Reading Frenzy
by My goal this summer was to find a top 100 Fiction Novels list and read them all. I have utterly failed in this endeavor, but I did find a pretty credible list, I think. The following books are from the Harvard Book Store's 100 Favorite Titles.
1) 1984 by George Orwell
2) Beloved by Toni Morrison
3) One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
4) A People's History of the United States by Howard Zinn
5) Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky
6) The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger
7) Dubliners by James Joyce
8) The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
9) Nine Stories by J.D. Salinger
10) The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath
11) The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky
12) The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
13)Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte
14)The Jungle by Upton Sinclair
15) Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
16) The Plague by Albert Camus
17) Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce
18) Savage Inequalities by Jonathan Kozol
19) The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner
20) Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston
21) The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway
22) Light In August by William Faulkner
23) Where I'm Calling From by Raymond Carver
24) Absalom, Absalom by William Faulkner
25) Another Country by James Baldwin
26) Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
27) Nightwood by Djuna Barnes
28) Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison
29) The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien
30) As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner
31) Ask the Dust by John Fante
32) Bastard Out of Carolina by Dorothy Allison
33) Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
34) Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee by Dee Brown
35) Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
36) The Cherry Orchard by Anton Chekhov
37) City of Quartz by Mike Davis
38) The Complete Saki by Saki
39) David Copperfield by Charles Dickens
40) A Death in the Family by James Agee
41) The English Patient by Michael Ondaatje
42) Fathers and Sons by Ivan Turgenev
43) Fear and Trembling by Soren Kierkegaard
44) For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway
45) Got Tell It On The Mountain by James Baldwin
46) Journey To The End Of The Night by Louis-Ferdinand Celine
47) Hamlet by William Shakespeare
48) Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
49) History of the Arab Peoples by Albert Hourani
50) King Lear by William Shakespeare
51) The Long Goodbye by Raymond Chandler
52) Middlemarch by George Eliot
53) Maus by Art Spiegelman
54) Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf
55) Of Mice And Men by John Steinbeck
56) One Day In the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Alexander Solzhenitsyn
57) Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
58) Raise High The Roof Beam, Carpenters by J.D. Salinger
59) The Stranger by Albert Camus
60) Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe
61) To Kill A Mockingbird by Harper Lee
62) To The Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf
63) Ulysses by James Joyce
64) Watermark by Joseph Brodsky
65) Ways of Seeing by John Berger
66) White Noise by Don DeLillo
67) Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte
68) A Farewell To Arms by Ernest Hemingway
69) A Good Man Is Hard To Find by Flannery O'Connor
70) Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
71) Autumn of the Patriarch by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
72) Barrel Fever by David Sedaris
73) Burger's Daughter by Nadine Gordimer
74) Collected Stories of Eudora Welty
75) The Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx
76) Cosmicomics by Italo Calvino
77) The Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon
78) Duino Elegies by Rainer Maria Rilke
79) East of Eden by John Steinbeck
80) The Heart is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers
81) Going After Cacciato by Tim O'Brien
82) Homage To Catalonia by George Orwell
83) If On A Winter's Night a Traveler by Italo Calvino
84) The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka
85) Native Son by Richard Wright
86) Next of Kin by Roger Fouts
87) Origins of Totalitarianism by Hannah Arendt
88) Price of a Ticket by James Baldwin
89) The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir
90) Selected Stories by Alice Munro
91) Silent Spring by Rachel Carson
92) Structural Anthropology by C. Levi-Strauss
93) The Souls of Black Folk by W.E.B. duBois
94) The Night in Question by Tobias Wolff
95) The Odyssey by Homer
96) Race Matters by Cornel West
97) Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates
98) The Trial by Franz Kafka
99) What We Talk About When We Talk About Love by Ray Carver
100) Written on the Body by Jeanette Winterson
Discuss Amongst Yourselves.
AI Summary
72 Comments
i guess i'm not very well educated. i've only read a few of these. where is the old man and the sea? and of mice and men?
You know, I originally had another list but the address is no longer working. I've heard of almost all of the first half and then..it's really hard to find a good quality list.
This look any better? It has of mice and men (Which I think is a horrible novel by the way) but still no old man and the sea. however it was chosen by proffessors at Harvard soo.
ugh, i despised both those books...actually, i dont think i like anything hemingway or steinbeck
So do I! Though I haven't read any Hemingway books, just samples. But Steinbeck kills me.
