Top 100 Novels of the Century by the Modern Library?s Editorial Board

Books

I?ve read the ones in bold.

  1. ULYSSES by James Joyce
  2. THE GREAT GATSBY by F. Scott Fitzgerald
  3. A PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS A YOUNG MAN by James Joyce
  4. LOLITA by Vladimir Nabokov
  5. BRAVE NEW WORLD by Aldous Huxley
  6. THE SOUND AND THE FURY by William Faulkner
  7. CATCH-22 by Joseph Heller
  8. DARKNESS AT NOON by Arthur Koestler
  9. SONS AND LOVERS by D.H. Lawrence
  10. THE GRAPES OF WRATH by John Steinbeck
  11. UNDER THE VOLCANO by Malcolm Lowry
  12. THE WAY OF ALL FLESH by Samuel Butler
  13. 1984 by George Orwell
  14. I, CLAUDIUS by Robert Graves
  15. TO THE LIGHTHOUSE by Virginia Woolf
  16. AN AMERICAN TRAGEDY by Theodore Dreiser
  17. THE HEART IS A LONELY HUNTER by Carson McCullers
  18. SLAUGHTERHOUSE-FIVE by Kurt Vonnegut
  19. INVISIBLE MAN by Ralph Ellison
  20. NATIVE SON by Richard Wright
  21. HENDERSON THE RAIN KING by Saul Bellow
  22. APPOINTMENT IN SAMARRA by John O?Hara
  23. U.S.A. (trilogy) by John Dos Passos
  24. WINESBURG, OHIO by Sherwood Anderson
  25. A PASSAGE TO INDIA by E.M. Forster
  26. THE WINGS OF THE DOVE by Henry James
  27. THE AMBASSADORS by Henry James
  28. TENDER IS THE NIGHT by F. Scott Fitzgerald
  29. THE STUDS LONIGAN TRILOGY by James T. Farrell
  30. THE GOOD SOLDIER by Ford Madox Ford
  31. ANIMAL FARM by George Orwell
  32. THE GOLDEN BOWL by Henry James
  33. SISTER CARRIE by Theodore Dreiser
  34. A HANDFUL OF DUST by Evelyn Waugh
  35. AS I LAY DYING by William Faulkner
  36. ALL THE KING?S MEN by Robert Penn Warren
  37. THE BRIDGE OF SAN LUIS REY by Thornton Wilder
  38. HOWARDS END by E.M. Forster
  39. GO TELL IT ON THE MOUNTAIN by James Baldwin
  40. THE HEART OF THE MATTER by Graham Greene
  41. LORD OF THE FLIES by William Golding
  42. DELIVERANCE by James Dickey
  43. A DANCE TO THE MUSIC OF TIME (series) by Anthony Powell
  44. POINT COUNTER POINT by Aldous Huxley
  45. THE SUN ALSO RISES by Ernest Hemingway
  46. THE SECRET AGENT by Joseph Conrad
  47. NOSTROMO by Joseph Conrad
  48. THE RAINBOW by D.H. Lawrence
