what should I read? and top 169 list.

[kelber at mindspring.com]

Thanks for all the suggestions, everybody.  I've decided to read Ulysses, since I have nothing better to do with my life at the moment, followed, probably by the Murakami book. When and how was the below-mentioned top 169 list compiled?  I'd definitely vote for a lot of the books on the list, though I'd want to add a lot of others. 

-----Original Message-----
From: David Gentle <gentle_family at btinternet.com>
Sent: Aug 5, 2005 11:31 PM
To: kelber at mindspring.com
Subject: Re: what should I read?

ps. It's just occured to me that I never actually put up the web page for 
the
P-List top books list. I'm probably not going to do it soon but here it is.
And if you can't find something worth reading here then I wonder why you'd
subscribe to this list...

The top 169 novels
  1.. Gravity's Rainbow : Thomas Pynchon : 226
  2.. Ulysses : James Joyce : 88
  3.. Moby Dick : Herman Melville : 77
  4.. The Recognitions : William Gaddis : 50
  5.. One Hundred Years of Solitude : Gabriel Garcia Marquez : 50
  6.. Mason & Dixon : Thomas Pynchon : 45
  7.. JR : William Gaddis : 35
  8.. The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle : Haruki Murakami : 33
  9.. The Magic Mountain : Thomas Mann : 30
  10.. Pale Fire : Vladimir Nabokov : 29
  11.. Lolita : Vladimir Nabokov : 28
  12.. V : Thomas Pynchon : 27
  13.. Molloy/Malone/Unnamable : Samuel Beckett : 27
  14.. Tristram Shandy : Laurence Sterne : 25
  15.. The Satanic Verses : Salman Rushdie : 23
  16.. Dhalgren : Samuel R. Delany : 22
  17.. Huckleberry Finn : Mark Twain : 20
  18.. Absalom! Absalom! : William Faulkner : 20
  19.. The Crying of Lot 49 : Thomas Pynchon : 20
  20.. A la recherche du temps perdu : Marcel Proust : 19
  21.. Midnight's Children : Salman Rushdie : 19
  22.. Neuromancer : William Gibson : 18
  23.. A Confederacy of Dunces : John Kennedy Toole : 18
  24.. Ada : Vladimir Nabokov : 18
  25.. Anna Karenina : Leo Tolstoy : 15
  26.. Vineland : Thomas Pynchon : 15
  27.. Foucault's Pendulum : Umberto Eco : 14
  28.. The Book of the New Sun : Gene Wolfe : 14
  29.. On The Road : Jack Kerouac : 13
  30.. The Master and Margarita : Mikhail Bulgakov : 13
  31.. Bleak House : Charles Dickens : 13
  32.. Chimera : John Barth : 13
  33.. Sometimes a Great Notion : Ken Kesey : 13
  34.. You Bright and Risen Angels : William T. Vollmann : 12
  35.. Death of Virgil : Hermann Broch : 11
  36.. Independent People : Halldor Laxness : 11
  37.. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas : Hunter S. Thompson : 11
  38.. The Brothers Karamazov : Fyodor Dostoevsky : 11
  39.. If On a Winter's Night a Traveller : Italo Calvino : 10
  40.. The Naked Lunch : William S. Burroughs : 10
  41.. Too Loud a Solitude : Bohumil Hrabel : 10
  42.. A Scanner Darkly : Philip K. Dick : 10
  43.. Oliver Twist : Charles Dickens : 10
  44.. Under the Volcano : Malcolm Lowry : 9
  45.. Madame Bovary : Gustave Flaubert : 9
  46.. The Tin Drum : Gunter Grass : 9
  47.. Winter's Tale : Mark Helprin : 9
  48.. The Castle : Franz Kafka : 9
  49.. The Man Without Qualities : Robert Musil : 9
  50.. Candide : Francois-Marie Arouet de Voltaire : 9
  51.. Blood Meridian : Cormac McCarthy : 9
  52.. Auto-da-Fe : Elias Canetti : 9
  53.. Roadside Picnic : Arkadi and Boris Strugatsky : 9
  54.. The Red and the Black : Stendhal : 9
  55.. Count Zero : William Gibson : 9
  56.. The Age of Innocence : Edith Wharton : 9
  57.. Cat's Cradle : Kurt Vonnegut : 8
  58.. Watt : Samual Beckett : 8
  59.. Two Girls, Fat and Thin : Mary Gaitskill : 8
  60.. The Sot-Weed Factor : John Barth : 8
  61.. Nog : Rudolph Wurlitzer : 8
  62.. Cryptonomicon : Neal Stephenson : 8
  63.. A Book of Common Prayer : Joan Didion : 8
  64.. Portrait of a Lady : Henry James : 8
  65.. Omon Ra : Victor Pelevin : 7
  66.. The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch : Philip K. Dick : 7
  67.. Fathers and Sons : Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev : 7
  68.. Hall of Mirrors : Robert Stone : 7
  69.. Farewell My Lovely : Raymond Chandler : 7
  70.. The Stars My Destination : Alfred Bester : 7
  71.. USA : John Dos Passos : 7
  72.. Ragtime : E. L. Doctorow : 7
  73.. Journey to the West : Anthony Yu : 7
  74.. Ubik : Philip K. Dick : 7
  75.. The Bridge Trilogy : William Gibson : 7
  76.. To Kill a Mockingbird : Harper Lee : 7
  77.. The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test : Thomas Wolfe : 7
  78.. Ficciones : Jorge Luis Borges : 7
  79.. Light in August : William Faulkner : 7
  80.. The Moon is a Harsh Mistress : Robert Heinlein : 6
  81.. The Man with the Golden Arm : Nelson Algren : 6
  82.. The Night (Alone) : Richard Meltzer : 6
  83.. Rabbit stories : John Updike : 6
  84.. A Hero of Our Time : Mikhail Lermontov : 6
  85.. House of Sleeping Beauties : Yasunari Kawabata : 6
  86.. Underworld : Don DeLillo : 6
  87.. The Power and the Glory : Graham Greene : 6
  88.. The Counterlife : Philip Roth : 6
  89.. The Story of the Treasure Seekers : Edith Nesbit : 5
  90.. Always Coming Home : Ursula LeGuin : 5
  91.. Catch-22 : Joseph Heller : 5
  92.. Crime and Punishment : Fyodor Dostoevsky : 5
  93.. Dune : Frank Herbert : 5
  94.. Dreams of Leaving : Rupert Thompson : 5
  95.. World's End : T.C. Boyle : 5
  96.. Wittgenstein's Mistress : David Markson : 5
  97.. Memories of the Ford Administration : John Updike : 5
  98.. Carpenter's Gothic : William Gaddis : 5
  99.. Lord of Light : Roger Zelazney : 5
  100.. The Alexandria Quartet : Lawrence Durrell : 5
  101.. Life of Pi : Yann Martel : 4
  102.. Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance : Richard Powers : 4
  103.. The Sound and the Fury : William Faulkner : 4
  104.. The Cairo Trilogy : Naguib Mahfouz : 4
  105.. The Man Who Was Thursday : G. K. Chesterton : 4
  106.. Vurt : Jeff Noon : 4
  107.. The Glass Bead Game : Herman Hesse : 4
  108.. Don Quixote : Cervantes : 4
  109.. Parade's End : Ford Madox Ford : 4
  110.. Enderby, The Poet : Anthony Burgess : 4
  111.. The Scarlet Letter : Nathaniel Hawthorne : 4
  112.. Libra : Don DeLillo : 4
  113.. Invisible Man : Ralph Ellison : 4
  114.. Harlot's Ghost : Norman Mailer : 4
  115.. Wise Blood (& Complete Stories) : Flannery O'Connor : 4
  116.. The Border Trilogy : Cormac McCarthy : 3
  117.. Warlock : Oakley Hall : 3
  118.. The Diamond Age : Neal Stephenson : 3
  119.. The Moviegoer : Walker Percy : 3
  120.. Giles Goat-Boy : John Barth : 3
  121.. Infinate Jest : David Foster Wallace : 3
  122.. Beautifull Losers : Leonard Cohen : 3
  123.. After The Banquet : Yukio Mishima : 3
  124.. Beloved : Toni Morrison : 3
  125.. Death On The Installment Plan : Louis Ferdinand-Celine : 3
  126.. The Things They Carried : Tim O'Brian : 3
  127.. White Jazz : James Ellroy : 3
  128.. The Trial : Franz Kafka : 3
  129.. Frank's World : George Mangles : 3
  130.. Metamorphosis (& Complete Works) : Franz Kafka : 3
  131.. The Big Sleep : Raymond Chandler : 2
  132.. Love in the Time of Cholera : Gabriel Garcia Marquez : 2
  133.. Invisible Cities : Italo Calvino : 2
  134.. Call It Sleep : Henry Roth : 2
  135.. Quo Vadis : Henryk Sienkiewicz : 2
  136.. Snow Crash : Neal Stephenson : 2
  137.. What a Carve Up : Jonathan Coe : 2
  138.. Revolutions Trilogy : John Banville : 2
  139.. Geek Love : Katherine Dunn : 2
  140.. Disgrace : J.M. Coatzee : 2
  141.. Weave World : Clive Barker : 2
  142.. Something Wicked This way Comes : Ray Bradbury : 2
  143.. The War at the End of the World : Vargas Llosa : 2
  144.. Slaughterhouse Five : Kurt Vonnegut : 2
  145.. The Gold Bug Variations : Richard Powers : 2
  146.. The Goodbye Look : Ross MacDonald : 2
  147.. The Lord of the Rings : J.R.R. Tolkien : 2
  148.. The Confidence Man : Herman Melville : 2
  149.. Cat's Eye : Margaret Atwood : 2
  150.. A Month of Sundays : John Updike : 2
  151.. Messiah of Stockholm : Cynthia Ozick : 1
  152.. Valis Trilogy : Philip K. Dick : 1
  153.. Locus Solus : Raymond Roussel : 1
  154.. Time Enough For Love : Robert Heinlein : 1
  155.. A Frolic of His Own : William Gaddis : 1
  156.. As Above, So Below : Rudy Rucker : 1
  157.. Women and Men: a novel : Joseph McElroy : 1
  158.. A House for Mr. Biswas : V.P. Naipaul : 1
  159.. Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man : James Joyce : 1
  160.. Lonesome Dove : Larry McMurtry : 1
  161.. The Secret History : Donna Tartt : 1
  162.. Life: A User's Manual : Georges Perec : 1
  163.. Sirens of Titan : Kurt Vonnegut : 1
  164.. Waiting for the End of The World : Madison Smartt Bell : 1
  165.. The Story of the Vivian Girls(etc.) : Henry Darger : 1
  166.. White Noise : Don Delillo : 1
  167.. Dog Soldiers : Robert Stone : 1
  168.. Lampiere's Dictionary : Lawrence Norfolk : 1
  169.. Labyrinths : Jorge Luis Borges : 1