SOURCE: "A Century's Best Novels, Chapter 2: Readers Vote," in Los Angeles Times, July 24, 1998, pp. El, E8.

[In the following essay, Lioce provides a sample of Times readers's views of Modern Library's list as well as their opinions of titles that should have been included.]

Where's Harper Lee? Where's Margaret Mitchell? Where's Ayn Rand? Where's John Irving? Where's William Burroughs? No Raymond Chandler? OK, they included Faulkner, Nabokov, Steinbeck and Hemingway. But where's Absalom, Absalom!? Where's Laughter in the Dark? Of Mice and Men and East of Eden? The Old Man and the Sea and For Whom the Bell Tolls?

Today at Radcliffe College, the Modern Library's editorial board officially will announce what it considers the 100 finest English-language novels published in this century, a list that starts with James Joyce's Ulysses and ends with Booth Tarkington's The Magnificent Ambersons.

The list has been in circulation since Monday, though, and...