Official Lists

feminista Modern Library Radcliffe Modern Library readers Best Ever Gay & Lesbian BBC

Combined, this is what I meant to read in 2001, the first year of this endeavor; now that I've read the obvious titles, chipping away at the others might not change much.

Feminista: now updated here

Modern Library: now updated here

Radcliffe: now updated here

Triangle: now updated here

MLA Readers

Source: http://www.randomhouse.com/modernlibrary/100best/novels.html
Validity: None. To Kill a Mockingbird is in the top ten, as it ought to be and as Radcliffe has it (Feminista didn't order its choices), but so are all four of Ayn Rand's novels and three by L. Ron Hubbard. Robert Heinlein might be a fine writer (I wouldn't know), but not fine enough to capture seven places; I'd never heard of Charles de Lint and he has eight. What this list shows is that Objectivism and science fiction and Scientology lend themselves to zealotry and ballot-packing. Also any list that considers A Town Like Alice to be worth reading at all obviously is severely flawed.
How many I had read as of December 2000, 38; as of June 2007, 59.
How many more I intend to read: Few that don't occur in the other lists or in my own previous lists. I have meant to read Stranger in a Strange Land since high school, and the Robertson Davies trilogies since I came across The Lyre of Orpheus in 1991, and At Swim-Two-Birds since it was assigned to me in the fall of 1989.

  1. Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged
  2. Ayn Rand, Fountainhead
  3. L. Ron Hubbard, Battlefield Earth
  4. J.R.R. Tolkien, Lord of the Rings
  5. Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird
  6. George Orwell, 1984
  7. Ayn Rand, Anthem
  8. Ayn Rand, We the Living
  9. L. Ron Hubbard, Mission Earth
  10. L. Ron Hubbard, Fear
  11. James Joyce, Ulysses May 2004
  12. Joseph Heller, Catch-22
  13. F. Scott Fitzgerald, Great Gatsby
  14. Frank Herbert, Dune
  15. Robert Heinlein, The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress
  16. Robert Heinlein, Stranger in a Strange Land October 2005
  17. Nevil Shute, A Town Like Alice
  18. Aldous Huxley, Brave New World
  19. J.D. Salinger, Catcher in the Rye
  20. Geroge Orwell, Animal Farm
  21. Thomas Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow
  22. John Steinbeck, Grapes of Wrath
  23. Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse Five
  24. Margaret Mitchell, Gone With the Wind
  25. William Golding, Lord of the Flies
  26. Jack Schaefer, Shane
  27. Nevil Shute, Trustee From the Toolroom
  28. John Irving, A Prayer For Owen Meany
  29. Stephen King, The Stand
  30. John Fowles, French Lieutenant's Woman
  31. Toni Morrison, Beloved
  32. E.R. Eddision, Worm Ouroboros
  33. William Faulkner, The Sound And the Fury
  34. Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita February 2001
  35. Charles De Lint, Moonheart
  36. William Faulkner, Absalom, Absalom! September 2004
  37. W. Somerset Maugham, Of Human Bondage
