Book Library and Classic List

Jan at Yearning for God gave this challenge She came up with the number evaluation... Newsweek has published their Top 100 Books: the Meta-List, derived via “number crunching” from various top-10 books lists. The purpose of this note is to gather a bit more information about your experience with the books on their list. If you’re interested

in participating, please copy the list and replace my numbers with your own, and tag me. Please note that more than one number may be used per book.

1 = read it

2 = saw the movie

3 = in my “to read” stack at home

4 = someday I’ll read it

5 = have made at least one attempt to read it, but didn’t finish

6 = no interest in reading it

(4) War and Peace—Tolstoy

(1,2) 1984—Orwell

(1) Ulysses—Joyce

(4) Lolita—Nabokov

(4) The Sound and the Fury—Faulkner

(1) Invisible Man—Ellison

(5) To the Lighthouse—Woolf

(1) The Iliad and The Odyssey—Homer

(2) Pride and Prejudice—Austen

(1) Divine Comedy—Alighieri

(1) Canterbury Tales—Chaucer

(1) Gulliver’s Travels—Swift

(4) Middlemarch—Eliot

(1) Things Fall Apart—Achebe

(5) The Catcher in the Rye—Salinger

(5) Gone with the Wind—Mitchell

(4) One Hundred Years of Solitude—Marquez

(1/2) The Great Gatsby—Fitzgerald

(4) Catch-22—Heller

(4) Beloved—Morrison

(2) The Grapes of Wrath—Steinbeck

(6) Midnight’s Children—Rushdie

(1/2) Brave New World—Huxley

(5) Mrs. Dalloway—Woolf

(4) Native Son—Wright

(4) Democracy in America—de Tocqueville

(6) On the Origin of Species—Darwin

(6) The Histories—Herodotus

(6) The Social Contract—Rousseau

(6) Das Kapital—Marx

(1) The Prince—Machiavelli

(1) Confessions—St. Augustine

(6) Leviathan—Hobbes

(6) The History of the Peloponnesian War—Thucydides

(1/2) The Lord of the Rings—Tolkien

(1/2) Winnie-the-Pooh—Milne

(1/2) The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe—Lewis

(4) A Passage to India—Forster

(5) On the Road—Kerouac

(1/2) To Kill a Mockingbird—Lee

(1) The Holy Bible (RSV)

(1/2) A Clockwork Orange—Burgess

(4) Light in August—Faulkner

(4) The Souls of Black Folk—Du Bois

(4) Wide Sargasso Sea—Rhys

(1) Madame Bovary—Flaubert

(1) Paradise Lost—Milton

(2) Anna Karenina—Tolstoy

(1/2) Hamlet—Shakespeare

(1/2) King Lear—Shakespeare

(1) Othello—Shakespeare

(1) Sonnets—Shakespeare

(1) Leaves of Grass—Whitman

(1) The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn—Twain

(4) Kim—Kipling

(1) Frankenstein—Shelley

(4) Song of Solomon—Morrison

(4) One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest—Kesey

(1) For Whom the Bell Tolls—Hemingway

(4) Slaughterhouse-Five—Vonnegut

(1/2) Animal Farm—Orwell

(1/2) Lord of the Flies—Golding

(6) In Cold Blood—Capote

(4) The Golden Notebook—Lessing

(6) Remembrance of Things Past—Proust

(4) The Big Sleep—Chandler

(4) As I Lay Dying—Faulkner

(6) The Sun Also Rises—Hemingway

(6) I, Claudius—Graves

(4) The Heart is a Lonely Hunter—McCullers

(5) Sons and Lovers—Lawrence

(1) All the King’s Men—Warren

(4) Go Tell It on the Mountain—Baldwin

(1/2) Charlotte’s Web—White

(6) Heart of Darkness—Conrad

(4/5) Night—Wiesel

(5) Rabbit, Run—Updike

(5) The Age of Innocence—Wharton

(6) Portnoy’s Complaint—Roth

(6) An American Tragedy—Dreiser

(6) The Day of the Locust—West

(4) Tropic of Cancer—Miller

(2) The Maltese Falcon—Hammett

(5) His Dark Materials—Pullman

(1) Death Comes for the Archbishop—Cather

(5) The Interpretation of Dreams—Freud

(5) The Education of Henry Adams—Adams

(6) Quotations from Chairman Mao—Mao

(6) The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature—James

(4) Brideshead Revisited—Waugh

(5) Silent Spring—Carson

(6) The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money—Keynes

(4) Lord Jim—Conrad

(6) Goodbye to All That—Graves

(6) The Affluent Society—Galbraith

(1) The Wind in the Willows—Grahame

(5) The Autobiography of Malcolm X—Haley/Malcolm X

(6) Eminent Victorians—Strachey

(1/2) The Color Purple—Walker

(4) The Second World War (6-volume set)—Churchill

Total read: 34

Additional questions:

What would you cut from the list?

Some of them do not seem relevant to today's readers, even if they mean to be well-read. That bitter autobiography would be among those I'd not read unless forced to do so for a class. A number of them have been read b/c I was teaching or taking a class.

What would you add?

• Pillars of the Earth by Ken Follett
• Mists of Avalon by Marion Zimmer Bradley
• Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
• Illusions by Richard Bach
• The Giver by Lois Lowry
• Book of Concord

When you look back at the list as a whole, do you draw any conclusions about yourself as a reader?

• I read the classics as an undergraduate English major and need to re-read them.
• I have not read classics of history, anthropology, and culture. Furthering my education would be the only way I'd force myself to read many of the books on the list.