  49. WOMEN IN LOVE by D.H. Lawrence
  50. TROPIC OF CANCER by Henry Miller
  51. THE NAKED AND THE DEAD by Norman Mailer
  52. PORTNOY?S COMPLAINT by Philip Roth
  53. PALE FIRE by Vladimir Nabokov
  54. LIGHT IN AUGUST by William Faulkner
  55. ON THE ROAD by Jack Kerouac
  56. THE MALTESE FALCON by Dashiell Hammett
  57. PARADE?S END by Ford Madox Ford
  58. THE AGE OF INNOCENCE by Edith Wharton
  59. ZULEIKA DOBSON by Max Beerbohm
  60. THE MOVIEGOER by Walker Percy
  61. DEATH COMES FOR THE ARCHBISHOP by Willa Cather
  62. FROM HERE TO ETERNITY by James Jones
  63. THE WAPSHOT CHRONICLES by John Cheever
  64. THE CATCHER IN THE RYE by J.D. Salinger
  65. A CLOCKWORK ORANGE by Anthony Burgess
  66. OF HUMAN BONDAGE by W. Somerset Maugham
  67. HEART OF DARKNESS by Joseph Conrad
  68. MAIN STREET by Sinclair Lewis
  69. THE HOUSE OF MIRTH by Edith Wharton
  70. THE ALEXANDRIA QUARTET by Lawrence Durell
  71. A HIGH WIND IN JAMAICA by Richard Hughes
  72. A HOUSE FOR MR BISWAS by V.S. Naipaul
  73. THE DAY OF THE LOCUST by Nathanael West
  74. A FAREWELL TO ARMS by Ernest Hemingway
  75. SCOOP by Evelyn Waugh
  76. THE PRIME OF MISS JEAN BRODIE by Muriel Spark
  77. FINNEGANS WAKE by James Joyce
  78. KIM by Rudyard Kipling
  79. A ROOM WITH A VIEW by E.M. Forster
  80. BRIDESHEAD REVISITED by Evelyn Waugh
  81. THE ADVENTURES OF AUGIE MARCH by Saul Bellow
  82. ANGLE OF REPOSE by Wallace Stegner
  83. A BEND IN THE RIVER by V.S. Naipaul
  84. THE DEATH OF THE HEART by Elizabeth Bowen
  85. LORD JIM by Joseph Conrad
  86. RAGTIME by E.L. Doctorow
  87. THE OLD WIVES? TALE by Arnold Bennett
  88. THE CALL OF THE WILD by Jack London
  89. LOVING by Henry Green
  90. MIDNIGHT?S CHILDREN by Salman Rushdie
  91. TOBACCO ROAD by Erskine Caldwell
  92. IRONWEED by William Kennedy
  93. THE MAGUS by John Fowles
  94. WIDE SARGASSO SEA by Jean Rhys
  95. UNDER THE NET by Iris Murdoch
  96. SOPHIE?S CHOICE by William Styron
  97. THE SHELTERING SKY by Paul Bowles
  98. THE POSTMAN ALWAYS RINGS TWICE by James M. Cain
  99. THE GINGER MAN by J.P. Donleavy
  100. THE MAGNIFICENT AMBERSONS by Booth Tarkington

