I initially snagged this list and instructions from a friend’s LJ and added to it. It was kind of a fun exercise. *Originally posted 02-Oct-2008. Updated 30-Jan-2010*
Bold what you have read, italicize what you started but couldn’t finish, and strike through what you couldn’t stand. Add an asterisk to those you’ve read more than once. (I didn’t include books I had only reread as a child, i.e., before I went to college, since I often reread favorite books multiple times as a kid.) Underline those you own but haven’t read yet. Put an exclamation point in front of those you haven’t read but that you either want to or think you should. (I added this.)
Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
Anna Karenina
Crime and Punishment
Catch-22
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Wuthering Heights
The Silmarillion
Life of Pi: A Novel
The Name of the Rose
Don Quixote
!Moby Dick
Ulysses
Madame Bovary
The Odyssey*
Pride and Prejudice
Jane Eyre
A Tale of Two Cities*
The Brothers Karamazov
Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies
War and Peace
Vanity Fair
!The Time Traveler’s Wife
The Iliad
Emma
!The Blind Assassin
!The Kite Runner
Mrs. Dalloway
Great Expectations*
American Gods
Atlas Shrugged
Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books
Memoirs of a Geisha
Middlesex
Quicksilver
Wicked: the Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West
The Canterbury Tales*
The Historian: A Novel
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Love in the Time of Cholera
Brave New World
The Fountainhead
Foucault’s Pendulum
Middlemarch
Frankenstein
The Count of Monte Cristo*
Dracula
A Clockwork Orange
Anansi Boys
The Once and Future King*
The Grapes of Wrath*
The Poisonwood Bible: A Novel
1984
Angels & Demons
The Inferno
The Satanic Verses
Sense and Sensibility
The Picture of Dorian Gray*
Mansfield Park
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
To the Lighthouse
Tess of the D’Urbervilles*
Oliver Twist
Gulliver’s Travels
Les Misérables
The Corrections
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time
Dune
The Prince
!The Sound and the Fury
Angela’s Ashes: A Memoir
The God of Small Things
A People’s History of the United States: 1492-present
!Cryptonomicon
Neverwhere
!A Confederacy of Dunces
A Short History of Nearly Everything
Dubliners
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
!Beloved
Slaughterhouse-five
The Scarlet Letter
Eats, Shoots & Leaves
The Mists of Avalon
Oryx and Crake: A Novel
Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed
Cloud Atlas
The Confusion
Lolita
Persuasion
Northanger Abbey
The Catcher in the Rye
On the Road
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Freakonomics: a Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: an Inquiry into Values
The Aeneid*
Watership Down
Gravity’s Rainbow
The Hobbit*
White Teeth
Treasure Island*
David Copperfield*
The Three Musketeers
The Gay Science*
Three Men in a Boat, to Say Nothing of the Dog*
Barchester Towers
Orley Farm
Pnin*
The Bonfire of the Vanities
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
The Life and Adventures of Martin Chuzzlewit
Dandelion Wine
The Republic (Plato’s)*
Tao Te Ching*
Death in Venice*
Robinson Crusoe
The Sorrows of Young Werther*
The Stranger*
Labyrinths*
I, Robot
The Left Hand of Darkness
Ivanhoe
Mill on the Floss
Cat’s Eye
The Persian Expedition*
As I Lay Dying
Lady Chatterley’s Lover*
The Good Soldier*
Briefing for a Descent into Hell
!The Sea, the Sea
The Judge and his Hangman (Der Richter und sein Henker)*
Empire of the Sun
Grendel
A Slight Trick of the Mind*
!The Cosmology of Bing
!Neuromancer
The Remains of the Day
!When We Were Orphans
!The Joy Luck Club
For Whom the Bell Tolls
The Old Man and the Sea
I, Claudius
The Trial*
Tristram Shandy
!The Optimist’s Daughter
The Caine Mutiny
Burger’s Daughter
The Wind in the Willows*
Winnie-the-Pooh*
No Country for Young Men
!Time’s Arrow
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland*
Little Women
The Prisoner of Zenda*
Macbeth*
King Lear*
!Pygmalion
!Of Human Bondage
Brighton Rock
Candide
!Dead Souls
!Flatland
Jude the Obscure*
Of Time and the River
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If you’d prefer to start with a novel of his, Memory and Dream is quite good. Because he sets many of his stories in Newford and populates them with many recurring characters, there is an argument for reading them in order of publication, but as they are not serial novels, it isn’t necessary to do that, and I think that Memory and Dream is a great one to begin with.
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