I know. I’m to the point of addiction with these things. And you’d think I’d know better, particularly when the list comes from England, counts Twilight as the best book of 2005 and has already selected a best book of 2009.
That said, here’s the best 60 books of the past 60 years, at least according to The Times. This time, books I’ve read are in bold while those I started but never finished are underlined. Plainly, the books from the mid to late 1970s are in my wheelhouse.
1949 — Nineteen Eighty-Four, George Orwell
1950 — The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, C. S. Lewis
1951 — The Catcher in the Rye, J. D. Salinger
1952 — Pigs Have Wings, P. G. Wodehouse
1953 — Casino Royale, Ian Fleming
1954 — Lord of the Flies, William Golding
1955 — Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov
1956 — The Hundred and One Dalmatians, Dodie Smith
1957 — Doctor Zhivago, Boris Pasternak
1958 — Our Man in Havana, Graham Greene
1959 — The Leopard, Giuseppe di Lampedusa
1960 — To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee (I suppose one of these days I just better read this book!)
1961 — Catch 22, Joseph Heller
1962 — The Golden Notebook, Doris Lessing
1963 — The Bell Jar, Sylvia Plath
1964 — Funeral in Berlin, Len Deighton
1965 — Dune, Frank Herbert
1966 — Wide Sargasso Sea, Jean Rhys
1967 — Towards the End of the Morning, Michael Frayn
1968 — 2001, Arthur C. Clarke
1969 — The French Lieutenant’s Woman, John Fowles
1970 — Play it as it Lays, Joan Didion
1971 — Americana, Don DeLillo
1972 — Watership Down, Richard Adams
1973 — Crash, J. G. Ballard
1974 — Fear of Flying, Erica Jong
1975 — Salem’s Lot, Stephen King
1976 — Even Cowgirls get the Blues, Tom Robbins
1977 — A Scanner Darkly, Philip K. Dick
1978 — The World According to Garp, John Irving
1979 — Smiley’s People, John le Carré
1980 — Earthly Powers, Anthony Burgess
1981 — Lanark, Alasdair Gray
1982 — The House of the Spirits, Isabel Allende
1983 — Waterland, Graham Swift
1984 — Money, Martin Amis
1985 — Love in The Time of Cholera, Gabriel Garcia Marquez
1986 — Tourist Season, Carl Hiaasen
1987 — More Die of Heartbreak, Saul Bellow
1988 — Mother London, Michael Moorcock
1989 — Sexing the Cherry, Jeannette Winterson
1990 — Get Shorty, Elmore Leonard
1991 — The Famished Road, Ben Okri
1992 — The Secret History, Donna Tartt
1993 — Trainspotting, Irvine Welsh
1994 — How Late it Was, How Late, James Kelman
1995 — Northern Lights, Philip Pullman
1996 — Angela’s Ashes, Frank McCourt
1997 — Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, J. K. Rowling
1998 — The Wind-up Bird Chronicle, Haruki Murakami
1999 — Disgrace, J. M. Coetzee
2000 — The Blind Assassin, Margaret Atwood
2001 — The Corrections, Jonathan Franzen
2002 — Atonement, Ian McEwan
2003 — The Time Traveler’s Wife, Audrey Niffenegger
2004 — The Line of Beauty, Alan Hollinghurst
2005 — Twilight, Stephenie Meyer
2006 — The Road, Cormac McCarthy
2007 — A Thousand Splendid Suns, Khaled Hosseini
2008 — Netherland, Joseph O’Neill
2009 — The Little Stranger, Sarah Waters
I would sooner read a time-table or a catalogue than nothing at all
W. Somerset Maugham, The Summing Up
I've read 7 of the first 10, 4 of the second 10, 2 of the next 20 (Watership Down (at least twice), and Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone. and none of the last 20.
Tim, I cannot believe a lawyer like yourself has not read To Kill A Mockingbiird. Leave the TBR stack, go the store, buy a copy and make it your next read.
I second the motion. I suppose you never saw Paul Newman in "The Verdict" either.
But I saw Gregory Peck in the movie. Doesn't that count??? As for The Verdict, Newman uttered one of my favorite movie lines ever, "He's the prince of f***ing darkness!"