  38. Flannery O'Connor, Wise Blood December 2005
  39. Malcolm Lowry, Under the Volcano March 2007
  40. Robertson Davies, Fifth Business August 2005
  41. Charles De Lint, Someplace To Be Flying
  42. Jack Kerouac, On the Road March 2001
  43. Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness
  44. Charles De Lint, Yarrow
  45. H.P. Lovecraft, At the Mountains of Madness
  46. Miceky Spillane, One Lonely Night
  47. Charles De Lint, Memory And Dream
  48. Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse December 2002
  49. Walker Percy, The Moviegoer
  50. Charles De Lint, Trader
  51. Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide To the Galaxy
  52. Carson McCullers, The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter February 2001
  53. Margaret Atwood, Handmaid's Tale
  54. Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian
  55. Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange
  56. Nevil Shute, On the Beach January 2001
  57. James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist As a Young Man January 2001
  58. Charles De Lint, Greenmantle
  59. Orson Scott Card, Ender's Game April 2003
  60. Charles De Lint, Little Country
  61. William Gaddis, Recognitions
  62. Robert Heinlein, Starship Trooper
  63. Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises
  64. John Irving, The World According To Garp
  65. Ray Bradbury, Something Wicked This Way Comes
  66. Shirley Jackson, The Haunting of Hill House May 2001
  67. William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying
  68. Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer
  69. Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man May 2002
  70. Terri Windling, Wood Wife
  71. John Fowles, The Magus March 2001
  72. Robert Heinlein, Door Into Summer
  73. Robert Pirsig, Zen And the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
  74. Robert Graves, I, Claudius
  75. Jack London, Call of the Wild November 2004
  76. Flann O'Brien, At Swim-Two-Birds January 2003
  77. Ray Bradbury, Farenheit 451
  78. Sinclair Lewis, Arrowsmith
  79. Richard Adams, Watership Down
  80. William S. Burroughs, Naked Lunch, April 2007
  81. Tom Clancy, Hunt For Red October
  82. Laurell K. Hamilton, Guilty Pleasures
  83. Robert Heinlein, Puppet Masters
  84. Stephen King, It
  85. Thomas Pynchon, V.
  86. Robert Heinlein, Double Star
  87. Robert Heinlein, Citizen of the Galaxy
  88. Evelyn Waugh, Brideshead Revisited
  89. William Faulkner, Light in August April 2001
  90. Ken Kesey, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
  91. Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell To Arms
  92. Paul Bowles, The Sheltering Sky
  93. Ken Kesey, Sometimes a Great Notion
  94. Willa Cather, My Ántonia
  95. Charles De Lint, Mulengro
  96. Cormac McCarthy, Suttree
  97. Robert Holdstock, Mythago Wood
  98. Richard Bach, Illusions
  99. Robertson Davies, Cunning Man
  100. Salman Rushdie, Satanic Verses, June 2007

The 2001 Lists Merged

In the four lists of 100 books each, there were 292 discrete titles. M, R, F, and O exclusively listed 221 of them (M 45, R 8, F 85, and O 54) and 71 were shared.

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Manchester Guardian reports a Norwegian book club's poll of 54 worldwide authors' opinion of the 100 most important fictional works of all time. As of May 2002 when I started, I'd read 42; as of June 2006, 55. And The Aeneid is was my book of shame.

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Another list, from here (a Hungarian journalist offers this as a list that Waterstone's, in association with the BBC, developed in September 1996) and linked courtesy of Mo. As of 19 June 2004, I had read 62; as of June 2006, 70. This is a readers' list, slightly more dignified than the MLA readers' list; I doubt I'm going to read any more Stephen King or start on Michael Crichton but I've never heard of Jung Chang or Wild Swans and that, along with others, is going on my to-read list.

  1. J. R. R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings
  2. George Orwell, 1984
  3. George Orwell, Animal Farm
  4. James Joyce, Ulysses
  5. Joseph Heller, Catch-22
  6. J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye
  7. Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird
  8. Gabriel Garcia Marquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude
  9. John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath
  10. Irvine Welsh, Trainspotting
  11. Jung Chang, Wild Swans
  12. F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
  13. William Golding, The Lord of the Flies
  14. Jack Kerouac, On the Road
  15. Aldous Huxley, Brave New World
  16. Kenneth Grahame, The Wind in the Willows
  17. A.A. Milne, Winnie the Pooh
  18. Alice Walker, The Color Purple
  19. J. R. R. Tolkien, The Hobbit
  20. Albert Camus, The Outsider Camus had no such title in English and I figure this is the Englished Hungarian for L'Étranger.
  21. C.S. Lewis, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe
  22. Franz Kafka, The Trial
  23. Margaret Mitchell, Gone with the Wind
  24. Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
  25. Salman Rushdie, Midnight's Children
  26. Anne Frank, The Diary of Anne Frank
  27. Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange
  28. D.H. Lawrence, Sons and Lovers
  29. Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse
  30. Primo Levi, If This is a Man
  31. Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita
  32. Iain Banks, The Wasp Factory
  33. Marcel Proust, A La Recherche du Temps Perdu
  34. Roald Dahl, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory
  35. John Steinbeck, Of Mice and Men
  36. Toni Morrison, Beloved
  37. A. S. Byatt, Possession
  38. Joseph Conrad, The Heart of Darkness
  39. E. M. Forster, A Passage to India
  40. Richard Adams, Watership Down
  41. Jostein Gaarder, Sophie's World
  42. Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose
  43. Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Love in the Time of Cholera
  44. Daphne du Maurier, Rebecca
  45. Kazuo Ishiguro, The Remains of the Day
  46. Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being
  47. Sebastian Faulks, Birdsong
  48. E. M. Forster, Howard's End
  49. Evelyn Waugh, Brideshead Revisited
  50. Vikram Seth, A Suitable Boy
  51. Frank Herbert, Dune
  52. John Irvine, A Prayer for Owen Meany
  53. Patrick Süskind, Perfume
  54. Boris Pasternak, Doctor Zhivago
  55. Mervyn Peake, Gormenghast
  56. Laurie Lee, Cider with Rosie
  57. Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar
  58. Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid's Tale
  59. Vera Brittain, Testament of Youth
  60. John Fowles, The Magus
  61. Graham Greene, Brighton Rock December 2005
  62. Robert Tressell, The Ragged-Trousered Philanthropists
  63. Mikhail Bulgakov, The Master and Margarita
  64. Armistead Maupin, Tales from the City
  65. John Fowles, The French Lieutenant's Woman
  66. Louis de Bernières, Captain Corelli's Mandolin
  67. Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse 5
  68. Robert Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
  69. E. M. Forster, A Room with a View
  70. Kingsley Amis, Lucky Jim July 2006
  71. Stephen King, It
  72. Graham Greene, The Power and the Glory
  73. Stephen King, The Stand
  74. Erich Maria Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front
  75. Roddy Doyle, Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha
  76. Roald Dahl, Matilda
  77. Brett Easton Ellis, American Psycho
  78. Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
  79. Stephen Hawking, A Brief History of Time
  80. Roald Dahl, James and the Giant Peach
  81. D. H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley's Lover
  82. Tom Wolfe, The Bonfire of the Vanities
  83. Delia Smith, Complete Cookery Course
  84. Brian Keenan, An Evil Cradling
  85. D. H. Lawrence, The Rainbow
  86. George Orwell, Down and Out in Paris and London
  87. Arthur C. Clarke, 2001 - A Space Odyssey
  88. Gunther Grass, The Tin Drum
  89. Alexander Solzhenitsyn, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
  90. Nelson Mandela, A Long Walk to Freedom
  91. Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene
  92. Michael Crichton, Jurassic Park
  93. Lawrence Durrell, The Alexandria Quartet
  94. Alan Paton, Cry the Beloved Country
  95. Nick Hornby, High Fidelity
  96. Roddy Doyle, The Van
  97. Roald Dahl, The BFG
  98. Anthony Burgess, Earthly Powers
  99. Robert Graves, I, Claudius
  100. Nicholas Evans, The Horse Whisperer

Either I've got to develop some resistance or people have got to stop making up lists, especially ones requiring as much cleaning up as this one did, in formatting, misspellings, and inconsistent inclusions of first names, even for the same author in different entries. A Montana State University graduate English class developed this list, which I also discovered through Mo. As of December 2004, 47; as of June 2006, 56. I like that the first five are before 1650 and that of those five, the two English ones are Jacobian. Whether anyone ever actually spoke English like that, certainly no one's written it that evocatively, purely yet imaginatively, utterly beautifully, since.

