Ross and the Supremes?