YES! Steinbeck is so incredibly boring. why would he do that to people?
hey i think this list is wrong. i read portrait of an artist as a young man but it's by Joseph Heller. is there two different books or did they mis-label this? (#17)
No, it's definetly by James Joyce. It's written completely in stream of consciousness and just the worst thing ever.
okay. just re-checked it and joseph heller must have writen this book as a joke because its called portrait of an artist as an OLD man. similiar except with the age thing.
wow, i have read 17 of these books...and heard of way more of them...its mainly thanks to AP english...my teacher rocked...and college modern condition...as much as i hated that class...it made me read that tough stuff
What books did you read for your AP lit class, and what one did you end up writing on for the exam?
Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison
As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner
Hamlet by William Shakespeare
The Stranger by Albert Camus
-Those were some of the ones from the list. I used the stranger on the ap test. We also read Sidhartha. I'm drawing a blank on the other books we read...i'm sure they will come back to me slowly. How about you?
We read in this order..I think:
Emma, Jane Austen
Beloved, Toni Morrison
Odeipus..spelled wrong
King Lear, Shakespear
The Awakening, Kate Chopin
Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man, James Joyce
I studied Emma so hard for the exam and ended up writing on Beloved.
oh, we read oedipus also....and antigone...but none of those others
i remember reading antigone in 9th grade...i thought it was pretty interesting...i can't remember why, though.
because you're a pervert. she was the daughter of a man and his own mother and when he found out he gouged his own eyes out.
hahaha..it's just such a funny story because it sucks so bad to be Oedipus.
calm down over there, mole boy. teach your brother about art.
hey dan...if you like that....maybe you should read about freud's oedipal complex
Ah yes..it's very interesting and disgusting.
I'm surprised that the Lord of the Rings Trilogy isn't mentioned. My daughter and are are reading it togethter separately, book one that is.
I'm doing it so I can help her understand it cause it pretty weird.
Help her understand it? How old is she? I thought it was fairly easy reading after you get the names and geography down.
shes 15 and her best attribute is NOT her brain. Anyway my bro the says now u can buy the Trilogy with a glossary in the back so as not to get confused, and it IS a confusing book, esp after u see the movie b/c the movie had some big differences.
yeah i read it before the the film and unless you constantly referred to the maps and had a great memory for names it can get a tad confusing - who is doing what with who and where, but what a stonking great set of books, i loved it
Have you read the Silmarillion? Now that's tough. I tackled it at the beginning of the summer, very interesting but confusing with a million names.
I've read 10 of these. I wonder how Jane Austen isn't on this list. We read Emma for AP lit this year and I loved it. Also, Kate Chopin with The Awakening.
that's probably the point. you read it for high school english. this is Harvard we're talking bout here.
yeah, most high school classes don't go over this stuff...but a lot of the books we actually did read in college...and a few of them we read in ap english...not bad, considering it is harvard
Darling..Jane Austen is classic. Remember that Austen wit!
pretty depressing...i've only read 4 of these
hmm, cool. I wrote an essay on "The Trial" by Kafka. I counted 9 books on this list, I might have had more on the other list. I need to read more straight-fiction. I'm in a science-fiction rut.
hey, you were born october 17th?? Thats my birthday!
cool. maybe we can have our birthday parties together sometime. oh wait....
that's my brother's b-day too
eminem was born that day too
oh word? i didn't know that either
i was born on Albert Einstein's b-day
dude! you signed up for ezabel on my birthday!! go mets!
#8! Great Gatsby, that's my fav
i hate these book lists they are so pretentious, everyone's perception of a "good read" is different, and quite frankly there are a number of books on that list i would not wish to read. I think people should read books which interest them and not have to live up to a perceived notion of what should be read.
It is also dangerous to get caught up in an onslaught of secular literature, "To the making of many books there is no end, and much devotion to them is wearisome to the flesh." (Ecclesiastes 12:12) Okay im not saying reading of secular literature is bad, i just think we need to be careful and there is an interesting point in the Young people ask book which says ""Bad associations spoil useful habits."(1 Corinthians 15:33) The people with whom you associate can mold your personality. Have you ever spent so much time with a friend that you found yourself beginning to act, talk, and even think like your friend? Well, reading a book is like spending hours conversing with the one who wrote it."
