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tknowlton's "200 Books to Read in a Lifetime"

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loosely based off several "best of" lists, and colored by my own experience and opinions

  1. 1.
    Things Fall Apart
    by Chinua Achebe
  2. 2.
    All the King's Men
    by Robert Penn Warren
  3. 3.
    American Pastoral
    by Philip Roth
  4. 4.
    An American Tragedy (Signet Classics)
    by Theodore Dreiser
  5. 5.
    Animal Farm: Centennial Edition
    by George Orwell
  6. 6.
    Appointment in Samarra: A Novel
    by John O'Hara
  7. 7.
    Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret
    by JUDY BLUME
  8. 8.
    The Assistant: A Novel
    by Bernard Malamud
  9. 9.
    At Swim-Two-Birds (Irish Literature Series)
    by Flann O'Brien
  10. 10.
    Atonement: A Novel
    by Ian McEwan
  11. 11.
    The Berlin Stories
    by Christopher Isherwood
  12. 12.
    The Big Sleep
    by Raymond Chandler
  13. 13.
    The Blind Assassin: A Novel
    by Margaret Atwood
  14. 14.
    Blood Meridian: Or the Evening Redness in the West
    by Cormac McCarthy
  15. 15.
    The Bridge of San Luis Rey (Perennial Classics)
    by Thornton Wilder
  16. 16.
    Call It Sleep: A Novel
    by Henry Roth
  17. 17.
    Catch-22
    by Joseph Heller
  18. 18.
    The Catcher in the Rye
    by J. D. Salinger
  19. 19.
    A Clockwork Orange
    by Anthony Burgess
  20. 20.
    Farewell To Arms
    by Ernest Hemingway
  21. 21.
    The Jungle Book (Sterling Classics)
    by Rudyard Kipling
  22. 22.
    The Confessions of Nat Turner
    by William Styron
  23. 23.
    The Corrections: A Novel
    by Jonathan Franzen
  24. 24.
    ?
    The Crying of Lot 49
    by Thomas Pynchon
  25. 25.
    A Dance to the Music of Time: First Movement
    by Anthony Powell
  26. 26.
    Day of the Locust
    by Nathanael West
  27. 27.
    Death Comes for the Archbishop (Virago Modern Classics)
    by Willa Cather
  28. 28.
    A Death in the Family (Penguin Classics)
    by James Agee
  29. 29.
    The Death of the Heart
    by Elizabeth Bowen
  30. 30.
    Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde (Signet Classics)
    by Robert Louis Stevenson
  31. 31.
    Deliverance
    by James Dickey
  32. 32.
    Dog Soldiers
    by Robert Stone
  33. 33.
    Falconer
    by John Cheever
  34. 34.
    The French Lieutenant's Woman
    by John Fowles
  35. 35.
    The Golden Notebook: A Novel (P.S.)
    by Doris Lessing
  36. 36.
    Go Tell It on the Mountain
    by James Baldwin
  37. 37.
    Gone with the Wind
    by Margaret Mitchell
  38. 38.
    The Grapes of Wrath
    by John Steinbeck
  39. 39.
    The Great Gatsby
    by F. Scott Fitzgerald
  40. 40.
    Gulliver's Travels (Penguin Classics)
    by Jonathan Swift
  41. 41.
    A Handful of Dust (Everyman's Library)
    by Evelyn Waugh
  42. 42.
    The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter (Modern Library)
    by Carson McCullers
  43. 43.
    The Heart of the Matter: (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition)
    by Graham Greene
  44. 44.
    Housekeeping: A Novel
    by Marilynne Robinson
  45. 45.
    A House for Mr. Biswas
    by V.S. Naipaul
  47. 47.
    Infinite Jest: A Novel
    by David Foster Wallace
  48. 48.
    Invisible Man
    by Ralph Ellison
  49. 49.
    Light in August (The Corrected Text)
    by William Faulkner
  51. 51.
    The Lord of the Rings: 50th Anniversary, One Vol. Edition
    by J.R.R. Tolkien
  52. 52.
    Loving (A novel by Henry Green)
    by Henry Green
  53. 53.
    Lucky Jim (Penguin Classics)
    by Kingsley Amis
  54. 54.
    The Man Who Loved Children: A Novel
    by Christina Stead
  55. 56.
    Money
    by Martin Amis
  56. 57.
    The Moviegoer
    by Walker Percy
  57. 58.
    Mrs. Dalloway
    by Virginia Woolf
  58. 59.
    Naked Lunch
    by William S. Burroughs
  59. 60.
    Native Son (Bloom's Modern Critical Interpretations)
    by Richard Wright
  60. 61.
    Neuromancer
    by William Gibson
  61. 62.
    Never Let Me Go
    by Kazuo Ishiguro
  62. 63.
    1984 (Signet Classics)
    by George Orwell
  63. 64.
    On the Road (Penguin Classics)
    by Jack Kerouac
  64. 65.
    One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (Penguin Classics)
    by Ken Kesey
  65. 66.
    The Painted Bird
    by Jerzy Kosinski
  66. 67.
    Pale Fire (Everyman's Library Classics & Contemporary Classics)
    by Vladimir Nabokov
  67. 68.
    A Passage to India (Penguin Classics)
    by E. M. Forster
  68. 69.
    Play It As It Lays: A Novel
    by Joan Didion
  69. 70.
    Possession: A Romance (Modern Library)
    by A.S. Byatt
  70. 71.
    The Power and the Glory (Penguin Classics)
    by Graham Greene
  71. 72.
    Pride and Prejudice (Penguin Classics)
    by Jane Austen
  72. 73.
    The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie: A Novel (P.S.)
    by Muriel Spark
  73. 74.
    The Recognitions (Penguin Classics)
    by William Gaddis
  74. 75.
    Red Harvest
    by Dashiell Hammett
  76. 77.
    The Scarlet Letter (Oxford World's Classics)
    by Nathaniel Hawthorne
  77. 78.
    The Sheltering Sky (P.S.)
    by Paul Bowles
  78. 79.
    Slaughterhouse-Five: A Novel
    by Kurt Vonnegut
  79. 80.
    Snow Crash.
    by Neal Stephenson
  80. 81.
    The Sound and the Fury: The Corrected Text
    by William Faulkner
  81. 82.
    The Sportswriter: Bascombe Trilogy (1)
    by Richard Ford
  82. 83.
    The Spy Who Came in From the Cold
    by John le Carre
  83. 84.
    The Sun Also Rises
    by Ernest Hemingway
  84. 85.
    Their Eyes Were Watching God
    by Zora Neale Hurston
  85. 86.
  86. 87.
    To The Lighthouse
    by Virginia Woolf
  87. 88.
    Ubik
    by Philip K. Dick
  88. 89.
    Under the Net
    by Iris Murdoch
  89. 90.
    Watchmen
    by Alan Moore
  90. 91.
    White Noise: (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition)
    by Don DeLillo
  91. 92.
    White Teeth: A Novel
    by Zadie Smith
  92. 93.
    Wide Sargasso Sea (Essential Penguin)
    by Jean Rhys
  93. 94.
  94. 95.
  95. 96.
    Moby Dick (Oxford World's Classics)
    by Herman Melville
  96. 97.
    The Red Badge of Courage (Enriched Classics (Pocket))
    by Stephen Crane
  97. 98.
    The Odyssey of Homer
    by Homer
  98. 99.
  99. 100.
    Paradise Lost (Penguin Classics)
    by John Milton
  100. 101.
    The Arabian Nights

