In which I reveal my obsession

[Mysterious Dude]

Those of us with Asperger's syndrome are known for rambling on about certain things that other people aren't really interested in. I like to believe that I am not guilty of this trait. In fact, perhaps I too often assume that other people do not share my interests, so I do not share mine with them. This particular interest of mine is one I've pretty much kept to myself, both in real life and in my web life. I find it a little embarrassing that I have spent as much time on this as I have. I've been working on it, on and off, for over a year now.

What I did was I searched for different lists of great books, mostly on the internet, but also in print, and found the titles that appeared on the most lists and put them in order. One of the first lists I used was the Modern Library's list (http://www.randomhouse.com/modernlibrary/100bestnovels.html). So far, I have included 83 different lists. The Great Gatsby has appeared on exactly fifty lists. 1984 and The Catcher in the Rye appeared on 48 lists each. Though 1984 appears to outrank The Catcher in the Rye, they are, in fact, tied. Tied books are ranked chronologically. I do this mainly because I think it looks nicer.

All of the included lists, naturally, have different rules for themselves. Some lists had plays and non-fiction books, and others had only novels. I included some lists that had only books written by women. Some lists were based on the supposed literary worth of the books, whereas others were more concerned with their historical importance. I chose to include all titles regardless, but my own bias is in favor of fiction, so that is the main focus of the list. Non-fiction books are identified by a different symbol that means something to me: for example, (mem) is for memoirs, confessions, diaries and. autobiographies.

Anyway, I have more to say, but I'm going to save it for the next post. Here's the list, which will include everything that appeared on five lists or more.

1. The Great Gatsby (1925)
2. The Catcher in the Rye (1951)
3. Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949)
4. Ulysses (1922)
5. Pride and Prejudice (1813)
6. One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967)
7. Jane Eyre (1847)
8. Catch-22 (1961)
9. Moby-Dick (1851)
10. Lolita (1955)

11. Wuthering Heights (1847)
12. The Grapes of Wrath (1939)
13. Don Quixote (1605)
14. Anna Karenina (1877)
15. Crime and Punishment (1866)
16. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884)
17. To Kill a Mockingbird (1960)
18. War and Peace (1869)
19. Beloved (1987)
20. Madame Bovary (1857)

21. The Trial (1925)
22. Brave New World (1932)
23. Invisible Man (1952)
24. Heart of Darkness (1902)
25. In Search of Lost Time (1913-27)
26. The Sound and the Fury (1929)
27. On the Road (1957)
28. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865)
29. Middlemarch (1872)
30. The Stranger (1942)

31. Great Expectations (1861)
32. To the Lighthouse (1927)
33. Frankenstein (1818)
34. Animal Farm (1945)
35. Slaughterhouse-Five (1969)
36. Plays (William Shakespeare)
37. Gulliver’s Travels (1726)
38. Lord of the Flies (1954)
39. The Lord of the Rings (1954-55)
40. Vanity Fair (1848)

41. The Scarlet Letter (1850)
42. Gone With the Wind (1936)
43. The Brothers Karamazov (1880)
44. Robinson Crusoe (1719)
45. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916)
46. Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937)
47. The Iliad (c. 800 BC)
48. The Odyssey (c. 800 BC)
49. The Divine Comedy (c. 1320)
50. Les Miserables (1862)

51. Little Women (1868)
52. A Farewell to Arms (1929)
53. The Bible
54. David Copperfield (1850)
55. The Sun Also Rises (1926)
56. Rebecca (1938)
57. Native Son (1940)
58. Midnight’s Children (1981)
59. The Color Purple (1982)
60. Tom Jones (1749)

61. Candide (1759)
62. Tristram Shandy (1760-67)
63. A Tale of Two Cities (1859)
64. A Passage to India (1924)
65. Of Mice and Men (1937)
66. The Handmaid’s Tale (1986)
67. Tess of the d’Urbervilles (1891)
68. Dracula (1897)
69. Brideshead Revisited (1945)
70. A Clockwork Orange (1962)

71. Stories (Edgar Allan Poe)
72. Fathers and Sons (1862)
73. The Portrait of a Lady (1881)
74. The Magic Mountain (1924)
75. Mrs. Dalloway (1925)
76. Rabbit, Run (1960)
77. One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1962)
78. The Bell Jar (1963)
79. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (1979)
80. The Canterbury Tales (c. 1390)

81. Emma (1816)
82. The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890)
83. The Age of Innocence (1920)
84. Things Fall Apart (1958)
85. The Tin Drum (1959)
86. Dialogues (Plato)
87. The Red and the Black (1830)
88. The Count of Monte Cristo (1844)
89. Sons and Lovers (1913)
90. My �ntonia (1918)

91. The Hobbit (1937)
92. The Old Man and the Sea (1952)
93. Plays (Sophocles)
94. The Aeneid (19 BC)
95. The Prince (nf) (1532)
96. Le Père Goriot (1835)
97. Walden (mem) (1854)
98. As I Lay Dying (1930)
99. Possession (1990)
100. Faust (pl) (1806)

101. Treasure Island (1883)
102. The Call of the Wild (1903)
103. Women in Love (1920)
104. Arabian Nights (c. 850 AD)
105. Paradise Lost (1667)
106. The Pilgrim’s Progress (1678)
107. On the Origin of Species (sci) (1859)
108. The Woman in White (1860)
109. Plays (Henrik Ibsen)
110. Jude the Obscure (1895)

111. The House of Mirth (1905)
112. All Quiet on the Western Front (1929)
113. For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940)
114. The Heart is a Lonely Hunter (1940)
115. The Chronicles of Narnia (1950-56)
116. Charlotte’s Web (1952)
117. Atlas Shrugged (1957)
118. The Golden Notebook (1962)
119. Dune (1965)
120. The Master and Margarita (1967)

121. Gravity’s Rainbow (1973)
122. Works (Aristotle)
123. Confessions (mem) (397 AD, Augustine)
124. Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852)
125. Kim (1901)
126. Plays (Anton Chekhov)
127. The Big Sleep (1939)
128. Stories (Flannery O’Connor)
129. Pale Fire (1962)
130. Wide Sargasso Sea (1966)

131. Love in the Time of Cholera (1985)
132. A Prayer for Owen Meany (1989)
133. Plays (Aeschylus)
134. The Tale of Genji (c. 1010)
135. The Red Badge of Courage (1895)
136. The Wind in the Willows (1908)
137. Poetry (T.S. Eliot)
138. Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1928)
139. Under the Volcano (1947)
140. Fahrenheit 451 (1952)

141. Herzog (1964)
142. The World According to Garp (1978)
143. The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1982)
144. The Remains of the Day (1989)
145. Harry Potter (1997-2007)
146. The Histories (hist) (c. 440 BC, Herodotus)
147. Plays (Euripides)
148. The Last of the Mohicans (1826)
149. Essays (Ralph Waldo Emerson)
150. The Idiot (1869)

151. The Interpretation of Dreams (sci) (1900)
152. Lord Jim (1900)
153. The Ambassadors (1903)
154. The Jungle (1906)
155. Howards End (1910)
156. Babbitt (1922)
157. Winnie-the-Pooh (1926)
158. Absalom, Absalom! (1936)
159. The Little Prince (1943)
160. Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953)

161. Naked Lunch (1959)
162. Portnoy’s Complaint (1969)
163. Watership Down (1972)
164. The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1969)
165. Lives (bio) (c. 100 AD, Plutarch)
166. Essays (nf) (1580, Michel de Montaigne)
167. The Three Musketeers (1844)
168. The Communist Manifesto (nf) (1848)
169. Leaves of Grass (po) (1855, Walt Whitman)
170. The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (1892)

171. Anne of Green Gables (1908)
172. Plays (George Bernard Shaw)
173. The Good Soldier (1915)
174. An American Tragedy (1925)
175. I, Claudius (1934)
176. Tropic of Cancer (1934)
177. Molloy; Malone Dies; The Unnamable (1950-53)
178. East of Eden (1952)
179. The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1961)
180. The Stand (1978)

181. Sophie’s Choice (1979)
182. Atonement (2001)
183. Life of Pi (2001)
184. Tao Te Ching (nf) (c. 300 BC, Lao-tzu)
185. Qur’an (610-32 AD)
186. Plays (Molière)
187. Persuasion (1818)
188. The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1831)
189. A Christmas Carol (1843)
190. Bleak House (1853)

191. Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886)
192. The Time Machine (1895)
193. The Turn of the Screw (1898)
194. The Awakening (1899)
195. The Hound of the Baskervilles (1902)
196. Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927)
197. The Maltese Falcon (1930)
198. The Power and the Glory (1940)
199. All the King’s Men (1946)
200. The Diary of a Young Girl (mem) (1947)

201. The Plague (1947)
202. The Adventures of Augie March (1953)
203. Waiting for Godot (pl) (1953)
204. Doctor Zhivago (1957)
205. In Cold Blood (nf) (1965)
206. Song of Solomon (1977)
207. A Confederacy of Dunces (1980)
208. The Name of the Rose (1980)
209. Neuromancer (1984)
210. Perfume (1985)

