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Emily's "My Quest to be Well-Read"

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A mix from several different lists, including Harold Bloom’s Western Canon, Harvard Book Store’s 100 Favorite Titles, Books that Changed the World, 100 Most Meaningful Books of All Time, 100 Books for the Modern Person, and The Well-Stocked Bookcase. And, because it’s hard to find a list of great books released within the last five or ten years, I threw in a few books that everyone I know has read and can’t stop talking about.

I think there’s a pretty good balance of American, British, and world literature, as well as a pretty even balance of women and men. I did my best to cover a wide range of time as well.

It goes without saying that this list is a work in progress, and will probably be frequently added to.

All the lists I took titles from can be found here:

http://www.interleaves.org/~rteeter/greatbks.html

  1. 1.
    Things Fall Apart
    by Chinua Achebe

  2. 2.
    The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
    by Douglas Adams

  3. 3.
    Little Women (Signet Classics)
    by Louisa May Alcott

  4. 4.
    Winesburg, Ohio (Worlds Classics)
    by Sherwood Anderson

  5. 6.
    Aristotle's on the Soul
    by Aristotle

  6. 7.
    The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born (African Writers Series)
    by Ayi Kwei Armah

  7. 8.
    Surfacing
    by Margaret Atwood

  8. 9.
    Collected Poems: Auden
    by W. H. Auden

  9. 10.
    Pride and Prejudice (Modern Library Classics)
    by Jane Austen

  10. 11.
    Herzog (Penguin Classics)
    by Saul Bellow

  11. 12.
    Seize the Day (Penguin Twentieth-Century Classics)
    by Saul Bellow

  12. 13.
    The Holy Bible
    by Various Authors

  13. 14.
    The Complete Poems, 1927-1979
    by Elizabeth Bishop

  14. 16.
    Labyrinths: Selected Stories and Other Writings
    by Jorge Luis Borges

  15. 17.
    The Tortilla Curtain
    by T. Coraghessan Boyle

  16. 18.
    Fahrenheit 451: A Novel
    by Ray Bradbury

  17. 19.
    Wuthering Heights (Classic Novels Series)
    by Emily Bronte

  18. 20.
    Ham on Rye
    by Charles Bukowski

  19. 21.
    A Clockwork Orange
    by Anthony Burgess

  20. 22.
    Anatomy of Melancholy (2 vols.)
    by Robert Burton

  21. 23.
    The Way of All Flesh (Giant Thrifts)
    by Samuel Butler

  22. 24.

  23. 25.
    The Stranger
    by Albert Camus

  24. 26.
    In Cold Blood
    by Truman Capote

  25. 28.
    Silent Spring
    by Rachel Carson

  26. 29.
    Where I'm Calling From: Selected Stories
    by Raymond Carver

  27. 30.
    My Antonia
    by Willa Cather

  28. 31.
    The Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini
    by Benvenuto Cellini

  29. 32.
    ?
    The Plays of Anton Chekhov
    by Anton Pavlovich Chekhov

  30. 33.
    The Awakening
    by Kate Chopin

  31. 34.
    The Nature of the Gods (Oxford World's Classics)
    by Cicero

  32. 35.
    The House on Mango Street

  33. 36.
    ?
    Casualties: Poems 1966-68,
    by J. P Clark-Bekederemo

  34. 37.
    The Secret Agent (Oxford World's Classics)
    by Joseph Conrad

  35. 38.
    Adolphe and the Red Notebook
    by Benjamin Constant

  36. 39.
    ?
    Stories and Collected Poems
    by Stephen Crane

  37. 41.
    House of Leaves
    by Mark Z. Danielewski

  38. 42.

