100

There are probably 100 lists out there of the “best” 100 books.

I came across this one over at BOOKRIOT: From Zero to Well-Read in 100 Books by Jeff O’Neal.

It’s a good approach, because he isn’t saying these are the only books that matter, or even that they’re the best 100– just that if you read these 100, you’d be set to join the literary discussion at the big kids’ table.

Here’s his list, in alphabetical order:

1. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
2. The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Arthur Conan Doyle
3. The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton
4. All Quiet on the Western Front by Eric Maria Remarque
5. The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Klay  by Michael Chabon
6. American Pastoral by Philip Roth
7. Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
8. Anne of Green Gables by Lucy Maud Montgomery
9. Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand
10. The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath
11. Beloved by Toni Morrison
12. Beowulf
13. The Book Thief by Markus Zusak
14. Brave New World by Alduos Huxley
15. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz
16. The Call of the Wild  by Jack London
17. Candide by Voltaire
18. The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer
19. Casino Royale by Ian Fleming
20. Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
21. The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger
22. Charlotte’s Web by E.B. White
23. Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell
24. The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson
25. The Complete Stories of Edgar Allan Poe
26. The Complete Stories of Flannery O’Connor 
27. The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen
28. Crime & Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky
29. The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown
30. Death of a Salesman by Arthur Miller
31. Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes
32. Dream of Red Chamber by Cao Xueqin
33. Dune by Frank Herbert
34. Everything is Illuminated by Jonathan Safran Foer
35. Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
36. The Fault in Our Stars by John Green
37. Faust by Goethe
38. Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
39. Game of Thrones by George RR Martin
40. The Golden Bowl by Henry James
41. The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing
42. Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn
43. The Gospels
44. The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
45. Great Expectations by Charles Dickens
46. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
47. Hamlet by William Shakespeare
48. The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood
49. Harry Potter & The Sorceror’s Stone by J.K. Rowling
50. Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
51. The Help by Kathryn Stockett
52. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams
53. The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien
54. House Made of Dawn by N. Scott Momaday
55. Howl by Allen Ginsberg
56. The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins
57. if on a winter’s night a traveler by Italo Calvino
58. The Iliad by Homer
59. The Inferno by Dante
60. Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace
61. Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
62. Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman
63. The Life of Pi by Yann Martel
64. The Lion, the Witch, and The Wardrobe by C.S. Lewis
65. The Little Prince by Antoine  de Saint-Exepury
66. Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
67. Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
68. Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
69. Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie
70. Moby-Dick by Herman Melville
71. Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf
72. Murder on the Orient Express by Agatha Christie
73. The Odyssey by Homer
74. Oedipus, King by Sophocles
75. On the Road by Jack Kerouac
76. A Passage to India by E.M. Forster
77. The Pentateuch
78. Pride & Prejudice by Jane Austen
79. Rabbit, Run by John Updike
80. The Road by Cormac McCarthy
81. Romeo & Juliet by William Shakespeare
82. The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne
83. Slaughterhouse-5 by Kurt Vonnegut
84. The Sound and The Fury by William Faulkner
85. The Stand by Stephen King
86. The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway
87. Swann’s Way by Marcel Proust
88. Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston
89. Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe
90. The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien
91. To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
92. Ulysses by James Joyce
93. The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera
94. A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan
95. Waiting for the Barbarians by J.M. Coetzee
96. Watchmen by Alan Moore
97. The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami
98. Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte
99. 1984 by George Orwell
100. 50 Shades of Grey by E.L. James

Not everyone appreciated his choices. The article generated over 100 comments about:

• why these books got picked,
• how few of the chosen titles many of us have read (only 36 for me),
• suggestions for missing titles,
• who gets to say which are the right books, and
• can we be “well-read” if we’ve read the wrong books?

Seems like he made a lot of people either angry or ashamed. Come on, people! Top 100s can be a great reference, but we don’t have to live and die by them.

Am I really missing out by skipping Fifty Shades of Grey? Doubt it.

What about On the Road by Jack Kerouac? It’s on almost every list out there, but I will never be stoned enough or bored enough to finish the thing. Does that make me illiterate?

Nah. My “score” of 36 on O’Neal’s list just means our tastes overlap about 36% of the time. If reading part of On the Road or any other book counts, I’m well over 40. Including alternate titles by the authors on his list, that rises to 59. Champ!

Whichever way, I think we’d have plenty to talk about over our big kids’ lunch.

*Do you know a good list of best modern books/authors? There’s more consensus on the classics, but newer lists seem arbitrary. The mods are where I’m lacking– recommendations appreciated!