Must Read: Classics Challenge
UPDATED: August 2, 2010
See the original post that started this madness here!
| A Clockwork Orange | Anthony Burgess |
| A Confederacy of Dunces | John Kennedy Toole |
| A Death in the Family | James Agee |
| A Farewell to Arms | Ernest Hemingway |
| A Man in Full | Tom Wolfe |
| A Moveable Feast | Ernest Hemingway |
| A Room of One’s Own | Virginia Woolf |
| A Room With a View | E.M. Forster |
| A Streetcar Named Desire | Tennessee Williams |
| A Tale Of Two Cities | Charles Dickens |
| A Thousand Acres: A Novel | Jane Smiley |
| A Tree Grows in Brooklyn | Betty Smith |
| A Wrinkle in Time | Madeleine L’Engle |
| Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, The | Mark Twain |
| Adventures of Tom Sawyer, The | Mark Twain |
| Age of Reason, The | Jean-Paul Sartre |
| Alchemist, The | Paulo Coelho |
| All the King’s Men | Robert Penn Warren |
| American Pastoral | Philip Roth |
| An American Tragedy | Theodore Drieser |
| And Then There Were None | Agatha Christie |
| Angela’s Ashes | Frank McCourt |
| Angle of Repose | Wallace Stevens |
| Anna Karenina | Leo Tolstoy |
| Anne of Green Gables | LM Montgomery |
| Atlas Shrugged | Ayn Rand |
| Atonement | Ian McEwen |
| Autobiography of Malcolm X, The | Malcolm X |
| Babbitt | Sinclair Lewis |
| Bastard Out of Carolina | Dorothy Allison |
| Bleak House | Charles Dickens |
| Blind Assassin, The | Margaret Atwood |
| Blindness | José Saramago |
| Blood Meridian | Cormac McCarthy |
| Bonfire of the Vanities | Tom Wolfe |
| Bostonians, The | Henry James |
| Brave New World | Aldous Huxley |
| Breakfast at Tiffany’s | Truman Capote |
| Brideshead Revisited | Evelyn Waugh |
| Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, The | Junot Díaz |
| Brothers Karamazov, The | Fyodor Dostoyevsky |
| Cannery Row | John Steinbeck |
| Cat’s Cradle | Kurt Vonnegut |
| Charlotte’s Web | E.B. White |
| Children’s Hour, The | Lillian Hellman |
| Clan Of The Cave Bear, The | Jean M Auel |
| Cold Mountain | Charles Frazier |
| Cold Sassy Tree | Olive Ann Burns |
| Complete Stories, The | Flannery O’Connor |
| Count Of Monte Cristo, The | Alexandre Dumas |
| Curious Case Of Benjamin Button, The | F. Scott Fitzgerald |
| Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time, The | Mark Haddon |
| Daisy Miller | Henry James |
| David Copperfield | Charles Dickens |
| Death of a Salesman | Arthur Miller |
| Disgrace | J.M. Coetzee |
| Doctor Doolittle | Hugh Lofting |
| Doctor Zhivago | Boris Pasternak |
| Don Quixote | Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra |
| Drop City | T.C. Boyle |
| Dune | Frank Herbert |
| Earthsea Trilogy, The | Ursula K. LeGuin |
| East of Eden | John Steinbeck |
| Echo Maker, The | Richard Powers |
| Emma | Jane Austen |
| Ender’s Game | Orson Scott Card |
| Executioner’s Song, The | Norman Mailer |
| Fahrenheit 451 | Ray Bradbury |
| Fall on Your Knees | Ann-Marie MacDonald |
| Far From The Madding Crowd | Thomas Hardy |
| Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas | Hunter S. Thompson |
| Fear of Flying | Erica Jong |
| Finnegan’s Wake | James Joyce |
| Flowers for Algernon | Daniel Keyes |
| Fountainhead, The | Ayn Rand |
| Frankenstein | Mary Shelley |
| Franny and Zooey | J.D. Salinger |
| From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs Basil E. Frankweiler | E.L. Konigsburg |
| Gilead: A Novel | Marilynne Robinson |
| Go Ask Alice | Anonymous |
| God Of Small Things, The | Arundhati Roy |
| Godfather, The | Mario Puzo |
| Gone with the Wind | Margaret Mitchell |
| Good Earth, The | Pearl S. Buck |