  39. 43.
    The Origin Of Species: 150th Anniversary Edition
    by Charles Darwin

  40. 44.
    ?
    Music of Human Flesh
    by Mahmoud Darwish

  41. 45.
    The Girl with the Golden Eyes (The Art of the Novella)
    by Honore de Balzac

  42. 46.
    The Second Sex (Everyman's Library (Cloth))
    by Simone de Beauvoir

  43. 47.
    Don Quixote (Penguin Classics)
    by Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra

  44. 48.
    The Fables Of La Fontaine
    by Jean De LA Fontaine

  45. 49.
    ?
    The unknown light: The poems of Fray Luis de León
    by Luis de León

  46. 51.
    Selected Stories of Guy de Maupassant
    by Guy de Maupassant

  47. 52.
    Confessions of an English Opium Eater (Penguin Classics)
    by Thomas De Quincey

  48. 53.
    Democracy in America
    by Alexis de Tocqueville

  49. 54.
    Fuente Ovejuna/Lost in a Mirror (Absolute Classics)
    by Lope de Vega

  50. 55.
    Descartes's Rules for the Direction of the Mind (Key Texts)
    by Harold Joachim

  51. 56.
    Great Expectations (Penguin Classics)
    by Charles Dickens

  52. 57.
    The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson
    by Emily Dickinson

  53. 58.
    The Idiot (Modern Library Classics)
    by Fyodor Dostoevsky

  54. 60.
    Selected Poems
    by Rita Dove

  55. 61.
    A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
    by Dave Eggers

  56. 62.
    You Shall Know Our Velocity
    by Dave Eggers

  57. 63.

  58. 64.
    Emerson's Essays
    by Ralph Waldo Emerson

  59. 65.
    ?
    Poems for people who don't read poems;
    by Hans Magnus Enzensberger

  60. 66.
    In Praise of Folly
    by Erasmus

  61. 68.
    Middlesex: A Novel
    by Jeffrey Eugenides

  62. 69.
    The Sound and the Fury: The Corrected Text
    by William Faulkner

  63. 70.
    ?

  64. 71.
    Tom Jones (Modern Library Classics)
    by Henry Fielding

  65. 72.
    The Great Gatsby
    by F. Scott Fitzgerald

  66. 73.
    Madame Bovary (Penguin Classics)
    by Gustave Flaubert

  67. 74.
    Everything Is Illuminated
    by Jonathan Safran Foer

  68. 75.
    The Good Soldier
    by Ford Madox Ford

  69. 76.
    Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl
    by Anne Frank

  70. 77.
    The Interpretation Of Dreams
    by Sigmund Freud

  71. 78.
    The Feminine Mystique
    by Betty Friedan

  72. 79.
    The Affluent Society
    by John Kenneth Galbraith

  73. 80.
    Non-Violent Resistance (Satyagraha)
    by M. K. Gandhi

  74. 81.
    The Beggar's Opera (Dover Thrift Editions)
    by John Gay

  75. 82.
    Lord of the Flies
    by William Golding

  76. 84.
    The Complete Grimm's Fairy Tales
    by Brothers Grimm

  77. 85.
    H. D.: Collected Poems, 1912-1944 (New Directions Paperbook)
    by Hilda Doolittle

  78. 86.
    The Complete Poems and Plays: 1909-1950
    by T. S. Eliot

  79. 87.
    The Federalist Papers (Signet Classics)
    by Alexander Hamilton

  80. 88.
    The Mayor of Casterbridge (Modern Library Classics)
    by Thomas Hardy

  81. 89.
    Second Skin
    by John Hawkes

  82. 90.
    The Scarlet Letter (Penguin Classics)
    by Nathaniel Hawthorne

  83. 91.
    Catch-22
    by Joseph Heller

  84. 92.
    Garden of Eden
    by Ernest Hemingway

  85. 93.
    The Jewish State
    by Theodor Herzl

  86. 94.
    Siddhartha
    by Hermann Hesse

  87. 96.
    Magna Carta
    by J. C. Holt

  88. 97.
    The Odyssey
    by Robert Fagles

  89. 98.
    ?
    Complete Poems A.E. Housman
    by A.E. Housman

  90. 99.
    Treatise of Human Nature
    by David Hume

  91. 100.
    Their Eyes Were Watching God
    by Zora Neale Hurston

  92. 101.
    ?
    An Egyptian Childhood (Modern Arabic Writing)
    by Taha Hussein

  93. 102.
    Brave New World
    by Aldous Huxley

  94. 103.
    The Portrait of a Lady (Penguin Classics)
    by Henry James

  95. 104.
    In Parenthesis (New York Review Books)
    by David Jones

  96. 105.

