The Big Read Test

[Zankapfel]

From BBC's Big Read Project (http://neabigread.org/index.php) the list of the Top 100 most influential/loved books of all time.
Not a great source, but one has to start somewhere.
Personally, I find a few of the titles are quite questionable, and there are books that have been inexplicably left out. But that's part of the problematic of popular choice.

Here are the rules, which I have altered slightly:

Bold those you have read in full.
Italicize those you have started but haven't finished.
Place an asterisk by those you intend to read/finish someday *
Mark in red the books you love.
Mark in blue those you read, but are not particularly fond of.



---------------------


Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
The Bible
Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
Little Women - Louisa May Alcott
Tess of the D'Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
Complete Works of Shakespeare
Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
The Time Traveller's Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
Middlemarch - George Eliot
Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
The Great Gatsby - F. Scott Fitzgerald
Bleak House - Charles Dickens
War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
Emma - Jane Austen
Persuasion - Jane Austen
The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis [odd bit of duplication re: #33]
The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
Captain Corelli's Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
Animal Farm - George Orwell
The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
A Prayer for Owen Meany - John Irving
The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood
Lord of the Flies - William Golding
Atonement - Ian McEwan
Life of Pi - Yann Martel
Dune - Frank Herbert
Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
The Secret History - Donna Tartt
The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
On The Road - Jack Kerouac
Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
Bridget Jones's Diary - Helen Fielding
Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie
Moby Dick - Herman Melville
Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
Dracula - Bram Stoker
The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
Ulysses - James Joyce
The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
Germinal - Emile Zola
Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
Possession - AS Byatt
A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
The Color Purple - Alice Walker
The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
Charlotte's Web - EB White
The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
The Faraway Tree Collection
Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
Watership Down - Richard Adams
A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
Hamlet - William Shakespeare [again, why the duplication?]
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
Les Miserables - Victor Hugo


And just out of curiosity, what books would you do away with and what would you choose for a substitute?

I'll let someone else post their results first, and I will follow.

[Sikeliot]

1. Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen *
2. The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien *
3. Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4. Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
5. To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6. The Bible
7. Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8. Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9. His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10. Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11. Little Women - Louisa May Alcott
12. Tess of the D'Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13. Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14. Complete Works of Shakespeare
15. Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16. The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17. Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18. Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger *
19. The Time Traveller's Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20. Middlemarch - George Eliot
21. Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22. The Great Gatsby - F. Scott Fitzgerald
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 *
34. Emma - Jane Austen
35. Persuasion - Jane Austen
36. The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis [odd bit of duplication re: #33]
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
41. Animal Farm - George Orwell *
42. The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown *
43. One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44. A Prayer for Owen Meany - John Irving
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
49. Lord of the Flies - William Golding *
50. Atonement - Ian McEwan
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
58. Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60. Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61. Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62. Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov *
63. The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64. The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold *
65. Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66. On The Road - Jack Kerouac
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
74. Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75. Ulysses - James Joyce
76. The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath *
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
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
88. The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom *
89. Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90. The Faraway Tree Collection
91. Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92. The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93. The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94. Watership Down - Richard Adams
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 [again, why the duplication?]
99. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl *
100. Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

[Lucretius]

too many important titles missing.

[_______]

1.Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen2.The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien3.Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4.Harry Potter series - JK Rowling5.To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee6.The Bible7.Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8.Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9.His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman10.Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11.Little Women - Louisa May Alcott[/B]12.Tess of the D'Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13.Catch 22 - Joseph Heller14.Complete Works of Shakespeare15.Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16.The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien17.Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks18.Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger19.The Time Traveller's Wife - Audrey Niffenegger20.Middlemarch - George Eliot
21.Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell22.The Great Gatsby - F. Scott Fitzgerald23.Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24.War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy25.The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams26.Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27.Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky28.Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
[B]29.Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll30.The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31.Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy32.David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33.Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34.Emma - Jane Austen35.Persuasion - Jane Austen
36.The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis [odd bit of duplication re: #33]37.The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38.Captain Corelli's Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39.Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden40.Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
41.Animal Farm - George Orwell42.The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43.One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44.A Prayer for Owen Meany - John Irving
45.The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46.Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery47.Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48.The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood49.Lord of the Flies - William Golding50.Atonement - Ian McEwan
51.Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52.Dune - Frank Herbert
53.Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons54.Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55.A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth56.The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57.A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58.Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59.The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon60.Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61.Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck62.Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov63.The Secret History - Donna Tartt64.The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65.Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66.On The Road - Jack Kerouac67.Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68.Bridget Jones's Diary - Helen Fielding69.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 Burnett74.Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75.Ulysses - James Joyce
76.The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath77.Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78.Germinal - Emile Zola
79.Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray80.Possession - AS Byatt
81.A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82.Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83.The Color Purple - Alice Walker84.The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85.Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86.A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87.Charlotte's Web - EB White88.The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89.Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90.The Faraway Tree Collection
91.Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad92.The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery93.The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks94.Watership Down - Richard Adams
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 [again, why the duplication?]99.Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl100.Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

