100 Must-Read Novels

It is ridiculously hard to pick an all-time-best or must-read list. There are so many out there an no one really agrees.  I chose TIME's list because the works are more contemporary and there is a wide scope. I wish there were more novels on it by women--and fewer by Saul Bellow and Thomas Pynchon. Also, why does every list-maker thing Infinite Jest is worth reading? It's not. So I've made a few replacements of my own, which are noted.

Strike-through I have finished
Bold are books I own copies of but have not read

1. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, by Douglas Adams, replaces The Adventures of Augie March, by Saul Bellow
2. All the King’s Men, by Robert Penn Warren
3. American Pastoral, by Philip Roth
4. An American Tragedy, by Theodore Dreiser
5. The Bell Jar, by Sylvia Plath replaces Animal Farm, by George Orwell
6. Appointment in Samarra, by John O'Hara
7. Valley of the Dolls, by Jacqueline Susann replaces Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret, by Judy Blume
8. The Assistant, by Bernard Malamud
9. At Swim-Two-Birds, by Flann O'Brien
10. Atonement, by Ian McEwan
11. Beloved, by Toni Morrison
12. The Berlin Stories, by Christopher Isherwood
13. The Storyteller, by Mario Varga Llosa replaces The Big Sleep, by Raymond Chandler
14. The Blind Assassin, by Margaret Atwood
15. Blood Meridian, by Cormac McCarthy
16. Brideshead Revisited, by Evelyn Waugh
17. The Bridge of San Luis Rey, by Thornton Wilder
18. Call It Sleep, by Henry Roth
19. Catch-22, by Joseph Heller
20. The Catcher in the Rye, by J.D. Sallinger
21. A Clockwork Orange, by Anthony Burgess
22. Sophie's Choice, replaces The Confessions of Nat Turner by William Styron
23. The Corrections, by Jonathan Franzen
24. Atlas Shrugged, by Ayn Rand, replaces (I don't like it, but I think it has to be done) The Crying of Lot 49, by Thomas Pynchon
25. A Fine Balance, by Rohinton Mistry replaces, A Dance to the Music of Time, by Anthony Powell
26. Miss Lonelyhearts and The Day of the Locust, by Nathanael West
27. Death Comes for the Archbishop, by Willa Cather
28. A Death in the Family, by James Agee
29. The Death of the Heart, by Elizabeth Bowen
30. Deliverance, by James Dickey
31. Dog Soldiers, by Robert Stone
32. Falconer, by John Cheever
33. The French Lieutenant’s Woman, by John Fowles
34. The Golden Notebook, by Dorris Lessing
35. Go Tell it on the Mountain, by James Baldwin
36. Gone With the Wind, by Margaret Mitchell
37. The Grapes of Wrath, by John Steinbeck
38. The Good Soldier, by Ford Maddox Ford, replaces Gravity’s Rainbow, by Thomas Pynchon
39. The Great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzgerald
40. Scoop, by Evelyn Waugh, replaces A Handful of Dust, by Evelyn Waugh
41. The Heart is A Lonely Hunter, by Carson McCullers
42. Kafka on the Shore, by Haruki Murakami, replaces The Heart of the Matter, by Graham Green
43. The Home and the World, by Rabindranath Tagore, replaces Herzog, by Saul Bellow
44. Housekeeping, by Marilynn Robinson
45. A House for Mr. Biswas, by V.S. Naipaul
46. The God of Small Things, by Arundhati Roy, I, Claudius, by Robert Graves
47. Enders Game, by Orson Scott Card, replaces Infinite Jest, by David Foster Wallace
48. Invisible Man, by Ralph Ellison
49. Light in August, by William Faulkner
50. The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe, by C.S. Lewis
51. Lolita, by Vladimir Nabokov
52. Lord of the Flies, by William Golding
53. The Lord of the Rings, by J.R.R. Tolkein
54. The Moviegoer, by Walker Percy
55. Loving, by Henry Green
56. Lucky Jim, by Kingsley Amis
57. The Man Who Loved Children, by Christina Stead
58. Midnight’s Children, by Salman Rushdie
59. Money, by Martin Amis
60. Kindred, by Octavia Butler replaces Mrs. Dalloway, by Virginia Woolf
61. Naked Lunch, by William Burroughs
62. Native Son, by Richard Wright
63. Neuromancer, by William Gibson
64. The Children of Men, by P.D. James replaces Never Let Me Go, by Kazuo Ishiguro
65. 1984, by George Orwell
66. On the Road, by Jack Karouac
67. One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, by Ken Kesey
68. The Painted Bird, by Jerzy Kosinski
69. Pale Fire, by Vladimir Nabokov
70. A Passage to India, by E.M. Forster
71. Play It As It Lays, by Joan Didion
72. Portnoy’s Complaint, by Philip Roth
73. Possession, by A.S. Byatt
74. The Power and the Glory, by Graham Greene
75. The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, by Muriel Spark
76. Rabbit, Run, by John Updike
77. Ragtime, by E. L. Doctorow
78. The Recognitions, by William Gaddis
79. Red Harvest, by Dashiell Hammett
80. Revolutionary Road, by Richard Yates
81. The Sheltering Sky, by Paul Bowles
82. Slaughterhouse Five, by Kurt Vonnegut
83. Snow Crash, by Neal Stephenson
84. The Sot-Weed Factor, by John Barth
85. The Sound and the Fury, by William Faulkner
86. The Sportswriter, by Richard Ford
87. The Spy Who Came in From the Cold, by John le Carre
88. The Sun Also Rises, by Ernest Hemingway
89. Their Eyes Were Watching God, by Zora Neal Hurston
90. Things Fall Apart, by Chinua Achebe
91. To Kill a Mockingbird, by Harper Lee
92. To the Lighthouse, by Virginia Woolf
93. Tropic of Cancer, by Henry Miller
94. Ubik, by Philip K. Dick
95. Under the Net, by Iris Murdoch
96. Under the Volcano, by Malcolm Lowry
97. Watchmen, by Alan Moore and David Gibbons
98. White Noise, by Don DeLillo
99. White Teeth, by Zadie Smith
100. Wide Sargasso Sea, by Jean Rhys