I ran across Newsweek’s top 100 books list yesterday. I know no list is perfect, there are always books that should be added or deleted, but I was curious how many of them I’ve read. Ones I’ve read are in bold.
- War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
- 1984 byGeorge Orwell
- Ulysses by James Joyce
- Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov *
- The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner
- Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
- To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf
- The Illiad and The Odyssey by Homer
- Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
- Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri
- Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer (I think I did read portions of this in school)
- Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift
- Middlemarch by George Eliot
- Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe
- The Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger
- Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell
- One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
- The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
- Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
- Beloved by Toni Morrison
- The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
- Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie
- Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
- Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf
- Native Son by Richard Wright
- Democracy in America by Alexis de Tocqueville
- On the Origin of Species by Charles Darwin
- The Histories by Herodotus
- The Social Contract by Jean-Jacques Rousseau
- Das Kapital by Karl Marx
- The Prince by Niccolo Machiavelli
- Confessions by St. Augustine
- Leviathan by Thomas Hobbes
- The History of the Peloponnesian War by Thucydides
- The Lord of the Rings by J. R. R. Tolkien
- Winnie the Pooh by A. A. Milne
- The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe by C. S. Lewis
- A Passage to India by E. M. Forster
- On the Road by Jack Kerouac
- To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
- The Holy Bible
- A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess
- Light in August by William Faulkner
- The Souls of Black Folk by W. E. B. DuBois
- Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys
- Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
- Paradis Lost by Joh Milton
- Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
- Hamlet by William Shakespeare
- King Lear by William Shakespeare *
- Othello by William Shakespeare
- Sonnets by William Shakespeare
- Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman
- The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
- Kim by Rudyard Kipling
- Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
- Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison
- One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest by Ken Kesey (But I saw the movie, if that counts for anything.)
- For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway
- Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut
- Animal Farm by George Orwell
- Lord of the Flies by William Golding
- In Cold Blood by Truman Capote *
- The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing
- Remembrance of Things Past by Marcel Proust
- The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler *
- As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner
- The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway *
- I, Claudius by Robert Graves
- The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers
- Sons and Lovers by D. H. Lawrence
- All the King’s Men by Robert Penn Warren
- Go Tell It on the Mountain by James Baldwin
- Charlotte’s Web by E. B. White
- Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
- Night by Elie Wiesel
- Rabbit, Run by John Updike
- The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton
- Portnoy’s Complaint by Philip Roth
- An American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser
- The Day of the Locust by Nathanael West
- Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller
- The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett *
- His Dark Materials by Philip Pullman
- Death Comes for the Archbishop by Willa Cather
- The Interpretation of Dreams by Sigmund Freud
- The Education of Henry Adams by Henry Adams
- Quotations from Chairman Mao by Mao Zedong
- The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature by William James
- Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh
- Silent Spring by Rachel Carson
- The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money by John Maynard Keynes
- Lord Jim by Joseph Conrad
- Goodbye to All That by Robert Graves
- The Affluent Society by John Kenneth Galbraith
- The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame
- The Autobiography of Malcom X by Alex Haley and Malcolm X
- Eminent Victorians by Lytton Strachey
- The Color Purple by Alice Walker
- The Second World War by Winston Churchill
I’ve read 19, I ‘m pretty sure. That’s not very good, but really there aren’t that many left that I want to read. I’ve starred the ones that I’m hoping to get around to soon.
What about you? What would be at the top of your 100 best list?
20 for me, if I counted correctly.
I came in at 21. Those are some pretty heavy books. My fave list is much lighter.
Should I admit this? I’ve only read 17 and some of those were a long time ago. I do think you should someday get to Chandler’s The Big Sleep and Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon. I’m a fan of noir and those are good ones. (Can you tell those are two of my 17?)
11 for me and most of them were forced on us in highschool! A few others sound familiar, but I can’t remember for sure if I read them.
19 for me, too – with lots more on my to-read stacks.
Twenty-seven, with lots more that I started but didn’t finish.
btw, you were at Kennywood? Why don’t we ever hook up and talk books and stuff????
NPR-just put out a list of 100 best beach reads.
Canterbury Tales
Native Son
The Prince
A Passage to India
To Kill a Mockingbird
The Holy Bible (the good parts)
A Clockwork Orange (one of my favorite books)
King Lear
Frankenstein (actually, in the middle of this one)
Slaughterhouse-Five (great, quick one I read over Christmas)
Sons and Lovers
Lord Jim
I didn’t count but I have read more than I thought. Some I started and never finished, ie. Slaughterhouse Five. Sorry but I was bored to tears and had no interest whatsoever.
14 I read and finished
2 I read part of (1 left in the Dark Matters Trilogy) and only the Illiad
5 I started and gave up on.
Interesting list though.
I had read 35 (and parts of others) but mainly a long time ago… guess I’m getting old and watching too many movies!