Saturday, April 25, 2009

Aerin's List


Although I planned on doing this when Moonie first discussed it, I've only now gotten myself together and actually made the list.  I received a few recommendations, but mostly I chose books based on the fill-in-the-gap principle.  These are books I think I should have read, and not necessarily classics or popular works.   Because the limit was 100, I purposely excluded nonfiction (though I need still to replace Foucault).  And now I need a drink.  Honestly.  Who knew the list itself would take several hours to compile??


A
Adams, Richard.  Watership Down    
Alcott, Louisa May.  Good Wives    
Alcott, Louisa May.  Jo’s Boys    
Alcott, Louisa May.  Little Men    
Alexander, Lloyd.  The Prydian Chronicles    
Angelou, Maya.  I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings    
Avi.  The True Confessions of Charlotte Doyle    
B
Baxter, Charles.  Feast of Love    
Bellow, Saul.  Henderson the Rain King    
Bradbury, Ray.  Farenheit 451    
Bronte, Anne.  The Tenant of Wildfell Hall    
Bronte, Charlotte.  Villette    
Brooks, Gwendolyn.  A Tree Grows in Brooklyn    
Bryson, Bill.  A Short History of Nearly Everything    
Bryson, Bill.  A Walk in the Woods    
Bryson, Bill.  The Mother Tongue: English and How It Got That Way    
Buck, Pearl S..  The Good Earth    
Burgess, Anthony.  A Clockwork Orange    
Byars, Betsy.  Summer of the Swans    
C
Camus, Albert.  The Stranger    
Cather, Willa.  O Pioneers!    
Chabon, Michael.  The Yiddish Policemen’s Union    
Clarke, Susanna.  Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell    
Collins, Wilkie.  The Woman in White    
Conrad, Joseph.  Lord Jim    
Cooper, James Fenimore.  The Deerslayer  
D
Dante.  The Inferno    
De Beauvoire, Simone.  She Came to Stay    
Defoe, Daniel.  Robinson Crusoe    
Dickens, Charles.  A Tale of Two Cities    
Doyle, Sir Arthur Conan.  The Hound of the Baskervilles    
Dreiser, Theodore.  An American Tragedy    
Du Maurier, Rebecca.  Rebecca    
E
Eco, Umberto.  The Name of the Rose    
Eggers, Dave.  A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius    
Eliot, George.  Middlemarch    
Ellison, Ralph.  The Invisible Man    
Eugenides, Jeffrey.  Middlesex    
F
Faulkner, William.  As I Lay Dying    
Foer, Jonathan Safran.  Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close    
Forster, E.M..  A Passage to India    
Foucault, Michel.  Discipline and Punish    
G
Gaiman, Neil.  The Graveyard Book    
George, Jean Craighead.  Julie of the Wolves    
H
Hammet, Dashiell.  The Maltese Falcon   
Heller, Joseph.  Catch-22    
Hemingway, Ernest.  The Old Man and the Sea    
Herbert, Frank.  Dune    
Homer.  The Iliad    
Hosseini, Khaled.  The Kite-Runner    
Hurston, Nora Zeale.  Their Eyes Were Watching God    
I
Irving, John.  The Cider House Rules    
J
Jacobs, Harriet.  Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl    
Joyce, James.  The Dubliners    
K
Kaye, M.M..  The Far Pavilions    
Kerouac, Jack.  On the Road    
Kingsolver, Barbara.  The Poisonwood Bible    
Kipling, Rudyard.  Kim    
Kundera, Milan.  The Unbearable Lightness of Being    
L
L’Engle Madeline.  And Both Were Young    
L’Engle, Madeline.  Meet the Austins    
Lawrence, D.H..  Sons and Lovers    
Lewis, Sinclair.  Kingsblood Royal    
Lowry, Lois.  Number the Stars    
M
Mitchell, Margaret.  Gone with the Wind    
Moore, Alan.  Watchmen    
Morrison, Toni.  Beloved    
N
Nabokov, Vladimir.  Lolita    
Naslund, Sena Jeter.  Ahab’s Wife    
O
O’Dell, Scott.  Island of the Blue Dolphins    
P
Paterson, Katherine.  Jacob Have I Loved    
Pears, Iain.  Stone’s Fall    
Peet, Mal.  Tamar    
Pessl, Marisha.  Special Topics in Calamity Physics    
Plath, Sylvia.  The Bell Jar    
Porter, Katherine Anne.  Ship of Fools    
Pullman, Philip.  The Golden Compass    
R
Rand, Ayn.  Atlas Shrugged    
Rawls, Wilson.  Where the Red Fern Grows    
Robinson, Marilynne.  Gilead    
Rushdie, Salman.  Midnight’s Children    
S
Scott, Sir Walter.  Ivanhoe    
Shelley, Mary.  Frankenstein    
Shikibu, Murasaki.  The Tale of Genji    
Spenser, Edmund.  The Faerie Queen    
Steinbeck, John.  Cannery Row    
Sterne, Laurence.  Tristram Shandy    
Stoker, Bram.  Dracula    
Swift, Jonathan.  Gulliver’s Travels      
T
Taylor, Mildred D..  Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry    
U
Updike, John.  The Poorhouse Fair  
V
Virgil.  The Aeneid    
Vonnegut, Kurt.  Slaughterhouse Five    
W
Walker, Alice.  The Color Purple    
Waugh, Evelyn.  Brideshead Revisted    
Welty, Eudora.  The Optimist’s Daughter    
Wharton, Edith.  House of Mirth    
Woodson, Jacqueline.  After Tupac & D Foster    
Woolf, Virginia.  A Room of One’s Own    
Wright, Richard.  Native Son  

4 comments:

Goedi said...

Yeah, just doing the list is quite a bit of homework, but at least it makes the commitment that much stronger. You reacquaint yourself with your friends on the shelves, and, having held them again...
You're off and running/reading!

moonrat said...

dude. i totally spent days on mine. haha. "hours." awesome list :)

is the true confessions of charlotte doyle still in print? i read and reread it as a kid. wrote my first novel (in seventh grade) inspired by, or, erm, based on it.

Stephanie said...

I loved And Both Were Young. I can't remember if I read it as a teenager or as an adult, although I've always had a thing for books about boarding school.

Alyce said...

I spent a couple of days obsessing about my list - in a good way though. I had so much fun making mine. I have only read ten books on your list. I didn't realize that Number the Stars was by Lois Lowry. My mother-in-law had the book sitting around her house and I read it a few years ago when I was there.