211. White Noise (1985)
212. A Fine Balance (1995)
213. Memoirs of a Geisha (1997)
214. The Poisonwood Bible (1998)
215. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time (2003)
216. The Peloponnesian War (hist) (c. 400 BC, Thucydides)
217. Utopia (1516, More)
218. Gargantua and Pantagruel (1534)
219. The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774)
220. Dangerous Liaisons (1782)

221. Dream of the Red Chamber (1791)
222. Dead Souls (1842)
223. The Mill on the Floss (1860)
224. The Moonstone (1868)
225. Germinal (1885)
226. A Room With a View (1908)
227. The Secret Garden (1909)
228. Ethan Frome (1911)
229. Dubliners (1916)
230. The Metamorphosis (1915)

231. Of Human Bondage (1915)
232. Poetry (William Butler Yeats)
233. Stories (Ernest Hemingway)
234. Finnegans Wake (1939)
235. The Fountainhead (1943)
236. The Naked and the Dead (1948)
237. Lucky Jim (1954)
238. If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler (1979)
239. Blood Meridian (1985)
240. His Dark Materials (1995-2000)

241. The God of Small Things (1997)
242. Plays (Aristophanes)
243. Bhagavad Gita (c. 150 BC)
244. Beowulf (c. 700 AD)
245. The Social Contract (nf) (1762, Rousseau)
246. The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (hist) (1776-89)
247. Confessions (mem) (1782, Rousseau)
248. Grimm’s Fairy Tales (1812)
249. Eugénie Grandet (1833)
250. The Pickwick Papers (1837)

251. Oliver Twist (1838)
252. Poetry (Emily Dickinson) (1856, etc.)
253. The War of the Worlds (1898)
254. The Wings of the Dove (1902)
255. U.S.A. Trilogy (1930-38)
256. The Good Earth (1931)
257. Cry, The Beloved Country (1948)
258. Wise Blood (1952)
259. The Leopard (1958)
260. Stranger in a Strange Land (1961)

261. The Autobiography of Malcolm X (mem) (1965)
262. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (nf) (1974)
263. Ironweed (1983)
264. The English Patient (1992)
265. The Secret History (1992)
266. Captain Corelli’s Mandolin (1993)
267. Angela’s Ashes (mem) (1996)
268. The Epic of Gilgamesh (c. 1150 BC)
269. Analects (nf) (500 BC, Confucius)
270. Mahabharata (c. 350 AD)

271. The Decameron (1353)
272. Plays (Christopher Marlowe)
273. Leviathan (nf) (1651, Hobbes)
274. Pensées (nf) (1669, Pascal)
275. The Wealth of Nations (nf) (1776, Smith)
276. The Federalist Papers (nf) (1787-88)
277. Poetry (John Keats)
278. Ivanhoe (1819, Scott)
279. Silas Marner (1861)
280. Stories (Anton Chekhov)

281. Nostromo (1904)
282. Tarzan of the Apes (1914)
283. Winesburg, Ohio (1919)
284. Main Street (1920)
285. The Good Soldier Švejk (1923)
286. Journey to the End of the Night (1932)
287. Light in August (1932)
288. At Swim-Two-Birds (1939)
289. The Day of the Locust (1939)
290. Ficciones (1941-56, Jorge Luis Borges)

291. The Sheltering Sky (1949)
292. The Long Goodbye (1953)
293. Alexandria Quartet (1957-60)
294. The Moviegoer (1961)
295. Labyrinths (1962)
296. Cat’s Cradle (1963)
297. One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (1963)
298. 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)
299. Stories (Alice Munro)
300. The New York Trilogy (1985-86)

301. Lonesome Dove (1986)
302. The Joy Luck Club (1989)
303. A Suitable Boy (1994)
304. The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle (1994)
305. The Da Vinci Code (2003)
306. The Time Traveler’s Wife (2003)
307. On the Nature of Things (c. 50 BC, Lucretius)
308. Meditations (nf) (c. 175 AD, Aurelius)
309. Journey to the West (c. 1595, Wu Cheng’en)
310. Poetry (John Donne)

311. Discourse on the Method (ph) (1637, Descartes)
312. Poetry (Matsuo Basho)
313. Poetry (William Blake)
314. The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin (mem) (1791)
315. The Life of Samuel Johnson (bio) (1791, Boswell)
316. Sense and Sensibility (1811)
317. The Charterhouse of Parma (1839)
318. The House of Seven Gables (1851)
319. Barchester Towers (1857)
320. Das Kapital (nf) (1867)

321. Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (1870)
322. Through the Looking-Glass (1871)
323. Death in Venice (1912)
324. Works (Albert Einstein)
325. Orlando (1928)
326. The Man Without Qualities (1930-43)
327. The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933)
328. Tender is the Night (1934)
329. A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (1943)
330. The Razor’s Edge (1944)

331. Plays (Tennessee Williams)
332. Franny and Zooey (1961)
333. Silent Spring (sci) (1962)
334. The Feminine Mystique (nf) (1963)
335. Where the Wild Things Are (1963)
336. The Magus (1965)
337. The Crying of Lot 49 (1966)
338. Fifth Business (1970)
339. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1971)
340. Interview with the Vampire (1976)

341. A Bend in the River (1979)
342. Housekeeping (1980)
343. The House of the Spirits (1982)
344. Ender’s Game (1985)
345. Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit (mem) (1985)
346. Bastard Out of Carolina (1992)
347. The Shipping News (1993)
348. American Pastoral (1997)
349. The Corrections (2001)
350. The Lovely Bones (2002)

351. The Kite Runner (2003)
352. Aesop’s Fables (c. 580 BC)
353. Ramayana (c. 300 BC, Valmiki)
354. Metamorphoses (c. 8 AD, Ovid)
355. Satyricon (c. 61 AD)
356. The Pillow Book (c. 1000, Sei Shonagon)
357. Rubaiyat (c. 1100, Khayyam)
358. Clarissa (1748)
359. The Rights of Man (nf) (1791, Paine)
360. Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1824)

361. Fairy Tales (1835-37, Hans Christian Andersen)
362. Democracy in America (nf) (1835-40, Tocqueville)
363. Civil Disobedience (nf) (1849, Thoreau)
364. Works (John Stuart Mill)
365. The Last Chronicle of Barset (1867)
366. Far From the Madding Crowd (1874)
367. The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876)
368. The Return of the Native (1878)
369. Thus Spoke Zarathustra (ph) (1883-85)
370. The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886)

371. Hunger (1890)
372. The Importance of Being Earnest (pl) (1895)
373. Cyrano De Bergerac (pl) (1897)
374. Sister Carrie (1900)
375. The Varieties of Religious Experience (nf) (1902, James)
376. The Way of All Flesh (1903)
377. The Golden Bowl (1904)
378. The Forsyte Saga (1906-21)
379. The Man Who Was Thursday (1908)
380. Zeno’s Conscience (1923)

[Mysterious Dude]

381. The Castle (1926, Kafka)
382. The Well of Loneliness (1928)
383. Look Homeward, Angel (1929)
384. A Room of One’s Own (nf) (1929, Woolf)
385. Cold Comfort Farm (1932)
386. Call It Sleep (1934)
387. The Death of the Heart (1938)
388. La Nausée (1938, Sartre)
389. Darkness at Noon (1940)
390. Stories (Eudora Welty)

391. If This Is a Man (mem) (1947, Levi)
392. The Heart of the Matter (1948)
393. The Second Sex (nf) (1949)
394. Plays (Arthur Miller)
395. Memoirs of Hadrian (1951)
396. A Dance to the Music of Time (1951-75)
397. The Quiet American (1955)
398. The Once and Future King (1958)
399. The Death of Artemio Cruz (1962, Fuentes)
400. The Spy Who Came in From the Cold (1963)

401. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (mem) (1969)
402. Invisible Cities (1972)
403. Sula (1973)
404. Ragtime (1975)
405. Humboldt’s Gift (1975, Bellow)
406. The Thorn Birds (1977)
407. Money: A Suicide Note (1984, Amis)
408. The Wasp Factory (1984)
409. The Alchemist (1988)
410. The Satanic Verses (1988)

411. The Pillars of the Earth (1989)
412. Birdsong (1993)
413. The Stone Diaries (1993)
414. Middlesex (2002)
415. Upanishads (c. 600 BC)
416. Works (Cicero)
417. The Recognition of Sakuntala (pl) (c. 440 AD, Kalidasa)
418. Summa Theologica (nf) (1273, Aquinas)
419. The Travels of Marco Polo (mem) (1298-99)
420. Water Margin (c. 1370, Shi Naian)

