Sunday, November 28, 2010

One Hundred And One

A few days ago, there was a list going around about one hundred classic books. It asked you to copy and paste the list into your own blog and then bold the ones you’ve read and italicize the ones you read part of but, for whatever reason did not finish. The list was pretty good, but there were a few doubles, i.e. Hamlet and the Complete Works of Shakespeare (which there are a lot of; I don’t know how anyone could read all of them), and some works I thought were slighted since they are, if this makes sense, recent classics. 

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 CafĂ©, 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

8 comments:

  1. 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.

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  2. Interesting to see Audrey Niffenegger: The Time Traveler’s Wife at #25. Now !I'll have to read that book. Interlibrary loan, here I come

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  3. Fantastic list, and great idea to post it :)

    I'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

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  4. All of them are such classics. I have read lots of those books on the list. I just love to read.
    I 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.

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  5. Jhon-I would have to disagree that they don't add anything. They both know how to write an interesting story.

    Gale-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.

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  6. 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!

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  7. I just bought Speak for my nieces for x-mas, but have not read it myself. Perhaps I should remedy that. :)

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  8. Interesting list. Sad to say that I haven't read most of those. I'd best get cracking.

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