Saturday, February 28, 2009

100 Books (not the BBC list)

On Facebook people have been counting how many books from a list put out by the BBC they have read. I've read 29 from the BBC list, but I have some friends who have read nearly 60.

I thought I'd create my own list of 100 books I have read or would like to read. There is significant overlap with the BBC list, since I used it as a starting point. I couldn't figure out the order of the BBC list; was it in order of popularity? My list is not in any particular order, although I have clustered books according to some similarities. Anyway, here is my list:

1, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, Lewis Carroll
2, Charlotte’s Web, E.B. White
3, The Harry Potter Books (Sorcerer’s Stone, Chamber of Secrets, Prisoner of Azkaban, Goblet of Fire, Order of the Phoenix, Half-Blood Prince, Deathly Hallows), J.K. Rowling
4, The Little Prince, Antoine De Saint-Exupery
5, The Once and Future King, T.H. White
6, The Secret Garden, Frances Hodgson Burnett
7, The Wind in the Willows, Kenneth Grahame
8, Winnie the Pooh, A.A. Milne
9, The Phantom Tollbooth, Norton Juster
10, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, L. Frank Baum
11, A Christmas Carol, Charles Dickens
12, Oliver Twist, Charles Dickens
13, The Hobbit, J.R.R. Tolkien
14, The Lord of the Rings (The Fellowship of the Ring, The Two Towers, The Return of the King), J.R.R. Tolkien
15, Crime and Punishment, Fyodor Dostoyevsky
16, War and Peace, Leo Tolstoy
17, Dream of the Red Chamber, Tsao Hsueh-Chin
18, In Search of Lost Time (Remembrance of Things Past), Marcel Proust
19, Infinite Jest, David Foster Wallace
20, Memory of Fire (Genesis, Faces and Masks, Century of the Wind), Eduardo Galeano
21, The Alexandria Quartet (Mountolive, Balthazar, Justine, Clea), Lawrence Durrell
22, The Cairo Trilogy (Palace Walk, Palace of Desire, Sugar Street), Naguib Mahfouz
23, The Magic Mountain, Thomas Mann
24, The Republic, Plato
25, The Inferno, Dante
26, Beowulf, Unknown Anglo-Saxon bard
27, The Canterbury Tales, Geoffrey Chaucer
28, The Guide of the Perplexed, Moses Maimonides
29, Don Quixote, Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
30, Hamlet, William Shakespeare
31, MacBeth, William Shakespeare
32, Beyond Rationality, Kenneth R. Hammond
33, Team of Rivals, Doris Kearns Goodwin
34, Goodbye, Darkness: A Memoir of the Pacific War, William Manchester
35, Hiroshima, John Hersey
36, The Star Thrower, Loren Eiseley
37, So Human an Animal, René Dubos
38, Blink, Malcolm Gladwell
39, Jane Eyre, Charlotte Bronte
40, Sense and Sensibility, Jane Austen
41, Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen
42, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain
43, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Harriet Beecher Stowe
44, A Death In The Family, James Agee
45, Moby Dick, Herman Melville
46, Ishmael, Daniel Quinn
47, The Great Gatsby, F Scott Fitzgerald
48, Little Women, Louisa M. Alcott
49, Catch 22, Joseph Heller
50, Catcher in the Rye, J.D. Salinger
51, On The Road, Jack Kerouac
52, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time, Mark Haddon
53, Turbulence (Fuzao), Jia Pingwa
54, The Great Learning, the Doctrine of the Mean, and the Analects (The first three of The Four Books), Confucius
55, Tao Te Ching, Lao Tzu
56, Journey to the West, Wu Cheng-en
57, Sadhana, Rabindranath Tagore
58, God’s Bits of Wood, Sembene Ousmane
59, Midnight’s Children, Salman Rushdie
60, One Hundred Years of Solitude, Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61, Love In The Time Of Cholera, Gabriel Garcia Marquez
62, The Pillars Of The Earth, Ken Follett
63, Dreams From My Father, Barack Obama
64, Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck
65, In Dubious Battle, John Steinbeck
66, Babbitt, Sinclair Lewis
67, The Jungle, Upton Sinclair
68, Tales of Soldiers and Civilians, Ambrose Bierce
69, Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad
70, The Trial, Franz Kafka
71, Kwaidan: Stories and Studies of Strange Things, Lafcadio Hearn
72, Frankenstein: The Modern Prometheus, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
73, It, Stephen King
74, Dracula, Bram Stoker
75, The Turn of the Screw, Henry James
76, Brave New World, Aldous Huxley
77, The Iron Heel, Jack London
78, 1984, George Orwell
79, Homage to Catalonia, George Orwell
80, The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, Philip K. Dick
81, The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress, Robert A. Heinlein
82, Childhood’s End, Arthur C. Clarke
83, A Canticle for Leibowitz, Walter M. Miller Jr.
84, Empire Falls, Richard Russo
85, Watership Down, Richard Adams
86, The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams
87, Les Miserables, Victor Hugo
88, The Three Musketeers, Alexandre Dumas
89, Madame Bovary, Gustave Flaubert
90, Freedom from the Known, Jiddu Krishnamurti
91, The Screwtape Letters, C.S. Lewis
92, The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe, C.S. Lewis
93, The Book of Certitude (Kitab-i-Iqan), Husayn-`Ali Nuri (Baha’u’llah)
94, The Hidden Words, Husayn-`Ali Nuri (Baha’u’llah)
95, The Four Gospels and the Acts of the New Testament (of the Bible), Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.
96, The Imitation of Christ, Thomas à Kempis
97, Why I Am Not a Christian, Bertrand Russell
98, The Story of My Experiments with Truth (Gandhi’s Autobiography), Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi
99, The Autobiography of Martin Luther King, Jr., Martin Luther King Jr., & Clayborne Carson
100, The Nature and Destiny of Man: A Christian Interpretation, Reinhold Neibuhr

3 comments:

Eric Hadley-Ives said...

By the way, I've only read through (cover to cover) about half the books on my list of 100. It's as much a list of books I want to read or own and haven't finished reading as it is a list of books I like.

Anonymous said...

I am very surprised the BBC left out the Douglas Adams books

Eric Hadley-Ives said...

I think the original BBC list was a list of the most popular books, and I think Hitch Hiker's Guide To The Galaxy was indeed on it.
The interesting thing about the Douglas Adams comedy science fiction books is that they originally started as a radio drama script. That's right, the books are based on the radio programs (which Adams also wrote).