421. Le Morte D’Arthur (1485, Malory)
422. Essays (nf) (1597, Francis Bacon)
423. Plays (Jean Racine)
424. The Princess of Clèves (1678)
425. An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (nf) (1748, Hume)
426. The Castle of Otranto (1764, Walpole)
427. The Vicar of Wakefield (1766, Goldsmith)
428. Critique of Pure Reason (nf) (1781, Kant)
429. Lyrical Ballads (po) (1798, Wordsworth & Coleridge)
430. Poetry (Samuel Coleridge)

431. Lost Illusions (1837-39, Balzac)
432. La Cousine Bette (1846)
433. Poetry (William Wordsworth)
434. Cranford (1853, Gaskell)
435. Poetry (Charles Baudelaire)
436. Adam Bede (1859)
437. Oblomov (1859)
438. Notes From Underground (1864)
439. Our Mutual Friend (1865)
440. Sentimental Education (1869)

441. The Possessed (Demons) (1872)
442. Stories (Guy de Maupassant)
443. À rebours (Against Nature) (1884, Huysmans)
444. King Solomon’s Mines (1885)
445. The Diary of a Nobody (1892)
446. The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900)
447. Buddenbrooks (1901)
448. Kokoro (1914)
449. The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists (1914)
450. The Rainbow (1915)

451. Stories (Franz Kafka) (1915 etc.)
452. The Education of Henry Adams (nf) (1918)
453. We (1921)
454. Siddhartha (1922)
455. Billy Budd (1924)
456. The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (1926, Christie)
457. Steppenwolf (1927)
458. Civilization and Its Discontents (nf) (1930, Freud)
459. Man’s Fate (1934, Malraux)
460. Snow Country (1935-37, Kawabata)

461. Nightwood (1936, Barnes)
462. The Man Who Loved Children (1940)
463. Being and Nothingness (nf) (1943, Sartre)
464. The Makioka Sisters (1943-48)
465. Baby and Child Care (nf) (1946)
466. I Capture the Castle (1948)
467. Gormenghast (1950, Peake)
468. Howl (po) (1956)
469. Long Day’s Journey Into Night (pl) (1956)
470. A House for Mr. Biswas (1961)

471. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (1964)
472. Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-tung (nf) (1964)
473. The Godfather (1969)
474. The Left Hand of Darkness (1969, Le Guin)
475. Crash (1973)
476. The Gulag Archipelago (hist) (1973)
477. Roots (1976)
478. Burger’s Daughter (1979)
479. The Mists of Avalon (1979)
480. The Clan of the Cave Bear (1980)

481. Rabbit is Rich (1981)
482. The Lover (1984, Duras)
483. The Accidental Tourist (1985)
484. A Brief History of Time (sci) (1988)
485. Rabbit at Rest (1990)
486. Outlander (1991, Gabaldon)
487. A Thousand Acres (1991, Smiley)
488. American Psycho (1991)
489. Trainspotting (1993)
490. Blindness (1995)

491. Infinite Jest (1996)
492. The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay (2000)
493. Book of Mencius (nf) (c. 320 BC, Mencius)
494. Book of Zhuangzi (Chuang Tzu) (nf) (c. 275-65 BC)
495. Records of the Grand Historian (hist) (109-91 BC, Sima Qian)
496. The Golden Ass (c. 160 AD, Apuleius)
497. Shahnameh (c. 1000, Firdausi)
498. Njáls saga (c. 1250)
499. Romance of the Three Kingdoms (c. 1370)
500. Muqaddimah (nf) (1377, Khaldun)

501. The Praise of Folly (nf) (1511, Erasmus)
502. The Golden Lotus (1610)
503. Plays (John Webster)
504. Ethics (nf) (1677, Spinoza)
505. Two Treatises of Government (nf) (1689, Locke)
506. Moll Flanders (1722)
507. Pamela (1740, Richardson)
508. Fanny Hill (1748, John Cleland)
509. A Vindication of the Rights of Women (nf) (1792)
510. Northanger Abbey (1817)

511. Stories (Washington Irving)
512. A Hero of Our Time (1839, Lermontov)
513. La Rabouilleuse (The Black Sheep) (1842, Balzac)
514. Fear and Trembling (nf) (1843, Kierkegaard)
515. Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (mem) (1845)
516. The Warden (1855, Trollope)
517. A Journey to the Center of the Earth (1864)
518. Lorna Doone (1869, Blackmore)
519. The Death of Ivan Ilyich (1886)
520. Three Men in a Boat (1889)

521. The Golden Bough (nf) (1890-1915, Frazer)
522. The Island of Dr. Moreau (1896)
523. The Souls of Black Folk (nf) (1903)
524. Le Grand Meaulnes (1913, Alain-Fournier)
525. Poetry (Robert Frost)
526. The Thirty-Nine Steps (1915)
527. Stories (Lu Xun)
528. Six Characters in Search of an Author (pl) (1921, Pirandello)
529. The Counterfeiters (1925, Gide)
530. Mein Kampf (mem) (1925)

531. Manhattan Transfer (1925, Dos Passos)
532. My Experiments with Truth (mem) (1928, Gandhi)
533. Poetry (Federico GarcÃ*a Lorca)
534. Les Enfants Terribles (1929, Cocteau)
535. Red Harvest (1929, Hammett)
536. Swallows and Amazons (1930)
537. The Waves (1931, Woolf)
538. Radetzky March (1932, Roth)
539. Lost Horizon (1933, Hilton)
540. A Handful of Dust (1934, Waugh)

541. Independent People (1934, Laxness)
542. The Blind Owl (1937, Hedayat)
543. Out of Africa (mem) (1937, Dinesen)
544. Scoop (1938, Waugh)
545. Plays (Eugene O’Neill)
546. Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (nf) (1941, Agee)
547. Plays (Bertolt Brecht)
548. The Horse’s Mouth (1944, Cary)
549. Cannery Row (1945)
550. Loving (1945, Green)

551. Pippi Longstocking (1945, Lindgren)
552. The Day of the Triffids (1951)
553. The End of the Affair (1951)
554. From Here to Eternity (1951)
555. Speak, Memory (mem) (1951, Nabokov)
556. Bonjour Tristesse (1954, Sagan)
557. The Recognitions (1955)
558. The Talented Mr. Ripley (1955, Highsmith)
559. Seize the Day (1956, Bellow)
560. A Death in the Family (1957)

561. Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1958)
562. Night (mem) (1958, Wiesel)
563. A Severed Head (1961, Murdoch)
564. A Wrinkle in Time (1962, L’Engle)
565. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (sci) (1962, Kuhn)
566. Cancer Ward (1968)
567. Slouching Towards Bethlehem (mem) (1968, Didion)
568. Rabbit Redux (1971, Updike)
569. Angle of Repose (1972, Stegner)
570. The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum (1974, Böll)

571. Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (1974)
572. J R (1975, Gaddis)
573. The Selfish Gene (sci) (1976, Dawkins)
574. Ceremony (1977, Silko)
575. Dispatches (nf) (1977, Herr)
576. Life: A User’s Manual (1978, Perec)
577. The Sea, the Sea (1978, Murdoch)
578. Stories (John Cheever)
579. The Executioner’s Song (1979)
580. Waiting for the Barbarians (1980)

581. July’s People (1981)
582. Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant (1982)
583. Schindler’s Ark (1982)
584. Annie John (1985, Kincaid)
585. It (1986)
586. Watchmen (gr) (1986-87)
587. The Bonfire of the Vanities (1987)
588. The Bean Trees (1988)
589. Regeneration (1990, Barker)
590. Wild Swans (1991, Chang)

591. All the Pretty Horses (1992)
592. The Emigrants (1993, Sebald)
593. The Virgin Suicides (1993, Eugenides)
594. High Fidelity (1995, Hornby)
595. Underworld (1997, DeLillo)
596. Disgrace (1999, Coetzee)
597. The Blind Assassin (2000)
598. House of Leaves (2000, Danielewski)
599. White Teeth (2000)
600. The Five People You Meet in Heaven (2003)

[Mysterious Dude]

Anywho, despite my best efforts, the list is flawed. Of the lists that included plays, some listed individual plays by Shakespeare, whereas others listed "the complete works of Shakespeare." I decided to put each entry for a Shakespeare play into one entry, which is why you see an entry for "Plays (William Shakespeare)," but I kept all the individual plays under that entry in the word document I did this on, so I can make a separate list for just plays, which is kind of fun to do. I would like to find some lists that include only plays, but haven't had any luck.

