In any case, I’ve decided to post my own list, this one of 101 writers you should read before you die. If anyone has any writers or works by them to add, leave it in the comments, because I know I missed some great ones.
1. Kurt Vonnegut: Slaughterhouse Five, Harrison Bergeron
2. Laurie Halse Anderson: Speak
3. Toni Morrison: The Bluest Eye, Song of Solomon, Beloved
4. Zora Neale Hurston: Their Eyes Were Watching God
5. William Shakespeare, whose written a number of sonnets as well as plays like Hamlet, Romeo & Juliet, Othello, and a Midsummer Night’s Dream
6. Suzanne Collins: The Hunger Games (series)
7. J.K. Rowling: Harry Potter (series)
8. C.S. Lewis: The Chronicles of Narnia (series)
9. Richard Adams: Watership Down
10. Mark Z. Danielewski: House of Leaves
11. Stephen King: It, Misery, The Stand, Christine and many, many more
12. Ira Levin: Rosemary’s Baby, The Stepford Wives, A Kiss Before Dying, Sliver
13. H.P. Lovecraft: The Call of Cthulhu, At the Mountains of Madness, The Whisperer in Darkness
14. Thomas Harris: The Silence of the Lambs, Red Dragon
15. Jane Austen: Pride and Prejudice, Sense and Sensibility, Emma
16. Charles Dickens: A Christmas Carol, Great Expectations, Oliver Twist, A Tale of Two Cities
17. Charlotte Bronte: Jane Eyre
18. Emily Bronte: Wuthering Heights
19. Emily Dickinson, author of 1775 poems
20. William Golding: Lord of the Flies
21. George Orwell: 1984, Animal Farm
22. JRR Tolkien: Lord of the Rings (series), The Hobbit
23. John Irving: A Prayer for Owen Meany
24. Daphne Du Maurier: Rebecca, The Birds
25. Audrey Niffenegger: The Time Traveler’s Wife
26. F. Scott Fitzgerald: The Great Gatsby, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
27. Langston Hughes: The Negro Speaks of Rivers, My People, Not Without Laughter
28. Fyodor Dostoyevski: Crime and Punishment, The Brothers Karamazov
29. John Steinbeck: East of Eden, The Grapes of Wrath, Of Mice and Men
30. Lewis Carroll: Alice in Wonderland, Through the Looking Glass
31. L. Frank Baum: The Wizard of Oz (and its sequels)
32. Khaled Hosseini: The Kite Runner
33. Arthur Golden: Memoirs of a Geisha
34. Gabriel Garcia Marquez: One Hundred Years of Solitude, Love in the Time of Cholera, A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings
35. Rudyard Kipling: The Jungle Book, The Man Who Would Be King
36. Laura Ingalls Wilder: Little House in the Big Woods, Little Town on the Prairie
37. Margaret Atwood: The Handmaiden’s Tail
38. Frank Herbert: Dune
39. Leo Tolstoy: War and Peace, Anna Karenina
40. Henrik Ibsen: A Doll’s House
41. Kenneth Grahame: The Wind in the Willows
42. J.D. Salinger: Catcher in the Rye
43. Vladimir Nabokov: Lolita
44. Alice Sebold: The Lovely Bones, Lucky
45. Alexandre Dumas: The Count of Monte Cristo, The Three Musketeers
46. Louis L’Amour: Silver Canyon, The Quick and the Dead, How the West was Won
47. Jean Shepherd: In God We Trust, All Others Pay Cash
48. Cormac McCarthy: The Road
49. A.A. Milne: Winnie the Pooh
50. Louise Fitzhugh: Harriet the Spy
51. John Le Carre: The Constant Gardener
52. Mark Twain: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer
53. Herman Melville: Moby Dick
54. Bram Stroker: Dracula
55. Salman Rushdie: The Satanic Verses, Midnight’s Children
56. James Joyce: Ulysses, Finnegans Wake, Dubliners
57. Alan Sillitoe: The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner
58. William Peter Blatty: The Exorcist
59. Truman Capote: Breakfast at Tiffany’s, In Cold Blood
60. Harper Lee: To Kill A Mockingbird
61. William Blake: Songs of Innocence, The Tiger, To Spring, A Poison Tree
62. Alice Walker: The Color Purple
63. Aldous Huxley: Brave New World
64. E.B. White: Charlotte’s Web
65. Franz Kafka: Metamorphosis, In the Penal Colony, A Hunger Artist, A Country Doctor
66. Gustave Flaubert: Madam Bovary
67. Hermann Hesse: Siddartha
68. Stieg Larsson: The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, The Girl who Played with Fire, The Girl who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest
