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Book List

Date Posted: 08.05.07

This is my list of 100 novels to read this year. I intend to write at least a paragraph about each of them. My goal may be too ambitious given that I have to work a lot but I will do my best. The purpose of this little activity isn't to prove I can read fast. It is to force myself to expand my thinking and read outside of my comfort zone.

These novels are listed alphabetically. I have read a few of them already. I chose them by combining lists from the websites listed below. Novels that appeared on 3 or more sites were all listed. Then I looked at authors with multiple works and cut them down to one if possible. I researched as many of the books as I could. Then I admit that I simply deleted books I had never heard of. I also kept a few books that people have suggested to me and a few that I simply insist belong on my list. I deleted many of the books I have already read but I kept the ones I felt warranted another read or more intensive analysis. Ultimately, the list I have made does not really constitute the "top 100." It is just a list to give myself a reasonable reading goal.

http://www.randomhouse.com/modernlibrary/100bestnovels.html
http://www.bbc.co.uk/arts/bigread/top100.shtml
http://www.time.com/time/2005/100books/the_complete_list.html
http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/observer/
http://www.adherents.com/people/100_novel.html#100Books
http://www.best100novels.com/

I have read apx 30% of the list. I will write commentary as I have time and inclination and link to it from this list.

* Bold titles are books I already own (in case my Mummy is looking for stocking stuffers).
* Italic titles are books I have read.

1984 - George Orwell

A Bend in the River - V.S. Naipaul

A Clockwork Orange - Anthony Burgess

A Farewell to Arms - Ernest Hemingway

A Passage to India - E.M. Forster

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man - James Joyce

A Wrinkle in Time - Madeline L'Engles

Alice's Adventures in Wonderland - Lewis Carrol

All the Kings Men - Robert Penn Warren

An American Tragedy - Theodore Dreiser

Animal Farm - George Orwell

Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl - Ann Frank

As I Lay Dying - William Faulkner

Blood Meridian - Cormac McCarthy

Brave New World - Aldous Huxley

Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh

Catch 22 - Jospeh Heller

Don Quixote - Miguel de Cervantes

Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde - Robert Lewis Stevenson

Dune - Frank Herbert

Ender's Game - Orson Scott Card

Epic of Gilgamesh - Unknown

Fahrenheit 451 - Ray Bradbury

Frankenstein - Mary Shelley

Gone with the Wind - Margaret Mitchell

Gravity's Rainbow - Thomas Pynchon

Greenmantle-Charles de Lint

Gulliver's Travels - Jonathen Swift

Harry Potter (Series) - J.K. Rowling

Heart of Darkness - Jospeh Conrad

Huckleberry Finn - Mark Twain

I, Claudius - Robert Graves

In Search of Lost Time - Marcel Proust

Jayne Eyre - Charlotte Bronte

Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy

Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

Life of Pi - Yann Martel

Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov

Lord of the Flies - William Golding

Main Street - Sinclair Lewis

Malevil - Robert Merle

Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie

Moby Dick - Herman Melville

My Antonia - Willa Carter

Of Human Bondage - W. Somerset Maugham

On the Road - Jack Kerouac

One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest - Ken Kesey

One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen

Ragtime - E.L. Doctrow

Robinson Crusoe - Daniel Defoe

Siddhartha - Herman Hesse

Slaughterhouse Five - Kurt Vonnegut

Song of Solomon - Toni Morrison

Stranger in a Strange Land - Robert Heinlein

The Adventures of Augie March - Saul Bellow

The Age of Innocence - Edith Wharton

The Black Sheep - Honore De Balzac

The Bridge of San Luis Rey - Thorton Wilder

The Brothers Karamazov - Fyodor Dostoevsky

The Call of the Wild - Jack London

The Catcher in the Rhye - J.D. Salinger

The Chronicles of Narnia - C.S. Lewis

The Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole

The Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas

The Devine Comedy - Dante

The Fountainhead - Ayn Rand

The Grapes of Wrath - John Steinback

The Great Gatsby - F. Scott Fitzgerald

The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood

The Heart is a Lonely Hunter - Carson McCullers

The Hitchhikers Guide to the Gallexy - Douglas Adams

The Invisible Man - Ralph Ellison

The Lord of the Rings - J.R.R. Tolkien

The Magus - John Fowles

The Maltese Falcon - Dashiell Hammett

The Moviegoer - Walker Percy

The Name of the Rose - Umberto Ecco

The Picture of Dorian Gray - Oscar Wilde

The Plague - Albert Camus

The Portrait of a Lady - Henry James

The Scarlett Letter - Nathaniel Hawthorne

The Sheltering Sky - Paul Bowles

The Sound and the Fury - William Faulkner

The Way We Live Now - Anthony Trollope

The World According to Garp - John Irving

Things Fall Apart - Chinua Achebe

To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee

To the Lighthouse - Virgina Wolfe

Tropic of Cancer - Henry Miller

U.S.A. (trilogy) - John Dos Passos

Ulysses - James Joyce

Uncle Tom's Cabin - Hariet Beecher Stowe

Under the Volcano - Malcolm Lowry

Vanity Fair - Makepeace Thackeray

War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy

Watership Down - Richard Adams

Wise Blood - Flannery O'Connor

Women in Love - D.H. Lawrence

Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte

Books may be added or removed from this list at any time as long as I have not already started them. I will not give up a book once I begin it.

Anyone who happens upon this site is welcome to make suggestions for additions or removals.

Other books people have suggested: