time's top 100 novels

the intrepid people at Time (critics Richard Lacayo and Lev Grossman) have come up with their favorite 100 novels published since that magazine debuted in 1923. What brave men these must be to stand in the line of fire of millions of readers around the world, angry that Harry Potter or Hercule Poirot have been left off THE LIST. Says Lacayo:

Lists like this one have two purposes. One is to instruct. The other of course is to enrage. We're bracing ourselves for the e-mails that start out: "You moron! You pathetic bourgeoise insect! How could you have left off...(insert title here)." We say Mrs. Dalloway. You say Mrs. Bridge. We say Naked Lunch. You say Breakfast at Tiffanys. Let's call the whole thing off? Just the opposite—bring it on."

Here are some of my favorites.

All the King's Men, Robert Penn Warren
At Swim-Two-Birds, Flann O'Brien
Atonement, Ian McEwan
Beloved, Toni Morrison
The Berlin Stories, Christopher Isherwood
Brideshead Revisited, Evelyn Waugh
The Catcher in the Rye, J.D. Salinger
The Crying of Lot 49, Thomas Pynchon
A Dance to the Music of Time, Anthony Powell
Death Comes for the Archbishop, Willa Cather
Gone With the Wind, Margaret Mitchell
Gravity's Rainbow, Thomas Pynchon
A Handful of Dust, Evelyn Waugh
The Heart of the Matter, Graham Greene
Light in August, William Faulkner
Mrs. Dalloway, Virginia Woolf
Never Let Me Go, Kazuo Ishiguro
1984, George Orwell
On the Road, Jack Kerouac
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Ken Kesey
The Painted Bird, Jerzy Kosinski
A Passage to India, E.M. Forster
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, Muriel Spark
The Sheltering Sky, Paul Bowles
The Sun Also Rises, Ernest Hemingway
Their Eyes Were Watching God, Zora Neale Hurston
To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee
To the Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf
Under the Net, Iris Murdoch
Wide Sargasso Sea, Jean Rhys

For the rest of THE LIST, see the Time site, which also has links to all the original reviews.