The List

So, this list has been floating around for a while, so I've decided it's my turn to show my literary ignorance. I have bolded the ones which I have read -- considered italicising the ones I tried really, really hard to read but simply can't (life is too short to read books you're not enjoying and/or learning something from). Ones which I have read and/or re-read as an adult are underlined.

1. 1984 by George Orwell


2. The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien


3. The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger


4. Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen


5. To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee


6. Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky


7. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald


8. Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov


9. Catch-22 by Joseph Heller


10. Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte


11. Brave New World by Aldous Huxley


12. Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte


13. Ulysses by James Joyce


14. Animal Farm by George Orwell


15. Great Expectations by Charles Dickens


16. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams


17. The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky


18. Les Miserables by Victor Hugo


19. The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde


20. The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck


21. The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien


22. Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy


23. Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes


24. The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas


25. A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens


26. Frankenstein by Mary Shelley


27. East of Eden by John Steinbeck


28. A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess


29. Life of Pi by Yann Martel


30. Lord of the Flies by William Golding


31. Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell


32. One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez


33. War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy


34. The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner


35. The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown


36. Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card


37. Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier


38. Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury


39. Memoirs of a Geisha by Arthur Golden


40. Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut


41. The Time Traveler’s Wife by Audrey Niffenegger


42. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce


43. The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov


44. His Dark Materials by Phillip Pullman


45. The Chronicles of Narnia by C.S. Lewis


46. Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison


47. Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand


48. The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini


49. The Stand by Stephen King


50. A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway


51. Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad


52. Tess of the D’Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy


53. The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway


54. The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand


55. Watership Down by Richard Adams


56. Dracula by Bram Stoker


57. Of Human Bondage by W. Somerset Maugham


58. Moby Dick by Herman Melville


59. One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest by Ken Kesey


60. The Heart is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers


61. On the Road by Jack Kerouac


62. The Idiot by Fyodor Dostoevsky


63. Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov


64. Dune by Frank Herbert


65. The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver


66. Harry Potter Series by J.K. Rowling


67. Anne of Green Gables by L.M. Montgomery


68. Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak


69. The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera


70. Gravity’s Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon


71. Little Women by Louisa May Alcott


72. The Trial by Franz Kafka


73. I, Claudius by Robert Graves


74. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time by Mark Haddon


75. Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert


76. The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath


77. A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole


78. The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway


79. To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf


80. Vanity Fair by William Thackeray


81. Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez


82. The Stranger by Albert Camus (in both English and French)


83. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain


84. The Hunchback of Notre Dame by Victor Hugo


85. The Phantom of the Opera by Gaston LeRoux


86. For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway


87. Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy


88. Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens


89. The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle


90. Persuasion by Jane Austen


91. Light in August by William Faulkner


92. Franny and Zooey by J.D. Salinger


93. Call of the Wild by Jack London


94. Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides


95. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll


96. Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe


97. The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka


98. The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco


99. The Clan of the Cave Bear by Jean M. Auel


100. As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner

Hmmm, 55 -- more than half the list isn't half bad, right? Guess that makes it only 45% bad.

How did Faulkner rate 3 places on the list?! I can tell you that I will probably never read the two Faulkners that I haven't yet. And there are a couple of other titles here I've tried and simply can't (Lolita, A Confederacy of Dunces and Life of Pi). But do I get extra credit for the one that I read in both French and English?

My takeaway is that I need to read more Russian and American classics (big surprise there -- I was, after all an English major in the purest sense of the word).

So, because Sandy misses being in school so much (though M and I have embarked on the four-year odyssey known as Education for Ministry), she's vowing here, publicly, to be better. Starting with the books on this list which I haven't read or haven't read since high school, then moving on to the books on this list which I haven't read yet. [Just because I was on the committee which put together the list doesn't mean I've read them all.]

So far, I've re-read Brave New World and wondered the whole time: 1) how you can teach/explain a lot of that book to adolescents (I have few memories of the book from my high school days, and here publicly admit I probably never even finished it); and 2) why it's considered such a classic. I mean, the story is an interesting look at an attempt at utopian society and an intriguing morality play, but the language is rather pedestrian, and it really seems to lack any structure or true arc of narrative. Maybe it's just me.

Of course, the next book I picked up to re-read was 1984. The only thing I remember vividly about this book from high school is the rats. Now that I have finished it, I can say that the rats weren't nearly as vivid this time around. No, what's really vivid for me this time around is the fear. I don't want my blog to become a political one (one of the reasons I have not written lately is that all I can think of to write about is politics -- knitting is slow right now, and work is absorbing me), so that's it.

Next, something that doesn't touch that nerve (I've had enough of totalitarianism for now between BNW, 1984 and the Olympics). Don't know what's next -- well, except that I've got to read the creation stories from Genesis for our next EfM class Monday night.

And just cause, y'know, it ain't fair to have all those words without some pictures:
I wish I could be so relaxed.