30 Before 30: #22 The Greatest Books List

(Background on my 30 Before 30 list can be found here.)

When you hear about the top 100 books, generally the list being referenced is The Modern Library compendium.  What made me decide against choosing this list is the fact that it was created by a group of ten men.  That's it.  These ten guys got together and decided on the top 100 books according to... them.  Admittedly, they've probably got a better grasp on what makes literature than I do, but still, it was off-putting.  So, I searched around the net for top 100 books lists, and that's how I found the Greatest Books list.

"This list is generated from 43 "best of" book lists from a variety of great sources. An algorithm is used to create a master list based on how many lists a particular book appears on. Some lists count more than others. I generally trust "best of all time" lists voted by authors and experts over user-generated lists. On the lists that are actually ranked, the book that is 1st counts a lot more than the book that's 100th."
~The Greatest Books

The list of books is below, but for those of you who don't feel like scanning through a hundred books, here are some of my thoughts:

• I've already read 30 of the books on the list, giving me 70 more to read by December 20, 2012.
• Dear God, that's a whole lot of Russians...  The only Russian novel I've ever managed to complete was Dr. Zhivago, and as much as I love the movie, that book was a definite slog to the finish line.
• I'm most excited about reading The Catcher in the Rye and Virginia Woolf's books.
• I've started Ulysses twice and never made it more than about 20 pages in--am quite nervous.
• Some of these books, I've never even heard of... Clarissa?  Does she explain it all?  Under the Volcano??  Well, you might want to move.
• If I made a top 100 list, Anne of Green Gables, Little Women, and Little House on the Prairie would absolutely be included.  And I think that's a pretty unbiased opinion.
• Wuthering Heights should be above Jane Eyre.  Just saying!

(Books that I read prior to the start of the challenge are highlighted in red.  Books that are completed as part of the challenge will be highlighted in green and will be tracked in a list found in the sidebar to the left.)

