I wasn’t going to bother with this list after I saw it, since I haven’t even heard of a large portion of them. So I’m just going to link to a copy of the full list and post the ones I HAVE reada which will be a much shorter list.
The list comes from the book by the same name as this post. The actual list I used is here: http://queerbychoice.livejournal.com/503604.html
Another book blogger, Arukiyomi, has made an excellent spreadsheet to keep track of how many books you’ve read. It even tells you, based on your age and life expectancies in the West, how many books you’ll need to read every year if you really do want to read all of them before you die. Download it here.
Books I HAVE read! (More than I expected!)
- The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams
- The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood
- I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings – Maya Angelou
- Breakfast at Tiffany’s – Truman Capote
- Lord of the Flies – William Golding
- The Catcher in the Rye – J. D. Salinger
- Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov
- Animal Farm – George Orwell
- Their Eyes Were Watching God – Zora Neale Hurston
- Gone With the Wind – Margaret Mitchell
- Brave New World – Aldous Huxley
- The Great Gatsby – F. Scott Fitzgerald
- Through the Looking Glass, and What Alice Found There – Lewis Carroll
- Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens
Books I Attempted to Read (But did not, finish, mostly because they sucked.)
- A Suitable Boy – Vikram Seth (Too verbose.)
- Things Fall Apart – Chinua Achebe (Wrong part of Africa, Americans are dumb.)
- On the Road – Jack Kerouac (Fitzgeraldian. AUGH.)
- The Scarlet Letter – Nathaniel Hawthorne (Ceerap.)
- The Three Musketeers – Alexandre Dumas (I was in 8th grade, so I’ll try again later.)
- The Trial – Franz Kafka (BAH.)
- Siddhartha – Herman Hesse (Depressing.)
- The Age of Innocence – Edith Wharton (Boring as all hell.)
- The Lord of the Rings – J. R. R. Tolkien (Couldn’t get into it.)
- Emma – Jane Austen (Should try again, but also couldn’t get into it.)
Would like to read:
- Mrs. ‘Arris Goes to Paris – Paul Gallico
- Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen
- Bunner Sisters – Edith Wharton
- After the Death of Don Juan – Sylvie Townsend Warner
- Les Misérables – Victor Hugo
- Great Expectations – Charles Dickens
- A Tale of Two Cities – Charles Dickens
- The Hunchback of Notre Dame – Victor Hugo
- David Copperfield – Charles Dickens
- Wuthering Heights – Emily Brontë
- Tarzan of the Apes – Edgar Rice Burroughs
- The War of the Worlds – H.G. Wells
- Dracula – Bram Stoker
- The Time Machine – H. G. Wells
- The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn – Mark Twain
- Treasure Island – Robert Louis Stevenson
- The Portrait of a Lady – Henry James
- Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy
- Invisible Man – Ralph Ellison
- We – Yevgeny Zamyatin
- Cry, the Beloved Country – Alan Paton
- Thursbitch – Alan Garner
- Life: A User’s Manual – Georges Perec
- Lady Chatterley’s Lover – D. H. Lawrence
- Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy – John Le Carré
- The Black Prince – Iris Murdoch
- Slaughterhouse Five – Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
- 2001: A Space Odyssey – Arthur C. Clarke
- Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? – Philip K. Dick
- A Kestrel for a Knave – Barry Hines
- To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee
- Cryptonomicon – Neal Stephenson
- The Poisonwood Bible – Barbara Kingsolver
- The Virgin Suicides – Jeffrey Eugenides
- The Robber Bride – Margaret Atwood
- The Invention of Curried Sausage – Uwe Timm
- Cat’s Eye – Margaret Atwood
- Foucault’s Pendulum – Umberto Eco
- The Cider House Rules – John Irving
- Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit – Jeanette Winterson
- Contact – Carl Sagan
- White Noise – Don DeLillo
- Neuromancer – William Gibson
- Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole
I am surprised that 1984, Chaucer, and Athol Fugard are nowhere to be found on this gigantic list. The original LJ poster mentioned the lack of Shakespeare, but those are technically plays, not books. Still no excuse, eh?
I keep a small shelf for my own collection of faves and classics. Among them not mentioned here, Good Omens by Pratchett & Gaiman, Memoirs of a Geisha, and the Narnia Chronicles. I also highly recommend The Princess Bride, Sharon Shinn’s Archangel books, and Torey Hayden’s One Child.
If you ever get a chance to, listen to the old audio recording of the original War of the Worlds. It’s pretty good, and people throught it was really happening when they heard it on the radio.