Oh and where on the list is the most wide spread invaluable book of all time............the BIBLE, the words of Jehovah!???
Don't get me wrong i love reading but caution is needed.
you just wrote a book.
Very true, we just had a talk on this a few weeks back. Of course, having the plan of being a literature major in college makes not reading too much a bit of a challenge. You just have to have a healthy balance and make sure you're not taking up time you should be reading bible literature with reading other things.
good points...i finally made it up to luke. can i take credit for reading 41 books (gen thru mark)?
no, you can only say you've read 62% of the Bible. sorry!
i think a better question is, if you place a bible, does it count as 66 books?
hahhaa! good thought dan...see, i'm not the only one with random/weird thoughts. such as my thought about if some people in the new system will be the same age forever...ie: some will be 4 years old forver..ect....i brought this up at sal's yesterday...i was taunted for a while.
hahahha i'm imagining all the little brats in my hall being 2 forever...argh...i would go nuts...
Same age forever..isn't it just young and healthy forever?
see, in paradise pictures they always have people of all ages...if everyone looks like there 20 forever we wouldnt have little kids...so *I* think some kids will never grow up...but i was told that sounded really cruel and unusual.
hahaha, so weird. even though early humans lived to be 800 years old, that doesn't mean they were physically stuck at 4 their whole lives. there will be children in the new system, but they will grow up just like they do now until they're mature. i thought this was obvious
Yes but she does make a good point cause if people just stop aging at a certain point it will be like a bunch of 30 year olds and under. Kinda freaky but i'm sure it'll work out perfectly.
yea, but i'm saying once all the kids grow up...and all the kids that have died are resurrected and THEY grow up...people cant just keep on having babies...the earth would be swarming, reproduction has to stop eventually.
well, women do have a limited amount of eggs. and there is an entire universe that Jehovah created for some reason.
see, i don't think thats' fair. if reproduction has to stop eventually (which i agree with) then some people who have waited their whole lives to have kids and then died serving as missionaries might not get to have kids in the new system
well i dont think it would stop until everyone was resurrected and the earth would have to be "filled" i think it'd take a while so everyone who wanted kids probly would have the chance to...but no matter what, it's not like anyone is going ot be unhappy or complaining..because if they are...ZAP! haha
i wonder what'll happen when your loved ones come back who will be younger than you...my dad when he was 31. i'm now 33...and the longer the system goes on...*brain freeze!!!*
yeah, that's a really interesting thought. i've thought about it before...
i think that maybe once the majority of humanity reaches their peak of maturity, in the overall scheme of time, they'll all be essentially the same age. it will certainly give us an interesting new perspective on our close relatives (or distant ancestors for that matter)
i think of how little life people get to experience in their limited amount of years on the earth. it makes total sense how in the bible when people lived for hundreds of years they would be like 100 when they got married and started having kids. we have to get married too young or we'll be dead
i keep thinking how isaac was 30
i keep thinking how isaac was 30
Do you really think that much about it that you had to repeat yourself?
i guess he was quite an entrepreneurister
sorry, ian...i'll ALWAYS be older than you. even when i'm 2.56789 x 10890823 and you're 2.56778 x 10890823, i'll still be older!
(strippin the superscript tags now too?)
whoops, forgot that one.
here's the tags that are allowed right now (and it's been this way for likr almost a year)
a,i,p,br,b,font,h1,h2,h3,h4,img,marquee,blockquote,li,ul,ol,tt,code,strong,div,em,big,small,span,pre,u,strike,super
1984-really great book. pretty dark though and kind of scary how close to reality it is in some countries (ie Iraq, N. Korea).
You should all check out modern library for a good list.
Wow, I've read like 60 of those. I feel so smart. (I hate myself right now)
read 4 or 5 of those books in a row and i promise you'll go insane
haha look at all that anti-communist propoganda!
some interesting notes on 1984- it uses Jehovah's name as many times as most current bible translations (twice), it is in the appendix that discusses the principles of newspeak (the "language" used throughout the book). there he says Jehovah is the one God and all others are false.
-one more interesting point in the middle of the the book it reads "The world of today is a bare, hungry dilapidated place compared with the world that existed before 1914" interesting, huh, well at least to me.
hey i never got around to that point in the book, that's really cool