Monday, August 17, 2009

104 Books You Really Should Read

This is not a meme; I spent hours compiling this list myself.

Ordered by difficulty and alphabetically. Roughly. I have read every one of these books, and I did not include any books which I myself have not read and been changed by. Which means The Kite Runner is not on here, because I haven't read it yet....

It is 104 because I could not stop after 100.

How many of these have you read? What would you add to the list, and why? Have any questions about any of these books?


1. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Roald Dahl
2. Dr. Doolittle, Hugh Lofting
3. Little House on the Prairie, Laura Ingalls Wilder
4. Misty of Chincoteague, Marguerite Henry
5. Over Sea and Under Stone, Susan Cooper
6. Stories from Grandmother's Attic, Arletta Richardson
7. The Princess and the Goblin, George MacDonald
8. The Secret Garden, Francis Hodgeson Burnett
9. The Trumpet of the Swan, E.B. White
10. The Wheel on the School, Meindert DeJong
11. Winnie the Pooh, A.A. Milne
12. A Winter Book, Tove Jansson
13. A Wrinkle in Time, Madeline L'Engle
14. Aesop's Fables
15. Alice in Wonderland, Lewis Carroll
16. All Creatures Great and Small, James Harriot
17. Anne of Green Gables, L.M. Montgomery
18. Another Fine Myth, Robert Asprin
19. Black Beauty, Anna Sewell
20. Hans Brinker, or The Silver Skates, Mary Mapes Dodge
21. Heidi, Johanna Spyri
22. King of the Wind, Margurite Henry
23. My Side of the Mountain, Jean Craighead George
24. Sherlock Holmes, Arthur Conan Doyle
25. Swallows and Amazons, Arthur Ransome
26. The Black Arrow, Robert Lewis Stevenson
27. The Chronicles of Narnia, C.S. Lewis
28. The Giver, Lois Lowry
29. The Jungle Book, Rudyard Kipling
30. The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven, Sherman Alexie
31. The Outlaws of Sherwood, Robin McKinley
32. The Prisoner of Zenda, Anthony Hope
33. The Scarlet Pimpernel, Baroness Orczy
34. The Wizard of Oz, Frank W. Baum
35. A Christmas Carol, Charles Dickens
36. A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, Mark Twain
37. A Long Way Gone, Ishmael Beah
38. A Raisin in the Sun, Lorraine Hansberry
39. Born on a Blue Day, Daniel Tammet
40. Diary of a Young Girl, Anne Frank
41. Frankenstein, Mary Shelley
42. Ivanhoe, Sir Walter Scott
43. Kim, Rudyard Kipling
44. Links, Nuruddin Farah
45. Little Women, Louisa May Alcott
46. Lord of the Flies, William Golding
47. Lord of the Rings, J.R.R. Tolkien
48. Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen
49. Rebecca, Daphne Du Maurier
50. Short Stories, Rainer Maria Rilke
51. The Bronze Bow, Elizabeth George Speare
52. The Clan of the Cave Bear, Jean Auel
53. The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald
54. The Hiding Place, Corrie Ten Boom
55. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams
56. The Hoosier Schoolmaster, Edward Eggleston
57. The Invisible Man, H.G. Wells
58. The Joy Luck Club, Amy Tan
59. The Last of the Mohicans, James Fenimore Cooper
60. The Poisonwood Bible, Barbara Kingsolver
61. The Red Badge of Courage, Stephen Crane
62. The Swiss Family Robinson, Johann D. Wyss
63. The Three Musketeers, Alexandre Dumas
64. The Yearling, J.K. Rawlings
65. To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee
66. Tom Sawyer, Mark Twain
67. Treasure Island, Robert Lewis Stevenson
68. War of the Worlds, H.G. Wells
69. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Robert M. Pirsig
70. Anil's Ghost, Michael Ondaatje
71. Cry, the Beloved Country, Alan Paton
72. Jane Eyre, Charlotte Bronte
73. 1984, George Orwell
74. A Tale of Two Cities, Charles Dickens
75. Animal Farm, George Orwell
76. Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress, Die Sijie
77. Brave New World, Aldous Huxley
78. Cat's Cradle, Kurt Vonnegut
79. Catcher in the Rye, J.D. Salinger
80. Gulliver's Travels, Jonathan Swift
81. Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad
82. How Green Was My Valley, Richard Llewellyn
83. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, Maya Angelou
84. Les Miserables, Victor Hugo
85. My Name is Asher Lev, Chaim Potok
86. One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, Alexandr Solzhenitzen
87. Out of the Silent Planet, C.S. Lewis
88. Picture of Dorian Grey, Oscar Wilde
89. Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, James Joyce
90. Robinson Crusoe, Daniel DeFoe
91. Silas Marner, George Eliot
92. Tales from the Scriptorium, Paul Auster
93. The Cruel Sea, Nicholas Monsarrat
94. The Dispossessed, Ursula K. LeGuin
95. The Good Earth, Pearl S. Buck
96. The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck
97. The Illiad, Homer
98. The Killer Angels, Michael Shaara
99. The Pilgrim's Progress, John Bunyan
100. The Prince, Machiavelli
101. The Scarlet Letter, Nathaniel Hawthorne
102. Wuthering Heights, Emily Bronte
103. Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand
104. Crime and Punishment, Fyodor Dostoevsky

1 comment:

Unknown said...

...and people say reading is boring! Actually the vast majority of movies are boring, compared to books.