Slightly Better "Great Books" Memes
This one is based on the Great Books Program of Mortimer Adler and others. Give yourself a point for every complete work on this list that you have read - i.e. if you've read 6 Shakespeare plays, 6 points; if you've read Goethe's Faust but not Dichtung und Wahrheit, one point. Also, note the names of the works from an author's oeuvre you've read.
I'm putting what I've read in blue, and what I'm ashamed not to have read in red. Eventually I'd love to be able to say I've read all of this...but I guess we'll see. about that.
1. Homer: The Iliad, The Odyssey
2. The Old Testament - 1
3. Aeschylus: Tragedies
4. Sophocles: Tragedies - 2 (Oedipus Rex, Oedipus at Colonus)
5. Herodotus: Histories
6. Euripides: Tragedies
7. Thucydides: History of the Peloponnesian War
8. Hippocrates: Medical Writings
9. Aristophanes: Comedies
10. Plato: Dialogues
11. Aristotle: Works - 1 (Analytica Priora)
12. Epicurus: "Letter to Herodotus", "Letter to Menoecus"
13. Euclid: The Elements
14. Archimedes: Works
15. Apollonius: The Conic Sections
16. Cicero: Works
17. Lucretius: On the Nature of Things
18. Virgil: Works (especially The Aeneid)
19. Horace: Works
20. Livy: The History of Rome
21. Ovid: Works - parts of The Metamorphosis, but not enough to count
22. Plutarch: Parallel Lives; Moralia
23. Tacitus: Histories; Annals; Agricola; Germania
24. Nicomachus of Gerasa: Introduction to Arithmetic
25. Epictetus: Discourses; Enchiridion
26. Ptolemy: Almagest
27. Lucian: Works
28. Marcus Aurelius: Meditations
29. Galen: On the Natural Faculties
30. The New Testament - 1
31. Plotinus: The Enneads
32. St. Augustine: "On the Teacher"; Confessions; City of God; On Christian Doctrine (esp. the Confessions)
33. The Song of Roland
34. The Nibelungenlied - 1
35. The Saga of Burnt Njál - 1 (REPRESENT!!!)
36. St. Thomas Aquinas: Summa Theologica
37. Dante Alighieri: The New Life (La Vita Nuova); "On Monarchy"; The Divine Comedy - I should soo get 3 points for The Divine Comedy
38. Geoffrey Chaucer: Troilus and Criseyde; The Canterbury Tales (must read the Canterbury Tales!)
39. Leonardo da Vinci: Notebooks
40. Niccolò Machiavelli: The Prince; Discourses on the First Ten Books of Livy
41. Desiderius Erasmus: The Praise of Folly
42. Nicolaus Copernicus: On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres
43. Thomas More: Utopia
44. Martin Luther: Table Talk; Three Treatises
45. Francois Rabelais: Gargantua and Pantagruel
46. John Calvin: Institutes of the Christian Religion
47. Michel de Montaigne: Essays
48. William Gilbert: On the Lodestone and Magnetic Bodies
49. Miguel de Cervantes: Don Quixote
50. Edmund Spenser: Prothalamion; The Faerie Queene
51. Francis Bacon: Essays; The Advancement of Learning; Novum Organum; The New Atlantis
52. William Shakespeare: Poetry and Plays - 5. Hamlet, Othello, Romeo and Juliet, Macbeth, most of the Sonnets
53. Galileo Galilei: Starry Messenger; Dialogues Concerning Two New Sciences - I really want to read Starry Messenger
54. Johannes Kepler: The Epitome of Copernican Astronomy; Concerning the Harmonies of the World
55. William Harvey: On the Motion of the Heart and Blood in Animals; On the Circulation of the Blood; On the Generation of Animals
56. Thomas Hobbes: Leviathan
57. René Descartes: Rules for the Direction of the Mind; Discourse on Method; Geometry; Meditations on First Philosophy
58. John Milton: Works
59. Molière: Comedies
60. Blaise Pascal: The Provincial Letters; Pensées; Scientific Treatises
61. Christiaan Huygens: Treatise on Light
62. Benedict de Spinoza: Ethics
63. John Locke: A Letter Concerning Toleration; Of Civil Government; Essay Concerning Human Understanding; Some Thoughts Concerning Education
64. Jean Baptiste Racine: Tragedies
65. Isaac Newton: Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy; Opticks
66. Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz: Discourse on Metaphysics; New Essays Concerning Human Understanding; "Monadology"
67. Daniel Defoe: Robinson Crusoe - 1
68. Jonathan Swift: "A Tale of a Tub"; A Journal to Stella; Gulliver's Travels; "A Modest Proposal" - 1 for Gulliver. I so want to read "A Modest Proposal", though
69. William Congreve: The Way of the World
70. George Berkeley: Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge
71. Alexander Pope: "Essay on Criticism"; "The Rape of the Lock"; "Essay on Man"
72. Charles de Secondat, baron de Montesquieu: Persian Letters, Spirit of the Laws - 1, for Persian Letters. Completely delightful.
