My super smart friends Lindsay and Kim recently posted great lists of books on their blogs -- click their names to see. I'm a life-long reader (thanks Mom!) and book lover so as soon as I saw these I knew I had to blog about it myself.
The first 100 come from Lindsay, the next 50 are from Kim and the last straglers are my own additions. Their lists cover a lot of territory! Some of this stuff is classic, heavy reading and some is just stuff I think everyone should read. I know I have many more on my to-read list, but these come to mind first. I've edited the lists to reflect my own experience. I also added another part to Kim's key -- some of these books I read many years ago and really don't remember them so I might re-read.
Do you have any suggestions of your own? If so, I'd love for you to leave a comment.
When school is finally out I have planned to read some of the classics off these lists which I have yet to tackle. I will read anything really as long as it comes with a good recommendation. My favorite stuff is crime fiction, true crime, mystery, poetry and historical stuff.
Key
- BOLD = Read it
Stike-through= not interested- Italics Underlined = read part of it or in process
- **BOLD = Read it, but would like to read it again
1 To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee2 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 Meyer5 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. Rowling
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 Brown64 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 McMurtry
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
Kim’s 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 Shaw20. 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
My additions (in no particular order)
1. She’s Come Undone by Wally Lamb
2. Marley and Me by John Grogran
3. The Witches by Roald Dahl
4. A Million Little Pieces by James Frey
5. Tuesdays with Morrie by Mitch Albom
6. The Forgotten Man by Amity Shlaes
7. Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen
8. In Cold Blood by Truman Capote
9. **Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
10. The Last Lecture by Randy Pausch
11. The Shack by William P Young
12. One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest by Ken Kesey
13. The Stranger by Albert Camus
14. A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemmingway
15. To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf
16. Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe
Hey good list! I like these. I'm going to replace my will not reads with some of these!
Some duplicates (just in case you're a list maniac like me): Of Mice and Men and Grapes of Wrath are on my list and Kims. Sense and Sensability is on your list and mine.
I'm going to update my list now! Glad you're on board with the reading list! I'm heading to the LIBRARY tomorrow!?!?!?!
Posted by: Lindsay Teague | July 06, 2009 at 05:41 PM
woa! lots and lots of books! i love reading too. i'm gonna have to go back through and check which ones i have read :)
thanks for sharing!
Posted by: giuseppina | July 06, 2009 at 06:42 PM
oh and one more thing #60 on my list is supposed to be: The Compleat Works of Wllm Shkspr (1983) by Reduced Shakespeare Company (it's a spoof play that is supposed to be pretty good).
Posted by: Lindsay Teague | July 06, 2009 at 07:20 PM
love the list.
you have many on yours that I have read:
She's come undone, a million little pieces, tuesdays with Morrie, the last lecture,
just so fun to think of all the great books!!
Posted by: Diane Baldo | July 06, 2009 at 09:50 PM
don't forget Andrew Greeley,Blacky Ryan,gotta love him..Reading a quirky one White Shadow by Ace Atkins..a Classic Florida noir..circa 1950
Posted by: maura cuzzacrea | July 08, 2009 at 09:57 AM
"Tess of the D'uebervilles," "A Girl Named Zippy" and "She Got Up Off the Couch." Oh, David Sedaris "Dress Your Family in Corderoy and Denim."
Posted by: lynne | August 04, 2009 at 01:37 PM