The Books


Newsweek's Top 100 Books: The Meta-List
After surveying several lists of the Top 100 Books, I finally decided on this one. Newsweek's list took the Top 10 Book lists from places such as the New York Public Library, St. John's College, Oprah's Book List, etc. to come up with this list. I felt as though this was the best approach to coming up with a list rather than surveying readers, looking at best-selling lists and so on. My original list was the BBC's Big Read Top 100 which included "The Princess Diaries" by Meg Cabot. While that was a fun read, I hardly thought it merited being one of the best books of all time.

So, here's the list! My aim is to read 50 of the books off this list before my 25h birthday. As I read through them, I'll cross them off and try to provide a review on them!

1. War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
2. 1984 by George Orwell
3. Ulysses by James Joyce
4. Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
5. The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner
6. Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
7. To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf
8. The Illiad and the Odyssey by Homer
9. Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
10. Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri
11. The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer
12. Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift
13. Middlemarch by George Eliot
14. Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe
15. The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger
16. Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell
17. One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
18. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
19. Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
20. Beloved by Toni Morrison 
21. The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
22. Midnight's Children by Salman Rushdie
23. Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
24. Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf
25. Native Son by Richard Wright
26. Democracy in America by Alexis DeTocqueville
27. On the Origin of Species by Charles Darwin
28. The Histories by Herodotus
29. The Social Contract by Jean Jacques Rousseau
30. Das Kapital by Karl Marx
31. The Prince by Niccolo Machiavelli
32. Confessions by St. Augustine
33. Leviathan by Thomas Hobbes
34. The History of the Peloponnesian War by Thucydides
35. The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien
36. Winnie-the-Pooh by A.A. Milne 
37. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe by C.S. Lewis
38. A Passage to India by E.M.Forster
39. On the Road by Jack Kerouac
40. To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
41.  The Holy Bible. Revised Standard Edition
42. A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess
43. Light in August by William Faulkner
44. The Souls of Black Folk by W.E.B. DuBois
45. Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys
46. Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
47. Paradise Lost by John Milton
48. Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
49. Hamlet by William Shakespeare
50. King Lear by William Shakespeare
51. Othello by William Shakespeare
52. Sonnets by William Shakespeare
53. Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman
54. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
55. Kim by Rudyard Kipling
56. Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
57. Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison
58. One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest by Ken Kesey
59. For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway
60. Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut
61. Animal Farm by George Orwell
62. Lord of the Flies by William Golding
63. In Cold Blood by Truman Capote
64. The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing
65. Remembrance of Things Past by Marcel Proust
66. The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler
67. As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner
68. The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway
69. I, Claudius by Robert Graves
70. The Heart is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers
71. Sons and Lovers by D.H. Lawrence
72. All the King's Men by Robert Penn Warren
73. Go Tell it on the Mountain by James Baldwin
74. Charlotte's Web by E.B. White
75. Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
76. Night by Elie Wiesel
77. Rabbit, Run by John Updike
78. The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton
79. Portnoy's Complaint by Philip Roth
80. An American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser
81. The Day of the Locust by Nathanael West
82. Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller
83. The Maltese Falcon by Dashiel Hammett
84. His Dark Materials by Philip Pullman
85. Death Comes for the Archbishop by Willa Cather
86. The Interpretation of Dreams by Sigmund Freud
87. The Education of Henry Adams by Henry Adams
88. Quotations from Chairman Mao by Mao Zedong
89. The Varieties of Religious Experience: Varieties in Human Nature by William James
90. Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh
91. Silent Spring by Rachel Carson
92. The General Theory of Employment, History and Money by John Maynard Keynes
93. Lord Jim by Joseph Conrad
94. Goodbye to All That by Robert Graves
95. The Affluent Society by John Kenneth Galbraith
96. The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame
97. The Autobiography of Malcolm X by Alex Haley and Malcolm X
98. Eminent Victorians by Lytton Strachey
99. The Color Purple by Alice Walker
100. The Second World War (The Gathering Storm; Their Finest Hour; The Grand Alliance; The Hinge of Fate) by Winston Churchill

Total: 49/50


 

1 comment:

  1. Another great list. Night was an incredibly moving book. I loved it. I really want to read The Catcher in the Rye. Haven't gotten to it yet.

    *Erin

    ReplyDelete

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