So did I get your attention? Think you know the missing word? I bet you don't....
I was just thinking it's been ages since I had a good READ lately... hahahaha...
I have been looking at the top 100 best reads from 1923 - present. This list was done by Time Magazine in 2005 so maybe there has been some awesome books since then released but who knows..
Let's focus on one thing at a time.. I pride myself on being a reader - I pride myself on finding obscure authors and reading their stuff. I realised today I very rarely read what I should. I don't do the popular thing - I can't make myself read something a million people are telling me to read - yet I have NO qualms telling people what books they simply "must" read. Can anyone say hypocrite???
So here's the list in no particular order - actually that would be in alphabetical order :p
The Adventures of Augie March
Saul Bellow
All the King's Men
Robert Penn Warren
American Pastoral
Philip Roth
An American Tragedy
Theodore Dreiser
Animal Farm
George Orwell
Appointment in Samarra
John O'Hara
Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret
Judy Blume
The Assistant
Bernard Malamud
At Swim-Two-Birds
Flann O'Brien
Atonement
Ian McEwan
Beloved
Toni Morrison
The Berlin Stories
Christopher Isherwood
The Big Sleep
Raymond Chandler
The Blind Assassin
Margaret Atwood
Blood Meridian
Cormac McCarthy
Brideshead Revisited
Evelyn Waugh
The Bridge of San Luis Rey
Thornton Wilder
Call It Sleep
Henry Roth
Catch-22
Joseph Heller
The Catcher in the Rye
J.D. Salinger
A Clockwork Orange
Anthony Burgess
The Confessions of Nat Turner
William Styron
The Corrections
Jonathan Franzen
The Crying of Lot 49
Thomas Pynchon
A Dance to the Music of Time
Anthony Powell
The Day of the Locust
Nathanael West
Death Comes for the Archbishop
Willa Cather
A Death in the Family
James Agee
The Death of the Heart
Elizabeth Bowen
Deliverance
James Dickey
Dog Soldiers
Robert Stone
Falconer
John Cheever
The French Lieutenant's Woman
John Fowles
The Golden Notebook
Doris Lessing
Go Tell it on the Mountain
James Baldwin
Gone With the Wind
Margaret Mitchell
The Grapes of Wrath
John Steinbeck
Gravity's Rainbow
Thomas Pynchon
The Great Gatsby
F. Scott Fitzgerald
A Handful of Dust
Evelyn Waugh
The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter
Carson McCullers
The Heart of the Matter
Graham Greene
Herzog
Saul Bellow
Housekeeping
Marilynne Robinson
A House for Mr. Biswas
V.S. Naipaul
I, Claudius
Robert Graves
Infinite Jest
David Foster Wallace
Invisible Man
Ralph Ellison
Light in August
William Faulkner
The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe
C.S. Lewis
Lolita
Vladimir Nabokov
Lord of the Flies
William Golding
The Lord of the Rings
J.R.R. Tolkien
Loving
Henry Green
Lucky Jim
Kingsley Amis
The Man Who Loved Children
Christina Stead
Midnight's Children
Salman Rushdie
Money
Martin Amis
The Moviegoer
Walker Percy
Mrs. Dalloway
Virginia Woolf
Naked Lunch
William Burroughs
Native Son
Richard Wright
Neuromancer
William Gibson
Never Let Me Go
Kazuo Ishiguro
1984
George Orwell
On the Road
Jack Kerouac
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
Ken Kesey
The Painted Bird
Jerzy Kosinski
Pale Fire
Vladimir Nabokov
A Passage to India
E.M. Forster
Play It As It Lays
Joan Didion
Portnoy's Complaint
Philip Roth
Possession
A.S. Byatt
The Power and the Glory
Graham Greene
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie
Muriel Spark
Rabbit, Run
John Updike
Ragtime
E.L. Doctorow
The Recognitions
William Gaddis
Red Harvest
Dashiell Hammett
Revolutionary Road
Richard Yates
The Sheltering Sky
Paul Bowles
Slaughterhouse-Five
Kurt Vonnegut
Snow Crash
Neal Stephenson
The Sot-Weed Factor
John Barth
William Faulkner
The Sportswriter
Richard Ford
The Spy Who Came in From the Cold
John le Carre
The Sun Also Rises
Ernest Hemingway
Their Eyes Were Watching God
Zora Neale Hurston
Things Fall Apart
Chinua Achebe
To Kill a Mockingbird
Harper Lee
To the Lighthouse
Virginia Woolf
Tropic of Cancer
Henry Miller
Ubik
Philip K. Dick
Under the Net
Iris Murdoch
Under the Volcano
Malcolm Lowry
Watchmen
Alan Moore & Dave Gibbons
White Noise
Don DeLillo
White Teeth
Zadie Smith
Wide Sargasso Sea
Jean Rhys
So how may of these have I read? Not as many as I should have. How many have I always meant to read but never got around to it. Quite a few... I think it's time.... Time to join a library again. Get a book out and read read read.. Alas it will have to wait until Uni holidays ;)
So tell me how many of these have you read? How many of these do you want to read? And is your favourite book on here? If not what is yours???
