I don't know that this is comprehensive or even a good list, but it's a compilation of multiple lists I found online along with suggestions and books I've wanted to read for a while. I went by the criteria of "Have I heard of it before?" to slice off some of the chaff, then tried to get a swath of women writers and some international writers (sadly few of each really...) and I tried to cut down on repeat authors. Faulkner, Joyce, Fitzgerald, and Lawrence could probably fill a list all on their own if some of the "100 best" editors online had their way. I personally banned Joyce and Fitzgerald (Except for The Great Gatsby, out of guilt) due to taste reasons, and my personal opinion that Ulysses and Fitzgerald's books are greatly overblown. So here it is, a list to start pulling from, in no partiular order:
1. The Catcher in the Rye (JD Salinger)
2. The Grapes of Wrath (John Steinbeck)
3. To Kill a Mockingbird (Harper Lee)
4. The Color Purple (Alice Walker)
5. The Lord of the Flies (William Golding)
6. 1984 (George Orwell)
7. The Sound and the Fury (William Faulkner)
8. Lolita (Vladmir Nabokov)
9. Of Mice and Men (John Steinbeck)
10. Catch-22 (Joseph Heller)
11. A Brave New World (Aldous Huxley)
12. Animal Farm (George Orwell)
13. For Whom the Bell Tolls (Ernest Hemmingway)
14. Invisible Man (Ralph Ellison)
15. One Flew Over the Cukoo’s Nest (Ken Kesey)
16. The Great Gatsby (F. Scott Fitzgerald – begrudgingly)
17. Slauterhouse-Five (Kurt Vonnegut)
18. On the Road (Jack Kerouac)
19. The Old Man and the Sea (Ernest Hemmingway)
20. To the Lighthouse (Virginia Woolf)
21. Portrait of a Lady (Henry James)
22. The World According to Garp (John Irving)
23. A Room with a View (EM Forster)
24. The Fountainhead (Ayn Rand)
25. The Jungle (Upton Sinclair)
26. Lady Chatterley’s Lover (D.H. Lawrence)
27. A Clockwork Orange (Anthony Burgess)
28. My Antonia (Willa Cather)
29. In Cold Blood (Truman Capote)
30. The Satanic Verses (Salman Rushdie)
31. Ethan Frome (Edith Wharton)
32. Bonfire of the Vanities (Tom Wolfe)
33. Cat’s Cradle (Kurt Vonnegut)
34. Things Fall Apart (Chinua Achebe)
35. Rebecca (Daphne du Maurier)
36. Brideshead Revisited (Evelyn Waugh)
37. The Autobiography of Alice B. Tokias (Gertrude Stein)
38. The Maltese Falcon (Dashiell Hammett)
39. The Naked and the Dead (Norman Mailer)
40. Tropic of Cancer (Henry Miller)
41. The War of the Worlds (H.G. Wells)
42. Kim (Rudyard Kipling)
43. Rabbit, Run (John Updike)
44. Of Human Bondage (W. Somerset Maugham)
45. Death Comes for the Archbishop (Willa Cather)
46. Gone with the Wind (Margaret Mitchell)
47. The Prince (Niccolo Machiavelli)
48. The Inferno (Dante Alighieri)
49. The Richest Man in Babylon (George Samuel Clason)
50. Dracula (Bram Stoker)
51. The Wealth of Nations (Adam Smith)
52. Moby Dick (Herman Mellville)
53. Peter Pan (J.M. Barie)
54. Frankenstein (Mary Shelley)
55. All the King’s Men (Robert Penn Warren)
56. A Town like Alice (Neil Shute)
57. The Call of the Wild (Jack London)
58. Fahrenheit 451 (Ray Bradbury)
59. The Bell Jar (Sylvia Plath)
60. Circle of Friends (Maeve Binchy)
61. Persepolis (Marjane Satrapi)
62. The Agony and the Ecstasy (Irving Stone)
63. Tale of Two Cities (Charles Dickens)
64. Jane Eyre (Charlotte Bronte)
65. Wuthering Heights (Emily Bronte)
66. The Joy Luck Club (Amy Tan)
67. The Namesake (Jhumpa Lahiri)
68. The House of Mirth (Edith Wharton)
69. Beloved (Toni Morrison)
70. Madam Bovary (Gustave Flaubert)
71. Pride and Prejudice (Jane Austen)
72. The Shipping News (E. Annie Proulx)
73. Little Women (Lousia May Alcott)
74. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (Maya Angelou)
75. A Tree Grows in Brooklyn
76. The Diary of Anne Frank (Anne Frank)
77. The Unbearable Lightness of Being (Milan Kundera)
78. The Illiad & The Odessey (Homer)
79. Middlemarch (George Elliot)
80. Don Quixote (Miguel de Cervantes)
81. An American Tragedy (Theodore Dreiser)
82. Tess of the D’ubervillies (Thomas Hardy)
83. Watership Down (Richard Adams)
84. In Search of Lost Time (Marcel Proust)
85. Memoirs of a Geisha (Arthur Golden)
86. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (Douglas Adams)
87. The Handmaid’s Tale (Margaret Attwood)
88. Walden (Henry David Thoreau)
89. The Poisonwood Bible (Barbra Kingsolver)
90. The Bridge of San Luis Rey (Thornton Wilder)
91. The Brothers Karamazov (Fyodor Dostoyevsky)
92. Anna Karenina (Leo Tolstoy)
93. Hamlet (William Shakespeare)
94. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (Mark Twain)
95. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (Lewis Carrol)
96. The tale of Genji (Murasaki Shikibu)
97. Bleak House (Charles Dickens)
98. The Red and the Black (Stendhal)
99. The Golden Notebook (Doris Lessing)
100. The Trial (Franz Kafka)
Please, Let me know in the comments if I've duplicated a book, left out a priceless gem, or listed a book that is completely not worth my time. For most of these, I am going by hearsay since I've only read a select few. But, that's another one off the list at least!
Wednesday, September 24, 2008
A Book List to End All Book Lists...
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5 comments:
Woo! I am glad to say I influenced a bunch of these. Glad you kept Persepolis, I mean a book written by a woman growing up in Iran hits a lot of your criteria. :) I haven't read most of these, so I'll go along with you in completing this list if you don't mind.
16.5 (for those of you counting), Moby Dick is really hard for me to concentrate on.
I don't know if I'll ever get through Moby Dick... but I felt like I couldn't leave it off the list cuz it's almost shameful that an English major like me hasn't read it. I was definitely excited by your suggestion of Persepolis because I hadn't seen it on some of the other lists, but I've heard such good reviews of it (and the movie :P)
Ugh Moby Dick is an absolute bore and I still question why it is so lauded as an example of fantastic literature!
If you want, I have a fair amount of the books on your list should you desire to borrow them instead of purchasing or utuilizing the library.
I think All Quiet on the Western Front should be on there. I think it's the best book on war ever written, it doesn't pull any punches, it's very straight forward. I never felt like any of it was forced or added for dramatic effect, it simply is. If that makes sense. Of course I am also the biggest Remarque fan ever, so perhaps take my opinion with a grain of salt.
I read Sometimes A Great Notion (Kesey's other great novel) last year and ADORED it. My dad says that in some ways Cuckoo's Nest is better, but that he likes Sometimes A Great Notion better.
You'll have your hands full with all this, though.
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