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Opinions: Everybody’s got one

Time magazine has finally weighed in on the question of who wrote the greatest novels of the 20th century, with a list of 100 English-language novels. The list begins in 1923, the year the magazine was launched, so the chart is missing such obvious heavyweights as Ulysses and Heart of Darkness. The titles picked are certainly interesting. Reading at times like an advertisement for the magazine’s archive of online book reviews (each title is linked to the original Time review), the list is heavily American, with U.S. authors scoring 61 of the 100 spots, with one spot going to an African writer (Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart), two to Canadians (Margaret Atwood’s The Blind Assassin and William Gibson’s Neuromancer), and one from the Indian subcontinent, Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children. The list is also skewed toward contemporary titles that have yet to be tested by the sobering influence of historical judgment.

Related links:
Read the Time Top 100

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