Wednesday, November 23, 2005

100 Books To Read

Have picked out the 100 books I'm going to read before the end of 2006. Some are books I've always been meaning to read, but never found the time. Others, an excuse for me to re-read them. Then, there are the classics that I should read, but alas...

All here, the 100 shortlist, and I've revised it too many times over. The many omission is of course due to space constraints. And I will cheat somewhere down the road by altering the list a little.

But meanwhile, I've started on Jeanette Winterson's Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit last night (it's down there at #54). Decided to give it a good headstart. And no, it's not my favourite Winterson title. It's also not the Winterson title that I re-read most frequently. My personal favourite Winterson title is The Passion.


  1. In Search of Lost Time Marcel Proust
  2. War and Peace Leo Tolstoy
  3. Anna Karenina Leo Tolstoy
  4. The Idiot Fyodor Dostoevsky
  5. The Gambler Fyodor Dostoevsky
  6. Don Quixote Miguel De Cervantes
  7. Love in the Time of Cholera Gabriel Garcia Marquez
  8. One Hundred Years of Solitude Gabriel Garcia Marquez
  9. Flaubert's Parrot Julian Barnes
  10. Steppenwolf Herman Hesse
  11. Moby Dick Herman Melville
  12. The Pure and the Impure Colette
  13. The Claudine Novels Colette
  14. Norweigian Woods Haruki Murakami
  15. Marioka Sisters Junichiro Tanizaki
  16. Tale of Genji
  17. To Kill A Mockingbird Harper Lee
  18. Death In Venice Thomas Mann
  19. Nightwood Djuna Barnes
  20. Perfume Patrick Suskind
  21. The Bluest Eye Toni Morrison
  22. The Confederacy of Dunces John Kennedy Toole
  23. The House of Mirth Edith Wharton
  24. The Iliad Homer
  25. The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter Carson McCullers
  26. Gilgamesh trans. Stephen Mitchell
  27. The Immoralist Andre Gide
  28. Fruits of the Earth Andre Gide
  29. The Wings of the Dove Henry James
  30. The Moonstone Wilkie Collins
  31. Great Expectations Charles Dickens
  32. Dracula Bram Stoker
  33. The Deptford Trilogy Robertson Davis
  34. The Quiet American Graham Greene
  35. Master and Margarita Mikhail Bulgakov
  36. Of Human Bondage W. Somerset Maugham
  37. Jane Eyre Charlotte Bronte
  38. Middlemarch George Eliot
  39. A Fine Balance Rohinton Mistry
  40. Villette Charlotte Bronte
  41. Midnight's Children Salman Rushdie
  42. Farewell to Arms Ernest Hemingway
  43. The New York Trilogy Paul Auster
  44. Memoirs of Hadrian Marguerite Yourcenar
  45. The Three Musketeers Alexandre Dumas
  46. Complete Father Brown G. K. Chesterton
  47. The Handmaid's Tale Margaret Atwood
  48. Lolita Vladimir Nabokov
  49. Giovanni's Room James Baldwin
  50. The Great Gatsby F. Scott Fitzgerald
  51. The House of the Seven Gables Nathaniel Hawthorne
  52. Blindness Jose Saramago
  53. Hunger Knut Hamsun
  54. Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit Jeanette Winterson
  55. Sexing the Cherry Jeanette Winterson
  56. Orlando Virginia Woolf
  57. One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest Ken Kesey
  58. Madame Bovary Gustave Flaubert
  59. Les Liaisons Dangereuses Pierre Choderlos de Laclos
  60. The Colour Purple Alice Walker
  61. The Secret Agent Joseph Conrad
  62. Magus John Fowles
  63. Unbearable Lightness of Being Milan Kundera
  64. The Four Quartets T. S. Eliot
  65. Fall on Your Knees Ann-Marie MacDonald
  66. Gitanjali Rabindranath Tagore
  67. The Conference of the Birds Farid Ud-Din Attar
  68. The Prophet Khalil Ghibran
  69. Maximum City Suketu Mehta
  70. The Snow Leopard Peter Matthiessen
  71. Guns, Germs and Steel Jared Diamond
  72. The Crusades Through Arab Eyes Amin Maalouf
  73. Yogasutra of Patanjali
  74. Ways of Seeing John Berger
  75. Pilgrim at Tinker Creek Annie Dillard
  76. The Qu'ran
  77. Art of War Sun Tzu
  78. Book of Five Rings Miyamoto Musashi
  79. Twenty Love Poems and A Song of Despair Pablo Neruda
  80. Hagakure
  81. Seven Storey Mountain Thomas Merton
  82. Stiff Mary Roach
  83. Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee Dee Brown
  84. Meditations Marcus Aurelius
  85. A History of God Karen Armstrong
  86. A Moveable Feast Ernest Hemingway
  87. Diet For A Small Planet Frances Moore Lappe
  88. Dark Night of the Soul John of the Cross
  89. Myth of Sisyphus Albert Camus
  90. The Places that Scares You Pema Chodron
  91. In Praise of Folly Erasmus
  92. Beyond Belief Elaine Pagels
  93. The Histories Herodotus
  94. Bhagavad Gita
  95. An Autobiography: The Story of My Experiments with Truth Mohandas Gandhi
  96. Confessions Saint Augustine
  97. Saint Francis of Assisi G. K. Chesterton
  98. The Varieties of Religious Experience William James
  99. A Room of One's Own Virginia Woolf
  100. Dhammapada

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

I haven't even read 10% of these. Shucks.

I have so far only done Lolita.

That's like 1%.

darkorpheus said...

That's actually one I never got around to finishing. See, you have read something I have not read. Yay. ;)

Anonymous said...

For that one pathetic one i read, you probably read 10 others.

darkorpheus said...

actually, I've only really done 8% of the list...so...;p