Ben Crowder

Newsweek recently posted their Top 100 Books of All Time meta-list (which I found via Austenprose).

My legend: * = I’ve read it, % = I’ve read part of it, + = I want to read it, # = I own it

1. War and Peace, by Leo Tolstoy *#
2. 1984, by George Orwell *
3. Ulysses, by James Joyce
4. Lolita, by Vladimir Nabokov
5. The Sound and the Fury, by William Faulkner +
6. Invisible Man, by Ralph Ellison +
7. To the Lighthouse, by Virginia Woolf
8. The Iliad and the Odyssey, by Homer +#
9. Pride and Prejudice, by Jane Austen *#
10. Divine Comedy, by Dante Alighieri +#
11. Canterbury Tales, by Geoffrey Chaucer +#
12. Gulliver’s Travels, by Jonathan Swift *#
13. Middlemarch, by George Eliot +#
14. Things Fall Apart, by Chinua Achebe
15. The Catcher in the Rye, by J. D. Salinger
16. Gone with the Wind, Margaret by Mitchell +#
17. One Hundred Years of Solitude, by Gabriel Garcia Marquez +#
18. The Great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzgerald *#
19. Catch-22, by Joseph Heller
20. Beloved, by Toni Morrison
21. The Grapes of Wrath, by John Steinbeck +
22. Midnight’s Children, by Salman Rushdie-
23. Brave New World, by Aldous Huxley *
24. Mrs. Dalloway, by Virginia Woolf +
25. Native Son, by Richard Wright
26. Democracy in America, by Alexis de Tocqueville +
27. On the Origin of Species, by Charles Darwin +#
28. The Histories, by Herodotus +#
29. The Social Contract, by Jean-Jacques Rousseau +#
30. Das Kapital, by Karl Marx +#
31. The Prince, by Niccolo Machiavelli *#
32. Confessions, by St. Augustine +#
33. Leviathan, by Thomas Hobbes +#
34. The History of the Peloponnesian War, by Thucydides +#
35. The Lord of the Rings, by J. R. R. Tolkien *#
36. Winnie-the-Pooh, by A. A. Milne +
37. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, by C. S. Lewis *#
38. A Passage to India, by E. M. Forster *
39. On the Road, by Jack Kerouac
40. To Kill a Mockingbird, by Harper Lee +#
41. The Holy Bible, Revised Standard Version *#
42. A Clockwork Orange, by Antony Burgess
43. Light in August, by William Faulkner
44. The Souls of Black Folk, by W. E. Du Bois
45. Wide Sargasso Sea, by Jean Rhys %
46. Madame Bovary, by Gustave Flaubert +#
47. Paradise Lost, by John Milton +#
48. Anna Karenina, by Leo Tolstoy *#
49. Hamlet, by William Shakespeare *#
50. King Lear, by William Shakespeare *#
51. Othello, by William Shakespeare +#
52. Sonnets, by William Shakespeare +#
53. Leaves of Grass, by Walt Whitman +
54. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, by Mark Twain *#
55. Kim, by Rudyard Kipling +
56. Frankenstein, by Mary Shelley *#
57. Song of Solomon, by Toni Morrison
58. One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, by Ken Kesey
59. For Whom the Bell Tolls, by Ernest Hemingway +
60. Slaughterhouse-Five, by Kurt Vonnegut +
61. Animal Farm, by George Orwell *#
62. Lord of the Flies, by William Golding *
63. In Cold Blood, by Truman Capote +
64. The Golden Notebook, by Doris Lessing
65. Remembrance of Things Past, by Marcel Proust +
66. The Big Sleep, by Raymond Chandler
67. As I Lay Dying, by William Faulkner +
68. The Sun Also Rises, by Ernest Hemingway +
69. I, Claudius, by Robert Graves *#
70. The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, by Carson McCullers
71. Sons and Lovers, by D. H. Lawrence
72. All the King’s Men, by Robert Penn Warren +
73. Go Tell it on the Mountain, by James Baldwin +
74. Charlotte’s Web, by E. B. White *#
75. Heart of Darkness, by Joseph Conrad +#
76. Night, by Elie Wiesel +
77. Rabbit Run, by John Updike +
78. The Age of Innocence, by Edith Wharton %
79. Portney’s Complaint, by Philip Roth
80. An American Tragedy, by Theodore Dreiser
81. The Day of the Locust, by Nathaniel West
82. Tropic of Cancer, by Henry Miller
83. The Maltese Falcon, by Dashiel Hammett +
84. His Dark Materials, by Philip Pullman %#
85. Death Comes for the Archbishop, by Willa Cather *#
86. The Interpretation of Dreams, by Sigmund Freud
87. The Education of Henry Adams, by Henry Adams +
88. Quotations from Chairman Mao, by Mao Zedong
89. The Varieties of Religious Experience, by William James +
90. Brideshead Revisted, by Evelyn Waugh +
91. Silent Spring, by Rachel Carson
92. The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, by John Maynard Keynes +
93. Lord Jim, by Joseph Conrad +#
94. Goodbye to All That, by Robert Graves+
95. The Affluent Society, by John Kenneth Galbraith
96. The Wind in the Willows, by Kenneth Grahame +#
97. The Autobiography of Malcolm X, by Alex Haley & Malcom X +
98. Eminent Victorians, by Lytton Strachey
99. The Color Purple, by Alice Walker
100. The Second World War, by Winston Churchill +

Hmm, I don’t like this list very much. One of these days I’ll come up with my own…