73. Voltaire: Letters on the English, Candide, Philosophical Dictionary - but I've read L'Ingénu
74. Henry Fielding: Joseph Andrews, Tom Jones
75. Samuel Johnson: "The Vanity of Human Wishes", Dictionary, Rasselas, Lives of the Poets - 1, for reading the Introduction to his dictionary and writing an essay on it
76. David Hume: A Treatise of Human Nature, Essays Moral and Political, An Enquiry concerning Human Understanding
77. Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Discourse on the Origin of Inequality, On Political Economy, Emile, The Social Contract
78. Laurence Sterne: Tristram Shandy, A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy
79. Adam Smith: The Theory of Moral Sentiments, The Wealth of Nations
80. Immanuel Kant: Critique of Pure Reason, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, Critique of Practical Reason; The Science of Right; Critique of Judgment; Perpetual Peace
81. Edward Gibbon: The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire; Autobiography
82. James Boswell: Journal; The Life of Samuel Johnson, LL.D.
83. Antoine Laurent Lavoisier: Elements of Chemistry
84. Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and James Madison: The Federalist Papers
85. Jeremy Bentham: Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation; Theory of Fictions
86. Edmund Burke: Reflections on the Revolution in France
87. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe: Faust; Poetry and Truth - 1, for Faust, but I've read the first volume of Dichtung and Wahrheit, and six or seven of Goethe's other major works
88. Jean Baptiste Joseph Fourier: Analytical Theory of Heat
89. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel: The Phenomenology of Spirit; The Philosophy of Right; Lectures on the Philosophy of History - I've read fragments of the Phenomenology of Spirit, but not enough to merit a point
90. William Wordsworth: Poems
91. Samuel Taylor Coleridge: Poems; Biographia Literaria
92. Jane Austen: Pride and Prejudice; Emma - 1 for P&P; working on Emma
93. Carl von Clausewitz: On War
94. Stendhal: The Red and the Black; The Charterhouse of Parma; Stendhal
95. Lord Byron: Don Juan
96. Arthur Schopenhauer: Studies in Pessimism
97. Michael Faraday: The Chemical History of a Candle; Experimental Researches in Electricity
98. Charles Lyell: Principles of Geology - I'm more than a little ashamed I haven't read this yet
99. Auguste Comte: The Positive Philosophy
100. Honoré de Balzac: Le Père Goriot; Eugenie Grandet
101. Ralph Waldo Emerson: Representative Men, Essays, Journal
102. Nathaniel Hawthorne: The Scarlet Letter
103. Alexis de Tocqueville: Democracy in America
104. John Stuart Mill: A System of Logic; On Liberty; Representative Government; Utilitarianism; The Subjection of Women; Autobiography
105. Charles Darwin: The Origin of Species; The Descent of Man; Autobiography
106. Charles Dickens: The Pickwick Papers; David Copperfield; Hard Times
107. Claude Bernard: Introduction to the Study of Experimental Medicine
108. Henry David Thoreau: "Civil Disobedience"; Walden
109. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels: Capital; The Communist Manifesto
110. George Eliot: Adam Bede; Middlemarch
111. Herman Melville: Moby-Dick; Billy Budd - 1 for Moby Dick, which I need to reread
112. Fyodor Dostoevsky: Crime and Punishment; The Idiot; The Brothers Karamazov
113. Gustave Flaubert: Madame Bovary; Three Stories
114. Henrik Ibsen: Plays
115. Leo Tolstoy: War and Peace; Anna Karenina; What is Art?; Twenty-Three Tales
116. Mark Twain: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn; The Mysterious Stranger - 1 for Huck Finn
117. William James: The Principles of Psychology; The Varieties of Religious Experience; Pragmatism; Essays in Radical Empiricism
118. Henry James: The American; The Ambassadors
119. Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche: Thus Spoke Zarathustra; Beyond Good and Evil; The Genealogy of Morals; The Will to Power - 1 for Thus Spoke Zarathustra
120. Jules Henri Poincaré: Science and Hypothesis; Science and Method
121. Sigmund Freud: The Interpretation of Dreams; Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis; Civilization and Its Discontents; New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis
122. George Bernard Shaw: Plays and Prefaces
123. Max Planck: Origin and Development of the Quantum Theory; Where Is Science Going?; Scientific Autobiography
124. Henri Bergson: Time and Free Will; Matter and Memory; Creative Evolution; The Two Sources of Morality and Religion
125. John Dewey: How We Think; Democracy and Education; Experience and Nature; Logic: The Theory of Inquiry
126. Alfred North Whitehead: An Introduction to Mathematics; Science and the Modern World; The Aims of Education and Other Essays; Adventures of Ideas
127. George Santayana: The Life of Reason; Skepticism and Animal Faith; Persons and Places
128. Lenin: The State and Revolution
129. Marcel Proust: Remembrance of Things Past (the revised translation is In Search of Lost Time; the original French title is À la recherche du temps perdu)
130. Bertrand Russell: The Problems of Philosophy; The Analysis of Mind; An Inquiry into Meaning and Truth; Human Knowledge, Its Scope and Limits
131. Thomas Mann: The Magic Mountain; Joseph and His Brothers
132. Albert Einstein: The Meaning of Relativity; On the Method of Theoretical Physics; The Evolution of Physics
133. James Joyce: "The Dead" in Dubliners; A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man; Ulysses
134. Jacques Maritain: Art and Scholasticism; The Degrees of Knowledge; The Rights of Man and Natural Law; True Humanism
135. Franz Kafka: The Trial; The Castle - 1 for The Trial; also read a bunch of his shorter prose
136. Arnold J. Toynbee: A Study of History; Civilization on Trial
137. Jean-Paul Sartre: Nausea; No Exit; Being and Nothingness
138. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn: The First Circle; Cancer Ward
139. Paul Auster: Mr. Vertigo; City of Glass
140. Don Delillo: Libra; White Noise
I count twenty-five points! Huzzah!
And since the 20th century is rather underrepresented on the above list, which was published in 1940 and revised in 1972, here's Waterstone's 100 Greatest Books of the 20th Century, which I suspect is the basis for the other list that's floating around the web.
The Books of the Century
In September 1996 Waterstone's, in association with Channel 4 television, launched a U.K. search for the greatest books of the twentieth century - a chance for you, the reading public, to have your say. There was an overwhelming response, and a huge variety of books and authors voted for; over four thousand separate books, from On the Road to The Highway Code, from The Female Eunuch to Men Behaving Badly, from James Joyce to James and The Giant Peach.
(By the way, you can so tell that these books were chosen by the English public. Roald Dahl 4 times in the top 100? I suspect a lot of people who voted hadn't done much reading since they were of Roald Dahl-appropriate age. Not knockin' Dahl, but when Samuel Beckett doesn't even make the list...)
1. The Lord of the Rings , J. R. R. Tolkien - X
2. 1984 , George Orwell
3. Animal Farm , George Orwell
4. Ulysses, James Joyce
5. Catch-22, Joseph Heller
6. The Catcher in the Rye , J.D. Salinger - X
7. To Kill a Mockingbird , Harper Lee - X
8. One Hundred Years of Solitude , Gabriel Garcia Marquez
9. The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck
10. Trainspotting, Irvine Welsh
11. Wild Swans, Jung Chang
12. The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald
13. The Lord of the Flies, William Golding
14. On the Road, Jack Kerouac
15. Brave New World, Aldous Huxley
16. The Wind in the Willows, Kenneth Grahame - X
17. Winnie the Pooh, A.A. Milne - X
18. The Color Purple, Alice Walker
19. The Hobbit, J. R. R. Tolkien - X
20. The Outsider, Albert Camus - as soon as my French is good enough...
21. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, C. S. Lewis - X
22. The Trial, Franz Kafka - X
23. Gone with the Wind, Margaret Mitchell
24 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams
25. Midnight's Children, Salman Rushdie
26. The Diary of Anne Frank, Anne Frank - X
27. A Clockwork Orange, Anthony Burgess
28. Sons and Lovers, D. H. Lawrence
29.To the Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf
30. If This is a Man, Primo Levi
31. Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov
32. The Wasp Factory, Iain Banks
33. A La Recherche du Temps Perdu, Marcel Proust
34. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Roald Dahl - X
35. Of Mice and Men, John Steinbeck
36. Beloved, Toni Morrison
37. Possession, A. S. Byatt
38. The Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad
39.A Passage to India, E. M. Forster
40. Watership Down, Richard Adams
41. Sophie's World, Jostein Gaarder - X
42. The Name of the Rose, Umberto Eco
43. Love in the Time of Cholera, Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44. Rebecca, Daphne du Maurier
45. The Remains of the Day, Kazuo Ishiguro
46. The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Milan Kundera
47. Birdsong, Sebastian Faulks
48. Howard's End, E. M. Forster
49. Brideshead Revisited, Evelyn Waugh
50. A Suitable Boy, Vikram Seth
51. Dune, - Frank Herbert
52. A Prayer for Owen Meany, - John Irvine
53. Perfume, - Patrick Süskind
54. Doctor Zhivago, - Boris Pasternak
55. Gormenghast, - Mervyn Peake
56. Cider with Rosie, - Laurie Lee
57. The Bell Jar, Sylvia Plath
58. The Handmaid's Tale, Margaret Atwood
59. Testament of Youth, Vera Brittain
60.The Magus, John Fowles
61. Brighton Rock, Graham Greene
62. The Ragged-Trousered Philanthropists - Robert Tressell
63. The Master and Margarita, Mikhail Bulgakov
64. Tales from the City, Armistead Maupin
65. The French Lieutenant's Woman, John Fowles
66. Captain Corelli's Mandolin, Louis de Bernières
67. Slaughterhouse 5, Kurt Vonnegut
68. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Robert Pirsig
69. A Room with a View, E. M. Forster
70. Lucky Jim, - Kingsley Amis
71. It , Stephen King
72. The Power and the Glory, Graham Greene
73. The Stand, Stephen King
74. All Quiet on the Western Front, - Erich Maria Remarque
75. Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha, Roddy Doyle
76. Matilda, Roald Dahl - X
77. American Psycho, Brett Easton Ellis
78. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Hunter S. Thompson
79. A Brief History of Time, Stephen Hawking
80. James and the Giant Peach , Roald Dahl - X
81. Lady Chatterley's Lover, D. H. Lawrence
82. The Bonfire of the Vanities, Tom Wolfe
83. Complete Cookery Course, Delia Smith
84. An Evil Cradling, Brian Keenan
85. The Rainbow, D. H. Lawrence
86. Down and Out in Paris and London, George Orwell
87. 2001 - A Space Odyssey, Arthur C. Clarke
88. The Tin Drum, Gunter Grass - X
89.One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, Alexander Solzhenitsyn
90. A Long Walk to Freedom, Nelson Mandela
91. The Selfish Gene, Richard Dawkins
92. Jurassic Park, Michael Crichton
93. The Alexandria Quartet, Lawrence Durrell
94. Cry the Beloved Country, Alan Paton
95. High Fidelity, Nick Hornby
96. The Van, Roddy Doyle
97. The BFG, Roald Dahl - X
98. Earthly Powers, Anthony Burgess
99. I, Claudius, Robert Graves
100. The Horse Whisperer, Nicholas Evans
Just Missed Out - the next twenty-five
The Waste Land & Other Poems, T. S. Eliot
East of Eden, John Steinbeck
Waiting for Godot, Samuel Beckett - X, and should so have been in the top 100
Four Quarters, T. S. Eliot
The Secret History, Donna Tartt
Fever Pitch Nick Hornby
The Old Man & the Sea, Ernest Hemingway
Darkness at Noon Arthur Koestler
My Family & Other Animals, Gerald Durrell
Under Milk Wood, Dylan Thomas
For Whom the Bell Tolls, Ernest Hemingway
London Fields, Martin Amis
The Sound & the Fury, William Faulkner
The Shipping News, E. Annie Proulx - X
The Female Eunuch, Germaine Greer
Cat's Eye, Margaret Atwood
The Plague, Albert Camus
Interview with the Vampire, Anne Rice
Women in Love, D. H. Lawrence
The Second Sex, Simone de Beavoir
The Good Soldier, Ford Madox Brown
The Go-Between, L. P. Hartley
Orlando, Virginia Woolf
Good-bye to All That, Robert Graves
Cold Comfort Farm, Stella Gibbons
A meager fourteen X's in the top 100, with an additional 2 in nos 101-125.
I'm putting what I've read in blue, and what I'm ashamed not to have read in red. Eventually I'd love to be able to say I've read all of this...but I guess we'll see. about that.
1. Homer: The Iliad, The Odyssey
2. The Old Testament - 1
3. Aeschylus: Tragedies
4. Sophocles: Tragedies - 2 (Oedipus Rex, Oedipus at Colonus)
5. Herodotus: Histories
6. Euripides: Tragedies
7. Thucydides: History of the Peloponnesian War
8. Hippocrates: Medical Writings
9. Aristophanes: Comedies
10. Plato: Dialogues
11. Aristotle: Works - 1 (Analytica Priora)
12. Epicurus: "Letter to Herodotus", "Letter to Menoecus"
13. Euclid: The Elements
14. Archimedes: Works
15. Apollonius: The Conic Sections
16. Cicero: Works
17. Lucretius: On the Nature of Things
18. Virgil: Works (especially The Aeneid)
19. Horace: Works
20. Livy: The History of Rome
21. Ovid: Works - parts of The Metamorphosis, but not enough to count
22. Plutarch: Parallel Lives; Moralia
23. Tacitus: Histories; Annals; Agricola; Germania
24. Nicomachus of Gerasa: Introduction to Arithmetic
25. Epictetus: Discourses; Enchiridion
26. Ptolemy: Almagest
27. Lucian: Works
28. Marcus Aurelius: Meditations
29. Galen: On the Natural Faculties
30. The New Testament - 1
31. Plotinus: The Enneads
32. St. Augustine: "On the Teacher"; Confessions; City of God; On Christian Doctrine (esp. the Confessions)
33. The Song of Roland
34. The Nibelungenlied - 1
35. The Saga of Burnt Njál - 1 (REPRESENT!!!)
36. St. Thomas Aquinas: Summa Theologica
37. Dante Alighieri: The New Life (La Vita Nuova); "On Monarchy"; The Divine Comedy - I should soo get 3 points for The Divine Comedy
38. Geoffrey Chaucer: Troilus and Criseyde; The Canterbury Tales (must read the Canterbury Tales!)
39. Leonardo da Vinci: Notebooks
40. Niccolò Machiavelli: The Prince; Discourses on the First Ten Books of Livy
41. Desiderius Erasmus: The Praise of Folly
42. Nicolaus Copernicus: On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres
43. Thomas More: Utopia
44. Martin Luther: Table Talk; Three Treatises
45. Francois Rabelais: Gargantua and Pantagruel
46. John Calvin: Institutes of the Christian Religion
47. Michel de Montaigne: Essays
48. William Gilbert: On the Lodestone and Magnetic Bodies
49. Miguel de Cervantes: Don Quixote
50. Edmund Spenser: Prothalamion; The Faerie Queene
51. Francis Bacon: Essays; The Advancement of Learning; Novum Organum; The New Atlantis
52. William Shakespeare: Poetry and Plays - 5. Hamlet, Othello, Romeo and Juliet, Macbeth, most of the Sonnets
53. Galileo Galilei: Starry Messenger; Dialogues Concerning Two New Sciences - I really want to read Starry Messenger
54. Johannes Kepler: The Epitome of Copernican Astronomy; Concerning the Harmonies of the World
55. William Harvey: On the Motion of the Heart and Blood in Animals; On the Circulation of the Blood; On the Generation of Animals
56. Thomas Hobbes: Leviathan
57. René Descartes: Rules for the Direction of the Mind; Discourse on Method; Geometry; Meditations on First Philosophy
58. John Milton: Works
59. Molière: Comedies
60. Blaise Pascal: The Provincial Letters; Pensées; Scientific Treatises
61. Christiaan Huygens: Treatise on Light
62. Benedict de Spinoza: Ethics
63. John Locke: A Letter Concerning Toleration; Of Civil Government; Essay Concerning Human Understanding; Some Thoughts Concerning Education
64. Jean Baptiste Racine: Tragedies
65. Isaac Newton: Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy; Opticks
66. Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz: Discourse on Metaphysics; New Essays Concerning Human Understanding; "Monadology"
67. Daniel Defoe: Robinson Crusoe - 1
68. Jonathan Swift: "A Tale of a Tub"; A Journal to Stella; Gulliver's Travels; "A Modest Proposal" - 1 for Gulliver. I so want to read "A Modest Proposal", though
69. William Congreve: The Way of the World
70. George Berkeley: Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge
71. Alexander Pope: "Essay on Criticism"; "The Rape of the Lock"; "Essay on Man"
72. Charles de Secondat, baron de Montesquieu: Persian Letters, Spirit of the Laws - 1, for Persian Letters. Completely delightful.
73. Voltaire: Letters on the English, Candide, Philosophical Dictionary - but I've read L'Ingénu
74. Henry Fielding: Joseph Andrews, Tom Jones
75. Samuel Johnson: "The Vanity of Human Wishes", Dictionary, Rasselas, Lives of the Poets - 1, for reading the Introduction to his dictionary and writing an essay on it
76. David Hume: A Treatise of Human Nature, Essays Moral and Political, An Enquiry concerning Human Understanding
77. Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Discourse on the Origin of Inequality, On Political Economy, Emile, The Social Contract
78. Laurence Sterne: Tristram Shandy, A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy
79. Adam Smith: The Theory of Moral Sentiments, The Wealth of Nations
80. Immanuel Kant: Critique of Pure Reason, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, Critique of Practical Reason; The Science of Right; Critique of Judgment; Perpetual Peace
81. Edward Gibbon: The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire; Autobiography
82. James Boswell: Journal; The Life of Samuel Johnson, LL.D.
83. Antoine Laurent Lavoisier: Elements of Chemistry
84. Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and James Madison: The Federalist Papers
85. Jeremy Bentham: Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation; Theory of Fictions
86. Edmund Burke: Reflections on the Revolution in France
87. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe: Faust; Poetry and Truth - 1, for Faust, but I've read the first volume of Dichtung and Wahrheit, and six or seven of Goethe's other major works
88. Jean Baptiste Joseph Fourier: Analytical Theory of Heat
89. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel: The Phenomenology of Spirit; The Philosophy of Right; Lectures on the Philosophy of History - I've read fragments of the Phenomenology of Spirit, but not enough to merit a point
90. William Wordsworth: Poems
91. Samuel Taylor Coleridge: Poems; Biographia Literaria
92. Jane Austen: Pride and Prejudice; Emma - 1 for P&P; working on Emma
93. Carl von Clausewitz: On War
94. Stendhal: The Red and the Black; The Charterhouse of Parma; Stendhal
95. Lord Byron: Don Juan
96. Arthur Schopenhauer: Studies in Pessimism
97. Michael Faraday: The Chemical History of a Candle; Experimental Researches in Electricity
98. Charles Lyell: Principles of Geology - I'm more than a little ashamed I haven't read this yet
99. Auguste Comte: The Positive Philosophy
100. Honoré de Balzac: Le Père Goriot; Eugenie Grandet
101. Ralph Waldo Emerson: Representative Men, Essays, Journal
102. Nathaniel Hawthorne: The Scarlet Letter
103. Alexis de Tocqueville: Democracy in America
104. John Stuart Mill: A System of Logic; On Liberty; Representative Government; Utilitarianism; The Subjection of Women; Autobiography
105. Charles Darwin: The Origin of Species; The Descent of Man; Autobiography
106. Charles Dickens: The Pickwick Papers; David Copperfield; Hard Times
107. Claude Bernard: Introduction to the Study of Experimental Medicine
108. Henry David Thoreau: "Civil Disobedience"; Walden
109. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels: Capital; The Communist Manifesto
110. George Eliot: Adam Bede; Middlemarch
111. Herman Melville: Moby-Dick; Billy Budd - 1 for Moby Dick, which I need to reread
112. Fyodor Dostoevsky: Crime and Punishment; The Idiot; The Brothers Karamazov
113. Gustave Flaubert: Madame Bovary; Three Stories
114. Henrik Ibsen: Plays
115. Leo Tolstoy: War and Peace; Anna Karenina; What is Art?; Twenty-Three Tales
116. Mark Twain: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn; The Mysterious Stranger - 1 for Huck Finn
117. William James: The Principles of Psychology; The Varieties of Religious Experience; Pragmatism; Essays in Radical Empiricism
118. Henry James: The American; The Ambassadors
119. Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche: Thus Spoke Zarathustra; Beyond Good and Evil; The Genealogy of Morals; The Will to Power - 1 for Thus Spoke Zarathustra
120. Jules Henri Poincaré: Science and Hypothesis; Science and Method
121. Sigmund Freud: The Interpretation of Dreams; Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis; Civilization and Its Discontents; New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis
122. George Bernard Shaw: Plays and Prefaces
123. Max Planck: Origin and Development of the Quantum Theory; Where Is Science Going?; Scientific Autobiography
124. Henri Bergson: Time and Free Will; Matter and Memory; Creative Evolution; The Two Sources of Morality and Religion
125. John Dewey: How We Think; Democracy and Education; Experience and Nature; Logic: The Theory of Inquiry
126. Alfred North Whitehead: An Introduction to Mathematics; Science and the Modern World; The Aims of Education and Other Essays; Adventures of Ideas
127. George Santayana: The Life of Reason; Skepticism and Animal Faith; Persons and Places
128. Lenin: The State and Revolution
129. Marcel Proust: Remembrance of Things Past (the revised translation is In Search of Lost Time; the original French title is À la recherche du temps perdu)
130. Bertrand Russell: The Problems of Philosophy; The Analysis of Mind; An Inquiry into Meaning and Truth; Human Knowledge, Its Scope and Limits
131. Thomas Mann: The Magic Mountain; Joseph and His Brothers
132. Albert Einstein: The Meaning of Relativity; On the Method of Theoretical Physics; The Evolution of Physics
133. James Joyce: "The Dead" in Dubliners; A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man; Ulysses
134. Jacques Maritain: Art and Scholasticism; The Degrees of Knowledge; The Rights of Man and Natural Law; True Humanism
135. Franz Kafka: The Trial; The Castle - 1 for The Trial; also read a bunch of his shorter prose
136. Arnold J. Toynbee: A Study of History; Civilization on Trial
137. Jean-Paul Sartre: Nausea; No Exit; Being and Nothingness
138. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn: The First Circle; Cancer Ward
139. Paul Auster: Mr. Vertigo; City of Glass
140. Don Delillo: Libra; White Noise
I count twenty-five points! Huzzah!
And since the 20th century is rather underrepresented on the above list, which was published in 1940 and revised in 1972, here's Waterstone's 100 Greatest Books of the 20th Century, which I suspect is the basis for the other list that's floating around the web.
The Books of the Century
In September 1996 Waterstone's, in association with Channel 4 television, launched a U.K. search for the greatest books of the twentieth century - a chance for you, the reading public, to have your say. There was an overwhelming response, and a huge variety of books and authors voted for; over four thousand separate books, from On the Road to The Highway Code, from The Female Eunuch to Men Behaving Badly, from James Joyce to James and The Giant Peach.
(By the way, you can so tell that these books were chosen by the English public. Roald Dahl 4 times in the top 100? I suspect a lot of people who voted hadn't done much reading since they were of Roald Dahl-appropriate age. Not knockin' Dahl, but when Samuel Beckett doesn't even make the list...)
