Modern Library's Top 100 Novels of the 20th Century

I was vexed by some aspects of the NEA's Big Read list so I thought I'd look at the Modern Library list instead. This list was also controversial when it came out, not least because the #1 book on the list is an impenetrable fog of absinthe-laced stream-of-consciousness that few people ever really enjoyed or understood. But what the hey, let's look at the list, shall we? After the jump?

1 Ulysses – James Joyce
2 The Great Gatsby – F. Scott Fitzgerald
3 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 Slaugterhouse-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. – 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 Howard's 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 – Anthony Powell
44 Point Counterpoint – 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 for 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 Mr. Biswas – V.S. Naipaul
73 The Day of the Locust – Nathanael 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

So on this list I've only read 12. But many of them are things I've no intention of ever bothering with, starting with number one, Ulysses. I'm not going to put 18 months of my time into a book I won't really understand even after I finish it the third time. I might someday consider Finnegan's Wake, but as a rule I'm not impressed by books that only 1% of readers will ever actually understand, and I refuse to be one of those people who's read Ulysses, and didn't like or understand it, but claims it's this wonderful work of literature so that they'll sound smart.