| Good Omens | Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman |
| Grapes Of Wrath, The | John Steinbeck |
| Gravity’s Rainbow | Thomas Pynchon |
| Great Expectations | Charles Dickens |
| Great Gatsby, The | F. Scott Fitzgerald |
| His Dark Materials | Philip Pullman |
| Hours, The | Michael Cunningham |
| House of Sand And Fog, The | Andre Dubus III |
| House on Mango Street, The | Sandra Cisneros |
| How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents | Julia Alvarez |
| Howard’s End | E.M. Forster |
| Human Stain | Philip Roth |
| Hunchback of Notre Dame, The | Victor Hugo |
| Hyperion | Dan Simmons |
| I Claudius | Robert Graves |
| I Know This Much is True | Wally Lamb |
| Importance of Being Earnest, The | Oscar Wilde |
| In America | Susan Sontag |
| Independence Day | Richard Ford |
| Infinite Jest: A Novel | David Foster Wallace |
| Interview With the Vampire | Anne Rice |
| Ironweed | William Kennedy |
| Jane Eyre | Charlotte Brontë |
| Johnny Got His Gun | Dalton Trumbo |
| Jungle Book, The | Rudyard Kipling |
| Jungle, The | Upton Sinclair |
| Kafka on the Shore | Haruki Murakami |
| Killer Angels, The | Michael Shaara |
| Known World, The | Edward P. Jones |
| Lady Chatterley’s Lover | D.H. Lawrence |
| Les Misérables | Victor Hugo |
| Little Women | Louisa May Alcott |
| Lonesome Dove | Larry McMurtry |
| Lord Of The Flies | William Golding |
| Lord of the Rings, The | JRR Tolkien |
| Love In The Time Of Cholera | Gabriel García Márquez |
| Madame Bovary | Gustave Flaubert |
| Magic Mountain, The | Thomas Mann |
| Magician | Raymond E Feist |
| Mansfield Park | Jane Austen |
| Middlemarch | George Eliot |
| Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil | John Berendt |
| Midnight’s Children | Salman Rushdie |
| Moby Dick | Herman Melville |
| Mrs. Dalloway | Virginia Woolf |
| Mutiny on the Bounty | Charles Nordhoff and James Norman Hall |
| My Name Is Asher Lev | Chaim Potok |
| Never Let Me Go | Kazuo Ishiguro |
| New York Trilogy, The | Paul Auster |
| Night | Elie Wiesel |
| No Country for Old Men | Cormac McCarthy |
| Northanger Abbey | Jane Austen |
| Notes from the Underground | Fyodor Dostoyevsky |
| Of Human Bondage | W. Somerset Maugham |
| Of Mice And Men | John Steinbeck |
| Oil! | Upton Sinclair |
| Old Man and the Sea | Ernest Hemingway |
| Oliver Twist | Charles Dickens |
| On The Road | Jack Kerouac |
| One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest | Ken Kesey |
| One Hundred Years Of Solitude | Gabriel García Márquez |
| Optimist’s Daughter, The | Eudora Welty |
| Out Stealing Horses | Per Petterson |
| Outsiders, The | S.E. Hinton |
| Painted Bird, The | Jerzy Kosiński |
| Pearl, The | John Steinbeck |
| Perks of Being a Wallflower, The | Stephen Chbosky |
| Persuasion | Jane Austen |
| Phantom Tollbooth, The | Norton Juster |
| Play It As It Lays: A Novel | Joan Didion |
| Poisonwood Bible, The | Barbara Kingsolver |
| Portnoy’s Complaint | Philip Roth |
| Possession: A Romance | A.S. Byatt |
| Princess Bride, The | William Goldman |
| Prodigal Summer: A Novel | Barbara Kingsolver |
| Pygmalion | George Bernard Shaw |
| Quiet American, The | Graham Greene |
| Rabbit, Run | John Updike |
| Ragtime: A Novel | E.L. Doctorow |
| Razor’s Edge, The | W. Somerset Maugham |
| Rebecca | Daphne du Maurier |
| Remains of the Day, The | Kazuo Ishiguro |
| Revolutionary Road | Richard Yates |
| Road, The | Cormac McCarthy |
| Roman Holiday | Edith Warton |
| Satanic Verses | Salman Rushdie |
| She’s Come Undone | Wally Lamb |
| Shell Seekers, The | Rosamunde Pilcher |
| Shipping News, The | Annie Proulx |