[Psychonaut]

Here's mine:
Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
Harry Potter series - JK Rowling (don't judge me! :D)
To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
The Bible
Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
Little Women - Louisa May Alcott
Tess of the D'Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
Complete Works of Shakespeare
Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
The Time Traveller's Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
Middlemarch - George Eliot
Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
The Great Gatsby - F. Scott Fitzgerald
Bleak House - Charles Dickens
War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
Emma - Jane Austen
Persuasion - Jane Austen
The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis [odd bit of duplication re: #33]
The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
Captain Corelli's Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
Animal Farm - George Orwell
The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
A Prayer for Owen Meany - John Irving
The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood
Lord of the Flies - William Golding
Atonement - Ian McEwan
Life of Pi - Yann Martel
Dune - Frank Herbert
Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
The Secret History - Donna Tartt
The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
On The Road - Jack Kerouac
Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
Bridget Jones's Diary - Helen Fielding
Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie
Moby Dick - Herman Melville
Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
Dracula - Bram Stoker
The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
Ulysses - James Joyce
The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
Germinal - Emile Zola
Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
Possession - AS Byatt
A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
The Color Purple - Alice Walker
The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
Charlotte's Web - EB White
The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (I've read most, but not all of Doyle's original stories)
The Faraway Tree Collection
Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
Watership Down - Richard Adams
A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
Hamlet - William Shakespeare [again, why the duplication?]
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
Les Miserables - Victor Hugo



And just out of curiosity, what books would you do away with and what would you choose for a substitute?

If these are supposed to be the most important books of all time I can only wonder where all of the friggin classics are! Books that are, IMO, way more important than more than half of the books on the list would include:
The Orestia - Aeschylus
The Theban Plays - Sophocles
Parsifal - Wolfram von Eschenbach
Tristan - Gottfried von Strassburg
Le Morte d'Arthur - Thomas Mallory
The Divine Comedy - Dante
Paradise Lost - John Milton
Canterbury Tales - Chaucer
Faust - Goethe
Illiad/Odyssey - Homer
The Nibelungenleid
Beowulf

[Eldritch]

Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
The Bible
Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman*
Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
Little Women - Louisa May Alcott
Tess of the D'Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
Complete Works of Shakespeare
Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
The Time Traveller's Wife - Audrey Niffenegger*
Middlemarch - George Eliot
Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
The Great Gatsby - F. Scott Fitzgerald
Bleak House - Charles Dickens
War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh*
Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
Emma - Jane Austen
Persuasion - Jane Austen
The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis [odd bit of duplication re: #33] See above
The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
Captain Corelli's Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
Animal Farm - George Orwell
The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
A Prayer for Owen Meany - John Irving
The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood
Lord of the Flies - William Golding
Atonement - Ian McEwan
Life of Pi - Yann Martel
Dune - Frank Herbert
Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon*
A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
The Secret History - Donna Tartt
The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas*
On The Road - Jack Kerouac
Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
Bridget Jones's Diary - Helen Fielding :whistle:
Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie
Moby Dick - Herman Melville
Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
Dracula - Bram Stoker
The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
Ulysses - James Joyce
The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
Germinal - Emile Zola
Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
Possession - AS Byatt
A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
The Color Purple - Alice Walker
The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert*
A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
Charlotte's Web - EB White
The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
The Faraway Tree Collection
Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
Watership Down - Richard Adams
A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
Hamlet - William Shakespeare [again, why the duplication?]
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
Les Miserables - Victor Hugo


As for what should be on the list, well I'm terrible at making all-encompassing judgments. I would lose Harry Potter and Bridget Jones immediately, though.

