Dick Pigott's Reading Lists


The Modern Library Association's 
1999 list of best novels published in English

I read through this list in reverse order. I gave myself four months to get through Ulysses.
 

1.  Ulysses by James Joyce
2.  The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
3.  A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce
4.  Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
5.  Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
6.  The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner
7.  Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
8.  Darkness at Noon by Arthur Koestler
9.  Sons and Lovers by D.H. Lawrence
10.  The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
11.  Under the Volcano by Malcolm Lowry
12.  The Way of All Flesh by Samuel Butler
13.  1984 by George Orwell
14.  I, Claudius by Robert Graves
15.  To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf
16.  An American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser
17.  The Heart is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers
18.  Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut
19.  Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
20.  Native Son by Richard Wright
21.  Henderson the Rain King by Saul Bellow
22.  Appointment in Samarra by John O'Hara
23.  U.S.A. (trilogy) by John Dos Passos
24.  Winesburg, Ohio by Sherwood Anderson
25.  A Passage to India by E.M. Forster
26.  The Wings of the Dove by Henry James
27.  The Ambassadors  by Henry James
28.  Tender is the Night by F. Scott Fitzgerald
29.  The Studs Logan Trilogy by James T. Farrell
30.  The Good Soldier by Ford Madox Ford
31.  Animal Farm by George Orwell
32.  The Golden Bowl by Henry James
33.  Sister Carrie by Theodore Dreiser
34.  A Handful of Dust by Evelyn Waugh
35.  As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner
36.  All the King's Men by Robert Penn Warren 
37.  The Bridge of San Luis Rey by Thornton Wilder
38.  Howards End by E.M. Forster
39.  Go Tell it on the Mountain by James Baldwin
40.  The Heart of the Matter by Graham Greene 
41.  Lord of the Flies by William Golding
42.  Deliverance by James Dickey 
43.  A Dance to the Music of Time (series) by Anthony Powell
44.  Point Counter Point by Aldous Huxley
45.  The Sun also Rises by Ernest Hemingway
46.  The Secret Agent by Joseph Conrad
47.  Nostromo by Joseph Conrad
48.  The Rainbow by D.H. Lawrence
49.  Women in Love by D.H. Lawrence
50.  Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller
51. The Naked and the Dead by Norman Mailer
52.  Portnoy's Complaint by Philip Roth
53.  Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov
54.  Light in August by William Faulkner
55.  On the Road by Jack Kerouac
56.  The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett
57.  Parade's End by Ford Madox Ford
58.  The Age of Innnocence by Edith Wharton
59.  Zuleika Dobson by Max Beerbohm
60.  The Moviegoer by Walker Percy
61.  Death comes for the Archbishop by Willa Cather
62.  From Here to Eternity by James Jones
63.  The Wapshot Chronicles by John Cheever
64.  The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger
65.  A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess
66. Of Human Bondage by W. Somerset Maugham
67.  Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
68.  Main Street by Sinclair Lewis
69.  The House of Mirth by Edith Wharton
70.  The Alexandria Quartet by Lawrence Durell
71.  A High Wind in Jamaica by Richard Hughes
72.  A House for Mr. Biswas by V.S. Naipaul 
73.  The Day of the Locust by Nathanael West
74.  A farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway
75.  Scoop by Evelyn Waugh
76.  The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Spark
77.  Finnegans Wake by James Joyce
78.  Kim by Rudyard Kipling
79.  A Room with a View by E.M. Forster
80.  Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh
81.  The Adventures of Augie March by Saul Bellow
82.  Angle of Repose by Wallace Stegner
83.  A Bend in the River by V.S. Naipaul
84.  The Death of the Heart by Elizabeth Bowen 
85.  Lord Jim by Joseph Conrad
86.  Ragtime by E.L. Doctorow
87.  The Old Wives' Tale by Arnold Bennett
88.  The Call of the Wild by Jack London
89.  Loving by Henry Green
90.  Midnight's Children by Salman Rushdie
91.  Tobacco Road by Erskine Caldwell
92.  Ironweed by William Kennedy
93.  The Magus by John Fowles
94.  Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys
95.  Under the Net by Iris Murdoch
96.  Sophie's Choice by William Styron
97.  The Sheltering Sky by Paul Bowles
98.  The Postman always Rings Twice by James M. Cain
99.  The Ginger Man by J.P. Donleavy
100.  The Magnificent Ambersons by Booth Tarkington
Copyright © 1999 by Random House, Inc.
Books I'm going to read 

20th Century American novels

William Faulkner: Sanctuary, The Hamlet, The Town, The Mansion, Soldier’s Pay, A Fable, Sartoris, Pylon, Intruder In The Dust, The Reivers, Requiem For A Nun

Edith Wharton: The Custom Of The Country, Old New York, The Reef, Backward Glance

Henry James: Washington Square, The Europeans, The American, The Ambassadors, The Awkward Age, The Bostonians, The Turn Of The Screw (novella)

Ernest Hemingway:To Have And Have Not, Islands In The Stream, Men Without Women, In Our Time, Green  Hills Of Africa, Winner Take Nothing