1. Hamlet (1602) [16]
2. Faust (1806) [16]*
3. Oedipus Rex (428 BC) [14]
4. The Oresteia (458 BC) [12]
5. A Doll’s House (1879) [11]
6. Waiting for Godot (1953) [10]
7. Macbeth (1606) [9]
8. The Cherry Orchard (1904) [8]
9. Romeo and Juliet (1594) [7]
10. Cyrano De Bergerac (1897) [7]

11. Antigone (c. 441 BC) [6]
12. Medea (431 BC) [6]
13. The Recognition of Sakuntala (c. 440 AD, Kalidasa) [6]
14. A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1595) [6]
15. Pygmalion (1912) [6]
16. Oedipus at Colonus (c. 401 BC) [5]
17. King Lear (1605) [5]
18. The Tempest (1610) [5]
19. The Importance of Being Earnest (1895) [5]
20. Death of a Salesman (1949) [5]

21. Long Day’s Journey Into Night (1956) [5]
22. The Birds (441 BC) [4]
23. The Bacchae (403 BC) [4]
24. The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus (1604) [4]
25. Tartuffe (1664) [4]
26. Three Sisters (1900) [4]
27. Six Characters in Search of an Author (1921, Pirandello) [4]
28. Hippolytus (428 BC) [3]
29. Lysistrata (411 BC) [3]
30. The Duchess of Malfi (1623) [3]

31. The Misanthrope (1666) [3]
32. Phèdre (1677) [3]
33. Our Town (1938, Wilder) [3]
34. Hedda Gabler (1890) [3]
35. Uncle Vanya (1899) [3]
36. Saint Joan (1923) [3]
37. The Glass Menagerie (1944) [3]
38. Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955) [3]
39. The Clouds (c. 441 BC) [2]
40. Electra (c. 406 BC) [2]

41. Romance of the West Chamber (c. 1300, Wang Shifu) [2]
42. Richard III (c. 1591) [2]
43. Julius Caesar (1599) [2]
44. Othello (c. 1603) [2]
45. The White Devil (1612) [2]
46. Andromache (1667) [2]
47. The Miser (1668) [2]
48. The Way of the World (1700, Congreve) [2]
49. Chushingura (1784, Takeda Izumo) [2]
50. Peer Gynt (1867) [2]

51. The Seagull (1895) [2]
52. Caesar and Cleopatra (1901) [2]
53. Man and Superman (1903) [2]
54. The Iceman Cometh (1939) [2]
55. A Streetcar Named Desire (1947) [2]

*Wikipedia informs me that Faust is a closet drama, which is a play that is meant to be read like a novel, rather than performed. Not having read it, I don't know if I should include it here or not. I also have this issue with some books that blur the line between fiction and non-fiction, such as The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas or Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, neither of which have I read.

[Mysterious Dude]

Another flaw of the list is a bias towards 20th century works, given that several of the lists I included (The Modern Library's and Time Magazine's) featured only 20th century books. But another fun thing you can do is take out the 20th century books and leave only 19th century books, if that's your thing.

1. Pride and Prejudice (1813)
2. Jane Eyre (1847)
3. Wuthering Heights (1847)
4. Moby-Dick (1851)
5. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884)
6. War and Peace (1869)
7. Crime and Punishment (1866)
8. Madame Bovary (1857)
9. Anna Karenina (1877)
10. Great Expectations (1861)

11. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865)
12. Middlemarch (1872)
13. Frankenstein (1818)
14. Vanity Fair (1848)
15. The Brothers Karamazov (1880)
16. The Scarlet Letter (1850)
17. Little Women (1868)
18. Les Miserables (1862)
19. David Copperfield (1850)
20. A Tale of Two Cities (1859)

21. Tess of the d’Urbervilles (1891)
22. Dracula (1897)
23. Fathers and Sons (1862)
24. Emma (1816)
25. The Red and the Black (1830)
26. The Portrait of a Lady (1881)
27. The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890)
28. Stories (Edgar Allan Poe)
29. The Count of Monte Cristo (1844)
30. Walden (mem) (1854)

31. Treasure Island (1883)
32. Jude the Obscure (1895)
33. Le Père Goriot (1835)
34. The Woman in White (1860)
35. Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852)
36. The Red Badge of Courage (1895)
37. The Last of the Mohicans (1826)
38. The Idiot (1869)
39. The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (1892)
40. Persuasion (1818)

41. The Three Musketeers (1844)
42. Bleak House (1853)
43. The Turn of the Screw (1898)
44. A Christmas Carol (1843)
45. Germinal (1885)
46. Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886)
47. The Time Machine (1895)
48. The Awakening (1899)
49. The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1831)
50. Eugénie Grandet (1833)


51. The Pickwick Papers (1837)
52. Dead Souls (1842)
53. The Moonstone (1868)
54. Grimm’s Fairy Tales (1812)
55. Oliver Twist (1838)
56. The Mill on the Floss (1860)
57. Silas Marner (1861)
58. Stories (Anton Chekhov)
59. The War of the Worlds (1898)
60. Ivanhoe (1819, Scott)

61. The Charterhouse of Parma (1839)
62. Barchester Towers (1857)
63. Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (1870)
64. Sense and Sensibility (1811)
65. The House of Seven Gables (1851)
66. The Last Chronicle of Barset (1867)
67. Through the Looking-Glass (1871)
68. Far From the Madding Crowd (1874)
69. The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876)
70. The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886)

71. The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1824)
72. Lost Illusions (1837-39, Balzac)
73. La Cousine Bette (1846)
74. Cranford (1851-53, Gaskell)
75. Adam Bede (1859)
76. Oblomov (1859, Goncharov)
77. Notes From Underground (1864)
78. Our Mutual Friend (1865)
79. The Return of the Native (1878)
80. Hunger (1890, Hamsun)

81. Northanger Abbey (1817)
82. Fairy Tales (1835-37, Hans Christian Andersen)
83. La Rabouilleuse (The Black Sheep) (1842, Balzac)
84. Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (mem) (1845)
85. The Warden (1855, Trollope)
86. A Journey to the Center of the Earth (1864, Verne)
87. Lorna Doone (1869, Blackmore)
88. Sentimental Education (1869, Flaubert)
89. The Possessed (Demons) (1872)
90. Stories (Guy de Maupassant)

91. À rebours (Against Nature) (1884, Huysmans)
92. King Solomon’s Mines (1885, Haggard)
93. The Death of Ivan Ilyich (1886)
94. Three Men in a Boat (1889)
95. The Diary of a Nobody (1892)
96. The Island of Dr. Moreau (1896)
97. Rameau’s Nephew (1805, Diderot)
98. Mansfield Park (1814, Austen)
99. Waverley (1814, Scott)
100. Don Juan (1819, Byron)


101. Stories (Washington Irving)
102. Truth and Poetry: From My Own Life (mem) (1831, Goethe)
103. Le Cousin Pons (1847)
104. Thérèse Raquin (1867, Zola)
105. Erewhon (1872, Butler)
106. Around the World in Eighty Days (1873, Verne)
107. The American (1877, James)
108. Black Beauty (1877, Sewell)
109. Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ (1880, Wallace)
110. Heidi (1880, Spyri)

111. The Bostonians (1886)
112. Kidnapped (1886, Stevenson)
113. She (1887, Haggard)
114. The Maias (Os Maias) (1888, de Queiroz)
115. A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (1889)
116. The Master of Ballantrae (1889, Stevenson)
117. Stories (Oscar Wilde)
118. The Jungle Book (1894, Kipling)
119. Effi Briest (1895, Fontane)
120. The Invisible Man (1897)

[Mysterious Dude]

And furthermore! Even though I added several lists that have only Asian books on them, the list still has a bias towards western literature, but you can take out all the Asian/Middle Eastern books to see how well they do against each other.

1. Arabian Nights (c. 850 AD)
2. The Tale of Genji (c. 1010)
3. Tao Te Ching (nf) (c. 300 BC, Lao-tzu)
4. Qur’an (610-32 AD)
5. Dream of the Red Chamber (1791)
6. Bhagavad Gita (c. 150 BC)
7. Mahabharata (c. 350 AD)
8. Analects (nf) (551-479 BC, Confucius)
9. Poetry (Matsuo Basho) (also: The Narrow Road to the Deep North) (1702)
10. Ramayana (c. 300 BC, Valmiki)

11. The Pillow Book (c. 1000, Sei Shonagon)
12. Rubaiyat (c. 1100, Khayyam)
13. Journey to the West (c. 1595, Wu Cheng’en)
14. Upanishads (c. 600 BC)
15. The Recognition of Sakuntala (pl) (c. 440 AD, Kalidasa)
16. Kokoro (1914, Soseki)
17. Snow Country (1935-37, Kawabata)
18. The Makioka Sisters (1943-48, Tanizaki)
19. Book of Mencius (nf) (c. 320 BC, Mencius)
20. Book of Zhuangzi (Chuang Tzu) (nf) (c. 275-65 BC)

21. Records of the Grand Historian (hist) (109-91 BC, Sima Qian)
22. Shahnameh (c. 1000, Firdausi)
23. Water Margin (c. 1370, Shi Naian)
24. Muqaddimah (nf) (1377, Khaldun)
25. The Golden Lotus (1610)
26. Stories (Lu Xun)
27. My Experiments with Truth (mem) (1928, Gandhi)
28. The Art of War (nf) (c. 510 BC)
29. Platform Sutra of the Sixth Patriarch (nf) (c. 700 AD, Huineng)
30. Poetry (Du Fu, c. 740 AD)

31. Collection of Ten Thousand Leaves (Man’yoshu) (c. 760 AD)
32. Gita Govinda (c. 1150, Jayadeva)
33. The Conference of the Birds (po) (1177, Attar)
34. Hojoki (An Account of My Hut) (1212)
35. Poetry (Jalal al-Din Rumi)
36. Tsurezuregusa (Essays in Idleness) (c. 1331, Yoshida Kenko)
37. Romance of the Three Kingdoms (c. 1370)
38. The Noh Plays
39. Plays (Chikamatsu Monzaemon)
40. Poetry (Rabindranath Tagore) (1877, etc.)