69. Roald Dahl: Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Witches, Matilda
70. Victor Hugo: Les Miserables, The Hunchback of Notre Dame
71. Joseph Conrad: Heart of Darkness
72. Douglas Adams: The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (series)
73. Hans Christian Andersen: The Little Mermaid, The Ugly Duckling
74. Robert McCloskey: Make Way for Ducklings
75. Mitch Albom: Tuesdays with Morrie, The Five People You Meet in Heaven
76. Joseph Heller: Catch 22
77. William Gibson: The Miracle Worker
78. Geoffrey Chaucer: The Canterbury Tales
79. Henry James: The Turn of the Screw
80. Evelyn Waugh: Brideshead Revisited
81. Graham Green: The Third Man, The Fallen Idol
82. Silvia Plath: The Colossus and Other Poems, Ariel
83. Colleen McCullough: The Thorn Birds
84. Ian Flemming: James Bond (series)
85. Arthur C. Clark: 2001: A Space Odyssey
86. Ernest Hemmingway: The Pearl, The Old Man and the Sea, The Killers, A Clean, Well Lit Place
87. William Faulkner: The Sound and the Fury, Absalom, Absalom!, A Rose for Emily,
88. Tennessee Williams: The Glass Menagerie, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, A Streetcar Named Desire
89. Fannie Flag: Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistlestop Café, Daisy Fay and the Miracle Man
90. John Cheever: The Falconer, The Swimmer
91. Nathaniel Hawthorne: The Scarlet Letter, Young Goodman Brown, Feathertop,
92. Arthur Conan Doyle: The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes
93. James Dickey: Deliverance
94. Mary Shelley: Frankenstein
95. Percy Shelley: Ozymandias, Ode to the West Wind, To A Skylark
96. Washington Irving: The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, Rip Van Winkle
97. Shirley Jackson: The Lottery, The Haunting of Hill House
98. Isaac Asimov: The Bicentennial Man, The End of Eternity
99. Edgar Allen Poe: The Raven, The Pit and the Pendulum, The Murders in the Rue Morgue, The Cask of Amontillado
100. Jack London: To Build A Fire, Call of the Wild
101. Robert Louis Stevenson: Treasure Island, The Strange Case of Doctor Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
nice list save #7 and 11 - these authors sales do not equal any sort of skill that would denote a must read my any means. I've read most of these to include selections from my two exceptions and think to add - Jack Kerouac, William Carlos Williams, Milton... I could go on and take a few more away from your list easily (i.e. Harris) but most I wanted to compliment the compilation.
ReplyDeleteInteresting to see Audrey Niffenegger: The Time Traveler’s Wife at #25. Now !I'll have to read that book. Interlibrary loan, here I come
ReplyDeleteFantastic list, and great idea to post it :)
ReplyDeleteI've read heaps of titles on that list as well, perhaps even more than the BBC list. Which is a good thing, I think ;)
Rach
All of them are such classics. I have read lots of those books on the list. I just love to read.
ReplyDeleteI can add one:
The stories of Elsa the lion, Born Free, Living Free and Forever Free by Joy Adamson. I loved this book when I was a kid.
Jhon-I would have to disagree that they don't add anything. They both know how to write an interesting story.
ReplyDeleteGale-I haven't read it so I can't personally vouch for it, but I've heard good things, most importantly that it's well done:)
Rach-I thought the BBC list missed a lot of good books and writers.
Choices-Great idea! Joy Adamson can be 105 after the three Jhon brought up.
What an amazing list. My son is having to read classics in his Language Arts class, and it's prompted my interest in some of those that I haven't read yet. He's reading Of Mice and Men right now, and I've only seen the movie (gasp!) I'll read it when he's done. Thanks for the list!
ReplyDeleteI just bought Speak for my nieces for x-mas, but have not read it myself. Perhaps I should remedy that. :)
ReplyDeleteInteresting list. Sad to say that I haven't read most of those. I'd best get cracking.
ReplyDelete