Books read by year

Thursday, April 25, 2013

The book list challenge ~ A to Zen

I got these titles from The Book List Challenge, which says, "100 books to read before you die."  Who says?  I want to know, since no credit is given.  Six years ago, as only my fourth post ever on this blog, I made a list of a hundred books I chose myself, after counting 50 books I'd read on this list.  Everyone chooses different books as best or most important or must-reads.  I have read 40 of the 100 books of this newest list, though "most people" according to the makers of the book list challenge have read "fewer than 10" of them.  How many have you read?  What must-read book would you suggest that is not on this list?

1.  1984 ~ by George Orwell (1949)
2.  Adventures of Huckleberry Finn ~ by Mark Twain (1885)
3.  The Alchemist ~ by Paulo Coelho (1993)
4.  Alice in Wonderland ~ by Lewis Carroll (1865)
5.  All the King's Men ~ by Robert Penn Warren (1946)
6.  All the Pretty Horses ~ by Cormac McCarthy (1992)
7.  The Ambassadors ~ by Henry James (1903)
8.  And Then There Were None ~ by Agatha Christie (1939)
9.  Anne of Green Gables ~ by L. M. Montgomery (1908)
10.  Beloved ~ by Toni Morrison (1987)
11.  Brave New World ~ by Aldous Huxley (1932)
12.  Brideshead Revisited ~ by Evelyn Waugh (1945)
13.  Bridget Jones's Diary ~ by Helen Fielding (1996)
14.  The Call of the Wild ~ by Jack London (1903)
15.  The Canterbury Tales ~ by Geoffrey Chaucer (late 13th century)
16.  Catch-22 ~ by Joseph Heller (1961)
17.  The Catcher in the Rye ~ J. D. Salinger (1951)
18.  Charlie and the Chocolate Factory ~ Roald Dahl (1964)
19.  Charlotte's Web ~ by E. B. White (1952)
20.  Cloud Atlas ~ by David Mitchell (2004)
21.  The Color Purple ~ by Alice Walker (1982)
22.  A  Confederacy of Dunces ~ by John Kennedy Toole (1980)
23.  Count of Monte Cristo ~ by Alexandre Dumas (1844)
24.  Crime and Punishment ~ by Fyodor Dostoyevsky (1866)
25.  Darkness at Noon ~ Arthur Koestler (1940)
26.  Don Quixote ~ by Miguel de Cervantes (1605)
27.  Dracula ~ by Bram Stoker (1897)
28.  Dune ~ by Frank Herbert (1965)
29.  The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test ~ by Tom Wolfe (1969)
30.  Fahrenheit 451 ~ by Ray Bradbury (1951)
31.  A Fine Balance ~ by Rohinton Mistry (1995)
32.  Go Tell It on the Mountain ~ by James Baldwin (1953)
33.  The Golden Notebook ~ by Doris Lessing (1962)
34.  Gone with the Wind ~ by Margaret Mitchell (1936)
35.  The Good Soldier ~ by Ford Madox Ford (1915)
36.  The Grapes of Wrath ~ by John Steinbeck (1939)
37.  Gravity's Rainbow ~ by Thomas Pynchon (1972)
38.  Great Expectations ~ by Charles Dickens (1861)
39.  The Great Gatsby ~ by F. Scott Fitzgerald (1925)
40.  Gulliver's Travels ~ by Jonathan Swift (1726)
41.  Hamlet ~ by William Shakespeare (1603)
42.  The Handmaid's Tale ~ by Margaret Atwood (1986)
43.  Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone ~ by J. K. Rowling (1997)
44.  The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter ~ by Carson McCullers (1940)
45.  Heart of Darkness ~ by Joseph Conrad (1899)
46.  The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy ~ by Douglas Adams (1979)
47.  Howard's End ~ by E. M. Forster (1910)
48.  In Search of Lost Time ~ by Marcel Proust (1913)
49.  Invisible Man ~ by Ralph Ellison (1952)
50.  Jane Eyre ~ by Charlotte Brontë (1847)
51.  The Kite Runner ~ by Khaled Hosseini (2003)
52.  Les Misérables ~ by Victor Hugo (1862)
53.  Life of Pi ~ by Yann Martel (2001)
54.  The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe ~ by C. S. Lewis (1950)
55.  The Little Prince ~ by Antoine de Saint-Exupery (1943)
56.  Little Women ~ by Louisa M. Alcott (1868)
57.  Lolita ~ by Vladimir Nabokov (1955)
58.  Lord of the Flies ~ by William Golding (1954)
59.  The Fellowship of the Ring (The Lord of the Rings) ~ by J. R. R. Tolkien (1954)
60.  Madame Bovary ~ by Gustave Falubert (1856)
61.  Main Street ~ by Sinclair Lewis (1920)
62.  The Maltese Falcon ~ by Dashiell Hammett (1930)
63.  Memoirs of a Geisha ~ by Arthur Golden (1997)
64.  Middlemarch ~ by George Eliot (1874)