  101. 102.
    Great Expectations (Penguin Classics)
    by Charles Dickens
  102. 103.
    Candide: Or Optimism (Penguin Classics)
    by Francois Voltaire
  103. 104.
    Oedipus Rex - Literary Touchstone Edition
    by Sophocles
  104. 105.
    The Hunchback of Notre-Dame (Signet Classics)
    by Victor Hugo
  105. 106.
    The Last of the Mohicans (Signet Classics)
    by James Fenimore Cooper
  106. 107.
    The Sea-Wolf (Oxford World's Classics)
    by Jack London
  107. 108.
    Cyrano De Bergerac
    by Edmond Rostand
  108. 109.
    Robert Browning's Poetry (Norton Critical Editions)
    by Robert Browning
  109. 110.
    Emerson's Essays
    by Ralph Waldo Emerson
  110. 111.
    The Portrait of a Lady (Penguin Classics)
    by Henry James
  111. 112.
    Uncle Tom's Cabin (Barnes & Noble Classics Series)
    by Harriet Beecher Stowe
  112. 113.
    Treasure Island (Signet Classics)
    by Robert Louis Stevenson
  113. 114.
    Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (Wordsworth Collection)
    by Arthur Conan, Sir Doyle
  114. 115.
    The Origin Of Species: 150th Anniversary Edition
    by Charles Darwin
  115. 116.
    Don Quixote (Penguin Classics)
    by Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
  116. 117.
    The Legend of Sleepy Hollow
    by Washington, Irving
  117. 118.
    She Stoops to Conquer Goldsmith
    by Katherine C. Balderston
  118. 119.
    Of Mice and Men (Steinbeck Centennial Edition)
    by John Steinbeck
  119. 120.
    The Brothers Karamazov
    by Fyodor Dostoevsky
  120. 121.
    The Iliad of Homer
    by Homer
  121. 122.
    Lady Chatterly's Lover
    by D.H.Lawrence
  122. 123.
    Brave New World
    by Aldous Huxley
  123. 124.
  124. 125.
    The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin (Dover Thrift Editions)
    by Benjamin Franklin
  125. 126.
    Poetics (Penguin Classics)
    by Aristotle
  126. 127.
    Politics by Aristotle (Written 350 B.C.E)
    by Aristotle
  127. 128.
    Virgil's Aeneid (Penguin Classics)
    by Virgil
  128. 129.
    Madame Bovary (Penguin Classics)
    by Gustave Flaubert
  129. 130.
    The Prince
    by Niccolo Machiavelli
  130. 131.
    Jane Eyre (Vintage Classics)
    by Charlotte Bronte
  131. 132.
    Hamlet (Cambridge School Shakespeare)
    by William Shakespeare
  132. 133.
    Pygmalion (Enriched Classics Series)
    by George Bernard Shaw
  133. 134.
    Candida
    by George Bernard Shaw
  134. 135.
  135. 136.
    Romeo and Juliet (Dover Thrift Editions)
    by William Shakespeare
  136. 137.
    Chekhov: The Essential Plays (Modern Library Classics)
    by Anton Chekhov
  137. 138.
    The Divine Comedy (Oxford World's Classics)
    by Dante Alighieri
  138. 139.
    The Analects of Confucius