Do I have a favourite book? Probably not but I do love the first one from my series Wheel Of Time - that book takes me right back to the beginning of the series when everything was shiny and new and exciting and UNKNOWN.. I love re-reading it to get that feeling back.. Same as the Narnia books - they take me back to that time when anything was possible and where it was believable to be able to get to another world through a closet... I watched Limony Snicket's Series of Unfortunate Events last night with Sammo (when is the next one coming out or is there no others??) and it make me wish I was a child so I could read that book. I wonder if the feeling you have when you re-read a childhood favourite would be there with a children's book you are reading as an adult... Or would it just disapoint cause you don't believe in magic and well really in anything anymore - your too grown up for that...
Thoughts?
7 comments:
hmmmm...less than half a dozen that I have read. But I've always said that I don't watch movies, or read to make myself feel intelligent. I watch or read to escape. So I'm all for trashy, chick lit. I'm glad I got you to read The Da Vinci Code though!
hmmmm.... didnt i comment on this??
You know what I think that your blog eats my comments!!!
I find i dont read anything that isn't online anymore ;(
I could possibly blame my inability to borrow books and the poor selection of english titles at the local bookstores.... But we all know it comes my lack of motivation!!
p.s. chic lit rocks!!! I defo like to read to learn - but i like to escape as well!!! Think Jilly Cooper, Marian Keyes etc etc
Holden Caulfield is a wanka....the whole story is boring, boring boring... I know why all these (read 2) serial killers have millions of copies...it is because it bored them into insanity and that's why they murdered!!
will look up some of the titles...agree with most...maybe missing some....it's all relative really.... opinon of books is precrative...'
but HATE HATE HATE catcher in the rye....
sorry baby...but know that you understand...
Holden Caulfield is the most boring person in the world!!
sorry honey...(and i know you get this) but I HATE HATE HATE this book.
I understand why serial killers (ok...2 famous killers) had millions of copies....it is because it bored them to insanity and that is why they killed people...to get some excitment (???) in their lives!!
I agree with most others...missing a few...don't know others...but it is a good solid list.
still love my "boy" books. still love Wilbur Smith...corny I know...
might make my own and let you know....
xxx
Nic
how come two versions of this came up?//
had sooooo much trouble signing in...might be it...
clearly my opnion did not change too much???
p.s. i think it is the sad truth that when you grown up your too grown up to believe in the magic you did when you were a kid. I no longer believe that I could go to Narnia if I just found that closet - although I wish!!
I know you don't believe in the magic when you get older but when you re-read the stories you remember the magical feeling you had the first time.. That's why I love re-visting the Narnia books... But I truely feel reading the Lemony Snickett books could be similar but alas cause I didn't read them as a child it wouldn't hold the magic for me :(
Phew does that make sense?
And Nic - I know you hated him - I remember from when you were at school and that is probably the reason I haven't read it and why I want to read it also... B
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