65.  Midnight's Children ~ by Salman Rushdie (1981)
66.  Moby Dick ~ by Herman Melville (1851)
67.  Naked Lunch ~ by William S. Burroughs (1959)
68.  Native Son ~ by Richard Wright (1940)
69.  Northern Lights (The Golden Compass) ~ by Philip Pullman (1995)
70.  The Old Man and the Sea ~ by Ernest Hemingway (1952)
71.  On the Road ~ by Jack Kerouac (1957)
72.  One Hundred Years of Solitude ~ by Gabriel Garcia Marquez (`970)
73.  A Prayer for Owen Meaney ~ by John Irving (1989)
74.  Pride and Prejudice ~ by Jane Austen (1813)
75.  The Remains of the Day ~ by Kazuo Ishiguro (1989)
76.  The Scarlet Letter ~ by Nathaniel Hawthorne (1850)
77.  The Secret Garden ~ by Frances Hodgson Burnett (1911)
78.  The Secret History ~ by  Donna Tartt (1992)
79.  A Separate Peace ~ by John Knowles (1959)
80.  The Shadow of the Wind ~ by Carlos Ruiz Zafon (2004)
81.  Sister Carrie ~ by Theodore Dreiser (1900)
82.  Slaughterhouse-Five ~ by Kurt Vonnegut (1969)
83.  Sons and Lovers ~ by D. H. Lawrence (1913)
84.  The Sound and the Fury ~ by William Faulkner (1929)
85.  Stranger in a Strange Land ~ by Robert Heinlein (1961)
86.  Swallows and Amazons ~ by Arthur Ransom (1930)
87.  The Time Traveler's Wife ~ by Audrey Niffenegger (2003)
88.  To Kill a Mockingbird ~ by Harper Lee (1960)
89.  To the Lighthouse ~ by Virginia Woolf (1927)
90.  A Town Like Alice ~ by Nevil Shute (1950)
91.  Tropic of Cancer ~ by Henry Miller (1934)
92.  Ulysses ~ by James Joyce (1922)
93.  Under the Volcano ~ by Malcolm Lowry (1947)
94.  War and Peace ~ by Leo Tolstoy (1869)
95.  Watership Down ~ by Richard Adams (1972)
96.  The Way of All Flesh ~ by Samuel Butler (1903)
97.  The Wind in the Willows ~ by Kenneth Grahame (1908)
98.  Winnie the Pooh ~ by A. A. Milne (1926)
99.  Wuthering Heights ~ by Emily Bronte (1847)
100.  Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance ~ by Robert M. Pirsig (1974)
Here are a few I might have included on such a list.  These are simply ones that came to my mind while I was typing up this post.
The Stranger ~ by Albert Camus (1942)
The Plague ~ by Albert Camus (1947)
The Brothers Karamatzov ~ by Fyodor Dostoyevsky (1880)
A Tale of Two Cities ~ by Charles Dickens (1859)
Time and Again ~ by Jack Finney (1970)
On the Beach ~ by Nevil Shute (1957)
Possession ~ by A.S. Byatt(1990)
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer ~ by Mark Twain (1876)
The Secret Life of Bees ~ by Sue Monk Kidd (2002)
The Trial ~ by Franz Kafka (1925)
Cold Mountain ~ by Charles Frazier (1997)
The Giver ~ by Lois Lowry (1993)
A Thousand Acres ~ by Jane Smiley (1991)
I added dates to the books on today's list so you can see how old (or new) the books are.  Other lists:  In 2008, I shared a list of 100 new classics from Entertainment Weekly.  The Modern Library's 100 Best Novels is actually two lists, one from the Board and one from the Readers.

3 comments:

  1. Hmmmm... I fit in the category of reading fewer than 10. I have read 9 to completion. Then there are several I have started but not finished; a couple of those in their original language. Charlotte is currently reading #95 Watership Down. It was a gift recently since it is being retired next year for 7th grade gifted reading. She loves it. She may very well surpass me on such reading lists one day. There is so much reading to do; so little time. Which reminds me.... I must get back to my required reading. John Wesley may not have made it on any list, but he is on my syllabus list and time is slipping away. :)

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  2. I have "read" 35 of them. Does it count if read most of it and didn't like it? :-)

    These lists are always fun to look at, but you are right, it depends who makes the list as my list would have far fewer classics on it

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  3. Well, Helen, if we count DNF ("did not finish") books, my count would be higher, too. My list definitely would have fewer classics on it, unless we come up with a category called Modern Classics.

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