What we’re about
The Modern Library's 100 Best Novels is a list of the best English-language novels of the 20th century as selected by the Modern Library, an American publishing company owned by Random House. Since 2011, this book club, previously known as the Modern Library Top 100 Books Club, has gone through the list and read some amazing novels including the works of Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Faulkner, Wharton, Woolf, Nabokov and more.
Recently, book club found itself at a crossroads when it finished the last of the novels on the list. After 9 years of meeting, the question was what next? Having enjoyed hours of fruitful discussion, members decided to keep going and set their eyes on a new target. Among the many conversations over the years, one of the consistent debates has been why some books made the list when there are so many better books out there. And so a new list has been born.
The Modern Library Book Club will keep to its founding purpose – to provide an opportunity to revisit modern classics of English Literature – but this new list is a compilation of works that members think deserve some recognition. Some of these books have made it onto other top 100 lists, some are other works by authors that made the Modern Library's Top 100, while still others may not be well known.
The book club's list, not in reading order, is as follows:
The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing
Middlemarch by George Eliot
One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann
Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon
Ethan Frome by Edith Wharton
Death In Venice by Thomas Mann
The Death of Ivan Llych by Leo Tolstoy
Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
Tarry Flynn by Patrick Kavanaugh
Regeneration by Pat Barker
Ending UP by Kingsley Amis
Time's Arrow by Martin Amis
Gringos by Charles Portis
Child of God by Cormac McCarthy
Lucky Jim by Kingsley Amis
The Talented Mr. Ripley by Patricia Highsmith
The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson
Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates
Disgrace by J.M. Coetzee
Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest by Ken Kesey
The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway
The Jungle by Upton Sinclair
The Awakening by Kate Chopin
Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie
Things Fall Apart by Chinua Adeche
Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier
The War of the Worlds by HG Wells
Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson
Kate Vaiden by Reynolds Price
Nightwoods by Charles Frazier
Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison
East of the Mountains by David Gutherson
Beloved by Toni Morrison
To Kill A Mockingbird by Harper Lee
Ceremony by Leslie Mormon Silko
Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand
Ficciones by Jorge Luis Borges
The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood
The Time of the Hero by Mario Vargas Llosa
The House of the Spirits by Isabelle Allende
The Death of Artemio Cruz by Carlose Fuentes
Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston
A Grain of Wheat by Ngugi wa Thiong'o
A Severed Head by Iris Murdoch
July's People by Nadine Gordimer
The Shipping News by Annie Prouix