  97. 106.
    The Trial
    by Franz Kafka

  98. 108.
    Schindler's List
    by Thomas Keneally

  99. 109.
    On the Road (Penguin Great Books of the 20th Century)
    by Jack Kerouac

  100. 112.
    Complete Verse
    by Rudyard Kipling

  101. 113.
    Season on Earth (Poets, Penguin)
    by Kenneth Koch

  102. 114.
    The Koran (Penguin Classics)
    by Anonymous

  103. 115.

  104. 117.
    Essays of Elia: The Works of Charles Lamb
    by Charles Lamb

  105. 118.
    Selected Short Stories of D.H. Lawrence (Modern Library)
    by D.H. Lawrence

  106. 119.
    To Kill a Mockingbird
    by Harper Lee

  107. 120.
    If Not Now, When? (Penguin Twentieth-Century Classics)
    by Primo Levi

  108. 121.
    Collected Poems by Vachel Lindsay
    by Vachel Lindsay

  109. 123.
    The Prince
    by Niccolo Machiavelli

  110. 124.
    The Assistant: A Novel
    by Bernard Malamud

  111. 125.
    An Imaginary Life
    by David Malouf

  112. 126.

  113. 127.
    Death in Venice: And Seven Other Stories
    by Thomas Mann

  114. 128.
    The Collected Poems of Christopher Marlowe
    by Christopher Marlowe

  115. 129.
    Love in the Time of Cholera
    by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

  116. 130.
    Life of Pi: Student Edition
    by Yann Martel

  117. 131.
    The Communist Manifesto (Penguin Classics)
    by Karl Marx

  118. 132.
    Of Human Bondage (Bantam Classics)
    by W. Somerset Maugham

  119. 133.
    Angela's Ashes
    by Frank McCourt

  120. 134.
    The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter (Oprah's Book Club)
    by Carson McCullers

  121. 135.
    The Egoist
    by George Meredith

  122. 136.
    Death of a Salesman
    by Arthur Miller

  123. 137.
    Selected Poems: 1931-2004
    by Czeslaw Milosz

  124. 138.
    Don Juan
    by Moliere

  125. 139.
    Complete Poems
    by Marianne Moore

  126. 140.
    Utopia (Penguin Classics)
    by Thomas More

  127. 141.
    The Good Apprentice (Classic, 20th-Century, Penguin)
    by Iris Murdoch

  128. 142.
    Lolita, 50th Anniversary Edition
    by Vladimir Nabokov

  129. 143.
    Pale Fire (Everyman's Library Classics & Contemporary Classics)
    by Vladimir Nabokov

  130. 144.
    A Bend in the River
    by V. S. Naipaul

  131. 146.
    Beyond Good and Evil
    by Friedrich Nietzsche

  132. 147.
    Delta of Venus
    by Anais Nin

  133. 148.
    The Octopus
    by Frank Norris

  134. 149.
    The Complete Stories
    by Flannery O'Connor

  135. 150.
    Them (Modern Library)
    by Joyce Carol Oates

  136. 151.
    Nineteen Eighty-Four
    by George Orwell

  137. 152.
    Animal Farm: Centennial Edition
    by George Orwell

  138. 153.
    Ovid: The Art of Love
    by Ovid

  139. 154.
    Doctor Zhivago
    by Boris Pasternak

  140. 155.
    Cry, the Beloved Country
    by Alan Paton

  141. 156.
    The Bell Jar: A Novel (Perennial Classics)
    by Sylvia Plath

  142. 157.
    The Republic (Penguin Classics)
    by Plato

  143. 158.
    Complete Stories and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe
    by Edgar Allan Poe

  144. 159.
    An Essay On Criticism
    by Alexander Pope

  145. 160.
    The Cantos of Ezra Pound (New Directions Paperbook)
    by Ezra Pound

  146. 161.
    The Crying of Lot 49
    by Thomas Pynchon

  147. 162.
    ?
    A Dress of Fire
    by Dalia Ravikovitch

  148. 163.
    Rimbaud: Complete Works, Selected Letters
    by Jean Nicholas Arthur Rimbaud

