stoutfellow

I'm not sure what prompted me to compile this list. I was thinking about modern mainstream literature, and the extent to which I'm qualified to judge the "greatness" of works that I've read. My thought was that I'm really not particularly qualified, because I haven't read all that much of it. The ordinologist in me struck, and I decided to compile a list of modern mainstream novels that I've read. The restrictions were as follows. First, I'm restricting to novels, just for convenience. With a few exceptions, I excluded genre novels - science fiction, fantasy, Western, mystery, espionage, romance, and historical fiction. I used 1900 as a convenient cutoff date, and, for certainty's sake, stuck to books that I actually have. This last knocks out only a handful of books that I read, but did not like sufficiently to buy.

Anyway, for anyone who's interested, here's the full list.

Joseph Conrad: Lord Jim; Heart of Darkness
P. G. Wodehouse: The Code of the Woosters; Leave It To Psmith; Psmith Journalist
Graham Greene: Loser Take All; The Human Factor
Evelyn Waugh: The Decline and Fall
Marguerite Yourcenar: Hadrian's Memoirs
Umberto Eco: The Name of the Rose
Sigrid Undset: Master of Hestviken; Kristin Lavransdatter
Thomas Mann: The Magic Mountain; Buddenbrooks
Henry James: The Ambassadors
Jack London: White Fang; The Call of the Wild
F. Scott Fitzgerald: The Great Gatsby
William Faulkner: Absalom, Absalom
Sinclair Lewis: It Can't Happen Here; Main Street
John Steinbeck: Cannery Row; Of Mice and Men
Pearl Buck: The Three Daughters of Madame Liang
Chaim Potok: The Chosen; The Promise; My Name Is Asher Lev
Walker Percy: The Moviegoer; The Last Gentleman
John Nichols: New Mexico Trilogy
Saul Bellow: The Dean's December; Herzog
Amy Tan: The Joy Luck Club
Gabriel Garcia Marquez: One Hundred Years of Solitude
Chinua Achebe: Things Fall Apart; Anthills of the Savannah
Alan Paton: Cry, the Beloved Country; Too Late the Phalarope