Jenna's 100 List

I've just spent the last couple of hours compiling my list. It was a lot harder than I thought! I had to cull some books that probably deserved to be on the list more than others, but I am happy with the final product. (And I just had to add Pride and Prejudice and Zombies to the list! No, not a classic, but such a quirky concept that I couldn't pass it up!).

I used the "1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die" list for inspiration. Many are classics that I really should have read a long time ago. Some are ones I'm not too familiar with but that had outstanding reviews and big literary awards to their names. This is pretty much in random order, except I put the Tolstoy at the top because I will be reading that first...

1. Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy
2. Never Let Me Go – Kazuo Ishiguro
3. Austerlitz – W.G. Sebald
4. White Teeth – Zadie Smith
5. Fingersmith – Sarah Waters
6. The Red Queen – Margaret Drabble
7. The Road – Cormac McCarthy
8. Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet – Jamie Ford
9. Atonement – Ian McEwan
10. The Poisonwood Bible – Barbara Kingsolver
11. Amsterdam – Ian McEwan
12. Silk – Alessandro Baricco
13. Cocaine Nights – J.G. Ballard
14. The Master – Colm Tóibín
15. Schooling – Heather McGowan
16. Drop City – T. Coraghessan Boyle
17. Slaughterhouse-Five – Kurt Vonnegut
18. Prodigal Summer – Barbara Kingsolver
19. Tender is the Night – F. Scott Fitzgerald
20. Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil – John Berendt
21. Something Wicked This Way Comes – Ray Bradbury
22. Everything is Illuminated – Jonathan Safran Foer
23. Kafka on the Shore – Haruki Murakami
24. The Book of Illusions – Paul Auster
25. Blonde – Joyce Carol Oates
26. The Crow Road – Iain Banks
27. Cloudsplitter – Russell Banks
28. The Story of Edgar Sawtelle – David Wroblewski
29. Farenheit 451 – Ray Bradbury
30. Underworld – Don DeLillo
31. Beloved – Toni Morrison
32. The Life of Insects – Victor Pelevin
33. American Pastoral – Philip Roth
34. Great Apes – Will Self
35. The Unconsoled – Kazuo Ishiguro
36. Mr. Vertigo – Paul Auster
37. The Reader – Bernhard Schlink
38. The Clay Machine-Gun – Victor Pelevin
39. City Sister Silver – Jàchym Topol
40. The Pigeon – Patrick Süskind
41. American Psycho – Bret Easton Ellis
42. Possession – A.S. Byatt
43. Foucault’s Pendulum – Umberto Eco
44. The Bonfire of the Vanities – Tom Wolfe
45. Love in the Time of Cholera – Gabriel García Márquez
46. The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood
47. Night Watch - Sergei Lukyanenko
48. Rabbit is Rich – John Updike
49. Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole
50. The Name of the Rose – Umberto Eco
51. Delta of Venus – Anaïs Nin
52. Misery - Stephen King
53. The Shining – Stephen King
54. The Wild Boys – William Burroughs
55. The French Lieutenant’s Woman – John Fowles
56. Ada – Vladimir Nabokov
57. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? – Philip K. Dick
58. The Master and Margarita – Mikhail Bulgakov
59. In Cold Blood – Truman Capote
60. Wide Sargasso Sea – Jean Rhys
61. The Ravishing of Lol V. Stein – Marguerite Duras
62. A Clockwork Orange – Anthony Burgess
63. Catch-22 – Joseph Heller
64. Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov
65. Lord of the Flies – William Golding
66. Day of the Triffids – John Wyndham
67. The Catcher in the Rye – J.D. Salinger
68. The Rebel – Albert Camus
69. Pride and Prejudice and Zombies – Jane Austen and Seth Grahame-Smith
70. The Labyrinth of Solitude – Octavio Paz
71. Between the Acts – Virginia Woolf
72. For Whom the Bell Tolls – Ernest Hemingway
73. Farewell My Lovely – Raymond Chandler
74. The Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck
75. Rebecca – Daphne du Maurier
76. Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck
77. Gone With the Wind – Margaret Mitchell
78. The Great Gatsby – F. Scott Fitzgerald
79. Red Harvest – Dashiell Hammett
80. Les Enfants Terribles – Jean Cocteau
81. To The Lighthouse – Virginia Woolf
82. The Counterfeiters – André Gide
83. The Trial – Franz Kafka
84. The Garden Party – Katherine Mansfield
85. Siddhartha – Herman Hesse
86. Ulysses – James Joyce
87. The Return of the Soldier – Rebecca West
88. The Turn of the Screw – Henry James
89. Dracula – Bram Stoker
90. Tess of the D’Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy
91. Treasure Island – Robert Louis Stevenson
92. Les Misérables – Victor Hugo
93. The Marble Faun – Nathaniel Hawthorne
94. Villette – Charlotte Brontë
95. Cranford – Elizabeth Gaskell
96. Mary Barton – Elizabeth Gaskell
97. Agnes Grey – Anne Brontë
98. The Count of Monte-Cristo – Alexandre Dumas
99. Dangerous Liaisons – Pierre Choderlos de Laclos
100. Candide – Voltaire