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I have a burning need to know stuff and I love asking awkward questions.

Saturday, April 06, 2013


Before We Die.

 …and another List from the Internet. This is one made up of 100 books we’re all are supposed to read before we die. There’s a lot of classics in there as you might expect but, at least as far as I’m concerned a few strange ones too (World War Z?). As before I’ve highlighted the ones I’ve read in bold and the ones I have in a pile somewhere with italics.

The Hobbit – J. R. R. Tolkien
The Road Less Traveled – Dr. Scott M. Peck
Catcher in the Rye – J. D. Salinger
In Cold Blood – Truman Capote
To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee
War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy
The Great Gatsby – F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Three Musketeers – Alexandre Dumas
Les Miserables – Victor Hugo
World War Z – Max Brooks
Education of a Wandering Man – Louis L’Amour
Watership Down – Richard Adams
The Iliad – Homer
The Little Prince – Antoine De Saint-Exupery
The Color Purple – Alice Walker
Atlas Shrugged – Ayn Rand
Paradise Lost – John Milton
Ulysses – James Joyce
Dracula – Bram Stoker
Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen
A Tale of Two Cities – Charles Dickens
Brave New World – Aldous Huxley
1984 – George Orwell
Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck
Gone With the Wind – Margaret Mitchell
Shogun – James Clavell
For Whom the Bell Tolls – Ernest Hemingway
The Stand – Stephen King
Lady Chatterley’s Lover – D. H. Lawrence
Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad
The Picture of Dorian Gray – Oscar Wilde
War of the Worlds – H. G. Wells
A Clockwork Orange – Anthony Burgess
The Prince – Niccolo Machiavelli
The Art of War – Sun Tzu
The Scarlet Letter – Nathaniel Hawthorne
Treasure Island – Robert Louis Stevenson
Something Wicked This Way Comes – Ray Bradbury
Starship Troopers – Robert A. Heinlein
Deliverance – James Dickey
Lord of the Flies – William Golding
The Dark Knight Returns – Frank Miller
Season of Mists – Neil Gaiman
The Princess Bride – William Goldman
Eaters of the Dead – Michael Crichton
The Pillars of the Earth – Ken Follett
Night – Eli Wiesel
Exodus – Leon Uris
Contact – Carl Sagan
You Can’t Go Home Again – Thomas Wolfe
On the Road – Jack Kerouac
Blubber – Judy Blume
Foundation – Isaac Asimov
The Stranger – Albert Camus
The Trial – Franz Kafka
Rabbit, Run – John Updike
Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoevsky
The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe – C. S. Lewis
The Long Goodbye – Raymond Chandler
Absalom, Absalom! – William Faulkner
Grendel – John Gardner
Hour of the Dragon – Robert E. Howard
The Executioner’s Song – Norman Mailer
Cop Hater – Ed McBain
Moby Dick – Herman Melville
A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court – Mark Twain
McTeague – Frank Norris
A Game of Thrones – George R. R. Martin
Fight Club – Chuck Palahniuk
Titus Groan – Mervyn Peake
Slaughterhouse-Five – Kurt Vonnegut
Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea – Jules Verne
The Divine Comedy – Dante
Don Quixote – Miguel De Cervantes
Robinson Crusoe – Daniel Defoe
Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte
The Wind in the Willows – Kenneth Grahame
Charlotte’s Web – E. B. White
One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
The Magus – John Fowles
Foucault’s Pendulum – Umberto Eco
Middlemarch – George Eliot
Frankenstein – Mary Shelley
The Complete Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
The Complete Shakespeare – William Shakespeare
Rosemary’s Baby – Ira Levin
I Am Legend – Richard Matheson
The Compete Plays of Aristophanes – Aristophanes
The Science of God – Gerald L. Schroeder
The Maltese Falcon – Dashiell Hammett
No Exit – Jean-Paul Sartre
Alexander of Macedon – Harold Lamb
Battle Royale – Koushun Takami
We Have Always Lived in the Castle – Shirley Jackson
Band of Brothers – Stephen Ambrose
Ancient Inventions – Peter James and Nick Thorpe
The Telltale Heart and Other Writings – Edgar Allan Poe
The Call of the Wild – Jack London
The Wonderful Wizard of Oz – Frank Baum
The Canterbury Tales – Geoffrey Chaucer

Which I guess makes me pretty poorly read....... [grin] But I am working on it - slowly.

5 comments:

Stephen said...

World War Z and The Dark Knight Returns?! Sounds like someone is trying to 'improve' the list with their favorites.

World War Z does sound interesting,though. My library has it, but it's low priority in terms of future reads.

CyberKitten said...

I think all lists - no matter their provenience - are slightly idiosyncratic and some more than others! World War Z does show up on several lists I've seen though I do think its probably in there because Zombies are in fashion ATM (and, of course, they're making a movie of it with Brad Pitt!).

Though, like you, it's not exactly high on my list..... [grin]

I'm trying to read more classics and have two coming up fairly shortly. I was considering doing a batch of 10 classics one after the other but I think that's a challenge too far for me right now.

dbackdad said...

Definitely an interesting list because of the contemporary ones sprinkled in (Game of Thrones, for ex).

Anyway, here goes:

Read:
Hobbit
The Iliad
Atlas Shrugged
Paradise Lost
Pride and Prejudice
Brave New World
1984
Of Mice and Men
War of the Worlds
A Clockwork Orange
The Prince
The Scarlet Letter
Something Wicked This Way Comes
Starship Troopers
Exodus
Contact
Foundation
Fight Club
The Divine Comedy
Rosemary's Baby
I am Legend

Have, but not read:
Catcher in the Rye
In Cold Blood
To Kill a Mockingbird
War and Peace
The Great Gatsby
Rabbit, Run
Crime and Punishment
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe
Slaughterhouse-Five
The Complete Shakespeare (though, I've probably read half of them at one time or another)

I really feel guilty that I haven't read the ones that I have. So many books ... so little time! :-)

VV said...

I've only actually read about 15. Embarrassing. As for movies, I've seen about 52 of them.

CyberKitten said...

dbackdad said: I really feel guilty that I haven't read the ones that I have. So many books ... so little time! :-)

Definitely with you there on both counts. Although I do read a fair amount and know that most of it is of reasonable quality I do feel that I don't read enough 'quality' books. Maybe that's just my feeling of social inferiority? [lol]

But as you say there are *so* many books....!

v v said: I've only actually read about 15. Embarrassing. As for movies, I've seen about 52 of them.

Better numbers than me! It did make me laugh though - the discrepancy between reading classics and having seen the movie version! I'm most definitely with you on that one!!