Reading Lists

One of my roommates has a grand list of things she wishes to accomplish, and right now is focusing on reading. This led her to look for a top 100 books list, which I also find intriguing and now have been looking up.

The Great Gatsby seems to top many of the lists. Though I’ve read it, I don’t remember too much of what it’s about. It’s right up there for The Essential Man’s Library Part I, and The Modern Library Board’s 100 Best. The Modern Library’s readers, though, show a strong predeliction for Ayn Rand. Again, why? On the BBC list, generated from audience nominations in 2003, Harry Potter makes a very strong showing. Time and The College Board coyly put their lists in alphabetical order, as does the very international list compiled by The Guardian. The website best100novels.com claims to have a democratic approach — anyone can submit their top 10 list to be factored into the overall ranking. Then, there’s a book which I once flipped through at a bookstore, The Top Ten, in which well-known writers share their top lists.

Of course, starting grad school is a poor time to embark on such a project, but I’m curious enough, and wishfully erudite enough, to try and compile things into my own list.

After some crunching through excel, plus some adjusting for my own personal preferences, here’s what I come up with.

First, twenty authors who ought to be read.

1	George Orwell
2	William Faulkner
3	Lev Tolstoy
4	Jane Austen
5	James Joyce
6	John Steinbeck
7	JRR Tolkien
8	Vladimir V. Nabokov
9	Charles Dickens
10	Fyodor Dostoevsky
11	William Shakespeare
12	Ernest Hemingway
13	Gabriel García Márquez
14	Joseph Conrad
15	Salman Rushdie
16	Franz Kafka
17	Robert Heinlein
18	Terry Pratchett
19	Toni Morrison
20	J.M. Coetzee

