My Very Own Keen Reading List

I took the TIME 100, the Modern Library and The Guardian's 100, cross-referenced them in Excel and made my own list (as some of you suggested). Miraculously, it resulted in 50 books. All either appear on two or all three of the lists. 

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.

The Sun Also Rises

I am not a morning person. Yet I am drinking a cup of Waitrose Earl Grey tea at 6:30 am on a Saturday morning. Mushu, my pug, is trying to wedge his head between my lap and the laptop. The dogs and I are all wondering why we are up so early. And to be totally honest, I'm not sure. Something feels unsettled inside me, though. I haven't been able to sleep. You know the feeling.

So I decided this morning, while hopelessly keeping my eyes closed in bed, that I would give myself a project for distraction. I'm going to read 100 of "the best books," whatever that means. There are so many lists out there that I'm not sure which one I will use - and that is what this first post is about. I'll blog as I read because ever since I left college, I've missed writing about books. As some of you know, I have very little patience for a book that bores me, so though I will keep on reading, I also promise to frankly share my feelings about the books right here.

I realize this is a somewhat meaningless project for anyone but myself, but I have enough book-loving friends that I doubt I'll have trouble finding some moral support in the endeavor. And, like many bloggers before me who keep navel-gazing diaries online, I feel restless right now and need some psudo-intellectual centering.

It shouldn't surprise me that there are so many "top 100" lists online, but I am a bit baffled. The lists come from odd sources, also respected ones, and all of them are varied. Amazon.com readers don't hesitate to share their opinions on the best books. The whole concept of "Important Thing You Need to Do Before You Die" has never appealed to me though.

So here are the lists up for consideration. My initial idea was to read classics - which would mean re-reading some and picking up others for the first time (perhaps embarassingly for an English major). But I sort of love the Time list and NPR's oddball beachreads appeals to me too. I'm really just undertaking the project to help me focus - and as an amusing distraction. I'm not very good at distracting myself for very long unless I have a real "project" and a goal. So here are the lists up for consideration:

TIME's best English-language novels from 1923 to the present

Modern Library's 100 best novels, parallel to the site's readers' list of the 100 best

The Guardian's top 100 books of all time

NPR's Audience Picks: 100 best beach books ever