Here is my list of the greatest novels of the past one hundred years:

To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf - Set in the Isle of Skye, Virginia highlights the power of childhood emotions, the impermanence of adult relationships and the subjective parallax of perception, all while utilizing a Joycean stream of consciousness technique necessary to explore the innermost recesses of the characters.

The Waves by Virginia Woolf - “And here come the waves/Down by the shore/Washing the soul of the body/That comes from the depths of the sea.” (Percival is the Seventh).

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce - Joyce, like Daedalus, was a master craftsman, but his seed gave birth to a Luciferean stream.

Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison - he’s ready for his close-up…wait, where’d he go? i wish Ralph would have written another.

Sometimes a Great Notion by Ken Kesey - Kesey was a true virtuouso with words. (To quote Leadbelly: “Sometimes I live in the country/Sometimes I live in the town/Sometimes I get a great notion/To jump into the river an’ drown.”)

Martin Eden by Jack London - be careful what you wish for.

Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway - true to the Old Man’s word, Ernesto gave his Nobel Prize to the Marian shrine at El Cobre, Cuba. (A novel that attests to the fact that you don’t take anything with you but your soul). 

The Sea by John Banville - a masterful Irish writer who utilizes clean, clipped sentences, reminiscent of Cormac McCarthy.

Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse - biblical (and pre-biblical) simplicity.

East of Eden by John Steinbeck - the California feeling really shines through in so much of Steinbeck’s writing. (East of Eden=the place where Cain was exiled).

The Sea-Wolf by Jack London - as psychological as it gets.

Steppenwolf by Hermann Hesse - no wait, this is as psychological as it gets. (For Madmen Only).

Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut - must free-will be a myth if we all must someday die?

Lord of the Flies by William Golding - can somebody find Piggy his goddamn specs and asthma inhaler, please? (The literary, adolescent version of Lost).

Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller - Miller was a lech, but most genius writers are.

Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov - the funniest/creepiest sentence ever written in the English language: “How about a kiss for papa’s delcious dickey bird?”

The Shining by Stephen King - King always starts off with great narrative ideas that usually disperse into nonsense, but even this one’s nonsense doesn’t decay while deliquescing in the disquieting bathtub of Room 237.  (The title was inspired by John Lennon’s “Instant Karma!”).

The Plague by Albert Camus - the plague begins as a series of unheeded portents before it insidiously becomes an omnipresent reality, obliterating all traces of the past and driving its victims to almost unearthly extremes of suffering, madness and compassion. (To quote Helen Keller: “The world is full of suffering. It is also full of overcoming.”)

Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe - “Turning and turning in the widening gyre…”

The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien

Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad - kids like to do book reports on this one because it’s only about 100 pages long; but, after finishing reading it, they walk away from a pretty potent wallop to the upside of their psyches. The book was adapted into an equally powerful film, Apocalypse Now. (John of Patmos=Kurtz).

Darkness at Noon by Arthur Koestler - Its hero is an aging revolutionary, imprisoned and psychologically tortured by the Party to which he has dedicated his life. (If the 20th-century proved anything, it is probably this: Politics are to government what televangelism is to religion, and no soapbox will ever make another clean).

*Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoyevsky - published in 1880, this one is timeless. (“for your light will not die, even when you are dead. The righteous man departs, but his light remains. People are always saved after the death of him who saved them. The generation of men does not welcome its prophets and kills them, but men love their martyrs and venerate those they have tortured to death. Your work is for the whole, your deed is for the future. Never seek a reward, for great is your reward on earth without that: your spiritual joy, which only the righteous obtain”; or “Why hast thou come now to hinder us? For Thou hast come to hinder us, and Thou knowest that…We are working not with Thee but with him [Satan]… We took from him what Thou didst reject with scorn, that last gift he offered Thee, showing Thee all the kingdoms of the earth. We took from him Rome and the sword of Caesar, and proclaimed ourselves sole rulers of the earth… We shall triumph and shall be Caesars, and then we shall plan the universal happiness of man”; or ”I hope that his youthful brightheartedness and yearning for popular foundations will not turn later, as so often happens, into dark mysticism on the moral side, and witless chauvinism on the civic side.”)

No Country For Old Men by Cormac McCarthy - will the old man or the young man carry the fire of moonlight color in a horn?; or to (again) quote Yeats, “Caught in the sensual music all neglect/Monuments of unaging intellect.”

Light in August by William Faulkner - originally planned to be titled Dark House, Faulkner’s wife, while sitting on their front porch, supposedly remarked about the strange quality that light has in the South during the month of August; or “The intellect of man is forced to choose/Perfection of the life or the work/And if take the second must refuse/A heavenly mansion, raging in the dark.” (Go to sleep after reading Faulkner and your head will swim with diction).

O Pioneers! by Willa Cather - “With the energy of the innocent, they were gathering the tools/They would need to make their journey back to nature.”

The Call of the Wild by Jack London - “Old longings nomadic leap,/Chafing at custom’s chain;/Again from its brumal sleep/Wakens the ferrine strain.” (Talk about atavism!).

Bound For Glory by Woody Guthrie - because Christ live[d] in a boxcar. ”They’ve been pushed out into the high lonesome highway, and they’ve gone down it, from coast to coast, from Canada to Mexico, looking for that home again”; or “Too struck with the traveling fever to wait. While the other long strings of hitch-hikers was taking it easy in the shade back in the town, I’d be tugging and walking myself to death over the curves, wondering what was just around the next bend; walking to see some distant object, which turned out to be just a big rock, or knoll, from which you could see and wonder about other distant objects”; or “And the three men I admire most/The Father, Son and Holy Ghost/They caught the last train for the coast….” 

On the Road by Jack Kerouac - does the adolescent fantasy of perpetual motion/flight ever really dissolve? (“The only people for me are the mad ones…”).

One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest by Ken Kesey - obviously.

Coming of Age by Sean Phelan - psych! (Matthew 10:16 or Isaiah 11:6; or the salt of the earth does not rise unless it is carried by the Wave; or ”Some dive into the sea/Some toil upon the stone.”) http://www.iuniverse.com/Bookstore/BookDetail.aspx?BookId=SKU-000142292

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The Heart is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers - a powerful book, written when McCullers was only twenty-three, about a large-hearted deaf, mute man who, quite naturally, is all things to all different people; or “…the child’s balloon/eclipses both the sun and moon.”

Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger - for every hopelessly innocent neurotic.

The Chosen by Chaim Potok - Merion Station, Pennsylvania’s finest author.

The Stranger by Albert Camus - social outcasts, misfits, injustice and isolation - such are the characters, themes and authors of our best literature.

Gravity’s Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon - a work that helped usher in the hyper-intellectuality of the modern novel.

Foucault’s Pendulum by Umberto Eco - way more smart and captivating than anything Dan Brown has ever written.

Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace - If it were at all possible, Foster Wallace’s heart seemed to be as big as his head. The book presents specialist knowledge drawn from a wide range of disciplines, (also describing two things very near and dear to my heart: tennis and Joelle van Dyne).

The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen - love ‘em or leave ‘em (or want to leave ‘em), they’re your family.

To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee - Scout imagines life from Boo’s perspective and regrets that they never repaid him for the gifts he had given them. (“They don’t do one thing but sing their hearts out for us”; or “when they finally saw him, why he hadn’t done any of those things, Atticus, he was real nice” to which Atticus replies, ”Most people are, Scout, when you finally see them”; or “Lawyers, I suppose, were children once”). Its essence silently communicates itself to you and reflects your own essence back to you.

All the King’s Men by Robert Penn Warren - a story about a lifelong underling’s realization that one must “go out of history into history and the awful responsibility of time” in order to discover the interconnectedness of his own hand in all of it; or “And all times are one time, and all those dead in the past never lived before our definition gives them life, and out of the shadow their eyes implore us. That is what all of us historical researchers believe. And we love truth.” A disproportionate amount of great American writers are from the South, which is probably because, to paraphrase Milton, “All poets are of the [rebel's] party.”

Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston - because it takes great courage to find belief in a world filled with so much servitude to hyper-intellectualized, money-/ego-/mind-/power-/sex-driven isolation.

A New Earth by Eckhart Tolle - Revelation 21:1; or ”something within you resonates with it as if in recognition. You then sense the vast depth of space as your own depth, and you know that precious stillness that has no form to be more deeply who you are than any of the things that make up the content of your life. God, the scripture, is saying is formless consciousness and the essence of who you are [the Sea]. Everything else is form, is what people here adore. What you see, hear, touch, or think about is only one half of reality, so to speak. It is form. In the teaching of Jesus, it is simply called ’the world,’ and the other dimension is ‘the kingdom of heaven’ or ‘eternal life.’ The collective disease of humanity is that people are so engrossed in what happens, so hypnotized by the world of fluctuating forms [the cave], so absorbed in the content of their lives, they have forgotten the essence, that which is beyond content, beyond form, beyond thought. They are so consumed by time that they have forgotten eternity, which is their origin, their home, their destiny” ; or “Tolle lege.”

Look Homeward, Angel by Thomas Wolfe - “Look homeward Angel now, and melt with ruth:/And, O  ye Dolphins, waft the hapless youth”; or “But it’s alright, Ma, it’s life and life only.”

*Thanks to Robert Zimmerman, Mark Kendall, Don McLean, Townes Van Zandt, Eddie Vedder and W[in] Butler Yeats.