41. The Blind Owl (1937, Hedayat)
42. The Sailor Who Fell From Grace With the Sea (1963, Mishima)
43. The Sea of Fertility (1964-70, Mishima)
44. Book of Changes (I Ching) (c. 800 BC)
45. Rigveda (c. 800 BC)
46. Buddhist Scriptures
47. The Dhammapada (c. 250 BC)
48. Panchatantra (c. 200 BC)
49. Lotus Sutra (c. 50 AD)
50. Yoga Sutras (c. 200 AD, Patanjali)


51. Mu’allaqat (The Seven Odes) (c. 600 AD)
52. Poetry (Wang Wei, c. 740 AD)
53. Poetry (Li Bai, c. 740 AD)
54. Poetry (Bai Juyi, c. 810 AD)
55. The Ring of the Dove (c. 1030, Ibn Hazm)
56. Maqamat al-Hariri (The Assemblies of al-Hariri) (c. 1090)
57. The Deliverance From Error (nf) (c. 1100, Al-Ghazali)
58. The Tale of the Heike (c. 1200)
59. The Life of an Amorous Woman (1686, Saikaku)
60. The Scholars (1750, Wu Jingzi)

61. Stories (Ryunosuke Akutagawa)
62. The Master of Go (1951-54, Kawabata)



Anyway, that's it for now. If you have any questions, my office hours are Monday from 2 to 4. Also, if you see any mistakes I've made, don't hesitate to point them out to me.

[transmogrifier]

Also, if you see any mistakes I've made, don't hesitate to point them out to me.

Slaughterhouse Five at only 39.

Though to be fair, this is less your error than that of humanity, or at least the part responsible for making book lists.

[Kurosawa Fan]

This is fantastic Antoine. I've already copied all the lists and saved them to my machine. I have about ten lists bookmarked on my computer, but you went above and beyond here. This is going to be a great guide. Thanks for posting this.

[Duncan]

Gee-zus. Thanks for making this. Seems very useful. I like obsessional hobbies too. Or, I like that people have them.

[Wryan]

If anything in the history of this website deserved more rep, I can't think of it.

EDIT: Oh and Gatsby isn't that great. Come on, folks.

[Raiders]

Yeah, I've never really been all that enamored with Gatsby. Considering its reputation though, seems it was destined for the top spot.

[Wryan]

Yeah, I've never really been all that enamored with Gatsby. Considering its reputation though, seems it was destined for the top spot.

Yeah, that's the funny thing with the way in which Antoine created the list, just in the function of the mechanics of creating lists in such a way, but I think that's part of the fascination for me.

Copied and printed.

[Melville]

Now there's an obsessive hobby I can get behind. I made my own to-read list based on http://www.interleaves.org/~rteeter/greatbks.html
which compiles a bunch of lists. I just add or subtract things based on my level of interest. Speaking of obsessive hobbies, mine is to rate everything I see that's in list form:

