I had a request to share my list of 100 Books to Read Before I Die. I compiled it from three lists I found online; Time's All-Time 100 Novels, Amazon's 100 Books to Read in a Lifetime and a third that I just can't recall. It may have been Modern Library's list. There are so many out there. I am really loving this challenge I set for myself. Some of the books I am very excited to read, some I've read before, some even more than once and I can't wait to read them again. Of course there are a few that I am dreading. But they may surprise me and I am determined to persevere.
The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
On the Road by Jack Kerouac
The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien
The Catcher in the Rye by JD Salinger
Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
Lolita by Nabakov
Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie
To Kill A Mockingbird by Harper Lee
1984 by George Orwell
The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll
A Passage to India by EM Forster
Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte
Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf
The Sheltering Sky by Paul Bowles
Lord of the Flies by William Golding
The Lion The Witch and the Wardrobe by C.S. Lewis
Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe
The Spy Who Came in from the Cold by John LeCarre
One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Animal Farm by George Orwell
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Spark
Beloved by Toni Morrison
Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut
Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
The Stranger by Albert Camus
A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess
Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte
Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
Don Quixote by Miguel De Cervantes
Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe
Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates
David Copperfield by Charles Dickens
Little Women by Louisa May Alcott
The Call of the Wild by Jack London
The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame
The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler
A Bend in the River by V.S. Naipaul
Atonement by Ian McEwan
Lucky Jim by Kingsley Amis
Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson
If On a Winter’s Night a Traveler by Italo Calvino
The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton
His Dark Materials by Philip Pullman
Great Expectations by Charles Dickens
Middlemarch by George Eliot
Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams
Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh
Portnoy’s Complaint by Philip Roth
The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood
The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway
White Noise by Don Delillo
The Heart is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers
The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner
Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabakov
To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf
I, Claudius by Robert Graves
Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys
Go Tell it On the Mountain by James Baldwin
Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller
Under the Net by Iris Murdoch
A Dance to the Music of Time by Anthony Powell
Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift
Tom Jones by Henry Fielding
The Portrait of a Lady by Henry James
The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne
Clarissa by Samuel Richardson
Tristram Shandy by Laurence Sterne
Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace
Nostromo by Joseph Conrad
The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson
In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust
The Good Soldier by Ford Madox Ford
The Rainbow by D. H. Lawrence
As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner
The Trial by Franz Kafka
Herzog by Saul Bellow
Charlotte’s Web by E.B. White
Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison
The Tin Drum by Gunter Grass
Death Comes for the Archbishop by Willa Cather
Money by Martin Amis
Oscar and Lucinda by Peter Carey
American Pastoral by Philip Roth
Are You There God? It’s Me Margaret by Judy Blume
Austerlitz by W.G. Sebald
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay by Michael Chabon
Haroun and the Sea of Stories by Salman Rushdie
A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’Engle
Of Human Bondage by W. Somerset Maugham
The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz
The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen
Everything is Illuminated by Jonathan Safran Foer
Watchmen by Alan Moore
The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami
Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston
The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera