Anthony Burgess' 99 Novels

[evelyn_b]

Archived from Livejournal

I copied out Anthony Burgess' entire list of favorites from 99 Novels: The Best in English Since 1939, so that I could keep track of which ones I read. It's a great list!



1939
Party Going - Henry Green - finished March 2015
After Many A Summer - Aldous Huxley - finished March 30, 2015
Finnegans Wake - James Joyce - finished January 31, 2018
At Swim-Two-Birds - Flann O'Brien - finished April 27, 2015

1940
The Power and the Glory - Graham Greene - finished May 20, 2015
For Whom the Bell Tolls - Ernest Hemingway - - finished June 5, 2015
Strangers and Brothers (to 1970) -- C. P. Snow
* Vol 1 (Strangers and Brothers) finished July 9, 2015
* Vol 2 (The Light and the Dark) finished January 23, 2016
* Vol 3 (Time of Hope [1949]) - finished May 2016
* Vol 4 (The Masters [1951])
* Vol 5 (The New Men [1954])
* Vol 6 (Homecomings [1956])
* Vol 7 (The Conscience of the Rich [1958])
* Vol 8 (The Affair [1960]) - finished April 2018
* Vol 9 (Corridors of Power [1964]) - finished October 2, 2018
* Vol 10 (The Sleep of Reason [1968]) - finished October 30, 2018
* Vol 11 (Last Things [1970])
it just keeps going :|

1941
The Aerodrome - Rex Warner -- finished Aug. 10, 2015

1944
The Horse's Mouth - Joyce Cary -- finished Sept. 4, 2015
The Razor's Edge -- Somerset Maugham -- finished Sept. 13, 2015

1945
Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh - finished Oct 20, 2015

1946
Titus Groan - Mervyn Peake - finished January 2016

1947
The Victim - Saul Bellow - finished March 2016
Under the Volcano - Malcolm Lowry - finished March 2016

1948
The Heart of the Matter - -Graham Greene - finished March 2016
Ape and Essence - Aldous Huxley - finished March 2016
The Naked and the Dead -- Norman Mailer -- finished Feb. 23, 2015
No Highway - Nevil Shute - finished April 2016

1949
The Heat of the Day - Elizabeth Bowen - finished April 18, 2016
Nineteen Eighty-Four - George Orwell - finished March 6, 2015
The Body - William Sansom - finished May 1, 2016

1950
Scenes from Provincial Life -- William Cooper - finished May 2016
The Disenchanted -- Budd Sculberg - finished June 2, 2016

1951
A Dance to the Music of Time (to 1975) -- Anthony Powell
ALL RIGHT LET'S DO THIS - read!
* A Question of Upbringing – (1951) - finished June 18, 2016
* A Buyer's Market – (1952) - finished July 20, 2016
* The Acceptance World – (1955) - finished July 24, 2016
* At Lady Molly's – (1957) - finished November 2016
* Casanova's Chinese Restaurant – (1960) - finished November 2016
* The Kindly Ones – (1962) - finished November 24, 2016
* The Valley of Bones – (1964) - finished January 26, 2018
* The Soldier's Art – (1966)
* The Military Philosophers – (1968)
* Books Do Furnish a Room – (1971) - finished February 2018
* Temporary Kings – (1973)
* Hearing Secret Harmonies – (1975) - finished September 2018!

The Catcher in the Rye -- J. D. Salinger - finished June 21, 2015
A Chronicle of Ancient Sunlight (to 1969) -- Henry Williamson
wooooooo here we go
* The Dark Lantern (1951) - finished August 25, 2016
* Donkey Boy (1952) - finished October 2016
* Young Phillip Maddison (1953) - finished November 26, 2016
* How Dear Is Life (1954) - finished December 2016
* A Fox Under My Cloak (1955) - finished April 2017
* The Golden Virgin (1957) - finished February 2018
* Love and the Loveless (1958) - finished March 2018
* A Test to Destruction (1960) - finished October 2018
* The Innocent Moon (1961) - finished January 2019
* It Was the Nightingale (1962) - finished January 2019
* The Power of the Dead (1963) - finished January 2019
* The Phoenix Generation (1965) - finished February 2019
* A Solitary War (1967) - finished February 2019
* Lucifer Before Sunrise (1967) - finished February 2019
* The Gale of the World (1969) - FINISHED MARCH 4 2019

The Caine Mutiny -- Herman Wouk - finished August 6, 2016

1952
Invisible Man -- Ralph Ellison - finished Aug. 27, 2016
The Old Man and the Sea -- Ernest Hemingway - finished September 2016
The Groves of Academe -- Mary McCarthy - finished September 2016
Wise Blood -- Flannery O' Connor - finished September 24, 2016
Sword of Honor (to 1961) Evelyn Waugh
* Men at Arms (1952) - finished October 2016
* Officers and Gentlemen (1955) - finished October 2016
* Unconditional Surrender (1961) - finished July 2017

1953
The Long Goodbye -- Raymond Chandler - finished April 19, 2016

1954
Lucky Jim -- Kingsley Amis - finished July 4, 2015

1957
Room at the Top -- John Braine
The Alexandria Quartet (to 1960) -- Lawrence Durrell - TAKE THAT LAWRENCE DURRELL
* JUSTINE - finished July 10 or so, 2016
* Balthazar - finished December 4, 2016
* Mountolive - finished December 2016
* Clea - finished December 28, 2016
The London Novels (to 1960) Colin MacInnes
* City of Spades (1957)
* Absolute Beginners (1959)
* Mr. Love and Justice (1960) - finished January 2018
The Assistant -- Bernard Malamud - finished January 2018