  149. 164.
    The Collected Poems of Theodore Roethke
    by Theodore Roethke

  150. 165.
    Complete Poems of Christina Rossetti
    by Christina Georgina Rossetti

  151. 166.
    ?
    Portnoy's Complaint
    by Philip Roth

  152. 167.
    Confessions (Everyman's Library (Cloth))
    by Jean-Jacques Rousseau

  153. 168.
    Midnight's Children: A Novel
    by Salman Rushdie

  154. 169.
    The Catcher in the Rye
    by J. D. Salinger

  155. 170.
    No Exit and Three Other Plays
    by Jean-Paul Sartre

  156. 171.
    ?
    Two Essays: Naive and Sentimental Poetry & On The Sublime
    by Friedrich Von Schiller

  157. 172.
    Pygmalion (Penguin Classics)
    by George Bernard Shaw

  158. 173.
    Frankenstein (Enriched Classics)
    by Mary Shelley

  159. 175.
    Antigone (Greek Tragedy in New Translations)
    by Sophocles

  160. 176.
    The Jungle: The Uncensored Original Edition
    by Upton Sinclair

  161. 177.
    Spenser: Faerie Queene
    by A. Hamilton

  162. 178.
    Tender Buttons (Dodo Press)
    by Gertrude Stein

  163. 179.
    The Grapes of Wrath (Centennial Edition)
    by John Steinbeck

  164. 180.
    Love (Penguin Classics)
    by Stendhal

  165. 182.
    Bram Stoker's Dracula
    by Bram Stoker

  166. 183.
    Perfume: The Story of a Murderer
    by Patrick Suskind

  167. 184.

  168. 185.
    The Joy Luck Club
    by Amy Tan

  169. 186.
    Vanity Fair (Penguin Classics)
    by William Makepeace Thackeray

  170. 187.
    The Poems of Dylan Thomas, New Revised Edition [with CD]
    by Dylan Thomas

  171. 188.
    Civil Disobedience (Dodo Press)
    by Henry David Thoreau

  172. 189.
    Anna Karenina (Oprah's Book Club)
    by Leo Tolstoy

  173. 190.
    The Torah

  174. 191.
    Civilization on Trial
    by Arnold J Toynbee

  175. 192.
    Fathers and Sons
    by Ivan Turgenev

  176. 193.
    The Palm-Wine Drinkard and My Life in the Bush of Ghosts
    by Amos Tutuola

  177. 195.
    The Witches of Eastwick
    by John Updike

  178. 196.
    Candide (Modern Library)
    by Voltaire

  179. 197.
    Cat's Cradle: A Novel
    by Kurt Vonnegut

  180. 198.
    Slaughterhouse-Five: A Novel
    by Kurt Vonnegut

  181. 199.
    World Enough and Time (Voices of the South)
    by Robert Penn Warren

  182. 200.
    The Invisible Man (Penguin Classics)
    by H.G. Wells

  183. 201.
    The House of Mirth (Barnes & Noble Classics)
    by Edith Wharton

  184. 202.
    Leaves of Grass (Enriched Classics)
    by Walt Whitman

  185. 203.
    The Picture of Dorian Gray (Modern Library Classics)
    by Oscar Wilde

  186. 204.
    Three Plays By Thornton Wilder

  187. 205.
    A Streetcar Named Desire.
    by Tennessee Williams

  188. 206.
    The Glass Menagerie
    by Tennessee Williams

  189. 207.
    Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit
    by Jeanette Winterson

  190. 208.
    Cassandra: A Novel and Four Essays
    by Christa Wolf

  191. 209.
    Orlando (Wordsworth Classics)
    by Virginia Woolf

  192. 210.
    The Prelude: A Parallel Text (Penguin Classics)
    by William Wordsworth

  193. 211.
    Native Son (Perennial Classics)
    by Richard A. Wright

  194. 212.
    The Collected Poems of W.B. Yeats
    by William Butler Yeats

This is Emily's list. Only Emily can edit it. You can make your own version of this list.
Created by Emily on Oct 06, 2006.
 

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