TBR

I have no idea how this is going to work…but I need to try something. Here goes nothing.

This list of 100 novels was drawn up by the editorial board of Modern Library. Where possible, book titles have been linked to either the original New York Times review or a later article about the book.

1. “Ulysses,” James Joyce (read June 2022)
2. “The Great Gatsby,” F. Scott Fitzgerald (read Feb 2024)
3. “A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man,” James Joyce (read June 2022)
4. “Lolita,” Vladimir Nabokov (read October 2021)
5. “Brave New World,” Aldous Huxley (read April 2024)
6. “The Sound and the Fury,” William Faulkner (Oct. 2024)
7. “Catch-22,” Joseph Heller (Read 2025)
8. “Darkness at Noon,” Arthur Koestler
9. “Sons and Lovers,” D. H. Lawrence (March 2025)
10. “The Grapes of Wrath,” John Steinbeck (March 2025)
11. “Under the Volcano,” Malcolm Lowry
12. “The Way of All Flesh,” Samuel Butler (April 2025)
13. “1984,” George Orwell (May 2024)
14. “I, Claudius,” Robert Graves
15. “To the Lighthouse,” Virginia Woolf
16. “An American Tragedy,” Theodore Dreiser (April 2025)
17. “The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter,” Carson McCullers (May 2025)
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 (May 2025)
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

From June 2024 Facebook post asking people to create my TBR as a part of the “12 Books Challenge: 12 months to read 12 books recommended by 12 friends”

Jenny Offill’s Weather recommended by Jonathan Elmore
Angle of Repose by Wallace Stegner recommended by Doy Cave
Caught in the Moonlight Andrew Darovich recommended by Jeff Kelly (Nov 2024)
Dolly Alderton’s Good Material recommended by Cecilia Tran Arango (Jul 2024)
Mad Honey Jodi Piccoult and Jennifer Finney Boylan recommended by Vee Owens
Ashes to Ink Lisa Lucca recommended by Lisa Lucca
The Venice Sketchbook by Rhys Bowen recommended by Greg Dinan (July 2024)
The Pirate Coast Richard Zachs recommended by Thom Williamson (Nov 2024)
Mydas Jon Goode recommended by Prem Yndrome (Jul 2024)
There There by Tommy Orange recommended by Allison Grace (Jul 2024)
American Sniper Chris Kyle recommended by Jeff Campbell
Donna Tartt’s The Secret History recommended by Jeff Jackson (Jun 2024)
Donna Tartt’s The Little Friend recommended by Jeff Jackson (Dec 2024)
Plainsong Kent Haruf recommended by Olivia Carr Edenfield (Nov 2024)
Raney Clyde Edgerton recommended by Doy Cave (Sep 2024)

Mentioned in Frye, Steven. Understanding Cormac McCarthy, South Carolina UP, Columbia, SC, 2009

Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers of Karamazov – “Dueña Alfonsa’s character and the nature of her expression reflect the influence of Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers of Karamazov, since she emerges as a kind of Grand Inquisitor figure.” p. 106
Faulkner “The Bear” 117
Melville Moby Dick 117
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
- Lectures on the History of Philosophy, (1805)
- Encyclopedia (1817)
- Lectures on Aesthetics (1818)
- Philosophy of Fine Art (1818)
- Lectures on the Philosophy of History (1822)
T.S. Eliot “The Wasteland” 140

Mentioned by Parrish, Timothy. “History and the Problem of Evil in McCarthy’s Western Novels.” The Cambridge Companion to Cormac McCarthy, edited by Steven Frye, pp. 67-78.

Don Quixote
Dante
Cervantes
Lucretius
St. Augustine
Charles Darwin
Nietzsche
Plato
Willa Cather
Gabriel García Marquez
Alejo Carpentier
Juan Rulfo
Ozymandias (Shelley)

The 100 Best Books of the 21st Century

As voted on by 503 novelists, nonfiction writers, poets, critics and other book lovers — with a little help from the staff of The New York Times Book Review.

100 Tree of Smoke, Denis Johnson 2007

99 How to Be Both, Ali Smith 2014

98 Bel Canto Ann Patchett 2001

97 Men We Reaped Jesmyn Ward 2013

96 Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments, Saidiya Hartman 2019

95 Bring Up the Bodies, Hilary Mantel 2012

94 On Beauty Zadie Smith 2005

93 Station Eleven Emily St. John Mandel 2014 (Read Summer 2021)

92 The Days of Abandonment Elena Ferrante; translated by Ann Goldstein 2005

91 The Human Stain Philip Roth 2000

The Sympathizer

Viet Thanh Nguyen 2015

The Return

Hisham Matar 2016

The Collected Stories
of Lydia Davis

Detransition, Baby

Torrey Peters 2021

Frederick Douglass

David W. Blight 2018

Pastoralia

George Saunders 2000

The Emperor of All Maladies

Siddhartha Mukherjee 2010

When We Cease to Understand the World

Benjamín Labatut; translated by Adrian Nathan West 2021

Hurricane Season

Fernanda Melchor; translated by Sophie Hughes 2020

Pulphead

John Jeremiah Sullivan 2011

The Story of the Lost Child

Elena Ferrante; translated by Ann Goldstein 2015

A Manual for
Cleaning Women

Lucia Berlin 2015

Septology

Jon Fosse; translated by Damion Searls 2022

77 An American Marriage Tayari Jones 2018 (May 2025)

76 Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow Gabrielle Zevin 2022 (Feb 2025)

Exit West

Mohsin Hamid 2017

Olive Kitteridge

Elizabeth Strout 2008

The Passage of Power

Robert Caro 2012

Secondhand Time

Svetlana Alexievich; translated by Bela Shayevich 2016

The Copenhagen Trilogy

Tove Ditlevsen; translated by Tiina Nunnally and Michael Favala Goldman 2021

All Aunt Hagar’s Children

Edward P. Jones 2006

The New Jim Crow

Michelle Alexander 2010

The Friend

Sigrid Nunez 2018

Far From the Tree

Andrew Solomon 2012

We the Animals

Justin Torres 2011

The Plot Against America

Philip Roth 2004

The Great Believers

Rebecca Makkai 2018

Veronica

Mary Gaitskill 2005

10:04

Ben Lerner 2014

Demon Copperhead

Barbara Kingsolver 2022 (Apr 2024)

Authors who allowed their top 10 picks to be shared

Stephen King, Min Jin Lee, Karl Ove Knausgaard, Bonnie Garmus, Nana Kwame Adjei‑Brenyah, Junot Díaz, Sarah Jessica Parker, James Patterson, Elin Hilderbrand, Annette Gordon‑Reed, Rebecca Roanhorse, Marlon James, Roxane Gay, Jonathan Lethem, Sarah MacLean, Ed Yong, Thomas Chatterton Williams, Paul Tremblay, Nick Hornby, Scott Turow, Daniel Alarcón, Honorée Fanonne Jeffers, Lucy Sante, Gary Shteyngart, Anand Giridharadas, Jessamine Chan, Michael Robbins, Alma Katsu, Megan Abbott, Joshua Ferris, Ann Napolitano, John Irving, Tiya Miles, Jami Attenberg, Stephen L. Carter, Sarah Schulman, Elizabeth Hand, Dion Graham, Jeremy Denk, Morgan Jerkins, Michael Roth & Ryan Holiday

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