Theodore Dreiser: The Genius, The Color Of A Great City, The Stoic

e.e. Cummings: The Enormous Room

Sinclair Lewis: Elmer Gantry, Babbit, Dodsworth, It Can’t happen Here

Willa Cather: My Antonia, O Pioneers, Shadows On The Rock, Lucy Gayheart, The Professor’s House, My Mortal Enemy, The Song Of The Lark

F. Scott Fitzgerald: The Beautiful And Damned, Taps at Reveille (short story)

Sherwood Anderson: Beyond Desire, Marching Men, Many Marriages, Poor White, Dark Laughter

Erskine Caldwell: God’s Little Acre, Poor Fool, Journeyman, Trouble In July

John Dos Passos: Chosen Country, The Great Day, Midcentury (District Of Columbia Trilogy)

John Steinbeck: In Dubious Battle, The Short Reign of Pippin IV, The Wayward Bus, The Moon Is Down

Robert Penn Warren: Night Rider, At Heaven’s Gate, Band Of Angels, The Cave, Wilderness A Tale Of The Civil War, A Place To Come To

Katherine Anne Porter: Pale Horse, Pale Rider, (Collected Stories Of) Ship Of Fools, The Days, Before, The Leaning Tower, The Never Ending Wrong

Eudora Welty: Losing Battles, The Robber Bridegroom, The Golden Apples, The Ponder Heart

Thomas Wolfe: The Hills Beyond (short story), From Death To  Morning

John Cheever:The Wapshot Scandal, Falconer, Bullet Park 

Saul Bellow: Mr. Sammler’s Planet, The Dangling Man, The Victim

Henry Miller: The Tropic Of Capricorn, Black Spring

19th Century American novels

Herman Melville: Paradise Of Bachelor's, Confidence Man, Typee, Omoo, Voyage Thither, White Jacket

Mark Twain: Roughing It, The Adventures Of Tom Sawyer, Life On The Mississippi

Bret Harte: Gabril Conroy, Gold Rush (short story)

William Dean Howells: Their Wedding Journey, A Hazard Of New Fortunes

Stephen Crane: Maggie, A Girl Of The Streets

20th Century British novels

Graham Greene: The End Of The Affair, A Burnt-Out Case, Brighton Rock, The Honorary Counsel 

Virginia Woolf: Mrs. Dalloway, Mrs. Dalloway’s Party, Night And Day, Orlando, The Waves, The Voyage Out, A Room Of One’s Own, Between The Acts

E.M. Forster: The Longest Journey, Where Angels Fear To Tread 

D.H. Lawrence: Lady Chatterley’s Lover

Joseph Conrad: Typhoon and Other Tales, Secret Sharer, An Outcast Of The Islands, Nigger Of The Narcissus, Informer, Anarchist

Evelyn Waugh: Officers And Gentlemen, The Eve Of Battle, Decline And Fall

Somerset Maugham: Liza Of Lambeth, The Moon And Sixpence

Aldous Huxley: A Virgin Heart

19th Century British novels

Charles Dickens: Bleak House, Pickwick Papers, Oliver Twist, Old Curiosity Shop, Hard Times, Nicholas Nickelby

Daniel Defoe: Moll Flanders, A Journal Of The Plague Year, Roxanna Or The Fortunate Mistress

Rudyard Kipling: The Man Who Would Be King And Other Stories, The Light That Failed, Kim, Soldier’s Three, The Jungle Book, Many Inventions

Oscar Wilde: The Picture Of Dorian Gray

H.G. Welles: The War Of The Worlds, The Time Machine, The Invisible Man (four complete novels)

Thomas Hardy: Tess Of The D’Urbervilles (the webmaster's favorite book of all time) , Far From The Madding Crowd

Henry Fielding: Tom Jones

Novels translated from the French

Victor Hugo: Notre Dame Of Paris, The Hunchback Of Notre Dame, Claude Geuex, The Laughing Man, The Terrible Year, 1793

Jules Verne; An Antarctic Mystery, Five Weeks In A Balloon, Master Of The World, Off On A Comet

Alexander Dumas: The Count Of Monte Cristo, Corsican Brothers, Black Tulip, Man In The Iron Mask, The Three Musketeers, Twenty Years After

Marcel Proust: In Search Of Lost Time (Vols. I - VI)

Novels translated from the Russian

Fyododr Dostoyevsky: Notes From The Underground, The Adolescent, The Possessed

Victor Tolstoy: War And Peace, Death Of Ivan Ilych, Confession, Exiled To Siberia

Books by Indian authors

Salman Rushdie: The Satanic Verses, Shame, The Moor’s Last Sigh

V.S. Naipaul: The Enigma Of Arrival, Guerrillas, In a Free State, The Mimic Men, Mr. Stone and The Knights Companion, The Mystic Masseuse, The Suffrage Of Elvira, A Flag On The Island, A Way In The World

Authors for the next list

William Styron, Norman Mailer, John Updike, Philip Roth, James Baldwin, Frank McCourt, Thornton Wilder, William Burroughs, James Jones, Robert Louis Stevenson, Iris Murdoch, Doris Lessing, Kurt Vonnegut, James Clavell 


 
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