1958
The Bell - Iris Murdoch
Saturday Night and Sunday Morning -- Alan Sillitoe - finished April 2018
The Once and Future King -- T. H. White - finished July 6, 2015

1959
The Mansion -- William Faulkner - finished April 2018
Goldfinger -- Ian Fleming - finished May 11, 2018

1960
Facial Justice -- L. P. Hartley - finished April 2018
The Balkans Trilogy -- Olivia Manning
* The Great Fortune (1960)
* The Spoilt City (1962)
* Friends and Heroes (1965) - finished August 31, 2018

1961
The Mighty and their Fall - Ivy Compton-Burnett - finished Sept. 2018
Catch-22 - Joseph Heller - finished Sept. 5, 2018
The Fox in the Attic -- Richard Hughes - finished December 2018
Riders in the Chariot -- Patrick White - finished November 2018
The Old Men at the Zoo -- Angus Wilson - finished November 2018

1962
Another Country -- James Baldwin - finished Jan. 1, 2019
An Error of Judgement -- Pamela Hansford Johnson - finished March 2019
Island -- Aldous Huxley
The Golden Notebook -- Doris Lessing - finshed January 2017
Pale Fire -- Vladimir Nabokov - finished January 2019

1963
The Girls of Slender Means -- Muriel Spark - finished July 13, 2016

1964
The Spire -- William Golding - finished April 2019
Heartland -- Wilson Harris - finished June 2019
A Single Man -- Christopher Isherwood - finished June 2017
The Defence -- Vladimir Nabokov - finished June 2019
Late Call -- Angus Wilson - finished April 2019

1965
The Lockwood Concern - John O'Hara - Finished July 2019
The Mandelbaum Gate -- Muriel Spark - finished June 2019

1966
A Man of the People -- Chunua Achebe - finished June 2019
The Anti-Death League -- Kingsley Amis - finished October 2017
Giles Goat-Boy -- John Barth - finished August 2019
The Late Bourgeois World -- Nadine Gordimer - finished July 2019
The Last Gentleman -- Walker Percy - finished July 2019

1967
The Vendor of Sweets -- R. K. Narayan - finished July 2019

1968
The Image Men -- J. B. Priestley - finished August 2019
Cocksure -- Mordecai Richler - finished August 2019
Pavane -- Keith Roberts - finished August 2019

1969
The French Lieutenant's Woman -- John Fowles - finished August 2019
Portnoy's Complaint -- Philip Roth - finished June 2017

1970
Bomber - Len Deighton - finished August 2019

1973
Sweet Dreams -- Michael Frayn - finished September 2019
Gravity's Rainbow -- Thomas Pynchon - finished November 25, 2019

1975
Humbolt's Gift -- Saul Bellow - finished May 1, 2019
The History Man -- Malcolm Bradbury - finished September 2019

1976
The Doctor's Wife -- Brian Moore - finished November 2019
Falstaff -- Robert Nye - finished February 2018

1977
How to Save Your Own Life -- Erica Jong - finished August 2019
Farewell Companions -- James Plunkett - finished October 2019
Staying On -- Paul Scott - finished October 2019

1978
The Coup -- John Updike - finished June 2019

1979
The Unlimited Dream Company -- J. G. Ballard - finished March 2019
Dubin's Lives -- Bernard Malamud - finished November 2019
A Bend in the River -- V. S. Naipaul - finished March 2019
Sophie's Choice - William Styron - finished September 2019

1980
Life in the West --Brian Aldiss - finished October 2019
Riddley Walker -- Russell Hoban - finished October 2019
How Far Can You Go? -- David Lodge -- finished Nov. 30, 2015
A Confederacy of Dunces -- John Kennedy Toole -- finished April 2017

1981
Lanark -- Alasdair Gray - finished September 2019
Darconville's Cat -- Alexander Theroux - finished November 2019
The Mosquito Coast -- Paul Theroux - finished November 2019
Creation -- Gore Vidal - finished November 23, 2019

1982
The Rebel Angels -- Robertson Davies - finished December, 2019

1983
Ancient Evenings -- Norman Mailer - finished December 24, 2019



Burgess is cheating a little with his counting, or maybe a lot -- there are a lot of trilogies and quartets here, and worse -- Strangers and Brothers is "a sequence of eleven large novels" and, well, it remains to be seen whether I'm going to be on board for reading all of them.

There are books here I've never heard of, books I was already planning to re-read, books I'd sworn never to read again (hi, Nineteen Eighty-Four!) and books I've been meaning to read but never got around to, plus plenty of books I've seen around for most of my life that never called to me with any particularly enticing song. I'm looking forward to discovering unexpected gems, being bored out of my mind, and enjoying the epic love-hate relationship that has already begin to develop between me and Anthony Burgess.

I am especially looking forward to reading Portnoy's Complaint as an adult! I read it when I was much too young for it to be anything other than a bizarre curiosity, so I have no idea what I'll find.

There are no books on this list for 1971, 1972, 1942, or 1943. If anyone would like to suggest a good book published during one of those years, I would be happy to throw it on the pile.