A Clockwork Orange | Anthony Burgess |
A Dance to the Music of Time | Anthony Powell |
The Heart is A Lonely Hunter | Carson McCullers |
Things Fall Apart | Chinua Achebe |
Sons and Lovers | DH Lawrence |
The Golden Notebook | Doris Lessing |
Ragtime | E.L. Doctorow |
A Passage to India | E.M. Forster |
The Sun Also Rises | Ernest Hemingway |
Brideshead Revisited | Evelyn Waugh |
A Handful of Dust | Evelyn Waugh |
The Great Gatsby | F. Scott Fitzgerald |
Animal Farm | George Orwell |
1984 | George Orwell |
The Heart of the Matter | Graham Greene |
Loving | Henry Green |
Tropic of Cancer | Henry Miller |
Under the Net | Iris Murdoch |
The Catcher in the Rye | J.D. Salinger |
On the Road | Jack Kerouac |
Go Tell it on the Mountain | James Baldwin |
Deliverance | James Dickey |
Wide Sargasso Sea | Jean Rhys |
Appointment in Samarra | John O'Hara |
The Grapes of Wrath | John Steinbeck |
Nostromo | Joseph Conrad |
Catch-22 | Joseph Heller |
Slaughterhouse Five | Kurt Vonnegut |
Under the Volcano | Malcolm Lowry |
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie | Muriel Spark |
The Day of the Locust | Nathanael West |
The Sheltering Sky | Paul Bowles |
Invisible Man | Ralph Ellison |
Native Son | Richard Wright |
I, Claudius | Robert Graves |
All the King's Men | Robert Penn Warren |
Midnight's Children | Salman Rushdie |
The Adventures of Augie March | Saul Bellow |
An American Tragedy | Theodore Dreiser |
The Bridge of San Luis Rey | Thornton Wilder |
Beloved | Toni Morrison |
A House for Mr. Biswas | V.S. Naipaul |
To the Lighthouse | Virginia Woolf |
Mrs. Dalloway | Virginia Woolf |
Lolita | Vladimir Nabokov |
Pale Fire | Vladimir Nabokov |
The Moviegoer | Walker Percy |
Death Comes for the Archbishop | Willa Cather |
The Sound and the Fury | William Faulkner |
Lord of the Flies | William Golding |
The books that appear on all three lists are: Orwell's 1984; Ellison's The Invisible Man; Midnight's Children by Salman Rushdie,Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse; Nabokov, Lolita; and The Sound and the Fury by Faulkner.
I sadly admit that out of these six, I have only read one, and out of the 50, I've read seven. And all of those readings happened more than 10 years ago, with the exception of The Great Gatsby, which I read last year (for the first time, if you can believe it!).
I also want to note that Joyce's Ulysses appears on two of the lists, but I've read it once, and once is more than enough. Nor will I acknowledge its place on this list. This is, after all, my list now -- and I say Ulysses doesn't get to be on it.
As for the other 50 books, I really liked Molly's suggestion of taking recommendations from friends about a book that changed their lives. Fair warning: I will probably nix anything I've already read for the latter 50. For example, I know someone will say Pride and Prejudice is a must-read, for example. It is one of my favorite books of all time, but I have read it too many times already.
One more fairly significant thing: I want to read all or most of these by borrowing from the library. I already learned the O'Hara novel isn't even in the Garfield County Library System, which sort of shocks me. The county can order it from Denver, but I am going to talk to the librarian and see if I can purchase & donate whatever books are missing.
This week, I'll write about my love of old library books, also about The Sun Also Rises, which I'm halfway through already.
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