Sunday, July 12, 2009

I have several book lists to choose from. I have no idea where I got most of these lists, probably online. My goal in life is to finish every book on this list of 100. It will probably take the rest of my life to do but I'll get there eventually. The Laura Bush list is a good goal as well, as she (and Barbara) are the only Bush women I like.

100 Life Changing Books
1. Absalom! Absalom!, William Faulkner
2. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain
3. Alice In Wonderland, Lewis Carroll
4. All the Kings Men, Robert Penn Warren
5. Arrowsmith, Sinclair Lewis
6. The Artist's Way, Julia Cameron
7. As I Lay Dying, William Faulkner
8. Aspects of the Novel, E.M. Forster
9. Audubon: A Vision, Robert Penn Warren
10. Bastard Out of Carolina, Dorothy Allison
11. Beloved, Toni Morrison
12. Black Boy, Richard Wright
13. Body Rags, Galway Kinnell
14. The Brothers Karamazov, Fyodor Dostoyevsky
15. The Canterbury Tales, Geoffrey Chaucer
16. Catcher in the Rye, J.D. Salinger
17. Charlotte's Web, E.B. White

18. The Collected Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway
19. The Color Purple, Alice Walker
20. Confessions, St. Augustine
21. The Counterfeiters, Andre Gide
22. Crime and Punishment, Fyodor Dostoyevsky
23. Dark Symphony: Negro Literature in America, edited by James A. Emanuel and Theodore L. Gross
24. David Copperfield, Charles Dickens
25. A Death in the Family, James Agee
26. Death of a Lake, Arthur Upfield
27. Doktor Faustus, Thomas Mann
28. Dracula, Bram Stoker
29. Eight Men, Richard Wright
30. The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Tom Wolfe
31. Farewell to Arms, Ernest Hemingway
32. Fathers And Sons, Ivan Turgenev
33. Finnegan's Wake, James Joyce
34. Of a Fire on the Moon, Norman Mailer
35. For Whom the Bell Tolls, Ernest Hemingway
36. The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck
37. Gravity's Rainbow, Thomas Pynchon
38. Great Dialogues of Plato
39. Great Expectations, Charles Dickens
40. The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald

41. The Fire Next Time, James Baldwin
42. The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, Carson McCullers
43. The Essential Akutagawa, Ryunosuke Akutagawa
44. Henderson the Rain King, Saul Bellow
45. Homage to Catalonia, George Orwell
46. Horseman, Pass By, Larry McMurtry
47. The Idiot, Fyodor Dostoyevsky
48. Kafka's Other Trial, Elias Canetti
49. The King James Bible
50. The Left-Handed Woman, Peter Handke
51. Legends of the Fall, Jim Harrison
52. Les Miserables, Victor Hugo
53. Life on the Mississippi, Mark Twain
54. Lord of the Flies, William Golding
55. The Lottery, Shirley Jackson
56. The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony, Roberto Calasso
57. Meditations, Marcus Aurelius
58. Metamorphoses, Ovid
59. A Midsummer Night's Dream, William Shakespeare
60. Moby Dick, Herman Melville
61. Monsenor Quijote, Graham Greene
62. The Moviegoer, Walker Percy
63. My Book House, edited by Olive Beaupre Miller
64. My Name Is Aram, William Saroyan
65. Native Son, Richard Wright
66. The Negro Caravan: Writings by American Negroes, edited by Sterling A. Brown, Arthur P. Davis and Ulysses Lee
67. Of Time and the River, Thomas Wolfe
68. Open Secrets, Alice Munro
69. Out of Africa, Isak Dinesen
70. Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha, Roddy Doyle
71. Paradise Lost, John Milton
72. The Pointed Bone, Arthur Upfield
73. The Poorhouse Fair, John Updike
74. Portrait of a Lady, Henry James
75. Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, James Joyce
76. Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen
77. The Prince and the Pauper, Mark Twain
78. Remembrance of Things Past, Marcel Proust
79. The Richard Trilogy, Paul Horgan
80. A Season in Hell, Arthur Rimbaud
81. The Snow Leopard, Peter Matthiessen
82. So Long, See You Tomorrow, William F. Maxwell
83. The Stories of Breece D'J Pancake, Breece D'J Pancake
84. The Sun Also Rises, Ernest Hemingway
85. The Tale of Genji, Lady Murasaki Shikibu
86. Tales of the South Pacific, James A. Michener
87. The Tempest, William Shakespeare
88. The Temple of the Golden Pavilion, Yukio Mishima
89. Things Fall Apart, Chinua Achebe
90. The Times Are Never So Bad, Andre Dubus
91. Tom Jones, Henry Fielding
92. Treasure Island, Robert Louis Stevenson
93. The Twelve Caesars, Gaius Suetonius Tranquillus
94. Ulysses, James Joyce
95. The Voices of Marrakesh, Elias Canetti
96. Walden, Henry David Thoreau
97. War and Peace, Leo Tolstoy
98. Watt, Samuel Beckett
99. Wuthering Heights, Emily Bronte
100. The Yearling, Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings

25 BOOKS TO READ recommended by Laura Bush
Atonement; Ian McEwan
Bless Me, Ultima; Rudolfo Anaya
The Brothers Karamazov; Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Flannery O’Connor: The Complete Stories
The French Lieutenant’s Woman; John Fowles
The Heart of the Matter; Graham Greene
I, Claudius; Robert Graves
A Lesson Before Dying; Ernest J. Gaines
The Little Prince; Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
My Ántonia; Willa Cather
Mornings on Horseback; David McCullough
Music for Chameleons; Truman Capote
The Optimist’s Daughter; Eudora Welty
Pride and Prejudice; Jane Austen
The Razor’s Edge; W. Somerset Maugham
Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books; Azar Nafisi
Rebecca; Daphne du Maurier
The Secret Life of Bees; Sue Monk Kidd
Ship of Fools; Katherine Anne Porter
Siddhartha; Hermann Hesse
Sophie’s Choice; William Styron
War and Peace; Leo Tolstoy

Other "Smart" Reads, as I like to call them
The Bean Trees; Barbara Kingsolver
Smashed; Koren Zalickas
Cat’s Eye; Margaret Atwood
Kafka on the Shore; Haruki Murakami
Girl Bomb; Janice Erlbaum
Goat, a Memoir; Brad Land
White Teeth; Zadie Smith
Autobiography of a Face; Lucy Grealy
The Liar’s Club; Mary Karr
Human Oddities; Noria Jablonski
The Path to the Spiders’ Nests; Italo Calvino
Interpreter of Maladies; Jhumpa Lahiri
Lolita; Vladimir Nabokov
Reasons to Live; Amy Hempel
The Bell Jar; Sylvia Plath
In Pharaoh’s Army; Tobias Wolff
To the Lighthouse; Virginia Woolf
Jesus’ Son; Denis Johnson
The Memory Keeper’s Daughter
The Sun Also Rises; Ernest Hemingway
A Farewell to Arms; Ernest Hemingway
The Awakening; Kate Chopin
Tender is the Night; F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Beautiful and the Damned; F. Scott Fitzgerald
Hope’s Boy; Andrew Bridge
Her Last Death; Susanna Sonnenberg
Waiting for Normal; Leslie Connor
My complement, my enemy, my oppressor, my love; Kara Walker
The Glass Castle; Jeanette Walls
The Boy in the Striped Pajamas; John Boyne
Persuasion; Jane Austen
Leave Us Alone; Christopher Reeves
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night
The Things They Carried; Tim O’Brien
True Notebooks; Mark Salzman
The Reluctant Fundamentalist; Moshin Hamid
What Is The What; Dave Eggers
The Glass Castle; Jeannette Walls
Another Bullshit Night in Suck City; Nick Flynn
persian girls; nahid rachlin
Three Cups of Tea; Greg Mortenson and David Oliver Relin
Gang of One; Fan Shen
Kabul Beauty School; Deborah Rodriguez

No comments: