The Top 100 Must Reads On BC
Italics mean they are on my To-Be-Read Pile = 16
Bold means I have read them = 19
Not bad for 21 years ;-)
1. Bastard out of Carolina, by Dorothy Allison
2. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, by Maya Angelou
3. The Handmaid's Tale, by Margaret Atwood
4. Pride and Prejudice, by Jane Austen
5. Waiting For Godot, by Samuel Beckett
6. Farenheit 451, by Ray Bradbury
7. Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Bronte
8. Wuthering Heights, by Emily Bronte
9. The Baron in the Trees, by Italo Calvino
10. The Stranger, by Albert Camus
11. Breakfast at Tiffany's, by Truman Capote
12. Cool Salsa, ed Lori M. Carlson
13. Alice in Wonderland, by Lewis Carroll
14. The Cherry Orchard, by Anton Chekov
15. The Awakening, by Kate Chopin
16. The House on Mango Street, by Sandra Cisneros
17. Heart of Darkness, by Joseph Conrad
18. The Inferno, by Dante
19. A Tale of Two Cities, by Charles Dickens
20. Poems, by Emily Dickinson
21. Ragtime, by E.L. Doctorow
22. Crime and Punishment, by Fydor Doestoevsky - tried to read it, gave up.
23. Invisible Man, by Ralph Ellison
24. The Beet Queen, by Louise Erdrich
25. As I Lay Dying, by William Faulkner
26. The Great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzgerald
27. Diary of a Young Girl, by Anne Frank
28. Grendel, by John Gardner
29. Unsettling America, ed Maria Mazziotti Gillian and Jennifer Gillian
30. Lord of the Flies, by William Golding
31. Mythology, by Edith Hamilton
32. A Raisin in the Sun, by Lorraine Hansberry
33. Tess of the D'Urbervilles, by Thomas Hardy
34. The Scarlet Letter, by Nathaniel Hawthorne
35. Catch-22, by Joseph Heller
36. A Farewell to Arms, by Ernest Hemingway
37. The Holy Bible
38. The Odyssey, by Homer
39. Their Eyes Were Watching God, by Zora Neale Hurston
40. Brave New World, by Aldous Huxley
41. A Doll's House, by Henrik Ibsen
42. Rhinoceros, by Eugene Ionesco
43. The World According to Garp, by John Irving
44. Daisy Miller, by Henry James
45. Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, by James Joyce
46. The Metamorphosis, by Franz Kafka
47. The Liars' Club, by Mary Karr
48. Schindler's Ark, by Thomas Keneally
49. On the Road, by Jack Kerouac
50. One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, by Ken Kesey
51. Annie John, by Jamaica Kincaid
52. The Painted Bird, by Jerzy Kosinski
53. Angels in America, by Tony Kushner - I have also seen the excellent TV adaptation.
54. To Kill a Mockingbird, by Harper Lee
55. Angela's Ashes, by Frank McCourt
56. The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, by Carson McCullers
57. One Hundred Years of Solitude, by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
58. In Country, by Bobbi Ann Mason
59. Death of a Salesman, by Arthur Miller
60. In Search of Color Everywhere, ed E. Ethlbert Miller
61. Beloved, by Toni Morrison
62. Harper's Anthology of 20th Century Native American Poetry, ed Duane Niatum
63. The Things They Carried, by Tim O'Brien
64. The Complete Stores, by Flannery O'Connor
65. Long Day's Journey Into Night, by Eugene O'Neill - My mum gave me a copy so I've read bits of it.
66. 1984, by George Orwell
67. Metamorphoses, by Ovid
68. The Bell Jar, by Sylvia Plath
69. Tales, by Edgar Allan Poe
70. Hunger of Memory, by Richard Rodriguez
71. Earth Shattering Poems, ed. Liz Rosenberg
72. The Ghost Writer, by Philip Roth
73. The Catcher in the Rye, by J.D. Salinger
74. No Exit, by Jean Paul Sartre
75. Hamlet, by William Shakespeare
76. Macbeth, by William Shakespeare
77. A Midsummer Night's Dream, by William Shakespeare
78. Romeo and Juliet, by William Shakespeare
79. Pygmalion, by George Bernard Shaw
80. 100 Best-Loved Poems, ed Phillip Smith
81. Maus: A Survivor's Tale, by Art Spiegelman
82. The Grapes of Wrath, by John Steinbeck
83. Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, by Robert Louis Stevenson
84. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, by Tom Stoppard
85. The Joy Luck Club, by Amy Tan
86. Walden, by Henry David Thoreau
87. Anna Karenina, by Leo Tolstoy
88. Huckleberry Finn, by Mark Twain
89. Candide, by Voltaire
90. Cat's Cradle, by Kurt Vonnegut
91. The Color Purple, by Alice Walker
92. The Double Helix, by James D. Watson
93. Ethan Frome, by Edith Wharton
94. Leaves of Grass, by Walt Whitman
95. The Importance of Being Earnest, by Oscar Wilde
96. Our Town, by Thornton Wilder - I've seen the play does that count?
97. The Glass Menagerie, by Tennessee Williams
98. This Boy's Life: A Memoir, by Tobias Wolff
99. Mrs. Dalloway, by Virginia Woolf
100. Native Son, by Richard Wright
101. The Autobiograpy of Malcolm X, by Malcolm X with Alex Haley