2. 1984 – George Orwell
3. Middlemarch – George Eliot
4. The Great Gatsby – F Scott Fitzgerald
5. War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy
6. Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy
7. The Kite Runner – Khaled Hosseini
8. The Lovely Bones – Alice Sebold
9. The Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath
10. Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert
11. Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury
12. The Divine Comedy – Dante Alighieri
13. The Cyclops – Euripides
14. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maitenance – Robert Pirsig
15. A Wrinkle in Time – Madeleine L’Engle
16. The Tale of Despereaux – Kat DiCamillo
17. Because of Winn-Dixie – Kat DiCamillo
18. The Butterfly and the Diving Bell – Jean-Dominique Bauby
19. Notes on Nursing – Florence Nightingale
20. Agnes Grey – Anne Bronte
21. The Solomon Key (alleged title) – Dan Brown
22. (4/10/09)
23. Hamlet – Shakespeare
24. The Tale of Genji – Murasaki Shikibu
25. Absalom, Absalom! – William Faulkner
26. Crime and Punishment – Feodor Dostoevsky
27. The Portrait of a Lady – Henry James
28. Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen
29. Robinson Crusoe – Daniel Defoe
30. Vanity Fair – William Thackeray
31. Doctor Zhivago – Boris Pasternak
32. Metamorphosis – Franz Kafka
33. The Taming of the Shrew – Shakespeare
34. Portrait in Sepia – Isabella Allende
35. Grass for His Pillo – Lian Hearn
36. Brilliance of the Moon – Lian Hearn
37. Captain Corelli’s Mandolin – Louis De Bernieres
38. The Soloist – Steve Lopez
39. Dr. Seuss & Mr. Geisel: A Biography – Judy & Neil Morgan
40. The Stories of Anton Chekhov – Anton Chekhov
41. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (book 1) – Douglas Adams
42. East of Eden – John Steinbeck
43. The Golden Notebook – Doris Lessing
44. The Body Finder – Kimberly Derting
45. The Naughty List – Suzanne Young
46. Prophecy of Days – Christy Raedeke
47. Excavation – James Rollins
48. Sandstorm – James Rollins
49. Catch 22 – Joseph Heller
50. Paradise Lost – John Milton
51. Al Capone Does My Shirts – Gennifer Choldenko
52. An American Plague: The True and Terrifying Story…-Jim Murphy
53. Eleanor Roosevelt: A Life of Discovery – Russel Freedman
54. Shabanu, Daughter of the Wind – Suzanne Fisher Staples
55. A Fine White Dust – Cynthia Rylant
56. Volcano: The Eruption and Healing of Mount St. Helens – Patricia Lauber
57. In the Woods - - Tana French
58. Chasing Fireflies – Charles Martin
59. The Cure – Athol Dickson
60. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao – Junot Diaz
61. Ysabel – Guy Gavriel Kay
62. The Yiddish Policeman’s Union – Michael Chabon
63. This Side of Paradise – F. Scott Fitzgerald
64. Candide – Voltaire
65. The Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck
66. The Sound and Fury – William Faulkner
67. Villette – Charlotte Bronte
68. The Professor – Charlotte Bronte
69. Touch the Top of the World: A Blind Mans… - Erik Weihenmayer
70. The Republic – Plato
71. The Iliad – Homer
72. Idylls of the King – Alfred Tynnyson
73. The Black Tulip – Alexandre Dumas
74. Ben Hur – Lew Wallace
75. Persuasion – Jane Austin
76. Arabian Nights – Anthony Galland
77. Nostromo – Joseph Conrad
78. For Whom the Bell Tolls – Ernest Hemingway
79. The Red Badge of Courage – Stephen Crane
80. Pygmalian – George Bernard Shaw
81. The Picture of Dorian Gray – Oscar Wilde
82. Moll Flanders – Daniel Defoe
83. War of the Worlds – H. G. Wells
84. Toilers of the Sea – Victor Hugo
85. The Black Arrow – Robert Louis Stevenson
86. Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov
87. The Trial – Franz Kafka
88. Brave New World – Aldous Huxley
89. Island – Aldous Huxley
90. The Swan Maiden – Heather Tomlinson
91. David Copperfield – Charles Dickens
92. The Cider House Rules – John Irving
93. The Lighthouse at the End of the World – Jules Verne
94. Journey to the Center of the Earth – Jules Verne
95. The Sum of All Fears – Tom Clancy
96. Allan Quartermain – Sir Henry Rider Haggard
97. The Silmarillion – J.R.R. Tolkien
98. Esmeralda – Frances Hodgson Burnett
99. I Am Legend – Richard Matheson
100. I am America (And So Can You!) – Stephen Colbert
17 comments:
oh your tackling tom clancy (my bro loved him). i love your diverse list
Ooh, I think I'm going to have to grab some from this list for my perpetual TBR list.
I am ALL over the place with my list. But of course I wanted to support fellow bloggers so they've been added and then since I'm a SciFi-Thriller nerd I had to add accordingly.
