Positive Liberty featured this list; you’re supposed to 1. Bold what you have read; 2. Italicize what you started but couldn’t finish.
Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
Anna Karenina
Crime and Punishment
I loved this book. I read it, I admit, to impress a girl. Turned out to be virtually the only thing of lasting value to come from that relationship.
Catch-22
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Wuthering Heights
The Silmarillion
Life of Pi: a novel
The Name of the Rose
Don Quixote
I do plan to finish this. But when I tried I was in high school, so I have a good excuse for not finishing it.
Moby Dick
Is this really worth the effort? I’ve been thinking about trying.
Ulysses
Madame Bovary
I really enjoyed this. Another book that I read to impress a girl. (Different girl.) I enjoyed the style, even if it was a translation.
The Odyssey
I love the Greeks. I’ve read this three times, but I like The Iliad more.
Pride and Prejudice
I read this for a girl, also. (Yet a third one.) Enjoyed it.
Jane Eyre
A Tale of Two Cities
I started this after reading Great Expectations just to be sure I hate Dickens as much as I really do. Yes, I do.
The Brothers Karamazov
Great. Every bit as good as Crime And Punishment. “The Grand Inquisitor” and the chapter just before it are alone worth the effort. I read this in law school, when I was supposed to be studying for Corporations.
Guns, Germs, and Steel: the Fates of Human Societies
War and Peace
Vanity Fair
The Time Traveler’s Wife
The Iliad
Wonderful. But you must get Robert Fagles’ translation. No other will do. Definitely not the ultra-literal Lattimore.
Emma
The Blind Assassin
The Kite Runner
The Kite Runner? Why The Kite Runner? I’m sure it’s a good book, but why is it on this list?
Mrs. Dalloway
Who?
Great Expectations
I consider this the worst novel in the English language. Absolutely horrible. And required in California government schools. As a form of torture, you see, to ensure that kids learn to hate reading. Dear fucking lord, what a bad book.
American Gods
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
Atlas Shrugged
Reading Lolita in Tehran: a memoir in books
I was surprised by how much I liked this book. It tends to ramble a little bit at times, but I found it moving and powerful and extremely important.
Memoirs of a Geisha
See Great Expectations.
Middlesex
Quicksilver
Wicked : the life and times of the wicked witch of the West
What? Is this a classic?
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
Another one of those abandoned high school ambitions.
The Fountainhead
Foucault’s Pendulum
Middlemarch
Frankenstein
This was forced on me by an English teacher who was mad that I kept not reading the assigned books.
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
This is on my re-read list for 2008.
Angels & Demons
The Inferno
You notice they don’t say The Divine Comedy, cause they know nobody’s ever actually read the whole Divine Comedy.
The Satanic Verses
Sense and Sensibility
The Picture of Dorian Gray
I tried to read this for a girl. (A fourth girl.) She wasn’t worth it.
Mansfield Park
One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest
To the Lighthouse
Tess of the D’Urbervilles
Oliver Twist
Gulliver’s Travels
Les Misérables
I’m assuming audio books count.
The Corrections
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time
Dune
I’m reading this now, actually.
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
This one gives Great Expectations a run for its money. This is the most carefully, systematically fraudulent book I’ve ever encountered from a major publisher. It was, of course, required reading in my American history class at Chaffey Community College. Did you know that the Salem Witch Trials were not an incident of mass hysteria, but actually a battle in the class war? I finally stopped going to that class. I knew communism and I knew American history, so I could pretty much figure out the questions on the final. And I got an A.
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
The audio book of this is the best audio book I’ve ever heard.
Persuasion
The Jane Austen girl and I didn't last long enough.
Northanger Abbey
The Catcher in the Rye
Read this for girl number 1 listed above. And, as I said, Dostoyevsky was the only thing worth remembering from that relationship.
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
I just don’t get it. Sorry. Magic doesn’t do it for me. That’s why I’m not enjoying Dune.
In Cold Blood : A True Account of a Multiple Murder and Its Consequences
White Teeth
Treasure Island
David Copperfield
The Three Musketeers
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