The FB Forward List of the "Best" Books

I received this from Sally Conrad (wife of our friend who's battling cancer) about two years ago via Facebook. The (x) books are the ones I've read. As you can see, there are some glaring non-reads that I keep in my proverbial back pocket as "will reads." This list also inspired Sally to tag me in the 15 Books in 15 Minutes note craze.

I'm still mid-read with Life of Pi (can't get past the hyena vs. tiger scene - too raw I guess...). I'm also mid-read with The Kite Runner. It actually disturbed me so much last night that I had to stop reading. Nightmares ensued...

You'll notice a lot of parallels between this list and those I wrote myself.

Enjoy!

**************************************

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen (X)
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien (X)
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte (X)
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling (X)
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee (X )
6 The Bible - (X)
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte ( )
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell (X )
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman ( )
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens ( )
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott ( x)
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy ( )
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller (X)
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare (X)
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier ( )
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien ( )
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulk ( )
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger (X )
19 The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger ( )
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot ( )
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell (X )
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald (X)
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens ( )
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy ( )
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams ( )
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh ( )
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky ( )
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck ( )
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll ()
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame ( )
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy ( )
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens ( )
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis (X)
34 Emma - Jane Austen ()
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen ()
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis (X)
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini - ( )
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres ( )
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden ( )
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne (X)
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell (X)
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown (X)
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez (X)
44 A Prayer for Owen Meany - John Irving (X )
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins ( )
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery ()
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy ( )
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood (X)
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding (X)
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan (X )
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel ( )
52 Dune - Frank Herbert ( )
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons ( )
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen ()
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth ( )
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon ( )
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens (X)
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley (X)
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon ()
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez (X)
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck (X)
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov (X)
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt (X)
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold (X)
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas ( )
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac (X)
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy ( )
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding ()
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie ( )
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville ( )
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens ( )
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker ( )
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett (x )
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson ( )
75 Ulysses - James Joyce ()
76 The Inferno - Dante ()
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome ( )
78 Germinal - Emile Zola ( )
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray ( )
80 Possession - AS Byatt ()
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens ( )
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell ( )
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker (X )
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro ( )
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert ( )
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry ( )
87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White (X)
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom (X)
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle ( )
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton ( )
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad ( )
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery (X) - in French!
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks ( )
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams (X)
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole ( )
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute ( )
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas ( )
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare (X)
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl (X)
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo ( )

Additions:
Frankenstein - Mary Shelley ( )
Treasure Island - Robert Louis Stevenson ( X)
The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde - Robert Louis Stevenson ( )
The Time Machine - Jules Verne ()
20,000 Leagues Under the Sea - Jules Verne ( )
The Crucible - Arthur Miller (X)
Death of a Salesman - Arthur Miller (X)
The Iliad and The Odyssey - Homer ()
Perks of Being a Wallflower(X)
Grimms Fairy Tales ( X)
And Then There Were None - Agatha Christie ( )
A Separate Peace ( )
A History of Love ( )
Marley and Me - John Grogan ( )
The Princess Bride - William Goldman ( )
Little House on the Prairie Series - Laura Ingalls Wilder (x)

David's contributions

Born to Run, Christopher McDougall
Into the Wild, Jon Krakauer
Into Thin Air, Jon Krakauer
The Wild Trees, Richard Preston
The Stand, Stephen King
La Morte d'Arthur, Sir Thomas Mallory
Canterbury Tales
Beowulf, Anon
Pillars of the Earth, Ken Follett
Sherwood, Parke Godwin
Lord Foul's Bane, Samuel R. Donaldson
Night, Eli Weisel
Gulag Archipelago, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
All Quiet on the Western Front, Erich Maria Remarque
Damage, Josephine Hart
Secret History, Donna Tartt
Undaunted Courage, Stephen Ambrose
Good Morning Midnight, Chip Brown

Mystical Mind Trips

Beloved, Toni Morrison
Sula, Toni Morrison
The Bluest Eye, Toni Morrison
Tar Baby, Toni Morrison
The Shipping News, E. Annie Proulx
Jonathan Livingston Seagull, Richard Bach
Illusions, Richard Bach
One, Richard Bach
Mists of Avalon, Marion Zimmer Bradley
Many Lives, Many Masters, Brian Weiss

Heart Wrenchers

And I'm **not** talking romance novels - no way, no how.

Cold Mountain, Charles Frazier
Gone with the Wind, Margaret Mitchell
Lady Chatterly's Lover, D.H. Lawrence
Sons and Lovers, D.H. Lawrence
Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen
Little Women, Louisa May Alcott
Jane Eyre, Charlotte Brontë
Wuthering Heights, Emily Brontë
That Old Cape Magic, Richard Russo (not sad for the protagonist but another character)
The Lovely Bones, Alice Sebold

How Not to Be Fake

Into the Wild, Jon Krakauer
Catcher in the Rye, J.D. Salinger
It's Not About the Bike, Lance Armstrong
Into Thin Air, Jon Krakauer
On the Road, Jack Kerouac [also a counter-culture favorite]
The Perfect Storm, Sebastian Junger
Alive: The Story of the Andes Survivors, Piers Paul Read

Cultural Insights - Fiction and Non-fiction

Reading Lolita in Tehran
Kitchen God's Wife, Amy Tan
Three Cups of Tea, Greg Mortenson
Persepolis, Marjane Satrapi
Snow Falling on Cedars, David Guterson
How Soccer Explains the World, Frank Foer (mid-read)
The Kite Runner, Khaled Hosseini (mid-read)
Hundred Secret Senses, Amy Tan
100 Years of Solitude, Gabriel Garcia Marquez
The Color of Water, James McBride (a black man's tribute to his white mother - I used excerpts of this when I taught as a way of checking my students' ability to understand culture)
A River Sutra, Gita Mehta
Love in the Time of Cholera, Gabriel Garcia Marquez

(culture of extreme poverty / abuse)

Nickel and Dimed, Barbara Ehrenreich
Beans of Egypt Maine, Caroline Chute
Bastard Out of Carolina, Dorothy Allison

Dystopian Novels as Literary Mirrors

Reading for pleasure is not one of my past times, I fear. I enjoy it but it is not recreation. I enjoy it because the works I choose tend to be ones that stretch me. I have a strong belief that emotions are a gift and that we - as thinking beings - should stretch ourselves into the uncomfortable places.

What better way of stretching oneself than reading Dystopian Novels?!

Brave New World, Aldous Huxley
1984, George Orwell
Animal Farm, George Orwell
Handmaid's Tale, Margaret Atwood
Lord of the Flies, William Golding

Also, Apocalyptic Novels...

The Stand, Stephen King