1. The Great Gatsby (1925) - 9
2. Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) - 9.5
3. The Catcher in the Rye (1951) - 9
4. Ulysses (1922) - 10
5. Pride and Prejudice (1813) - 2
6. One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967) - 6
7. Jane Eyre (1847) - NA
8. Catch-22 (1961) - 10
9. Wuthering Heights (1847) - 6.5
10. Moby-Dick (1851) - 10
11. Don Quixote (1605) - only read about half of it
12. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884) - 10
13. Lolita (1955) - 9.5
14. War and Peace (1869) - 7
15. The Grapes of Wrath (1939) - 4
16. Crime and Punishment (1866) - 10
17. To Kill a Mockingbird (1960) - 4.5
18. Madame Bovary (1857) - 9.5
19. Anna Karenina (1877) - NA
20. Heart of Darkness (1902) - 10
21. The Trial (1925) - 10
22. Invisible Man (1952) - 7.5
23. In Search of Lost Time (1913-27) - only read the first two books, which I'd give 10 and 8
24. Brave New World (1932) - 8
25. On the Road (1957) - NA
26. Beloved (1987) - 6.5
27. The Sound and the Fury (1929) - 10
28. Great Expectations (1861) - 9.5
29. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) - 9
30. Middlemarch (1872) - NA
31. To the Lighthouse (1927) - 4.5
32. The Stranger (1942) - 10
33. Gulliver’s Travels (1726) - 5
34. Frankenstein (1818) - 8
35. Animal Farm (1945) - 9
36. Plays (William Shakespeare) - I've only read a few
37. Vanity Fair (1848) - NA
38. Gone With the Wind (1936) - NA
39. Slaughterhouse-Five (1969) - 6
40. The Brothers Karamazov (1880) - 10
41. The Lord of the Rings (1954-55) - 9.5
42. Robinson Crusoe (1719) - NA
43. The Scarlet Letter (1850) - 6
44. Little Women (1868) - NA
45. Lord of the Flies (1954) - 9.5
46. The Iliad (c. 800 BC) - 7
47. The Odyssey (c. 800 BC) - 7.5
48. Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937) - NA
49. The Bible - 7
50. The Divine Comedy (c. 1320) - only read Inferno, which I'd give 6.5
51. Les Miserables (1862) - only read an abridged version, which I'd give a 9
52. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) - 9.5
53. A Farewell to Arms (1929) - 8.5
54. Candide (1759) - 8
55. David Copperfield (1850) - 7.5
56. A Tale of Two Cities (1859) - 6
57. The Sun Also Rises (1926) - 8
58. Native Son (1940) - NA
59. The Color Purple (1982) - NA
60. Tom Jones (1749) - NA
61. Tristram Shandy (1760-67) - 10
62. Tess of the d’Urbervilles (1891) - NA
63. Dracula (1897) - 4
64. A Passage to India (1924) - NA
65. Rebecca (1938) - NA
66. A Clockwork Orange (1962) - 8.5
67. The Canterbury Tales (c. 1390) - NA
68. Fathers and Sons (1862) - 6.5
69. The Age of Innocence (1920) - NA
70. The Magic Mountain (1924) - NA
71. Mrs. Dalloway (1925) - 9
72. Of Mice and Men (1937) - 8.5
73. Brideshead Revisited (1945) - NA
74. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (1979) - 3
75. Midnight’s Children (1981) - NA
76. The Handmaid’s Tale (1986) - NA
77. Emma (1816) - NA
78. The Red and the Black (1830) - NA
79. The Portrait of a Lady (1881) - NA
80. The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890) - 4
81. Stories (Edgar Allan Poe) - only read a few
82. The Count of Monte Cristo (1844) - only read an abridged version, which I'd give a 7.5
83. The Old Man and the Sea (1952) - 8
84. Things Fall Apart (1958) - 7.5
85. Rabbit, Run (1960) - NA
86. Dialogues (Plato) - only read a few
87. The Aeneid (19 BC) - 9.5
88. Walden (mem) (1854) - NA
89. Treasure Island (1883) - 7.5
90. Sons and Lovers (1913) - 7.5
91. My �ntonia (1918) - NA
92. The Hobbit (1937) - 7.5
93. One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1962) - 8
94. The Bell Jar (1963) - NA
95. Possession (1990) - NA
96. Plays (Sophocles) - only read the Oedipus trilogy, which I'd give 7.5, 8.5, and 6.5
97. The Prince (nf) (1532) - 7
98. Paradise Lost (1667) - only read about half
99. Faust (pl) (1806) - 8 for the first half, 6.5 for the second
100. Jude the Obscure (1895) - NA
101. The Tin Drum (1959) - 7
105. Le Père Goriot (1835) - 8
106. Plays (Henrik Ibsen) - only read A Doll's House, which I'd give a 3.5
108. The Call of the Wild (1903) - 5
111. As I Lay Dying (1930) - 9
112. For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940) - 4
113. The Chronicles of Narnia (1950-56) - 5
115. Dune (1965) - 8.5
116. Works (Aristotle) - only read a few selections
117. Confessions (mem) (397 AD, Augustine) - currently about half way through it
124. Charlotte’s Web (1952) - 7
126. Pale Fire (1962) - 7
128. Plays (Aeschylus) - only read the Orestian trilogy, which I'd give 8
132. Winnie-the-Pooh (1926) - 9
133. Wide Sargasso Sea (1966) - 8
134. The Master and Margarita (1967) - 7
139. Plays (Euripides) - I've read a bunch. they're all good
144. The Idiot (1869) - 8.5
145. The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (1892) - 8
146. The Interpretation of Dreams (sci) (1900) - only read a bit of it
150. Poetry (T.S. Eliot) - only read a few
153. The Big Sleep (1939) - 6.5
154. Fahrenheit 451 (1952) - 7
158. Watership Down (1972) - 7
160. Love in the Time of Cholera (1985) - 6.5
161. Tao Te Ching (nf) (c. 300 BC, Lao-tzu) - 6
164. The Three Musketeers (1844) - 6 (might have been abridged)
165. The Communist Manifesto (nf) (1848) - 5
170. Plays (George Bernard Shaw) - only read Major Barbara, which I'd give a 5.5
171. The Good Soldier (1915) - 10
172. I, Claudius (1934) - 8.5
174. Absalom, Absalom! (1936) - 7.5
175. The Little Prince (1943) - 8.5
176. The Plague (1947) - 8
182. Qur’an (610-32 AD) - only read about half of it
184. Plays (Molière) - 8 for The Misanthrope, 3.5 for Don Juan
185. A Christmas Carol (1843) - 8.5
188. The Time Machine (1895) - 7
190. The Hound of the Baskervilles (1902) - 8
194. The Maltese Falcon (1930) - 4
206. White Noise (1985) - 5.5
207. The Remains of the Day (1989) - 5.5
210. Utopia (1516, More) - 5
216. The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1831) - 8
219. Dead Souls (1842) - 6.5
221. The Wings of the Dove (1902) - only read about half
224. Dubliners (1916) - 7.5
225. Poetry (William Butler Yeats) - only read a bit
229. Waiting for Godot (pl) (1953) - 8
236. Atonement (2001) - 5.5
237. The Epic of Gilgamesh (c. 1150 BC) - 7
238. Plays (Aristophanes) - only read The Frogs, which I'd give 7.5
239. Bhagavad Gita (c. 150 BC) - 8
240. Mahabharata (c. 350 AD) - only read a seriously abridged version, which I'd give 7
241. Beowulf (c. 700 AD) - 7.5
243. The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774) - 8.5
246. Oliver Twist (1838) - 8
247. Poetry (Emily Dickinson, 1856 etc.) - only read a bit
252. Nostromo (1904) - only read about half
253. The Metamorphosis (1915) - 9
262. Stranger in a Strange Land (1961) - 3
264. 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) - 4
271. Analects (nf) (551-479 BC, Confucius) - 6
274. Poetry (Matsuo Basho) - only read the poetry in his travel diary, which I'd give 7.5
275. Poetry (William Blake) - only read Songs of Innocence and Experience, which I'd give 8
277. Poetry (John Keats) - only read a bit
281. Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (1870) - 5
283. Works (Albert Einstein) - seriously?
287. Ficciones (1941-56, Jorge Luis Borges) - 9.5
293. Blood Meridian (1985) - 7
297. Ramayana (c. 300 BC, Valmiki) - only read an abridged version, which I'd give 7
298. Metamorphoses (c. 8 AD, Ovid) - 7.5
302. Rubaiyat (c. 1100, Khayyam) - 9.5
306. Discourse on the Method (ph) (1637, Descartes) - 5 (Meditations is much better)
315. Through the Looking-Glass (1871) - 9
317. The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) - 7
321. The Varieties of Religious Experience (nf) (1902, James) - only read a few selections from it
330. Tender is the Night (1934) - 6
333. The Heart of the Matter (1948) - 8
336. The Once and Future King (1958) - only read about half of it
338. Labyrinths (1962) - 8
342. One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (1963) - 8.5
351. Ender’s Game (1985) - 7.5
352. The New York Trilogy (1985-86) - only read City of Glass, which I'd give 6.5
363. The Recognition of Sakuntala (pl) (c. 440 AD, Kalidasa) - 8
368. Critique of Pure Reason (nf) (1781, Kant) - 10
372. The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1824) - 8.5
379. Works (John Stuart Mill) - only read selections
380. Notes From Underground (1864) - 10
381. Our Mutual Friend (1865) - only read a bit of it
383. Thus Spake Zarathustra (ph) (1883-85) - 8.5
384. Hunger (1890, Hamsun) - 10
391. Stories (Franz Kafka, 1915 etc.) - only read a few
394. Billy Budd (1924, Melville) - 7.5
395. The Castle (1926, Kafka) - only read a bit of it
398. Light in August (1932) - 8
402. La Nausée (1938, Sartre) - 9.5
403. Darkness at Noon (1940) - 9
407. Plays (Arthur Miller) - only read Death of a Salesman, which I'd give 7.5
408. Memoirs of Hadrian (1951) - 5.5
411. The Moviegoer (1961) - 4
413. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (1964) - 6
416. Fifth Business (1970) - 6.5
424. The Lover (1984, Duras) - 8
435. Book of Zhuangzi (Chuang Tzu) (nf) (c. 275-65 BC) - currently about half way through
444. The Praise of Folly (nf) (1511, Erasmus) - 6.5
447. Ethics (nf) (1677, Spinoza) - only read selections
449. Two Treatises of Government (nf) (1689, Locke) - only read selections
452. An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (nf) (1748, Hume) - only read selections
456. Fairy Tales (1835-37, Hans Christian Andersen) - 8
460. Poetry (William Wordsworth) - only read a bit
464. Lorna Doone (1869, Blackmore) - only read an abridged version, which I'd give 7
470. The Death of Ivan Ilyich (1886) - 7.5
474. The Island of Dr. Moreau (1896) - 5
494. Being and Nothingness (nf) (1943, Sartre) - 10
509. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (sci) (1962, Kuhn) - 8
526. The Accidental Tourist (1985, Tyler) - 2


1. Hamlet (1602) [16] - 9.5
2. Faust (1806) [16] - 8 / 6.5
3. Oedipus Rex (428 BC) [14] - 7.5
4. The Oresteia (458 BC) [12] - 7.5
5. A Doll’s House (1879) [11] - 3.5
6. Waiting for Godot (1953) [10] - 8
7. Macbeth (1606) [9] - 6.5
11. Antigone (c. 441 BC) [6] - 8.5
12. Medea (431 BC) [6] - 9
13. The Recognition of Sakuntala (c. 440 AD, Kalidasa) [6] - 8
16. Oedipus at Colonus (c. 401 BC) [5] - 6.5
17. King Lear (1605) [5] - 8
20. Death of a Salesman (1949) [5] - 7
23. The Bacchae (403 BC) [4] - 10
31. The Misanthrope (1666) [3] - 8
40. Electra (c. 406 BC) [2] - 7
44. Othello (c. 1603) [2] - 7.5

[Duncan]

I've read 97 from the primary list, including 8 from which I've only read selections. So, basically, lots of recommendations.

edit: Actually, I just went through the list again highlighting books I wanted to read and found that I've actually read 108. I'm not going to rate them all though.

[Kurosawa Fan]

Of the 534 books listed in the first list, I've read 65 of them. And that's not including stuff like The Bible or the poetry collections, of which I've read passages and poems here and there, but not enough to consider myself well-read.

[Mysterious Dude]

I've read a pitiful 24, myself. But I'm working on it.

I also have one for movies. I've been working on this one a lot longer, but it actually includes fewer lists (and is therefore less perfect). Unlike the book list, I totally pwn this list, having seen all but four of the following titles. Maybe that's why I had to move on to books.

1. Citizen Kane (1941)
2. 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)
3. Casablanca (1942)
4. The Godfather (1972)
5. Raging Bull (1980)
6. Singin’ in the Rain (1952)
7. Vertigo (1958)
8. The Searchers (1956)
9. Psycho (1960)
10. Lawrence of Arabia (1962)

11. Chinatown (1974)
12. The Godfather, Part II (1974)
13. The Wizard of Oz (1939)
14. The Third Man (1949)
15. Some Like It Hot (1959)
16. Annie Hall (1977)
17. Sunset Boulevard (1950)
18. Dr. Strangelove (1964)
19. Star Wars (1977)
20. It’s a Wonderful Life (1946)

21. On the Waterfront (1954)
22. Battleship Potemkin (1925)
23. City Lights (1931)
24. Gone with the Wind (1939)
25. Touch of Evil (1958)
26. Taxi Driver (1976)
27. Apocalypse Now (1979)
28. The Rules of the Game (1939)
29. Double Indemnity (1944)
30. Seven Samurai (1954)

31. North by Northwest (1959)
32. Sunrise (1927)
33. Rear Window (1954)
34. Schindler’s List (1993)
35. Nashville (1975)
36. The General (1927)
37. Ladri di Biciclette (1948)
38. Pulp Fiction (1994)
39. M (1931)
40. The Maltese Falcon (1941)

41. The Seventh Seal (1957)
42. The Wild Bunch (1969)
43. The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928)
44. The Night of the Hunter (1955)
45. 8½ (1963)
46. Bonnie and Clyde (1967)
47. Children of Paradise (1945)
48. All About Eve (1950)
49. The 400 Blows (1959)
50. Greed (1924)

