luvbight ([info]luvbight) wrote,
@ 2008-06-27 15:50:00
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Current location:Austin, TX
Current mood: thoughtful
Current music:CNBC Closing Bell
Entry tags:important books

Books I've Read, Books to Read
Per [info]elorin's meme:

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D'Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveller's Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34 Emma - Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli's Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones's Diary - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte's Web - EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

And where the HELL are:

101 The Fountain Head - Ayn Rand
102 Atlas Shrugged - Ayn Rand
103 Don Quixote - Miguel de Cervantes
104 The Story of O - Pauline Reage
105 The Kama Sutra - Vatsayana
106 Stranger in a Strange Land - Robert Heinlein
107 The Art of War - Sun Tzu
108 The Prince - Machiavelli
109 How to Win Friends and Influence People - Dale Carnegie
110 The Boy Scout Handbook
111 Future Shock - Alvin Toffler
112 Looking Out for Number One - Robert J. Ringer
113 Das Kapital - Karl Marx
114 The Wealth of Nations - Adam Smith
115 Mein Kampf - Adolph Hitler
116 The Koran

I added these last 16 because to me "Important, Life Changing Book" and "Great Literature" are two overlapping but different collections. And clearly some of my additions come under the heading of "know thine enemy".

I would have added "The Mythical Man Month" by Fred Brooks and "Software Tools" by Brian Kernighan and P.J. Plauger, but those are important books for programmers; they are not accessible to the general reading public.

I'd love to see other's suggested additions to the list...or reasons I should be intending to read the remainder of the first 100.

Thanks for a very thoughtful post, Elorin!

--Mick



(Post a new comment)


[info]elorin
2008-06-29 12:52 pm UTC (link)
I'm right there with Stranger in a Strange Land, but I'd also add The Moon is a Harsh Mistress and I will Fear No Evil by Heinlein. Both are "read and loved" here
The complete works of Mark Twain would be on my list, also. With an "intend to finish" marked beside them for me.

I had a list of "books I'd add" in my head last night, when I think of More I'll comment here.

Edited at 2008-06-29 01:03 pm UTC

(Reply to this)


[info]drbogdan
2008-07-01 03:10 am UTC (link)
Impressive List of Important Books - read some, aware of most - would add Samuel Beckett's "Waiting For Godot" (regarded as the *very best* Play of the 20th Century by over 800 playwrights, directors and journalists according to a news report not too long ago) - so many Good Books to read, so little time... - in any case, Enjoy :)

(Reply to this)(Thread)


[info]drbogdan
2008-07-01 02:58 pm UTC (link)
Brief Followup --

A LIST Of LISTS: WORLD'S ALL-TIME GREATEST BOOKS has now been posted at [info]drbogdan and includes The Harvard Classics, Great Books Of The Western World, Greatest Books (GB Index), Greatest Books (Gutenberg) and Greatest Novels (Modern Library).

Thanks for the Inspiration! - and Happy, Happy Reading! :)

(Reply to this)(Parent)

Just wanted to say
(Anonymous)
2008-08-10 11:46 am UTC (link)
It's amazing

(Reply to this)

thank you
(Anonymous)
2008-09-25 09:11 pm UTC (link)
thanks much, guy

(Reply to this)

well done
(Anonymous)
2008-10-07 08:40 am UTC (link)
i am gonna show this to my friend, guy

(Reply to this)


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