1. The Lord of the Rings , J. R. R. Tolkien - X
2. 1984 , George Orwell
3. Animal Farm , George Orwell
4. Ulysses, James Joyce
5. Catch-22, Joseph Heller
6. The Catcher in the Rye , J.D. Salinger - X
7. To Kill a Mockingbird , Harper Lee - X
8. One Hundred Years of Solitude , Gabriel Garcia Marquez
9. The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck
10. Trainspotting, Irvine Welsh
11. Wild Swans, Jung Chang
12. The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald
13. The Lord of the Flies, William Golding
14. On the Road, Jack Kerouac
15. Brave New World, Aldous Huxley
16. The Wind in the Willows, Kenneth Grahame - X
17. Winnie the Pooh, A.A. Milne - X
18. The Color Purple, Alice Walker
19. The Hobbit, J. R. R. Tolkien - X
20. The Outsider, Albert Camus - as soon as my French is good enough...
21. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, C. S. Lewis - X
22. The Trial, Franz Kafka - X
23. Gone with the Wind, Margaret Mitchell
24 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams
25. Midnight's Children, Salman Rushdie
26. The Diary of Anne Frank, Anne Frank - X
27. A Clockwork Orange, Anthony Burgess
28. Sons and Lovers, D. H. Lawrence
29.To the Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf
30. If This is a Man, Primo Levi
31. Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov
32. The Wasp Factory, Iain Banks
33. A La Recherche du Temps Perdu, Marcel Proust
34. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Roald Dahl - X
35. Of Mice and Men, John Steinbeck
36. Beloved, Toni Morrison
37. Possession, A. S. Byatt
38. The Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad
39.A Passage to India, E. M. Forster
40. Watership Down, Richard Adams
41. Sophie's World, Jostein Gaarder - X
42. The Name of the Rose, Umberto Eco
43. Love in the Time of Cholera, Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44. Rebecca, Daphne du Maurier
45. The Remains of the Day, Kazuo Ishiguro
46. The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Milan Kundera
47. Birdsong, Sebastian Faulks
48. Howard's End, E. M. Forster
49. Brideshead Revisited, Evelyn Waugh
50. A Suitable Boy, Vikram Seth
51. Dune, - Frank Herbert
52. A Prayer for Owen Meany, - John Irvine
53. Perfume, - Patrick Süskind
54. Doctor Zhivago, - Boris Pasternak
55. Gormenghast, - Mervyn Peake
56. Cider with Rosie, - Laurie Lee
57. The Bell Jar, Sylvia Plath
58. The Handmaid's Tale, Margaret Atwood
59. Testament of Youth, Vera Brittain
60.The Magus, John Fowles
61. Brighton Rock, Graham Greene
62. The Ragged-Trousered Philanthropists - Robert Tressell
63. The Master and Margarita, Mikhail Bulgakov
64. Tales from the City, Armistead Maupin
65. The French Lieutenant's Woman, John Fowles
66. Captain Corelli's Mandolin, Louis de Bernières
67. Slaughterhouse 5, Kurt Vonnegut
68. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Robert Pirsig
69. A Room with a View, E. M. Forster
70. Lucky Jim, - Kingsley Amis
71. It , Stephen King
72. The Power and the Glory, Graham Greene
73. The Stand, Stephen King
74. All Quiet on the Western Front, - Erich Maria Remarque
75. Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha, Roddy Doyle
76. Matilda, Roald Dahl - X
77. American Psycho, Brett Easton Ellis
78. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Hunter S. Thompson
79. A Brief History of Time, Stephen Hawking
80. James and the Giant Peach , Roald Dahl - X
81. Lady Chatterley's Lover, D. H. Lawrence
82. The Bonfire of the Vanities, Tom Wolfe
83. Complete Cookery Course, Delia Smith
84. An Evil Cradling, Brian Keenan
85. The Rainbow, D. H. Lawrence
86. Down and Out in Paris and London, George Orwell
87. 2001 - A Space Odyssey, Arthur C. Clarke
88. The Tin Drum, Gunter Grass - X
89.One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, Alexander Solzhenitsyn
90. A Long Walk to Freedom, Nelson Mandela
91. The Selfish Gene, Richard Dawkins
92. Jurassic Park, Michael Crichton
93. The Alexandria Quartet, Lawrence Durrell
94. Cry the Beloved Country, Alan Paton
95. High Fidelity, Nick Hornby
96. The Van, Roddy Doyle
97. The BFG, Roald Dahl - X
98. Earthly Powers, Anthony Burgess
99. I, Claudius, Robert Graves
100. The Horse Whisperer, Nicholas Evans
Just Missed Out - the next twenty-five
The Waste Land & Other Poems, T. S. Eliot
East of Eden, John Steinbeck
Waiting for Godot, Samuel Beckett - X, and should so have been in the top 100
Four Quarters, T. S. Eliot
The Secret History, Donna Tartt
Fever Pitch Nick Hornby
The Old Man & the Sea, Ernest Hemingway
Darkness at Noon Arthur Koestler
My Family & Other Animals, Gerald Durrell
Under Milk Wood, Dylan Thomas
For Whom the Bell Tolls, Ernest Hemingway
London Fields, Martin Amis
The Sound & the Fury, William Faulkner
The Shipping News, E. Annie Proulx - X
The Female Eunuch, Germaine Greer
Cat's Eye, Margaret Atwood
The Plague, Albert Camus
Interview with the Vampire, Anne Rice
Women in Love, D. H. Lawrence
The Second Sex, Simone de Beavoir
The Good Soldier, Ford Madox Brown
The Go-Between, L. P. Hartley
Orlando, Virginia Woolf
Good-bye to All That, Robert Graves
Cold Comfort Farm, Stella Gibbons
A meager fourteen X's in the top 100, with an additional 2 in nos 101-125.