The Modern Library List Revisited

Although I am still not quite ready yet to give any sort of year end wrap-up, I have been giving it a little thought.  You know how at the beginning of the year you make these goals, which at the end of the year you sort of wish you hadn't really stated so publicly?  In January I decided this was the year I was going to tackle the Modern Library List of 100 Best Novels.  I wasn't planning on attempting to read them all in 2006, but I thought an attainable goal of ten books from the list (numbers 100-91) wasn't asking too much.  I might even be able to read twenty books.  Well, maybe not.  I was thinking that I was rather a failure as I am still reading #96 (the most excellent, but very long Sophie's Choice). In actuality I have read eight (granted a few of them are out of sequence, but does that matter?).  Okay as soon as I finish Sophie's Choice I will have read eight.  I almost reached the goal. 

What brought this little declaration back (I had sort of mentally pushed it to the back of my mind and was planning on just ignoring that I ever made this statement) was discovering this reader doing the same thing (and being far more successful at it than I have been).  While the ML list is by no means perfect....not many women, only fiction written in English, why so many books by single authors?, no Dickens, no Hardy, no Eliot, no--fill in the blank with your favorite classic author-- did I mention not many women?  However, I have yet to find the perfect list.  My original motivation for trying to read it was simply to be exposed to great authors I would not likely pick up otherwise.  Here is where I stand with the list (the books crossed off in red are the ones that I read this year, and the ones in black I have read previously):

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

I have decided to continue reading from the list (as a very longterm sort of project).  As a matter of fact, I think I will have a variety of goals, which I am still pondering.  I just need to think about how I want to approach the list next year.  You might have noticed I tend to be detail oriented...I like working my way through the list from the bottom to the top.  But maybe it doesn't really matter.  If I am more likely to read ten or fifteen new titles next year by just picking ten or fifteen that sound appealing, maybe I should forego working my way systematically from bottom to top and choose randomly?  Has anyone read all 100?  I am nearly a fourth of the way through (surely a paltry number compared to some, but you have to start somewhere).  Is anyone else going to fess up to the goals they set earlier this year and whether or not they achieved them?

By the way...this is my other favorite list...I have read 25 of those books!  I like that the books cover all periods and many languages.  But no War and peace?...