I love book lists, reading about books, and books themselves. I am a book person. So when one of the writers over at Book Riot came up with his own list of 100 books for a well-read person, I had to take a look. And you know what? Its a fantastic list!
Jeff O’Neal writes: ““Well-read” for this person then has a number of connotations: a familiarity with the monuments of Western literature, an at least passing interest in the high-points of world literature, a willingness to experience a breadth of genres, a special interest in the work of one’s immediate culture, a desire to share in the same reading experiences of many other readers, and an emphasis on the writing of the current day. The following 100 books (of fiction, poetry, and drama) is an attempt to satisfy those competing requirements. After going through several iterations of the list, one thing surprised me: there are not as many “classic” books that I associate with the moniker well-read, and many more current books than I would have thought. Conversely, to be conversant in the literature of the day turned out to be quite a bit more important than I would have thought” (http://bookriot.com/2013/06/13/from-zero-to-well-read-in-100-books/).
Here is his list. How many have you read?
So here’s the list, in alphabetical order:
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Arthur Conan Doyle
The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton
All Quiet on the Western Front by Eric Maria Remarque
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Klay by Michael Chabon(read in 2002)
American Pastoral by Philip Roth
Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
Anne of Green Gables by Lucy Maud Montgomery
Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand
The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath
Beloved by Toni Morrison
Beowulf
The Book Thief by Markus Zusak
Brave New World by Alduos Huxley (read in 2000)
The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz
The Call of the Wild by Jack London
Candide by Voltaire
The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer
Casino Royale by Ian Fleming
Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger
Charlotte’s Web by E.B. White
Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell
The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson
The Complete Stories of Edgar Allan Poe
The Complete Stories of Flannery O’Connor
The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen
Crime & Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky
The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown (read in 2003)
Death of a Salesman by Arthur Miller
Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes
Dream of Red Chamber by Cao Xueqin
Dune by Frank Herbert
Everything is Illuminated by Jonathan Safran Foer
Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
The Fault in Our Stars by John Green
Faust by Goethe
Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
Game of Thrones by George RR Martin
The Golden Bowl by Henry James
The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing
Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn
The Gospels
The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
Great Expectations by Charles Dickens
The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald (read in 2003)
Hamlet by William Shakespeare
The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood
Harry Potter & The Sorceror’s Stone by J.K. Rowling (read in 1999, 2000, 2001, 2005, 2007, 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012)
Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad (read in 1990 and 2004)
The Help by Kathryn Stockett
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams (read in 2012)
The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien (read in 1999)
House Made of Dawn by N. Scott Momaday
Howl by Allen Ginsberg
The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins (read in 2010)
if on a winter’s night a traveler by Italo Calvino
The Iliad by Homer
The Inferno by Dante
Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace
Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman
The Life of Pi by Yann Martel (read in 2003)
The Lion, the Witch, and The Wardrobe by C.S. Lewis (read, but cannot find the year)
The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exepury (read in 2003)
Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie
Moby-Dick by Herman Melville
Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf
Murder on the Orient Express by Agatha Christie
The Odyssey by Homer
Oedipus, King by Sophocles
On the Road by Jack Kerouac
A Passage to India by E.M. Forster
The Pentateuch
Pride & Prejudice by Jane Austen (read in 2002)
Rabbit, Run by John Updike
The Road by Cormac McCarthy
Romeo & Juliet by William Shakespeare
The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne
Slaughterhouse-5 by Kurt Vonnegut
The Sound and The Fury by William Faulkner
The Stand by Stephen King
The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway
Swann’s Way by Marcel Proust
Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston
Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe (read in 1990)
The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien (read in 1991)
To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee (read in 1987)
Ulysses by James Joyce
The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera
A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan
Waiting for the Barbarians by J.M. Coetzee
Watchmen by Alan Moore
The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami
Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte
1984 by George Orwell
50 Shades of Grey by E.L. James