I've read or watched the following which is a pretty pale version of the bigger list. Some of these are interesting, like Snowcrash, which I thought was great, but wonder why it got the nod for top 100. Wonder if the gathering was a sci-fi buff. There are several on the list.

The Catcher in the Rye, J.D. Salinger
A Clockwork Orange, Anthony Burgess
Deliverance, James Dickey
The French Lieutenant's Woman, John Fowles
Gone With the Wind, Margaret Mitchell
The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck
I, Claudius, Robert Graves
The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe, C.S. Lewis
Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov
Lord of the Flies, William Golding
The Lord of the Rings, J.R.R. Tolkien
Mrs. Dalloway, Virginia Woolf
Naked Lunch, William Burroughs
Neuromancer, William Gibson
1984, George Orwell
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Ken Kesey
Slaughterhouse-Five, Kurt Vonnegut
Snow Crash, Neal Stephenson
The Sound and the Fury, William Faulkner
To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee

I like this - it's a lot livelier and less canonical than other lists of its kind. Some of the books don't seem to belong there ("Gone With The Wind"?) but others, like "The Blind Assassin" and even "Are You There, God? It's Me, Margaret" are really fun choices.

Nice list.

But where's

Maxine Hong Kingston's "The Woman Warrior"

A compilation of the best of the worst… about the best.

The following are excerpts from actual one-star Amazon.com reviews of books from Time’s list of the 100 best novels from 1923 to the present. Hilarious!

www.themorningnews.org/archiv...nts.php

Interesting, I have a few comments. I wonder how much some of these were influenced by movies rather than books. For example, A Clockwork Orange and One Flew Over the Cuckoos nest. I thought with those 2 that the movies had more impact that the bokos. For example Singing in the Rain in Clockwork Orange is burnt into my brain and Jack Nicholson made Cuckoo's Nest into one of those movies that is etched into my brain.

The Hobbitt and LOTR were a series that I started escaping into at 9 years of age and were a wonderful fantasy world and I have to say that fellow Kiwi Peter Jackson really did them justice in his movies.

It was great to see Philip K Dick in there, but where were Heinlein, Clarke and Asimov? The laws of Robotics will probably come into being one day and we know where they started. I agree with Rockstar, when I thought of classics that I grokked, Stranger in a Strange Land was right up there at the top of my list.

Other classics which amazed me with their absence were Kafka's The Trial and Metamorphosis (which spawned many movies), Hemingway's Old Man and the Sea was especially surprising when on the same web page Ernest's picture was shown on the cover. Finally I would have added Frank Herbet, at least for the Dune series. What a shame that his son couldn't enthrall me in the same way with his ongoing books of the series.

Time really should have consulted us before they put this list together:)

Geez, I only have 28 of them...of course, they're the *best* 28 ;)

Trouble with these so-called Of All Time Lists is this: Time Keeps Moving Onward. So, it makes sense to say "...Up To This Point, In Our Opinions" in a box someplace on the cover.