This. My eyes glazed over through Heart of Darkness, but I counted it and the several others that I just read because I was assigned them. I did manage to read and enjoy several of the rest of them of my own volition. I’m not sure how many of the novels I’ve read for school I’ve actually enjoyed. Call of the Wild. So that’s one at least.
Interesting to see exactly TWO books from the list that NOBODY has read: “A Death of the Heart” by Elizabeth Bowen and “Loving” by Henry Green.
Truthfully, I’d never even heard of either book before I found this list.
Where’s To Kill a Mockingbird? Gravity’s Rainbow? Red Harvest?
I’ve read about 30, but seem to remember a century’s end list that was much better than this one; maybe a librarian’s list or something?
Not to speak for Anaamika, but there are one or two African novels I felt could have been on the list. For example:
Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart
Amos Tutuola’s The Palm-Wine Drinkard
Oh, I’d missed that one! So there’s one book on the list that I’ve read.
That didn’t stop them from including The Way of All Flesh. (published posthumously past the century’s turn, sure, but written in and of the 19th).
Actually, it shows up here as a book about Mr. Al L’Flesh. I wonder if he knows the archbishop’s friend Mr. Dath? 
It seems clear that the list is English-language only, which would explain the preponderance of American & British authors. Odd that that does not seem to be mentioned explicitly.
Only 11 for me.
I noticed the title “Hart of Darkness.” I always wondered why Corey Hart wore his sunglasses at night.
I’d like to see lie detector results for those who claim to have slogged through either
Ulysses or Finnegan’s Wake.
James Joyce is actually probably the worst writer in the entire history of English literature,
and he would have to be on the short list of the worst in the history of world literature.
And any list of best novels which omits someone like Tolkein is a fraud, not to be taken seriously
by anyone who really knows what it really is to be a good book.
10 for me, at least half from High School.
HART OF DARKNESS-is that about a murderous deer? 
I’ve read 27, I couldn’t finish Heart of Darkness or Ulysses, so i didn’t count them. Am I right in thinking Salman Rushdie, James Baldwin and V.S. Naipaul are the only non whites on the list?
Only 4. But I have seen the movies!
I slugged through Ulysses. And Heart of Darkness - I will freely admit that I was 1) young 2) full of myself and 3) didn’t understand a darn thing but thought it was important that I read both those books to say I’d read them. In fact, I read many of the books on that list under those circumstances.
(Joyce’s The Dead, however, is a fantastic short story or novella or whatever it is…I have to dig that up and reread it).
Ralph Ellison and Richard Wright are African-Americans.
Only 9 for me, but I missed marking Catcher in the Rye.
Sad to see no sci-fi/fantasy, that I noticed anyway. No Bradbury, Clarke, Dick, Tolkien…
Jeez, no wonder I never get anything done. I read too damn much. Although, as SpoilerVirgin said, it helps to have taken novels courses. That’s how I ended up reading all of Faulkner and a lot of Nabokov and Conrad.
I can’t help wondering, looking over the list, if the people who compiled it have read much of anything written in the second half of the twentieth century. In fact, I’m noticing that a lot of what I’ve read is pre-1923 (in other words, free for Kindle). They’re missing a whole lot of good stuff there - and some of it was written by people who weren’t white and/or weren’t men!
This, though I don’t know if I read that one for school or on my own. I was the kid in class who always had her head down as if she had a headache, but in reality was reading an INTERESTING book in her lap.
Finished 25, some of them only because in my youth, if I started a book, I’d force myself to finish it. I wouldn’t read Sister Carrie again if you paid me.
Also surprised about To Kill A Mockingbird and didn’t see Gone With the Wind either. It might not be great literature compared to the others on the list, but I think it should be there.
My favorite from the list is Of Human Bondage.
Another book that should have made the list is A Fine Balance by Rohinton Mistry. And isn’t Kristin Lavrandsdattar a 20th century book? It won one of the big prizes and it’s awesome, and readable.
43 for certain, mostly the older and British ones. I’m up on James, Wharton, Waugh, and Forster. Some of the Hemingways, Faulkners, and Fitzergeralds, I’m not sure of; it’s been a long time since I took 20th-century American lit and I get the titles mixed up.
As is James Baldwin.