| Shogun | James Clavell |
| Silas Marner | George Eliot |
| Sister Carrie | Theodore Drieser |
| Slaughterhouse-Five | Kurt Vonnegut |
| Snow | Orhan Pamuk |
| Snow Falling on Cedars | David Guterson |
| Sophie’s Choice | William Styon |
| Speak | Laurie Halse Anderson |
| Stand, The | Stephen King |
| Stranger, The | Albert Camus |
| Stuart Little | E.B. White |
| Sun Also Rises, The | Ernest Hemingway |
| Terms of Endearment | Larry McMurtry |
| Tess Of The D’Urbervilles | Thomas Hardy |
| This Boy’s Life | Tobias Wolff |
| Thorn Birds, The | Colleen McCollough |
| Three Cups of Tea | Greg Mortenson |
| Till We Have Faces: A Myth Retold | C.S. Lewis |
| To the Lighthouse | Virginia Woolf |
| Travels with Charley in Search of America | John Steinbeck |
| Treasure Island | Robert Louis Stevenson |
| Unbearable Lightness of Being, The | Milan Kundera |
| Valley of the Dolls | Jacqueline Susann |
| Virgin Suicides, The | Jeffrey Eugenides |
| War and Peace | Leo Tolstoy |
| Washington Square | Henry James |
| Watership Down | Richard Adams |
| We Were the Mulvaneys | Joyce Carol Oates |
| Westing Game, The | Ellen Raskin |
| Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? | Edward Albee |
| Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, The | Haruki Murakami |
| Witches of Eastwick, The | John Updike |
| Woman In White, The | Wilkie Collins |
| Wonderful Wizard of Oz, The | L. Frank Baum |
| Wuthering Heights | Emily Brontë |
There are 212 books on this list. Holy moly.
Obviously, it’ll take some time to work my way through all of these — like years. But at least now I have a starting point. I’d still love some feedback on this list and any additions you would make. (Or if you see any duplicates here. I was pretty careful, but just in case…)
One more fun fact for this particular list of books: because I can’t afford to keep buying books, especially this many, I’m going to reactivate my library card. And use it!! Shock of shocks! But there’s something gratifying about the crinkling plastic cover on a library book and having the time pressure of needing to return the book by a certain time to make you read something you would otherwise push aside. Blame it on the fact that I just re-read Matilda for the billionth time.
Rachel
exqueeze me? *RE*activate your library card?! quelle horreur it was not active in the first place! i own a number of these if you want to borrow, just sayin’
I know, I know!! But you have to understand that the library in my teeny suburban MD town is pathetic. And I didn’t live there for a year, and I live near the main DC library, but it smells like pee and sadness out front and I can’t bring myself to go in. I have my reasons. But I will make an attempt to find a good PG County library and frequent it, since my nearest one is so sad.
Just so you know, Dreiser’s novel is called “Sister Carrie”. “Carrie” is, if I’m not mistaken, a book by Stephen King…
Whoops! Not sure how I missed that. Thanks for the correction
As a HUGE fan of the classics, I am loving this list. I’ve been having to work my way through books that most people have already read (Lemony Snicket, Twilight, Harry Potter, Stephen King, etc… but I’m done now, hurray!) and now this list is giving me some great ideas and inspiration since I’ve read through that other list. Good luck with this… it is quite a goal!
Oh my – are you making much progress? Your list is VERY extensive. I started one myself here – http://www.jennascribbles.com/books-and-ebooks/a-list-of-must-read-classics/ but I have to admit, I am starting with the easy ones.
Good luck!
Jenna