List :: The 20th Centrury's Greatest Hits by American Book Review

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  #1

  Pale Fire

  by Vladimir Nabokov

  (6 Reviews)

  Overall Rank: 101

  185 points

  "I was the shadow of the waxwing slain / By the false azure in the windowpane.Pale Fire, a poem in heroic couplets, of nine hundred ninety-nine lines, divided into four cantos, was composed by John..."

  

  I've Read It I Want To Read It
• 

  #2

  Ulysses

  by James Joyce

  (13 Reviews)

  Overall Rank: 4

  925 points

  "Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed."

  

  I've Read It I Want To Read It
• 

  #3

  Gravity's Rainbow

  by Thomas Pynchon

  (4 Reviews)

  Overall Rank: 83

  221 points

  "A screaming comes across the sky."

  

  I've Read It I Want To Read It
• 

  #4

  The Public Burning

  by Robert Coover

  (1 Review)

  Overall Rank: 203

  97 points

  

  I've Read It I Want To Read It
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  #5

  The Sound and the Fury

  by William Faulkner

  (15 Reviews)

  Overall Rank: 9

  703 points

  "Through the fence, between the curling flower spaces, I could see them hitting."

  

  I've Read It I Want To Read It
• 

  #6

  Molloy; Malone Dies; The Unnamable

  by Samuel Beckett

  (3 Reviews)

  Overall Rank: 71

  247 points

  "I am in my mother's room."

  

  I've Read It I Want To Read It
• 

  #7

  The Making of Americans

  by Gertrude Stein

  (3 Reviews)

  Overall Rank: 211

  94 points

  "Once an angry man dragged his father along the ground through his own orchard."

  

  I've Read It I Want To Read It
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  #8

  The Soft Machine

  by William S. Burroughs

  (3 Reviews)

  Overall Rank: 216

  93 points

  "I was working the hole with the Sailor and we did not bad fifteen cents on average night boosting the afternoons and short timing the dawn we made out from the land of the free but I was running..."

  

  I've Read It I Want To Read It
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  #9

  Lolita

  by Vladimir Nabokov

  (36 Reviews)

  Overall Rank: 5

  856 points

  "Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palette to tap, at three, on the teeth."

  

  I've Read It I Want To Read It
• 

  #10

  Finnegans Wake

  by James Joyce

  (4 Reviews)

  Overall Rank: 72

  247 points

  "riverrun, past Eve and Adam's, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs."

  

  I've Read It I Want To Read It