And, 100 novels, with * to denote ones I have read

1	*Catch-22	Joseph Heller	American	1961
2	*The Catcher in the Rye	J.D. Salinger	American	1951
3	*The Great Gatsby	F. Scott Fitzgerald	American	1925
4	To Kill A Mockingbird	Harper Lee	American	1960
5	*Slaughterhouse Five	Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.	American	1969
6	*Brave New World	Aldous Huxley	British	1932
7	Lord of the Flies	William Golding	British	1954
8	*Invisible Man	Ralph Waldo Ellison	American	1953
9	Wuthering Heights	Emily Bronte	British	1847
10	To the Lighthouse	Virginia Woolf	British	1927
11	The Illiad & The Odyssey	Homer	Greek	12th century
12	*The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy	Douglas Adams	British	1979
13	Gone With the Wind	Margaret Mitchell	American	1936
14	*The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn	Mark Twain	American	1885
15	Jane Eyre	Charlotte Bronte	British	1847
16	Middlemarch	George Eliot	British	1874
17	Madame Bovary	Gustave Flaubert	French	1856
18	*Don Quixote	Miguel de Cervantes	Spanish	1605
19	The Stand	Stephen King	American	1978
20	*A Clockwork Orange	Anthony Burgess	British	1962
21	An American Tragedy	Theodore Dreiser	American	1925
22	*Dune	Frank Herbert	American	1965
23	A Prayer for Owen Meany	John Irving	American	1989
24	Under the Volcano	Malcom Lowry	American	1947
25	*On the Road	Jack Kerouac	American	1958
26	*His Dark Materials	Phillip Pullman	British	1995
27	Tess of the D’ubervilles	Thomas Hardy	British	1891
28	The Picture of Dorian Gray	Oscar Wilde	British	1890
29	*The Stranger	Albert Camus	French	1942
30	Native Son	Richard Wright	American	1940
31	The Heart is a Lonely Hunter	Cason McCullers	American	1940
32	*Watership Down	Richard Adams	British	1972
33	I, Claudius	Robert Graves	British	1934
34	*Things Fall Apart	Chinua Achebe	Nigeria	1959
35	The Magic Mountain	Thomas Mann	German	1924
36	In Search of Lost Time	Marcel Proust	French	1913
37	The Call of the Wild	Jack London	American	1903
38	Rebecca	Daphne Du Maurier	British	1938
39	A Passage to India	E.M. Forster	British	1924
40	Brideshead Revisited	Evelyn Waugh	British	1945
41	Memoirs of a Geisha	Arthur Golden	American	1997
42	Ender’s Game	Orson Scott Card	American	1985
43	The Good Soldier	Ford Madox Ford	British	1915
44	*Midnight’s Children	Salman Rushdie	Indian-British	1985
45	Go Tell It On The Mountain	James Baldwin	American	1953
46	*The Master and Margarita	Mikhail Bulgakov	Russian	1940 (1967)
47	A Town Like Alice	Neil Shute	British	1950
48	The Golden Notebook	Doris Lessing	British	1962
49	Beloved	Toni Morrison	American	1987
50	One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest	Ken Kesey	American	1962
51	Moby Dick	Herman Melville	American	1851
52	Vanity Fair	William Thackeray	British	1847
53	The Moviegoer	Walker Percy	American	1962
54	The Tale of Genji	Murasaki Shikibu	Japanese	11th century
55	*The Handmaid’s Tale	Margaret Atwood	Canadian	1985
56	Death Comes for the Archbishop	Willa Cather	American	1927
57	Sons and Lovers	D.H. Lawrence	British	1913
58	*Walden	Henry David Thoreau	American	1854
59	The Count of Monte Cristo	Alexander Dumas, pere	French	1844
60	Tropic of Cancer	Henry Miller	American	1934
61	Tom Jones	Henry Fielding	British	1749
62	Call It Sleep	Henry Roth	American	1934
63	Appointment in Samarra	Jon O’Hara	American	1934
64	The Poisonwood Bible	Barbara Kingsolver	American	1998
65	The Man Without Qualities	Robert Musil	Austrian	1930-1942
66	The Portrait of A Lady	Henry James	British	1881
67	Frankenstein	Mary Shelley	British	1818
68	The Adventures of Augie March	Saul Bellow	American	1953
69	The French Lieutenant’s Woman	John Fowles	British	1969
70	The Red and the Black	Stendhal	French	1830
71	*The Scarlet Letter	Nathaniel Hawthorne	American	1850
72	The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy	Laurence Sterne	British	1759
73	Their Eyes Were Watching God	Zora Neale Hurston	American	1937
74	*Dead Souls	Nikolai Gogol	Russian	1842
75	All the King’s Men	Robert Penn Warren	American	1946
76	Farenheit 451	Ray Bradbury	American	1953
77	The Bridge of San Luis Rey	Thornton Wilder	American	1927
78	Father Goriot	Honore de Balzac	French	1835
79	The Tin Drum	Gunter Grass	German	1959
80	The Heart of the Matter	Graham Greene	British	1948
81	Blood Meridian	Cormac McCarthy	American	1985
82	Deliverance	James Dickey	American	1970
83	A Dance to the Music of Time	Anthony Powell	British	1951-1975
84	*Fathers and Sons	Ivan Turgenev	Russian	1862
85	*Captain Corelli’s Mandolin	Louis de Bernières	British	1993
86	Portnoy’s Complaint	Philip Roth	American	1969
87	*Oedipus Rex	Sophocles	Greek	429 BC
88	The Canterbury Tales	Geoffrey Chaucer	British	14th century
89	Gravity’s Rainbow	Thomas Pynchon	American	1966
90	A Death in the Family	James Agee	American	1957
91	Mrs. Dalloway	Virginia Woolf	British	1925
92	A Doll’s House	Henrik Ibsen	Norwegian	1879
93	Leaves of Grass	Walt Whitman	American	1855
94	Faust	Goethe	German	1805
95	Gulliver’s Travels	Jonathan Swift	British	1726
96	Divine Comedy	Dante Aligheri	Italian	1321
97	The Red Badge of Courage	Stephen Crane	American	1895
98	*Les Miserables	Victor Hugo	French	1862
99	Good Omens	Terry Pratchett & Neil Gaiman	British	1990
100	Darkness at Noon	Arthur Koestler	Hungarian-British	1940

It is remarkably short on non-Anglo-American authors, I know. And there’s much missing. It only includes a few of the Nobel laureates for literature, for instance. As the popular saying goes, “so many books, so little time.” I doubt that I’ll ever get to everything on this particular list, but I’m satisfied with the exercise of making it, and in looking up the contents have found not a few books that I am interested in reading.

Supposing I have the time, of course!