Thursday, July 05, 2007

Influential novels

Earlier today I blathered that On the Road has to be "probably one of the ten most famous and influential novels of the 20th century."

Oh? What are the other nine?

Hmm, well, it would be hard to go wrong with:
  • Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises and For Whom the Bell Tolls
  • Garcia Marquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude
  • Heller, Catch-22
  • Kesey, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
  • "Pauline Reage," Histoire d'O
  • De Lillo, White Noise
  • Nabokov, Lolita
  • Orwell, 1984
  • O'Connor, Wise Blood

    Oops, that's ten already. But what about The Great Gatsby, all of William Falukner, James Joyce, E.M. Forster, Kurt Vonnegut, Philip Roth... Clearly a fool's errand. Here's the Modern Library's 100 Best list.
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