100 Books

I got a kindle for Christmas.  I like to read.  See Timbeaux read.  See Timbeaux run.

Anyway, I have often wanted to take the time to read some of the classics.  During my youth, I did read some of them but most were read under duress and not for pleasure.  When I found out I was getting a kindle for Christmas,  I looked on the Internet for some good book choices.  In doing so I discovered some ‘Top 100 Books’ lists that were intriguing.  Unfortunately, no one list seemed varied enough for my liking.  They all had their own personal preferences which skewed one way or another.

So being an engineer, I took 8 different lists and merged them.  From the list of 446 books, I gave them a score depending on how high they ranked in each list.  I then sorted them by high score and chopped the list at 100. Below is my final list.

1. 1984 By George Orwell
2. Catch-22 By Joseph Heller
3. The Great Gatsby By F. Scott Fitzgerald
4. The Grapes Of Wrath By John Steinbeck
5. Lolita By Vladimir Nabokov
6. The Catcher In The Rye By J.D. Salinger
7. Ulysses By James Joyce
8. To Kill A Mockingbird By Harper Lee
9. The Sound And The Fury By William Faulkner
10. The Lord Of The Rings By J.R.R. Tolkien
11. To The Lighthouse By Virginia Woolf
12. Lord Of The Flies By William Golding
13. Invisible Man By Ralph Ellison
14. Slaughterhouse-Five By Kurt Vonnegut
15. Animal Farm By George Orwell
16. Brave New World By Aldous Huxley
17. Beloved By Toni Morrison
18. Gone With The Wind By Margaret Mitchell
19. On The Road By Jack Kerouac
20. Pride And Prejudice By Jane Austen
21. The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter By Carson Mccullers
22. Mrs. Dalloway By Virginia Woolf
23. Crime And Punishment By Fyodor M Dostoyevsky
24. A Portrait Of The Artist As A Young Man By James Joyce
25. A Prayer For Owen Meany By John Irving
26. The Sun Also Rises By Ernest Hemingway
27. One Hundred Years Of Solitude By Gabriel Garcia Marquez
28. White Noise By Don Delillo
29. Great Expectations By Charles Dickens
30. Middlemarch By George Eliot
31. The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy By Douglas Adams
32. Native Son By Richard Wright
33. The Divine Comedy By Dante Alighieri
34. Tropic Of Cancer By Henry Miller
35. Under The Volcano By Malcolm Lowry
36. For Whom The Bell Tolls By Ernest Hemingway
37. The Call Of The Wild By Jack London
38. Jane Eyre, Charlotte Brontë
39. I, Claudius By Robert Graves
40. Atlas Shrugged By Ayn Rand
41. Midnight’s Children By Salman Rushdie
42. Their Eyes Were Watching God By Zora Neale Hurston
43. A Clockwork Orange By Anthony Burgess
44. As I Lay Dying By William Faulkner
45. Sons And Lovers By D.H. Lawrence
46. All The King’s Men By Robert Penn Warren
47. Go Tell It On The Mountain By James Baldwin
48. Winnie-The-Pooh By A.A. Milne
49. Anna Karenina By Leo Tolstoy
50. Heart Of Darkness By Joseph Conrad – Read 5/04/2012
51. Blood Meridian By Cormac Mccarthy
52. A Passage To India By E.M. Forster
53. Brideshead Revisited By Evelyn Waugh
54. His Dark Materials, Philip Pullman
55. The Master And Margarita By Mikhail Bulgakov
56. Absalom, Absalom! By William Faulkner
57. The Fountainhead By Ayn Rand
58. A Farewell To Arms By Ernest Hemingway
59. Alice’s Adventures In Wonderland, Lewis Carroll – Read 5/05/2012
60. Dune By Frank Herbert
61. A Town Like Alice By Nevil Shute
62. An American Tragedy By Theodore Dreiser
63. Little Women, Louisa May Alcott
64. The Brothers Karamazov By Fyodor M Dostoyevsky
65. The Lion, The Witch And The Wardrobe By C.S. Lewis
66. The Moviegoer By Walker Percy
67. Light In August By William Faulkner
68. Wuthering Heights By Emily Brontë
69. Moby-Dick By Herman Melville – Read 4/25/2012
70. The Hobbit By J.R.R. Tolkien
71. Of Mice And Men By John Steinbeck
72. The Handmaid’s Tale By Margaret Atwood
73. Pale Fire By Vladimir Nabokov
74. One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest By Ken Kesey
75. The Iliad By Homer
76. Things Fall Apart By Chinua Achebe
77. War And Peace By Leo Tolstoy
78. Gravity’s Rainbow By Thomas Pynchon
79. Appointment In Samarra By John O’hara
80. The French Lieutenant’s Woman By John Fowles
81. The Stranger By Albert Camus
82. The Naked And The Dead By Norman Mailer
83. Watership Down By Richard Adams
84. The Old Man And The Sea By Ernest Hemingway
85. The Stand By Stephen King
86. A Handful Of Dust By Evelyn Waugh
87. Don Quixote By Miguel De Cervantes Saavedra
88. Rebecca By Daphne Du Maurier
89. The Bridge Of San Luis Rey By Thornton Wilder
90. Howards End By E.M. Forster
91. Tender Is The Night By F. Scott Fitzgerald
92. The Age Of Innocence By Edith Wharton
93. The Heart Of The Matter By Graham Greene
94. Deliverance By James Dickey
95. The Adventures Of Huckleberry Finn By Mark Twain
96. The Wings Of The Dove By Henry James
97. Hamlet By William Shakespeare
98. Housekeeping: A Novel By Marilynne Robinson
99. Nostromo By Joseph Conrad
100. Death Comes For The Archbishop By Willa Cather

Since I have already ready many of these books,  I will have to decide if I will re-read them.  Of course, it may take me years to finish all these books, but I am not in a hurry.  And when I am done, I will make another list.  Maybe a non-fiction list will be interesting.

I guess I will also update my progress here.  Once I finish a book, I will mark it in bold italics.  That way I can keep up with it.

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