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.