I was introduced to the idea of creating a fill-in-the-gaps list by Aerin at In Search of Giants. The idea was that we all have books that we should have read but didn’t **OR** books that are the foundation for much of popular culture that we have vague knowledge but have not read the original source material. Thus, a gap.
The idea is to make a list of (roughly- mine hits 110 and that was after trimming from 178) 100 books and give yourself 5 years to read the entire list. The real goal is to read AT LEAST 75% of the list by the end of the five year period, with the understanding that there is a reason why I haven’t read these already and some may just be impossible to finish at this time.
Criteria:
- Snobby classics that I’ve never read and get annoyed when other people talk about having read them
- Science fiction classics that I know I need to read to inform my reading of current science fiction
- Books I started in school but could never make myself finish (I’m looking at you, Finn!)
- Some books I’ve been curious about but keep forgetting/being too broke to buy
As I made my list, I realized that there are a LOT of classics that I know a little bit about but have never read. I’m finding that I don’t have a lot of contemporary novels on this list, which is fine. After five years, I guess I’ll just make a new list.
The Current List:
1. Cry, the Beloved Country - Alan Paton
2. The Stranger - Albert Camus
3. Brave New World - Aldus Huxley
4. The Counte of Monte-Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
5. The Color Purple - Alice Walker
6. The Diary of Anne Frank - Anne Frank
7. The Little Prince - Antoine de Sait-Exupery – 06/09/2010
8. Atlas Shrugged - Ayn Rand
9. Doctor Zhivago - Boris Pasternak
10. American Psycho - Bret Easton Ellis – 06/22/2010
11. A Tale of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
12. Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
13. Lady Chatterley’s Lover - D.H. Lawrence
14. Robinson Crusoe - Daniel Defoe
15. The Thin Man - Dashiell Hammett - 01/26/2010
16. Ragtime - E.L. Doctorow
17. A Passage to India - E.M.Forster
18. The Fall of the House of Usher - Edgar Allen Poe
19. Tarzan of the Apes - Edgar Rice Burroughs
20. Ethan Frome - Edith Wharton
21. All Quiet on the Western Front - Erich Maria Remarque
22. For Whom the Bell Tolls - Ernest Hemingway
23. Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
24. The Great Gatsby - F. Scott Fitzgerald
25. Dune - Frank Herbert
26. Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoevsky
27. Love in the Time of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
28. The Canterbury Tales - Geoffrey Chaucer
29. Middlemarch - George Eliot
30. 1984 - George Orwell
31. The Third Man - Graham Greene
32. Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
33. King Solomon’s Mines - H. Rider Haggard
34. The Invisible Man - H.G. Wells
35. Uncle Tom’s Cabin - Harriet Beecher Stowe
36. The Turn of the Screw - Henry James
37. Tropic of Cancer - Henry Miller
38. Moby-Dick - Herman Melville
39. The House of the Spirits - Isabel Allende
40. Out of Africa - Isak Dineson
41. Foundation Trilogy - Isaac Asimov
42. Franny and Zooey - J.D. Salinger – 03/06/2010
43. The Lord of the Rings - J.R.R. Tolkien
44. On the Road - Jack Kerouac
45. Last of the Mohicans - James Fenimore Cooper
46. Finnegan’s Wake - James Joyce
47. The Postman Always Rings Twice - James M. Cain
48. Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
49. Wide Sargasso Sea - Jean Rhys
50. The Thirty-Nine Steps - John Buchan
51. The French Lieutenant’s Woman - John Fowles
52. Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
53. Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy - John LeCarre
54. The Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
55. Rabbit Run - John Updike
56. A Modest Proposal - Jonathan Swift
57. Gulliver’s Travels - Jonathan Swift
58. Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
59. Catch-22 - Joseph Heller
60. 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea - Jules Verne
61. One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest - Ken Kesey
62. Slaughterhouse-Five - Kurt Vonnegut – 05/31/2010
63. Ringworld - Larry Niven
64. Tristram Shandy - Laurence Sterne
65. War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
66. The Giver - Lois Lowery
67. Remembrance of Things Past - Marcel Proust
68. The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood
69. Gone With the Wind - Margaret Mitchell
70. The Godfather - Mario Puzo
71. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn - Mark Twain
72. Frankenstein - Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
73. I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings - Maya Angelou
74. Don Quixote - Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
75. The Unbearable Lightness of Being - Milan Kundera
76. The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie - Muriel Spark
77. The House of Seven Gables - Nathaniel Hawthorne
78. Snowcrash - Neal Stephenson
79. Ender’s Game - Orson Scott Card
80. The Picture of Dorian Gray - Oscar Wilde
81. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? - Philip K. Dick
82. The Man in the High Castle - Philip K. Dick
83. American Pastoral - Philip Roth
84. Dangerous Liaisons - Pierre Choderlos de Laclos
85. Invisible Man - Ralph Ellison
86. Fahrenheit 451 - Ray Bradbury
87. The Martian Chronicles - Ray Bradbury
88. The Big Sleep - Raymond Chandler
89. Native Son - Richard Wright
90. A Stranger in a Strange Land - Robert A. Heinlein
91. Treasure Island - Robert Louis Stevenson
92. The Hound of the Baskervilles - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
93. Ivanhoe - Sir Walter Scott
94. The Red and the Black - Stendhal
95. The Shining - Stephen King
96. The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
97. The Once and Future King - T. H. White
98. More Than Human - Theodore Sturgeon
99. Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
100. Doctor Faustus - Thomas Mann
101. Beloved - Toni Morrison
102. Foucault’s Pendulum - Umberto Eco
103. The Name of the Rose - Umberto Eco
104. The Jungle - Upton Sinclair
105. Lolita - Valdimir Nabokov
106. The Hunchback of Notre Dame - Victor Hugo
107. Candide - Voltaire
108. Absalom, Absalom! - William Faulkner
109. Neuromancer - William Gibson
110. Of Human Bondage - William Somerset Maugham