Another hundred books

December 4, 2010

Another hundred books

There’s a list of books going around Facebook.  Purportedly compiled by the BBC, which has supposedly found that most people have read, on average, six of them.  Only according to a friend who went looking, the BBC compiled no such list; the meme seems to be some kind of conflation of the BBC’s “Big Read” list which is the result of a poll of Brits’ favorite books, and some apocryphal statistic about how little the average adult actually reads.

So relax everyone, it’s just fun; it’s not actually a judgment of how well-read you are.  Nevertheless, my Facebook friends had some interesting and useful banter about what made the list and important books and authors that didn’t make the list.

Here’s my own list of 100 important books that didn’t make the Facebook/BBC list, in no particular order of preference.  It’s a highly idiosyncratic and in no way judgmental list, incredibly biased towards stuff I’ve read and stuff I like, or found particularly formative.  I haven’t read all of these; a few are things I think I should have read and haven’t.

If you like, give it the Facebook treatment and see how you do.  (Copy and paste into a comment, star what you’ve read.)  Tell me your own–what are your most important books that haven’t made anyone’s list?

1. The Hunchback of Notre Dame–Victor Hugo
2. The Poisonwood Bible–Barbara Kingsolver
3. Caucasia–Danzy Senna
4. Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl–Linda Brent
5. American Gods–Neil Gaiman
6. Like Water for Chocolate–Laura Esquivel
7. Middlesex–Jeffrey Eugenides
8. White Oleander–Janet Fitch
9. The Alchemist–Paulo Coelho
10. 2001: A Space Odyssey–Arthur C. Clarke
11. Fahrenheit 451–Ray Bradbury
12. Pillars of the Earth–Ken Follett
13. Girl, Interrupted–Susanna Kaysen
14. Interpreter of Maladies–Jhumpa Lahiri
15. The Lacuna–Barbara Kingsolver
16. The Millennium Trilogy (The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, etc.)–Stieg Larsson
17. The Woman Warrior–Maxine Hong Kingston
18. Native Speaker–Chang-rae Lee
19. Wicked–Gregory Maguire
20. Beloved–Toni Morrison
21. A Canticle for Leibowitz–Walter M. Miller
22. No-No Boy–John Okada
23. Fight Club–Chuck Palahniuk
24. The Stolen Child–Keith Donohue
25. The Red Tent–Anita Diamant
26. God’s Mountain–Erri De Luca
27. House of Leaves–Mark Z. Danielewski
28. The Prince of Tides–Pat Conroy
29. The Mists of Avalon–Marion Zimmer Bradley
30. The Once and Future King–T.H. White
31. Atlas Shrugged–Ayn Rand
32. The Joy Luck Club–Amy Tan
33. Frankenstein–Mary Shelley
34. A Soldier of the Great War–Mark Helprin
35. Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil–John Berendt
36. Slaughterhouse 5–Kurt Vonnegut
37. The Demon-Haunted World–Carl Sagan
38. On the Origin of Species–Charles Darwin (If I had to pick ONE book that should be required reading in school, at the very least for anyone who ever takes a science class, this would be it.  Not only is it the basis of the practice of modern biology, it’s not that hard to read, fun, clever, and doesn’t remotely say what over half of Americans think it does.)
39. Till We Have Faces–C.S. Lewis
40. The Neverending Story–Michael Ende
41. Into the Wild–John Krakauer
42. The Last Temptation of Christ–Nikos Kazantzakis
43. A Little Princess–Frances Hodgson Burnett
44. The Giver–Lois Lowry
45. Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister–Gregory Maguire
46. Possum Living–Dolly Freed
47. Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ’s Childhood Pal–Christopher Moore
48. Breakfast at Tiffany’s–Truman Capote
49. The Time Quartet (A Wrinkle in Time, A Wind in the Door, A Swiftly Tilting Planet, Many Waters)–Madeleine L’Engle
50. Maus–Art Spiegelman
51. Reviving Ophelia–Mary Pipher
52. Cat’s Cradle–Kurt Vonnegut
53. Pudd’nhead Wilson–Mark Twain
54. A Gesture Life–Chang-rae Lee
55. Ishmael–Daniel Quinn
56. Something Wicked This Way Comes–Ray Bradbury
57. A Tale of Two Cities–Charles Dickens
58. Last of the Mohicans–James Fenimore Cooper
59. Walden–Henry David Thoreau
60. The Passage–Justin Cronin
61. The Canterbury Tales–Chaucer
62. Mystic River–Dennis LeHane
63. The Earthsea Cycle (A Wizard of Earthsea, etc.)–Ursula K. LeGuin
64. Jacob Have I Loved–Katherine Paterson
65. The Silmarillion–JRR Tolkien
66. The Screwtape Letters–C.S. Lewis
67. Shoeless Joe–W.P. Kinsella
68. The Feminine Mystique–Betty Friedan
69. The Scarlet Letter–Nathaniel Hawthorne
70. Wonderboys–Michael Chabon
71. The Iliad/The Odyssey–Homer (This is how we were taught The Odyssey in high school: our 9th grade language arts class was divided up into groups of 3 or 4, and each group was assigned one section of the tale–one of the adventures of Odysseus and his crew–and had to read it and present it in book report form to the rest of the class.  So we “learned” The Odyssey, but no one actually had to read the whole thing.  It was the stupidest thing ever.  And I still haven’t gotten around to correcting the situation and just reading it.)
72. My Sister’s Keeper–Jodi Picoult
73. The Diary of Anne Frank–Anne Frank
74. The Tipping Point–Malcolm Gladwell
75. The Magicians–Lev Grossman
76. Awakenings–Oliver Sacks
77. The Faerie Queene–Edmund Spenser
78. Anthem–Ayn Rand
79. A Farewell to Arms–Ernest Hemingway
80. One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest–Ken Kesey
81. Johnny Tremain–Esther Forbes
82. Matilda–Roald Dahl
83. The Outsiders–S.E. Hinton
84. Flowers for Algernon–Daniel Keyes
85. Bridge to Terebithia–Katherine Paterson
86. Neverwhere–Neil Gaiman
87. The Chocolate War–Robert Cormier
88. Only Revolutions–Mark Z. Danielewski
89. The Winter’s Tale–Mark Helprin
90. Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry–Mildred Taylor
91. Angels of Destruction–Keith Donohue
92. The Laramie Project–Moises Kaufman (Yes, technically a play; give yourself credit if you’ve seen it)
93. His Master’s Voice–Stanislaw Lem
94. Franny and Zooey–JD Salinger
95. The Satanic Verses–Salman Rushdie
96. Angels in America (Also a play, well, technically two plays)–Tony Kushner
97. Griffin and Sabine–Nick Bantock
98. The Koran
99. Little House in the Big Woods–Laura Ingalls Wilder
100. Beowulf–author unknown

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