51. The Gold Rush (1925)
52. Metropolis (1927)
53. Modern Times (1936)
54. Tokyo Story (1953)
55. Breathless (1960)
56. One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975)
57. E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial (1982)
58. Duck Soup (1933)
59. La Grande Illusion (1937)
60. The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948)

61. La Dolce Vita (1960)
62. A Clockwork Orange (1971)
63. Blade Runner (1982)
64. Intolerance (1916)
65. King Kong (1933)
66. The Graduate (1967)
67. The Deer Hunter (1978)
68. Persona (1966)
69. The Silence of the Lambs (1991)
70. Bringing Up Baby (1938)

71. Stagecoach (1939)
72. Rashomon (1950)
73. Wild Strawberries (1957)
74. His Girl Friday (1940)
75. High Noon (1952)
76. The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957)
77. Midnight Cowboy (1969)
78. Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981)
79. Do the Right Thing (1989)
80. Goodfellas (1990)

81. Nosferatu (1922)
82. Sherlock, Jr. (1924)
83. L’Atalante (1934)
84. Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939)
85. The Magnificent Ambersons (1942)
86. The Best Years of Our Lives (1946)
87. Jules et Jim (1961)
88. Manhattan (1979)
89. It Happened One Night (1934)
90. The Grapes of Wrath (1940)

91. Ugetsu (1953)
92. Pather Panchali (1955)
93. Sweet Smell of Success (1957)
94. The Manchurian Candidate (1962)
95. Blue Velvet (1986)
96. The Birth of a Nation (1915)
97. The Philadelphia Story (1940)
98. Rebel Without a Cause (1955)
99. L’Avventura (1960)
100. Mean Streets (1973)

101. Jaws (1975)
102. Sullivan’s Travels (1941)
103. Bride of Frankenstein (1935)
104. A Streetcar Named Desire (1951)
105. La Strada (1954)
106. The Empire Strikes Back (1980)
107. Unforgiven (1992)
108. Fargo (1996)
109. Napoleon (1927)
110. The Crowd (1928)

111. The Lady Eve (1941)
112. Ikiru (1952)
113. Pandora’s Box (1929)
114. Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937)
115. Notorious (1946)
116. The Big Sleep (1946)
117. My Darling Clementine (1946)
118. The African Queen (1951)
119. Shane (1953)
120. Viridiana (1961)

121. To Kill a Mockingbird (1962)
122. Once Upon a Time in the West (1968)
123. Andrei Rublev (1969)
124. The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920)
125. L’Age d’or (1930)
126. All Quiet on the Western Front (1930)
127. The Apartment (1960)
128. McCabe and Mrs. Miller (1971)
129. Platoon (1986)
130. The Blue Angel (1930)

131. Rebecca (1940)
132. Red River (1948)
133. Madame de... (1953)
134. Last Year at Marienbad (1961)
135. The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962)
136. Blowup (1966)
137. Il Conformista (1970)
138. The French Connection (1971)
139. Fanny and Alexander (1982)
140. Brazil (1985)

141. Wings of Desire (1987)
142. Un Chien Andalou (1929)
143. Swing Time (1936)
144. Fantasia (1940)
145. Rome: Open City (1945)
146. Out of the Past (1947)
147. Letter from an Unknown Woman (1948)
148. An American in Paris (1951)
149. From Here to Eternity (1953)
150. The World of Apu (1959)

151. Ben Hur (1959)
152. The Hustler (1961)
153. Contempt (1963)
154. Pierrot le Fou (1965)
155. Patton (1970)
156. Aguirre, the Wrath of God (1972)
157. Amarcord (1973)
158. Badlands (1973)
159. Days of Heaven (1978)
160. Ran (1985)

161. Dekalog (1988)
162. Top Hat (1935)
163. Ivan the Terrible (1945)
164. Ordet (1955)
165. Rio Bravo (1959)
166. Pickpocket (1959)
167. West Side Story (1961)
168. A Hard Day’s Night (1964)
169. Belle de Jour (1967)
170. Cabaret (1972)

171. Network (1976)
172. Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977)
173. The Shawshank Redemption (1994)
174. Broken Blossoms (1919)
175. The Man with the Movie Camera (1929)
176. Earth (1930)
177. Freaks (1932)
178. Trouble in Paradise (1932)
179. The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938)
180. Beauty and the Beast (1946)

181. The Red Shoes (1948)
182. Sansho the Bailiff (1954)
183. Twelve Angry Men (1957)
184. Night of the Living Dead (1968)
185. Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969)
186. The Last Picture Show (1971)
187. The Conversation (1974)
188. The Mirror (1975)
189. Barry Lyndon (1975)
190. Amadeus (1984)

191. Once Upon a Time in America (1984)
192. Forrest Gump (1994)
193. Frankenstein (1931)
194. Zéro de Conduite (1933)
195. The 39 Steps (1935)
196. Mutiny on the Bounty (1935)
197. The Palm Beach Story (1942)
198. To Be or Not to Be (1942)
199. Meet Me in St. Louis (1944)
200. Brief Encounter (1945)

201. A Matter of Life and Death (1946)
202. Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949)
203. Los Olvidados (1950)
204. Aparajito (1956)
205. Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956)
206. Paths of Glory (1957)
207. Ashes and Diamonds (1958)
208. Hiroshima, Mon Amour (1959)
209. The Exterminating Angel (1962)
210. Gertrud (1964)

211. The Sound of Music (1965)
212. Easy Rider (1969)
213. M*A*S*H (1970)
214. The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (1972)
215. The Exorcist (1973)
216. The Travelling Players (1975)
217. The Terminator (1984)
218. The Piano (1993)

[megladon8]

Yikes, I've only read 45 of the books on that list.

An incredible amount of work went into that, Antoine - thanks very much for sharing it with us all.

[monolith94]

from the master list, I got about 70, maybe 71. A lot of the poets I had read a great deal of, but not enough to count myself as having read it to mastery.

[Spinal]

I've read about 45 or 46 of the plays. Memory's a little fuzzy on some of those.

My insufficiency on the novels is just too depressing for me to even count.

[Ezee E]

showoff.

[SirNewt]

230. If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler (1979)

My favorite book of all time, pwned. . .

http://www.fhaloansfhamortgages.com/m/blogs/zmoneyd/charlie-brown-tree.JPG

This is awesome and makes me feel better about my own obsessive hobbies.

BTW, my old university has a top 100 lit list. If you'd like it I can try to find it.

[SirNewt]

I don't know that it's a mistake Bhagavad Gita is part of the Mahabharata. It's sort of like the shakespeare plays thing where some people listed them separately some list them all together.

[Mysterious Dude]

Just spent the last several hours combining 17 different 'best of the decade' lists I found online. Might as well share it with y'all.

1. The Corrections (2001, Jonathan Franzen) [12]
2. The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay (2000, Chabon) [11]
3. White Teeth (2000, Zadie Smith) [10]
4. The Road (2006, Cormac McCarthy) [9]
5. Gilead (2004, Marilynne Robinson) [7]
6. Never Let Me Go (2005, Kazuo Ishiguro)
7. A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius (2000, Eggers) [6]
8. Atonement (2002, Ian McEwan)
9. Middlesex (2002, Jeffrey Eudenides)
10. The Year of Magical Thinking (2005, Joan Didion) [5]

11. Harry Potter (1997-2007, J.K. Rowling) *
12. 2666 (2008, Roberto Bolaño) [4]
13. Austerlitz (2001, W.G. Sebald)
14. The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2007, DÃ*az)
15. The Fortress of Solitude (2003, Jonathan Lethem)
16. The Tipping Point (2000, Malcolm Gladwell)
17. Empire Falls (2001, Richard Russo) [3]
18. Everything Is Illuminated (2002, Jonathan Safran Foer)
19. Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell (2004, Susanna Clarke)
20. Life of Pi (2001, Yann Martel)

21. Netherland (2008, Joseph O’Neill)
22. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time (2003, Haddon)
23. The Known World (2003, Edward P. Jones)
24. The Omnivore’s Dilemma (2006, Michael Pollan)
25. The Time Traveler’s Wife (2003, Audrey Niffenegger)
26. The World Without Us (2007, Alan Weisman)
27. True History of the Kelly Gang (2001, Peter Carey)
28. Bel Canto (2001, Ann Patchett) [2]
29. Cloud Atlas (2004, David Mitchell)
30. Freakonomics (2005, Levitt & Dubner)

31. Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic (2006, Alison Bechdel)
32. Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage (2001, Munro)
33. Interpreter of Maladies (2000, Jhumpa Lahiri)
34. Me Talk Pretty One Day (2000, David Sedaris)
35. My Name Is Red (2002, Orhan Pamuk)
36. Nickel and Dimed (2001, Barbara Ehrenreich)
37. On Beauty (2005, Zadie Smith)
38. Oryx and Crake (2003, Margaret Atwood)
39. Out Stealing Horses (2003, Per Petterson)
40. Pictures at a Revolutions (2008, Mark Harris)

41. Seabiscuit (2003, Laura Hillenbrand)
42. Snow (2004, Orhan Pamuk)
43. The Book Thief (2005, Markus Zusak)
44. The Human Stain (2000, Philip Roth)
45. The Kite Runner (2003, Khaled Hosseini)
46. The Lovely Bones (2002, Alice Sebold)
47. The Master (2004, Colm TóibÃ*n)
48. The Plot Against America (2004, Philip Roth)
49. The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher (2008, Summerscale)
50. Tree of Smoke (2007, Denis Johnson)

51. Twilight of the Superheroes (2007, Deborah Eisenberg)
52. What is the What (2006, Dave Eggers)

* Only Paste magazine (http://www.pastemagazine.com/blogs/lists/2009/11/the-best-books-of-the-decade.html) listed the entire Harry Potter series as one entry. The other four lists had only one of the books. I list them all as one because I find it convenient. For the record, only the Half-Blood Prince would qualify if I listed them separately. Having appeared on two lists, it would fall right around #32.

