Hopefully, nothing will turn into a deal-breaker.
So I started looking into the concept of "great books" and remembered that my favorite book store in New York -- the Strand -- polled its customers a few years ago to help them come up with a list of the favorite 80 fiction books of all time. A moment later, I had found the list. And I finally relaxed a bit, as I recalled and counted up the books I had read.
To Kill a Mockingbird, by Harper Lee Still, I had big trouble sleeping last night. I got up at around 1:45 a.m., hoping that War and Peace would knock me out. But 30 pages later, I was still alert.
So I started looking into the concept of "great books" and remembered that my favorite book store in New York -- the Strand -- polled its customers a few years ago to help them come up with a list of the favorite 80 fiction books of all time. A moment later, I had found the list. And I finally relaxed a bit, as I recalled and counted up the books I had read. Here is the list, with the ones I have read noted in bold. There are actually 81 books on the list, as the last two tied for 80th place.
Readers, I hope you enjoy seeing the list, and counting the ones you have read too. And I would love your comments. What do you think of the list? (Personally, I think it's a bit heavy on Harry Potter books.) What are your favorites? Which, of the ones I haven't read, would you most recommend?
Pride and Prejudice, by Jane Austen
The Great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzgerald
Catcher in the Rye, by JD Salinger
Atlas Shrugged, by Ayn Rand
The Fountainhead, by Ayn Rand
The Fellowship of the Rings, by JRR Tolkien
One Hundred Years of Solitude, by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Bronte
Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, by JK Rowling
Lolita, by Vladimir Nabokov
1984, by George Orwell
On the Road, by Jack Kerouac
Gone With the Wind, by Margaret Mitchell
Anna Karenina, by Leo Tolstoy
The Brothers Karamazov, by Fyodor Dostoevsky
Crime and Punishment, by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, by Betty Smith
Slaughter-House Five, by Kurt Vonnegut
Ulysses, by James Joyce
The Kite Runner, by Khaled Hosseini
Catch-22, by Joseph Heller
The Grapes of Wrath, by John Steinbeck
East of Eden, by John Steinbeck
The Sun Also Rises, by Ernest Hemmingway
War and Peace, by Leo Tolstoy
The Hobbit, by JRR Tolkien
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, by JK Rowling
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, by Michael Chabon
Wuthering Heights, by Emily Bronte
A Prayer For Owen Meaney, by John Irving
The Count of Monte Cristo, by Alexandre Dumas
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, by Lewis Carroll
The Stranger, by Albert Camus
Brave New World, by Aldous Huxley
Little Women, by Louisa May Alcott
Middlesex, by Jeffrey Eugenides
Moby Dick, by Herman Melville
The Alchemist, by Paul Coelho
Les Miserables, by Victor Hugo
A Tale of Two Cities, by Charles Dickens
Anthem, by Ayn Rand
The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, by Haruki Murakami
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, by Mark Twain
In Cold Blood, by Truman Capote
Cat’s Cradle, by Kurt Vonnegut
Love in the Time of Cholera, by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
The Little Prince, by Antoine De Saint-Eupery
The Time Traveler’s Wife, by Audrey Niffenegger
Invisible Man, by Ralph Ellison
The Unbearable Lightness of Being, by Milan Kundera
The Bell Jar, by Sylvia Plath
The World According to Garp, by John Irving
Middlemarch, by George Eliot
To the Lighthouse, by Virginia Woolf
The Poisonwood Bible, by Barbara Kingsolver
Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, by JK Rowling
Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, by JK Rowling
The Old Man and the Sea, by Ernest Hemingway
Ender’s Game, by Orson Scott Card
Bleak House, by Charles Dickens
Beloved, by Toni Morrison
Great Expectations, by Charles Dickens
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, by Dave Eggers
Fight Club, by Chuck Palahniuk
The Sound and the Fury, by William Faulkner
Mrs. Dalloway, by Virginia Woolf
The Giver, by Lois Lowry
Master and Margarita, by Mikhail Bulgakov
Blindness, by Jose Saramago
Life of Pi, by Yann Martel
Madame Bovary, by Gustave Flaubert
Where the Wild Things Are, by Maurice Sendak
The Chronicles of Narnia, by CS Lewis
The Odyssey, by Homer
The Da Vinci Code, by Dan Brown
Franny and Zooey, by JD Salinger
A Wrinkle in Time, by Madeleine L’Engle
Everything is Illuminated, by Jonathan Safran Foer
The Picture of Dorian Gray, by Oscar Wilde
The Handmaid’s Tale, by Margaret Atwood
4 comments:
Interesting list! Thanks for posting it.
I was glad to see one of my all-time favourite books -- A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L'Engle -- included. I first read the book when I was about 10 but somehow lost my copy. I spent the next few years hunting for it in every bookstore I visited and was so happy to eventually find not only the original but the sequels. Such wonderful books.
thanks for the great list!! makes me want to check them all off. you should definitely read lolita. good book. the giver is great and a short read.
I am shocked that my favorite book, HOCKEY STARS OF 1973, by Stan Fischler, did not make the list.
It's better than than all the others put together, and the best 60 cents I ever spent ordering from the Schoalastic Book Club.
Your Strand book list is interesting. I agree with your too much Harry Potter comment and disagree with Strand on the heavy emphasis on classics and those stupid fantasy Tolkien and Narnia tomes. I hated Beloved, found Dave Eggers too precious and thought the Da Vinci Code was a comic book. Michael Chabon's WAS a comic book but as a writer, I found his next book about the Jewish detective in Alaska a terrific read! I have never liked Lewis Carroll or de Saint Empery and could never understand their attraction or 'adoration". Perhaps because children were supposed to love those books - I didn't, but even as an adult, I thought them boring.
Middlesex and The Kite Runner get 1000 votes from me for good stories, well told. I loved A Fine Balance by Mystry and am surprised not to find that on the Strand List; likewise Wally Lamb.
You should read Franny and Zooey. It will take you about 10 minutes, and will show you why all those people named their babies Zooey.
The Fountainhead (Rand) was a good read when I was 17. The other two books on the list by her are not.
Interesting topic. I'll be interested to follow your theme on and on.....
- Liz
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