  1. The Collected Works of Shakespeare (I've read about a third)
  2. The Bible (which? I'll go with the King James)
  3. Cervantes, Don Quixote
  4. Homer, The Iliad and The Odyssey
  5. Ovid, Metamorphoses
  6. James Joyce, Finnegans Wake
  7. Oresteia of Aeschylus
  8. Tao Te Ching-Lao Tzu
  9. Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov June 2005
  10. Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland
  11. Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse
  12. Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude
  13. Vladimir Nabokov, Pale Fire
  14. Dante, Divine Comedy
  15. Poems of Wallace Stevens
  16. Arabian Nights
  17. Tolstoy, War and Peace
  18. Toni Morrison, Beloved
  19. Collected Fictions of Jorge Luis Borges
  20. Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness
  21. Isak Dinesen, Anecdotes of Destiny
  22. Sophocles, Oedipus Trilogy
  23. Roberto Calasso, Marriage of Cadmus & Harmony
  24. Somadeva, Katasaratsagura (Oceans of Story)
  25. Chekhov, short stories
  26. Bhagavad Gita
  27. James Joyce, Ulysses
  28. Brothers Grimm, fairy tales
  29. Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man
  30. William Faulkner, Absalom, Absalom
  31. D.H. Lawrence, Women in Love
  32. Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita
  33. Plato: Dialogues
  34. Marcel Proust, Remembrance of Things Past
  35. Gunther Grass, The Tin Drum
  36. Flannery O'Connor: Short Stories
  37. Charles Dickens, Great Expectations
  38. Samuel Beckett, Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable
  39. Freud, Interpretation of Dreams
  40. Chaucer, Canterbury Tales
  41. T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets
  42. Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary
  43. Salman Rushdie, Midnight's Children
  44. Lawrence Sterne, Tristram Shandy
  45. William Yeats, Collected Poems (which collection? I've read lots and lots but not all)
  46. James Frazer, Golden Bough
  47. Kenneth Grahame, Wind in the Willows
  48. Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice
  49. Iris Murdoch, The Black Prince
  50. Jan Potaki, Manuscript found at Saragossa
  51. Euripides, Bacchae
  52. William Thackery, Vanity Fair
  53. Franz Kafka, Metamorphosis
  54. Virgil, Aeneid March 2006
  55. Tristan & Iseult, but which?
  56. William Blake, Collected Poems (again, which?)
  57. Golden Ass of Apuleius
  58. Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot and Endgame
  59. Emily Dickinson, Collected Poems
  60. Herman Melville, Moby-Dick
  61. Vladimir Nabokov, Speak, Memory
  62. Jean Racine, Phaedre
  63. Poetics of Aristotle
  64. Ivan Turgenev, Fathers and Sons
  65. Aristophanes, Lysistrata June 2006
  66. Henrik Ibsen, A Doll's House
  67. Oscar Wilde, Importance of Being Earnest
  68. Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms
  69. E.B. White, Charlotte's Web
  70. Mark Twain, Huckleberry Finn
  71. Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass
  72. Italo Calvino, If On a Winter's Night
  73. Charlotte Bronte, Jane Eyre
  74. Maria Vargos Llosa, Storyteller
  75. Heraclitus, Fragments
  76. Emily Bronte, Wuthering Heights
  77. Epic of Gilgamesh
  78. Dostoevsky, The Idiot
  79. Thomas Hardy, Tess of the D'Urbervilles
  80. Lady Murisaki, Tale of Genji
  81. Montaigne's Essays
  82. Henry David Thoreau, Walden
  83. Richard Wright, Native Son
  84. Emerson, On Nature
  85. Christopher Marlowe, Dr. Faustus but not Goethe's Faust?
  86. Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird
  87. Rabelais, Gargantua and Pantagruel
  88. John Milton, Paradise Lost winter 2005-2006
  89. Henry Fielding, Tom Jones
  90. Richard Wright, Native Son.Does its appearing twice mean it's twice as good as anything else?
  91. Frances Yates, The Art of Memory
  92. George Eliot, Middlemarch
  93. Peter Matthiessen, At Play in the Fields of the Lord
  94. Cormac McCarthy, All the Pretty Horses
  95. Voltaire, Candide
  96. Fredrich Nietzsche, Genealogy of Morals
  97. E.M. Forster, Passage to India March 2005
  98. Iris Murdoch, The Sea, the Sea December 2004
  99. Claude Levi-Strauss, Tristes Tropiques
  100. Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes were Watching God

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