Since I graduated from college in 2010, I have really missed reading. Sure, I'll pick up a book now and then, or I read the New Yorker, but I am not required to read several dense volumes per week like I did for my advanced literature and history seminars. I'm a huge nerd, and during my tenure at college I took courses on Existentialism (reading Camus, Kierkegaard, Nietszche), Transcendentalism (Thoreau and Emerson), and even a seminar on Proust, Joyce and Faulkner. There were definitely times when I felt like my brain was doing cartwheels- especially reading Kierkegaard or Ulysses- but I also loved it. I realized recently that I missed that kind of great literature, the kind that you were required to read in school but would not pick up on your own (who just decides one day to read War and Peace... for fun?).
When I was in a bookstore last year, I was searching for a new bookmark (yes, I am one of the few people who still uses bookmarks... or reads real books, for that matter). After perusing some bookmarks with famous quotes on them, I found the one you see above, which boasted (daringly) that it listed the "50 books you should read before you die." Intrigued, I decided to research the books everyone should read in their lifetime. Of course, it is extremely subjective, so I found several different versions of the same list online; but I found a couple of lists that were created by librarians or by well-known news sources like BBC. I compiled my own list from these, since there was a lot of overlap. Interestingly, there are several novels which are newer and wouldn't be considered classics, such as The Alchemist, and some books were on one list but not another (like one of my favorites, Tess of the D'Urbervilles). I then divided my master list into the ones I have already read, those that I have not read, and those which I have read parts of but not in total. I am going to try and make my way through the books I have not read first, and maybe eventually re-read the ones I have already read. Here are the lists:
The books I have read:
| 1984 by George Orwell |
| Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen |
| To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee |
| Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte |
| The Lord of the Flies by William Golding |
| Hamlet by William Shakespeare |
| The Great Gatsby by Scott Fitzgerald |
| The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger |
| Brave New World by Aldous Huxley |
| The Diary of Anne Frank by Anne Frank |
| The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer |
| The Harry Potter (series) by J.K. Rowling |
| His Dark Materials trilogy by Philip Pullman |
| Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad |
| The Color Purple by Alice Walker |
| Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain |
| Catch 22 by Joseph Heller |
| Memoirs of a Geisha by Arthur Golden |
| Tess of the D'Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy |
| Great Expectations by Charles Dickens |
| The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold |
| A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens |
| Candide by Voltaire |
The books I have not read:
| The Lord of the Rings Trilogy by Tolkein |
| The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck |
| A Passage to India by E.M. Forster |
| All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque |
| The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde |
| A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens |
| Birdsong by Sebastian Faulke |
| Tender is the Night by F Scott Fitzgerald |
| Winnie the Pooh by AA Mine |
| The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Graham |
| The Prophet by Khali Gibran |
| David Copperfield by Charles Dickens |
| The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho |
| The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov |
| Life of Pi by Yann Martel |
| Middlemarch by George Eliot |
| The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver |
| A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess |
| A Day in the Life of Ivan Densovich by A. Solzenhitsyn |
| The Bell Jar by Sylvie Plath |
| Emma by Jane Austen |
| The Quiet American by Graham Greene |
| Money by Marin Amis |
| Moby Dick by Herman Melville |
| Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy |
| Alice's Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Caroll |
| Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier |
| War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy |
| Les Miserables by Victor Hugo |
| The Beautiful and Damned by Scott Fitzgerald |
| Frankenstein by Mary Shelley |
| The War of the Worlds by H.G. Wells |
| Man Without Woman by Ernest Hemingway |
| Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift |
| Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe |
| One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest by Ken Kesey |
| The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas |
| The Divine Comedy by Dante The books I have read parts of: |
| Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte |
| Gone With the Wind by Margaret Mitchell |
| Ulysses by James Joyce |
| The Stranger by Albert Camus |
| Crime and Punishment by Dostoevsky |
For no reason in particular, I decided to start with The Picture of Dorian Gray. I have read Wilde a few times, and I have heard references to the book in popular culture. I have only gotten about a third of the way through, but so far it seems to be a commentary on the destruction of corruptive influence- the power of simple suggestion, and how it can shape our world views, relationships, and the future. In a way, Dorian Gray's story falls under the category of one of my favorite themes: the loss of innocence. Interestingly, too, though it was written in the 1890s, Dorian Gray could be transposed into our era almost seamlessly; the themes of the corruption of society and morality could also be applied to today. Meanwhile, Wilde's descriptions absolutley amaze me in their intricacy, the phrases glittering like woven, gleaming tapestries.
I'm periodically going to post about my current reading on my blog, so if anyone wants to read these books along with me (and post your own comments) in a sort of online book club, go for it!
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