1) Don Quixote, Miguel de Cervantes

2) Ulysses, James Joyce

3) Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov

4) The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain

5) The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald

6) 1984, George Orwell

7) War and Peace, Leo Tolstoy

8) In Search of Lost Time, Marcel Proust

9) Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy

10) Madame Bovary, Gustave Flaubert

11) The Brothers Karamazov, Fyodor Dostoyevsky

12) Middlemarch, George Eliot

13) One Hundred Years of Solitude, Gabriel Garcia Marquez

14) The Sound and the Fury, William Faulkner

15) Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison

16) The Catcher in the Rye, J.D. Salinger

17) To the Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf

18) On the Road, Jack Kerouac

19) Gulliver's Travels, Jonathan Swift

20) The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck

21) Moby Dick, Herman Melville

22) Beloved, Toni Morrison

23) The Portrait of a Lady, Henry James

24) The Iliad, Homer

25) Absalom, Absolom!, William Faulkner

26) A Passage to India, E.M. Forster

27) Native Son, Richard Wright

28) Mrs. Dalloway, Virginia Woolf

29) The Odyssey, Homer

30) Catch-22, Joseph Heller

31) A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, James Joyce

32) Pride & Prejudice, Jane Austen

33) The Trial, Franz Kafka

34) As I Lay Dying, William Faulkner

35) Brave New World, Aldous Huxley

36) Emma, Jane Austen

37) Nostromo, Joseph Conrad

38) Things Fall Apart, Chinua Achebe

39) To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee

40) Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad

41) The Lord of the Rings, J.R.R. Tolkien

42) Jane Eyre, Charlotte Bronte

43) The Divine Comedy, Dante Alighieri

44) Wuthering Heights, Emily Bronte

45) Lord of the Flies, William Golding

46) All the King's Men, Robert Penn Warren

47) Gone With the Wind, Margaret Mitchell

48) The Age of Innocence, Edith Wharton

49) The Aeneid, Virgil

50) Tom Jones, Henry Fielding

51) The Tin Drum, Gunter Grass

52) Vanity Fair, William Makepeace Thackeray

53) The Call of the Wild, Jack London

54) The Good Soldier, Ford Madox Ford

55) Malone Dies, Samuel Beckett

56) Animal Farm, George Orwell

57) Frankenstein, Mary Shelley

58) Oedipus the King, Sophocles

59) Gargantua and Pantagruel, Francois Rabelais

60) U.S.A Trilogy, John Dos Passos

61) The Tale of Genji, Murasaki Shikibu

62) Tristram Shandy, Laurence Sterne

63) An American Tragedy, Theodore Dreiser

64) Their Eyes Were Watching God, Zora Neale Hurston

65) The Canterbury Tales, Geoffrey Chaucer

66) Clarissa, Samuel Richardson

67) Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, Louis Carroll

68) The Sun Also Rises, Ernest Hemingway

69) The Woman in White, Wilkie Collins

70) Robinson Crusoe, Daniel Defoe

71) Slaughterhouse-Five, Kurt Vonnegut

72) Sons and Lovers, D.H. Lawrence

73) Finnegans Wake, James Joyce

74) Crime and Punishment, Fyodor Dostoyevsky

75) Brideshead Revisited, Evelyn Waugh

76) The Wind in the Willows, Kenneth Grahame

77) Women in Love, D.H. Lawrence

78) The Magic Mountain, Thomas Mann

79) Charlotte's Web, E.B. White

80) Under the Volcano, Malcolm Lowry

81) Pilgrim's Progress, John Bunyan

82) The Scarlet Letter, Nathaniel Hawthorne

83) Hamlet, William Shakespeare

84) A Farewell to Arms, Ernest Hemingway

85) The Golden Notebook, Doris Lessing

86) Light in August, William Faulkner

87) Rabbit, Run, John Updike

88) The Stranger, Albert Camus

89) Herzog, Saul Bellow

90) Go Tell it on the Mountain, James Baldwin

91) The Awakening, Kate Chopin

92) A Clockwork Orange, Anthony Burgess

93) Song of Solomon, Toni Morrison

94) Faust, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

95) King Lear, William Shakespeare

96) Dangerous Liaison, Pierre Choderlos de Laclos

97) Journey to the End of the Night, Louis-Ferdinand Celine

98) The Count of Monte Cristo, Alexandre Dumas

99) Great Expectations, Charles Dickens

100) Midnight's Children, Salman Rushdie

Comments

[Kristin]

You should also be crazy excited about Beloved, Frankenstein, and All the King's Men. Toni Morrison is a vivid writer, Frankenstein will leave you with crazy thoughts about the essence of humanity, and All the King's Men will hit close to 8th grade social studies since it's a fictionalization of HP Long.

Also, I agree with you... So many Russians...

[Emily]

What a great collection of novels! And you are inspiring to expand my current reading interests... I would love to re-read Cather & the Rye, and Ulysess was a very tough one to get through..good luck with that list! You've got a lot accomplished thus far!

[ColbyC.]

I have only read 29. And would say as tough as the Russians are Faulkner is my least favorite author on the list. I will definitely be adding many of these to my reading list. Good Luck

[Fraulein N]

I'm ashamed to count how many (or few) of these I've read. I'm excited to see your progress!

[Heidi Renée]

I intend to start reading more when Jason deploys later this year. Probably not esteemed literature like this, but maybe a few. Because I'm weird, I took a (translated) Russian literature class in college, so I'm pretty caught up on those guys. I actually really liked War and Peace and read it again on my own time after college.

[Kate P]

Never mind the Russians--why so much Faulkner??? The man does not punctuate; it makes me go cross-eyed.

I'm in the area of about 30, myself--which makes me feel weird because I have an English Lit degree--but I know I've read OTHER titles by the same authors. (And honestly I tend to read only what I'm interested in, unless required by a class.)

I recommend audio for some of these, if you like that sort of thing. I've been doing that with some YA titles and I alternate between listening in the car and listening at home. Happy reading!

[Julie]

Man, I gave Anna Karenina a really good solid try. Could. Not. Do. It. I really wanted to like it, too! Same thing with Love in the Time of Cholera. I got about 70% through it, hating it all the way, and finally let myself quit, after beating myself up over it, since I thought I should really like it too.

On the other hand - there are a ton of books on this list I haven't read - most of them, actually. Thanks for posting this! I will definitely add some of these to my reading list.

[Old Warrior]

What kind of stupid "Best 100" list wouldn't have East of Eden, Shogun, I Robot, Martian Chronicles, Atlas Shrugged, Dune, and Tales of the South Pacific in it.

My take on Russian books is that they are the literary equivalent of quicksand. You have to really love detail (ridiculous amounts of detail) and trying to keep track of a lot of characters with unpronounceable names. Here follows my list of my all time favorite Russian books:

1.

If you look up "Philistine" in the dictionary, you will probably see my picture.

[Elise Gautreau]

this is great, reading it makes me want to pick up a few (need to make a run to the library on my lunch break this week!)

I CANNOT believe your sister has let you live all these years without having read the Lord of the Rings.

[Jessica]

Wow it's sad how few of these books I've actually read. Yikes. I loved To Kill a Mockingbird and Pride and Prejudice. Those should be much higher.

[shani]

LOTR, Crime and Punishment, Slaughterhouse Five, A Farewell to Arms, these are books to get excited about! (Also, I agree with Elise on the LOTR thing-quite shocked)

I wish you loads of luck with Conrad. Heart of Darkness is in the top five of my most hated, loathed, and deplored books of all time.

[Jenna Hatty]

Angela-I discovered this list from your blog and took it upon myself to read the top 100 as well! My sister and I decided to do it together, and to start from #100. I also forced myself to purchase at least three from the list so I cant give up on it so easily. hahaha

And I love your blog! So very entertaining!