The Modern Library of New York's 100 Classics

Bugg's Take

It's Christmas Eve.

In the words of a popular Christmas jingle... "He's making a list, and checking it twice."

I stumbled across this list the day before yesterday.

It's the Modern Library of New York's 100 Best Novels of the Twentieth Century.

I decided to see just how many classics I've read to this point.

The answer....

*drumroll please*

a whopping 4 out of 100. (as at 26 Dec 2005)

Ok, so one of my New Year's resolutions is going to be to up that statistic by a bit.

Next on my reading list:

Catcher in the Rye by J.D Salinger
A House for Mr Biswas by V.S. Naipaul

The complete list follows: (titles I've read have been crossed off the laundry list)

1. Ulysses - James Joyce
2. The Great Gatsby - F. Scott Fitzgaerld
3. The 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 - Shwerwood 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 Bride of San Luis Ray - 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 Hemmingway
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 Hammet
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 For The Archbishop - Willa Cather
62. From Here to Eternity - James Joyce
63. The Wapshot Chronicle - 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 Durell
71. A High Wind In Jamaica - Richard Hughes
72. A House For Mr Biswas - V.S. Naipaul
73. A Farewell To Arms - Ernest Hemingway
74. The Day Of The Locust - Nathanael West
75. Scoop - Evelyn Waugh
76. The Prime Of Miss Jean Brodie - Muriel Spark
77. Finnegan's 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. Doctrow
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 Maginficent Ambersons - Booth Tarkington