Trust me, the fast paced books will probably be done first...except for the lengthy slow ones that I already have on my shelf that stare at me with big puppy dog eyes saying, "Just read me p-p-please!"
im doing that, too. i'm trying to knock out some quick ones at the beginning to make myself feel good about myself :) just finished a second one... another shortypie.
but of course this means i'm going to be left with all the monster doorstops come september... haha.
I'm going to try to vary mine, do one book that's longer, one book that's faster, and so on. It helps that I like classics in general, but recently I've been reading almost purely YA so going back to classics is a little bit difficult.
Oh, I've been meaning to read, The Tale of Despereaux wish I'd thought to put it on my list!
Good luck with Lolita - Nabokov's a beautiful writer, the language is gorgeous, but the subject matter made my teeth itch. I'm glad I finished it, but I had to throw it at the radiator a bunch of times before I finally got through it.
Merry - that's funny. I loved Lolita so much. It didn't make me uncomfortable (though I read it before I had kids, so that might have made a difference) and the prose was so gorgeous I was completely swept away. That probably says something negative about my psyche, but oh well. :)
Amanda,
The language was gorgeous... I really should read something else of his - like I said, the subject matter completely unnerved me, but that's probably because he made Humbert Humbert so believable.
I agree - I think the reason it's so disturbing is that he attempts, for the first half of the book, to make HH sympathetic, to ingratiate the reader into his mindframe. Then, HH looks even worse when Nabokov turns on him in the second half. I was warned about that in advance, and I think that helped me put it all into perspective when I read.
RE: how to decide what to read, I'm with Amanda. I'm going to try to read an "easy" one and then a "hard" one - that way I don't get stuck near the end with a bunch of books that will be really hard to slog through. That would be demoralizing for me :) But I'm also going to be reading a bunch not on the list for my real-life book club and for fun...so we'll see how it all goes!
Oh i'm kinda thinking lolita myself now, i had heard it was beautiful written but i don't know if i'm all the comfortable with the subject matter but when i was making the list i thought i needed to read it cause its famous but i might swap it with another of his books.
i'm such a whimp
This is a diverse list! Love it!
Seeing hearing the suggestions on Lolita makes me want to move it up on the list. ;) But thank goodness I have a shortie like Voltair's Candide ON MY BOOKSHELF! (my hubby bought it in high school but they never got to it) lol.
Maybe I should list the page count in a 3rd column and put it in order that way...lol.
I'm like you guys though...I have a feeling I'm gonna have a solid year of boring books to go thru if I leave them last.
I've come to the realization that while I *used* to be a fast reader, I find it harder to focus and I've started reading slower over the years. It's like I have to make sure I grasp each sentence fully so I don't miss something. It can take me forever to read a book if I'm not fully into it.
Okay so I just read the basic plot summary of Lolita. I knew the MC fell in love with a 12 year old but I didn't realize how in depth it went with his affair with her. I'm not sure I feel that comfortable now reading it. I don't think I could see it as a "beautiful" piece. I think maybe when I was a teenager I could. But not now. I think it might just aggravate me.
Shucks. Okay so I guess I'll have to replace it with something else. Thanks for the heads up though! (teeth itching, radiator throwing, etc). lol.
PC--if this helps at all, I think there is some real merit to reading LOLITA. It's an archetype, and started the dialogue of a generation about the meanings of consent, abuse, and rape. It will be clear as you go along that Nabokov is not sympathetic to Humbert--Humbert is convincingly drawn, but a monster--and although it is an uncomfortable read, reading it did help me understand a lot about our society, and draw much better established ideas of how to say something is morally reprehensible.
The trouble, alas, comes at least in part with the movie (I think). For example, I asked my mother if she knew what Lolita was about, and she told me "Of course. It's about a teenage nymphet who seduces her stepfather." That, unfortunately, is the spin of modern society/mass media. Nabokov isn't writing about a 12-yr-old who "seduces" an adult man (I would argue such a thing is impossible, and could recomment a couple of books explaining why, if you're interested)--he's writing about a pedophile, and the ways the man justifies his behavior, and the ways society forgives him and colludes. The book is ironic, and very sharp and eye-opening.
Hope I haven't said too much; once I get going I can't stop. But one last thing--if you DO read it you'll be perfectly equipped to set people like my mother straight.
I'm in complete agreement with Moonrat. This is one of the most powerful books I've ever read, one of my favorites, and I never once got the impression while reading that there was implicit approval of HH's actions. Rather the opposite. And, if it helps, while the affair does go far, it isn't particularly descriptive. The sex scenes aren't graphic, and really are for the most part glossed over or skipped altogether.
Hmm. Okay, if it was that impressionable I'll leave it on the list. My curiosity is piqued on the writing style and prose just by what you guys have said. Thanks Moon Rat and Amanda for detailed explanations!
Of course I might leave it for the end (you know the last 25%??)...haha.
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