  139. 140.
    A Midsummer Night's Dream
    by William Shakespeare
  140. 141.
    The Collected Poems of W.B. Yeats
    by William Butler Yeats
  141. 142.
    The Picture of Dorian Gray (Oxford World's Classics)
    by Oscar Wilde
  142. 143.
    Vanity Fair (Barnes & Noble Classics)
    by William Makepeace Thackeray
  143. 144.
    The Decameron (Penguin Classics)
    by Giovanni Boccaccio
  145. 146.
    Anna Karenina
    by Leo Tolstoy
  146. 147.
    The Necklace and Other Tales (Modern Library Classics)
    by Guy De Maupassant
  147. 148.
    The Time Machine (Penguin Classics)
    by H.G. Wells
  148. 149.
    Fathers and Sons (Penguin Classics)
    by Ivan Turgenev
  149. 150.
    Heart of Darkness and The Secret Sharer (Signet Classics)
    by Joseph Conrad
  150. 151.
    War and Peace (Penguin Classics)
    by Leo Tolstoy
  152. 153.
    Little Women (Signet Classics)
    by Louisa May Alcott
  153. 154.
    Talisman
    by Sir Walter Scott
  154. 155.
    Dracula
    by Bram Stoker
  155. 156.
  156. 157.
    The Red and the Black (Penguin Classics)
    by Stendhal
  157. 158.
  158. 159.
    The Republic (Penguin Classics)
    by Plato
  159. 160.
    Goethe's Faust
    by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
  160. 161.
    Tom Jones (Oxford World's Classics)
    by Henry Fielding
  161. 162.
    The Federalist Papers (Penguin Classics)
    by Alexander Hamilton
  162. 163.
    The Rights of Man
    by Thomas Paine
  163. 164.
    Leaves of Grass: The Original 1855 Edition
    by Walt Whitman
  164. 165.
    Billy Budd, Sailor (Enriched Classics (Simon & Schuster))
    by Herman Melville
  165. 166.
    The Confessions of St. Augustine (Dover Thrift Editions)
    by St. Augustine
  166. 167.
    Tales of Mystery & Imagination (Everyman Paperback Classics)
    by Edgar Allan Poe
  167. 168.
    Ivanhoe (Penguin Classics)
    by Walter Scott
  168. 169.
    The Way of All Flesh (Giant Thrifts)
    by Samuel Butler
  169. 170.
    Sound and the Fury (Vintage Classics)
    by William Faulkner
  170. 171.
    Crime and Punishment (Signet Classics)
    by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
  171. 172.
    Grimm's Fairy Tales (Barnes & Noble Classics)
    by Jacob Grimm
  172. 173.
    The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (Puffin Classics)
    by Mark Twain
  173. 174.
    Frankenstein (Penguin Classics)
    by Mary Shelley
  174. 175.
    David Copperfield (Penguin Classics)
    by Charles Dickens
  175. 176.
    The Divine Comedy: Volume 1: Inferno (Penguin Classics)
    by Dante Alighieri
This is tknowlton's list. Only tknowlton can edit it. You can make your own version of this list.
Created by tknowlton on Nov 18, 2009.
 

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