Great Reads
My brilliant friend Lindsay recently posted a great
list of books on her blog, and I was inspired to use that list as a launching
pad for my own list. It is
much more difficult than I would have thought, as I am an avid reader and voracious
student specifically of the Classics. I
love poetry, plays, philosophical treatises…oh heck, I just love books!
Here are the books on Lindsay’s list (the first 100) and then an
additional 50 I have added. I’d love to
see what books YOU would suggest for the ongoing list AND, which books are on
your list!
Key
- BOLD = Read it
Stike-through= not interested- Italics Underlined = read part of it or in process
1 To
Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
2 The Book of Mormon: Another Testament of Jesus Christ
by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (Editor),
Joseph Smith (Translator)
3 Pride and
Prejudice by Jane Austen
4 Twilight by Stephenie Meyer
5 The Lord of the
Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien
6 Holy Bible
7 1984
by George Orwell
8 Jane Eyre
by Charlotte Brontë
9 Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows by J.K.
Rowling10 The
Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger
11 Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne
Frank
12 Little
Women by Louisa May Alcott
13 Gone
With The Wind by Margaret Mitchell
14 The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe by C.S.
Lewis
15 The
Giver by Lois Lowry
16 The Kite
Runner by Khaled Hosseini
17 Eclipse by Stephenie
Meyer
18 The
Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
19 The
Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas, Robin Buss (Translator)
20 The
Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams
21 Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card
22 Anne of
Green Gables by L.M. Montgomery, Margaret Atwood (Introduction)
23 Crime
and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky
24 The Time
Traveler's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger
25 Les
Misérables by Victor Hugo
26 The
Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
27 New Moon by Stephenie Meyer
28 One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García
Márquez
29 The
Alchemist by Paulo Coelho
30 The
Princess Bride by William Goldman
31 East of
Eden by John Steinbeck
32 The
Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
33 Animal
Farm by George Orwell
34 Memoirs
of a Geisha by Arthur Golden
35 Breaking Dawn by Stephenie Meyer
36 Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
37 Lord
of the Flies by William Golding
38 Harry Potter
and the Order of the Phoenix by J.K.
Rowling
39 A Wrinkle
in Time by Madeleine L'Engle, Peter Sis (Illustrator)
40 Anna
Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
41 Catch-22
by Joseph Heller
42 Life of Pi by Yann Martel
43 Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut
44 A Tale
of Two Cities by Charles Dickens
45
Watership Down by Richard Adams
46 Alice's
Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass by Lewis Carroll
47 A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini
48 The
Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver
49
Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë
50 Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone by J.K.
Rowling
51 Dune
by Frank Herbert
52 The
Odyssey by Homer, Robert Fagles (Translator)
53 Water
for Elephants by Sara Gruen
54 Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
55 The Road
by Cormac McCarthy
56 The
Fountainhead by Ayn Rand
57 The
Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde
58 The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark
Twain
59 A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith
60 The
Complete Works of William Shakspeare
61 Angela's
Ashes by Frank McCourt
62 The Book
Thief by Markus Zusak
63 The Da Vinci Code by Dan
Brown
64 The
Hobbit: Or There and Back Again by J.R.R. Tolkien
65 Night
by Elie Wiesel
66 The Pillars of the Earth by Ken Follett
67 The
Giving Tree by Shel Silverstein
68 Outlander by Diana Gabaldon
69 The Brothers
Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky, Richard Pevear (Translator)
70 Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand
71 A Prayer for Owen Meany by John Irving
72 Don
Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
73 Dracula
by Bram Stoker
74 The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold
75 Sense
and Sensibility by Jane Austen
76 The
Iliad by Homer, Robert Fagles (Translator)
77 Moby
Dick by Herman Melville
78 War and
Peace by Leo Tolstoy, Henry Gifford (editor)
79 Of Mice
and Men by John Steinbeck
80 Hamlet by
William Shakespeare, Richard Andrews (Editor)
80 Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides
82 Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry83 The
Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath
84 The
Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera
85
Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse
86 The
Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood
87 Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale
Hurston
88 Emma by
Jane Austen, Fiona J. Stafford (Editor)
89 On the
Road by Jack Kerouac
90 The
Glass Castle: A Memoir by Jeannette Walls
91 All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque
92 The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov
93 The Red
Tent by Anita Diamant
94 Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire by J.K.
Rowling
95 A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess
96 The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen
Chbosky
97 Tess of
the D'Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy
98 The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco
99 Eat, Pray, Love by
Elizabeth Gilbert
100 Romeo and Juliet by
William Shakespeare
My additions (in no particular order):
1. The
Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway
2. I
Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou
3. Leaves
of Grass by Walt Whitman
4. Beloved
by Toni Morrison
5. Essential
Rumi by Mawlana Jalal-al-Din Rumi
6. The
Mists of Avalon by Marion Zimmer Bradley
7. M.
Butterfly by David Henry Hwang
8. Holy Quran by Allah
9. Charlotte's
Web
by E.B. White
10. Twelve
Angry Men by Reginald Rose
11. Lady
Chatterley's Lover by D.H. Lawrence
12. The
Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne
13. The
Rainbow by D.H. Lawrence
14.
The
Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer
15.
The
Faerie Queene by Edmund Spenser
16.
Origin of Species by Charles Darwin
17.
The
Glass Menagerie by Tennessee Williams
18.
The Art of War by Sun Tzu
19.
Pygmalion by George Bernard Shaw
20. Beowulf
21.
The
Republic by Plato
22.
The
Crucible by Arthur Miller
23.
Critique
of Pure Reason by Immanuel Kant
24.
Roots by Alex Haley
25.
The Old Man and the Sea by
Ernest Hemingway
26.
A Christmas Carol by
Charles Dickens
27.
The Tibetan Book of the
Dead
28.
Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair by Pablo Neruda
29.
Paradise Lost by John Milton
30.
James and the Giant Peach by Roald
Dahl
31.
Beyond Good and Evil by
Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
32.
The Aeneid by Publius Vergilius Maro
33.
Robinson Crusoe by
Daniel Defoe
34.
Mein Kampf by Adolf Hitler
35.
The Raven by Edgar
Allen Poe
36.
The
Prince by Niccolò Machiavelli
37.
The Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx
38.
Sons and
Lovers by D.H. Lawrence
39.
Walden by Henry
David Thoreau
40.
Of Mice
and Men by John
Steinbeck
41.
The
Grapes of Wrath by John
Steinbeck
42.
The
Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett
43.
Heart of
Darkness by Joseph Conrad
44.
Seven
Valleys and Four Valleys by Baha'u'llah
45. How to WIn Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie
46. The Kama Sutra
47.
Charlie
and the Chocolate Factory by Roald Dahl
48.
Watership
Down
by Richard Adams
49.
Oedipus
Rex by
Sophocles
50.
Black
Beauty by Anna Sewell