[Mara]

I missed this thread last time, so I am thrilled to see it now. Well done.

[Mara]

Okay, of the first list of 534, I've read 249. Not bad, but my aversion to read things translated from Russian is killing me. Many of the unread books on the list simply don't interest me, though, and I'm not enough of a completist to read them for the sake of reading them. I'm going to go through the unread ones and organize them into "must reads" "should reads" and "let's not kid ourselves."

[Raiders]

Not bad, but my aversion to read things translated from Russian is killing me.

So you haven't read any Dostoyevsky or Tolstoy?

[Mara]

So you haven't read any Dostoyevsky or Tolstoy?

I've read The Death of Ivan Ilyich. But just about every other Russian novel I've attempted I've eventually abandoned. Something about translations from Russian feel unnatural and awkward to me. I can't immerse myself in the story because the language issues make my brain itch.

I have this problem with a number of novels translated into English, but I think I notice it so particularly with the Russians because they are considered masters of the novel form (along with the English and Americans.) I also seem to find translations smoother when they are made from Germanic or Latin-derived languages, probably because there is more natural overlap in grammar and syntax.

I would assume that if you took a language even further removed from English (say, Japanese, or Navajo) I probably wouldn't be able to handle reading the translations at all.








So... Perchi's in Glen Burnie. Ever been? Is it good? Do you know if they serve lomo (or pollo) saltado?

[Raiders]

So... Perchi's in Glen Burnie. Ever been? Is it good? Do you know if they serve lomo (or pollo) saltado?

Only been once a couple years ago. Don't really remember the menu, my wife and I split a rotisserie chicken and chaufa. I can tell you I remember it being outstanding, so I would definitely recommend checking them out

[Dead & Messed Up]

Books List: 56 / 534 = 10.5 %
Plays List: 11 / 55 = 20.0 %
Movie List: 103 / 218 = 47.2%

Better than I thought I'd do. I'm working on the book thang.

[Mara]

I've read or seen 32 of the plays.

I'm going to assume that the films will be my weakest area.

[Raiders]

Books: 124/534 = 23.2%
Plays: 22/55 = 40%
Movies: 213/218 = 97.7%

[Mara]

Movies: 213/218 = 97.7%

Holy crap.

I'm at 93, and I was surprised I was that high.

[Raiders]

Holy crap.

I'm at 93, and I was surprised I was that high.

Yeah, to date I have always been very canonic in my film-watching, so I tend to do very well at having seen the vast majority of films on most "all time" or "best of" lists.

[Melville]

Books – 171/534 = 32%
Plays – 18/55 = 33%
Movies – 198/218 = 91%

I don't have much interest in most of the remaining movies (and a ton of the books).

[Qrazy]

Books – 171/534 = 32%
Plays – 18/55 = 33%
Movies – 198/218 = 91%

I don't have much interest in most of the remaining movies (and a ton of the books).

What are your remaining movies?

[Melville]

What are your remaining movies?
110. The Crowd (1928)
119. Shane (1953)
120. Viridiana (1961)
143. Swing Time (1936)
145. Rome: Open City (1945)
147. Letter from an Unknown Woman (1948)
148. An American in Paris (1951)
150. The World of Apu (1959)
157. Amarcord (1973)
161. Dekalog (1988)
167. West Side Story (1961)
168. A Hard Day’s Night (1964)
178. Trouble in Paradise (1932)
179. The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938)
196. Mutiny on the Bounty (1935)
197. The Palm Beach Story (1942)
199. Meet Me in St. Louis (1944)
202. Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949)
209. The Exterminating Angel (1962)
216. The Travelling Players (1975)

I expect to love Dekalog and at least really like Trouble in Paradise. Don't know about the rest.

[Mara]

Don't know about the rest.

An American in Paris is vastly overrated. Silly film.

Amarcord is my father's favorite film, ever. But I haven't seen it in 15 or so years, and I don't remember it. I should revisit.

The Adventures of Robin Hood is fun, light entertainment.

Kind Hearts and Coronets is actually a bit of a personal favorite. I'd really recommend it.

[Raiders]

Don't know about the rest.

:eek:

I know we have some differences in preference and what not, but dude. The following are great, great films:

110. The Crowd (1928)
120. Viridiana (1961)
145. Rome: Open City (1945)
147. Letter from an Unknown Woman (1948)
150. The World of Apu (1959)
161. Dekalog (1988)
168. A Hard Day’s Night (1964)
178. Trouble in Paradise (1932)
209. The Exterminating Angel (1962)

The following you can skip:

119. Shane (1953)
148. An American in Paris (1951)
167. West Side Story (1961)
179. The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938)
196. Mutiny on the Bounty (1935)

[Melville]

:eek:

I know we have some differences in preference and what not, but dude. The following are great, great films:

110. The Crowd (1928)
120. Viridiana (1961)
145. Rome: Open City (1945)
147. Letter from an Unknown Woman (1948)
150. The World of Apu (1959)
161. Dekalog (1988)
168. A Hard Day’s Night (1964)
178. Trouble in Paradise (1932)
209. The Exterminating Angel (1962)

I haven't been enthused by any post-Un-chien-Andalou Bunuel films I've seen, though Boner's love of The Exterminating Angel gives me some hope. Pather Panchali is one of my favorites, but the story already seemed to be losing some of its appeal by the second movie, so I haven't been too avid about seeing World of Apu. The two Ophüls films I've seen (Earrings of Madame de... and Le Plaisir) were technically astounding, but they were both too dainty for my liking. I don't really know anything about The Crowd, Rome: Open City, or A Hard Day’s Night, so it's less a lack of interest than a lack of knowledge in those cases.

But to be fair, my level of interest in everything is generally pretty low, so I'm not really singling out those films for uninterest. I'll definitely keep your recommendations in mind.


Kind Hearts and Coronets is actually a bit of a personal favorite. I'd really recommend it.
I've wanted to see that for a long time, but I despised The Ladykillers, which dampened my interest a bit. Though I don't know how similar the different Ealing comedies are to one another.

[Llopin]

This reminds me of Bloom's canon.

Obsessive indeed, thanks for sharing, they're fun lists.

[Qrazy]

Great

120. Viridiana (1961)
161. Dekalog (1988)
157. Amarcord (1973)

Very Good

147. Letter from an Unknown Woman (1948)
150. The World of Apu (1959)
168. A Hard Day’s Night (1964)
178. Trouble in Paradise (1932)
209. The Exterminating Angel (1962)

Good

179. The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938)
202. Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949)
145. Rome: Open City (1945)

OK

119. Shane (1953)
196. Mutiny on the Bounty (1935)

[Qrazy]

I've wanted to see that for a long time, but I despised The Ladykillers, which dampened my interest a bit. Though I don't know how similar the different Ealing comedies are to one another.

Ugh.

It's quite different though, plus there's one especially hilarious scene with Alec Guiness in drag.

[ledfloyd]

i've seen about 170 of the films.

[Fezzik]

This is a pretty amazing piece of work, Antoine. Thanks for doing this.

I'm actually surprised at the number of the novels on that list I've actually read.

Novels: 134/534 (26%)
Plays: 34/55 (62%)
Movies: 126/218 (58%)

As an additional note, I'm glad to see A Prayer for Owen Meany on the list.

Mr. Kendall, My AP English teacher made us read The Hotel New Hampshire during our senior year, and I thought it was...ok. Nothing fantastic. But my teacher's passion for Irving pretty much led to me buying Owen Meany when it came out, and it's one of my most cherished reads.

I found out later that Mr. Kendall changed his cirriculum and replaced Hotel with Owen Meany. God I wish I could have sat in on those round table discussions.

And I'll never forgive Hollywood for the mess they made of the book when they adapted it into Simon Birch. A curse on all their houses, I say.