Waterstone?s Top 100 Books of the Century

Books

I?ve read the ones in bold.

  1. The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien
  2. 1984 by George Orwell
  3. Animal Farm by George Orwell
  4. Ulysses by James Joyce
  5. Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
  6. The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger
  7. To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
  8. One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
  9. The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
  10. Trainspotting by Irvine Welsh
  11. Wild Swans by Jung Chang
  12. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
  13. The Lord of the Flies by William Golding
  14. On the Road by Jack Kerouac
  15. Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
  16. The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame
  17. Winnie the Pooh by A.A. Milne
  18. The Colour Purple by Alice Walker
  19. The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien
  20. The Outsider by Albert Camus
  21. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe by C.S. Lewis
  22. The Trial by Franz Kafka
  23. Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell
  24. The Hitchhiker?s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams
  25. Midnight?s Children by Salman Rushdie
  26. The Diary of Anne Frank by Anne Frank
  27. A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess
  28. Sons and Lovers by D.H. Lawrence
  29. To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf
  30. If This is a Man by Primo Levi
  31. Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
  32. The Wasp Factory by Iain Banks
  33. A la Recherche du Temps Perdu by Marcel Proust
  34. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory by Roald Dahl
  35. Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck
  36. Beloved by Toni Morrison
  37. Possession by A.S. Byatt
  38. The Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
  39. A Passage to India by E.M. Forster
  40. Watership Down by Richard Adams
  41. Sophie?s World by Jostein Gaarder
  42. The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco
  43. Love in a Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
  44. Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier
  45. The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro
  46. The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera
  47. Birdsong by Sebastian Faulks
  48. Howard?s End by E.M. Forster
  49. Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh
  50. A Suitable Boy by Vikram Seth
  51. Dune by Frank Herbert
  52. A Prayer for Owen Meany by John Irving
  53. Perfume by Patrick S?skind
  54. Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak
  55. Gormenghast by Mervyn Peake
  56. Cider with Rosie by Laurie Lee
  57. The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath
  58. The Handmaid?s Tale by Margaret Atwood
  59. Testament of Youth by Vera Brittain
  60. The Magus by John Fowles
  61. Brighton Rock by Graham Greene
  62. The Ragged-Trousered Philanthropists by Robert Tressell
  63. The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov
  64. Tales from the City by Armistead Maupin
  65. The French Lieutenant?s Woman by John Fowles
  66. Captain Corelli?s Mandolin by Louis de Berni?res
  67. Slaughterhouse 5 by Kurt Vonnegut
  68. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert Pirsig
  69. A Room with a View by E.M. Forster
  70. Lucky Jim by Kingsley Amis
  71. It by Stephen King
  72. The Power and the Glory by Graham Greene
  73. The Stand by Stephen King
  74. All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque
  75. Paddy Clarke ha ha ha by Roddy Doyle
  76. Matilda by Roald Dahl
  77. American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis
  78. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas by Hunter S. Thompson
  79. A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking
  80. James and the Giant Peach by Roald Dahl
  81. Lady Chatterley?s Lover by D.H. Lawrence
  82. The Bonfire of the Vanities by Tom Wolfe
  83. Complete Cookery Course by Delia Smith
  84. An Evil Cradling by Brian Keenan
  85. The Rainbow by D.H. Lawrence
  86. Down and Out in Paris and London by George Orwell
  87. 2001 – a Space Odyssey by Arthur C. Clarke
  88. The Tin Drum by G?nter Grass
  89. A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Alexander Solzhenitsyn
  90. Long Walk to Freedom by Nelson Mandela
  91. The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins
  92. Jurassic Park by Michael Crichton
  93. The Alexandria Quartet by Lawrence Durrell
  94. Cry the Beloved Country by Alan Paton
  95. High Fidelity by Nick Hornby
  96. The Van by Roddy Doyle
  97. The BFG by Roald Dahl
  98. Earthly Powers by Anthony Burgess
  99. I, Claudius by Robert Graves
  100. The Horse Whisperer by Nicholas Evan

How I Became a Web Designer

Computers, Family

How did an art-deficient musician get into web design, you ask? I?ve asked myself that a hundred times!

I was slow to get onto the Internet. My old boss and good friend Brad was (I swear) one of the first internet users. I had no use for chatting with people I didn?t know, so although I was an avid computer user, I limited myself to software applications.

Eventually the Internet morphed into the World Wide Web and I got a job that required going online for various purposes. By that time, I was also in school for computer science. Although we didn?t study any HTML, and the idea of dynamic sites was well out of my experience, I loved the idea of web pages. Graphics combined with code. What could be better? I was bound and determined to learn HTML.

One evening, while I was at work (I worked second shift and went to school during the day), then 12-year-old Kerri called me and asked me if I could teach her how to make a web page. I said, sure, maybe over the weekend we?d learn it together. Darned if that smarty-pants didn?t call me back an hour or so later and said never mind! She?d figured it out and now just needed to know how to upload.

Although I never learned it all that fast (Kerri would continually eclipse me with technical issues until I became proficient with databases, but I think she?s ready to pass me again), and my older sites are painfully dated, I fell in love with web design and all its potential. I studied a bit of graphic art, learned the Macromedia products, and got a job at a dot com, and absorbed everything I could. Sadly, the dot com closed, but I continued on my own, learned php, honed my design skills, and opened my own freelance business, White Wave Designs.

These days, I?m fortunate enough to be able to work on web pages all day! I am a programmer in the web development department of an area college, and continue to freelance. Life is good.