The Elliot's Reading Top 100 Books - with authors' names included!

Here is the Elliot's Reading Top 100 Books, with authors' names included. Thanks for your suggestions for filling the "100th" spot - which opened up after alert reader TG noticed that On the Road appeared twice. I mentioned some of the suggestions in previous posts; others that came in asked about Doris Lessing - I really liked her earlier, African-set novels and of course read The Golden Notebook, but don't think I want to re-read it - seems like it was best read and appreciated in its time. MMcV suggested Balzac; for me, his work is all of a piece and no single novel, at least that I've read, stands out as a worthy selection in and of itself - maybe my shortcoming - fans will remember that Bob Dylan, who I believe is the world's greatest living artist, had words of praise for "Mr. B" in his memoir (also praise for Chekhov's stories). I considered two books that I really liked many years back: Look Homeward, Angel - which in high school was my favorite novel "of all time" - makes me afraid to re-read it - and Cosmicomics - again, I don't know how well it might stand up. My selection for the 100th spot: Carson McCullers's The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter - which may lead you to read her novellas and A Member of the Wedding as well. If I could get some do-overs, I can see a few that I might trim in favor of Doctor Zhivago or Robinson Crusoe. But let's leave the list as it stands:

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1.     Don Quixote. Miguel de Cervantes

2.     War and Peace. Leo Tolstoy

3.     Crime and Punishment. Fyodor Dostoyevsky

4.     Swann’s Way. Marcel Proust

5.     A Sentimental Education. Gustav Flaubert

6.     The Red and the Black. Stendahl

7.     The Magic Mountain. Thomas Mann

8.     Ulysses. James Joyce

9.     Light in August. William Faulkner

10.  A Farewell to Arms. Ernest Hemingway

11.  Mrs. Dalloway. Virginia Woolf

12.  Emma. Jane Austen

13.  Bleak House. Charles Dickens

14.  The Lady with the Little Dog and other stories. Anton Chekhov

15.  A Passage to India. E.M. Forster

16.  The Color Purple. Alice Walker

17.  Death Comes for the Archbishop. Willa Cather

18.  Invisible Man. Ralph Ellison

19.  The God of Small Things. Arundhati Roy

20.  The Leopard. Giusseppe di Lampedusa

21.  Confessions of Zeno. Italo Svevo

22.  Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage. Alice Munro

23.  The Hill Bachelors. William Trevor

24.  Cathedral. Raymond Carver

25.  The Age of Innocence. Edith Wharton

26.  Things Fall Apart. Chinua Achebe

27.  Tom Jones. Henry Fielding

28.  Museums and Women . John Updike

29.  American Pastoral. Philip Roth

30.  Fathers and Sons. Ivan Turgenev

31.  The Elephant Vanishes. Haruki Murakami

32.  The Crying of Lot 49. Thomas Pynchon

33.  Middlemarch. George Eliot

34.  A Turn of the Screw and other stories. Henry James

35.  A Month in the Country. J.L. Carr

36.  The Light in the Piazza. Elizabeth Spencer

37.  The Good Soldier. Ford Maddox Ford

38.  100 Years of Solitude. Gabriel Garcia Marquez

39.  The Bell Jar. Sylvia Plath

40.  Mr. Mani. A.B. Yehoshua

41.  Snow. Orhan Pamuk

42.  Snow Falling on Cedars. David Guterson

43.  To Kill a Mockingbird. Harper Lee

44.  Nine Stories. J.D. Salinger

45.  Lord Jim. Joseph Conrad

46.  Moby-Dick. Herman Melville

47.  The Scarlet Letter. Nathaniel Hawthorne

48.  Wuthering Heights. Emily Bronte

49.  The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Mark Twain

50.  A Separate Peace. John Knowles

51.  Lord of the Flies. William Golding

52.  Jane Eyre. Charlotte Bronte

53.  The Tin Drum. Gunter Grass

54.  Crossing to Safety. Wallace Stegner

55.  Mrs. Bridge. Evan S. Connell

56.  Metamorphosis and other stories. Franz Kafka

57.  The Unbearable Lightness of Being. Milan Kundera

58.  The Known World. Edward Jones

59.  Germinal. Emile Zola

60.  One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. Alexander Solzhenitsyn

61.  The Adventures of Augie March. Saul Bellow

62.  The Origin of the Brunists. Robert Coover

63.  Pale Fire. Vladimir Nabokov

64.  A House for Mr. Biswas. V.S. Naipaul

65.  The Power and the Glory. Graham Greene

66.  Lonesome Dove. Larry McMurtry

67.  The Golden Gate. Vikram Seth

68.  A Fine Balance. Rohinton Mistry

69.  The Great Gatsby. F.Scott Fitzgerald

70.  On the Road. Jack Kerouac

71.  Jude the Obscure. Thomas Hardy

72.  Beloved. Toni Morrison

73.  A Good Man Is Hard to Find. Flannery O’Connor

74.  A Worn Path. Eudora Welty

75.  A Crown of Feathers and other stories. Isaac Bashevis Singer

76.  Their Eyes Were Watching God. Zora Neale Hurston

77.  A Confederacy of Dunces. John Kennedy Toole

78.  So Long, See You Tomorrow. William Maxwell

79.  The Housebreaker of Shady Hill. John Cheever

80.  The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner. Alan Sillitoe

81.  Suite Francaise. Irene Nemerovsky

82.  The Heart Is a Lonely Hunger. Carson McCullers

83.  Bonfire of the Vanities. Tom Wolfe

84.  All the King’s Men. Robert Penn Warren

85.  The Executioner’s Song. Norman Mailer.

86.  The Haunting of Hill House. Shirley Jackson

87.  Go Tell It on the Mountain. James Baldwin

88.  The Grapes of Wrath. John Steinbeck

89.  The Sheltering Sky. Paul Bowles

90.  Gulliver’s Travels. Jonathan Swift

91.  1984. George Orwell

92.  Brave New World. Aldous Huxley

93.  Austerlitz. W.G. Sebald

94.  Frankenstein. Mary Shelley

95.  Ficciones. Jorge Luis Borges

96.  Atonement. Ian MacEwan

97.  11 Kinds of Loneliness. Richard Yates

98.  The Secret History. Donna Tartt

99.  Blood Meridian. Cormac McCarthy

100.                 Catch-22. Joseph Heller