Ishiguro's inclusion was a lovely touch. However the title by him on the list should have been The Unconsoled.

Iain Banks is probably the most overrated author ever (only among British Guardian readers and BBC journalists though, afaIk outside that scene not many people think much of him). Look to Windward isn't too shabby though, much better than The Wasp Factory. But of course it's science fiction (bleh! yuck!), so it cannot be included on a list for serious, highbrow people who want to show each other how highbrow they are. :rolleyes:

Two novels by Márquez (again, adored by the champagne socialist crowd, so they can say they read a South American author), but nothing by Borges, Bolaño, Llosa, Carpentier, Neruda, etc?

Either Arthur C. Clarke or Isaac Asimov should have been included if only for decency's sake (both deserve to be).

Where's Kafka, Hamsun, Mann, Hesse, Eco, Calvino, Márai, etc etc?

As for American authors, it's a disgrace that the greatest living one, Paul Auster, is not included.

And finally, where is the greatest novel ever written, Cervantes' Don Quijote de la Mancha ?!?

[W. R.]

Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
The Bible* - Stopped somewhere in the Old Testament.
Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
Little Women - Louisa May Alcott
Tess of the D'Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
Complete Works of Shakespeare
Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
The Time Traveller's Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
Middlemarch - George Eliot
Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
The Great Gatsby - F. Scott Fitzgerald
Bleak House - Charles Dickens
War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy - Forced to read it at school. :rolleyes2: Not bad.
The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis*
Emma - Jane Austen
Persuasion - Jane Austen
The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis* [odd bit of duplication re: #33]
The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
Captain Corelli's Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
Animal Farm - George Orwell
The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown <= :lol: Hallo, Dan! It's so odd to see you here.
One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
A Prayer for Owen Meany - John Irving
The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood
Lord of the Flies - William Golding
Atonement - Ian McEwan
Life of Pi - Yann Martel
Dune - Frank Herbert
Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
The Secret History - Donna Tartt
The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
On The Road - Jack Kerouac
Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
Bridget Jones's Diary - Helen Fielding
Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie
Moby Dick - Herman Melville
Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
Dracula - Bram Stoker
The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
Ulysses - James Joyce
The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
Germinal - Emile Zola
Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
Possession - AS Byatt
A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
The Color Purple - Alice Walker
The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
Charlotte's Web - EB White
The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle - Not sure if read them all, I think not.
The Faraway Tree Collection
Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
Watership Down - Richard Adams
A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
Hamlet - William Shakespeare [again, why the duplication?]
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

[The Ripper]

---------------------
Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
The Bible*
Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
Little Women - Louisa May Alcott
Tess of the D'Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
Complete Works of Shakespeare
Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
The Time Traveller's Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
Middlemarch - George Eliot
Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
The Great Gatsby - F. Scott Fitzgerald
Bleak House - Charles Dickens
War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy*
The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams*
Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
Emma - Jane Austen
Persuasion - Jane Austen
The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis [odd bit of duplication re: #33]
The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
Captain Corelli's Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
Animal Farm - George Orwell
The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
A Prayer for Owen Meany - John Irving
The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood
Lord of the Flies - William Golding
Atonement - Ian McEwan
Life of Pi - Yann Martel
Dune - Frank Herbert
Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
The Secret History - Donna Tartt
The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
On The Road - Jack Kerouac
Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
Bridget Jones's Diary - Helen Fielding
Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie
Moby Dick - Herman Melville
Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
Dracula - Bram Stoker
The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
Ulysses - James Joyce
The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
Germinal - Emile Zola
Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
Possession - AS Byatt
A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
The Color Purple - Alice Walker
The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
Charlotte's Web - EB White
The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
The Faraway Tree Collection
Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
Watership Down - Richard Adams
A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
Hamlet - William Shakespeare [again, why the duplication?]
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

[Groenewolf]

Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
The Bible, had read large part of the new testament and some of the old one but stopped somewhere in all those laws.
Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
Little Women - Louisa May Alcott
Tess of the D'Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
Complete Works of Shakespeare
Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
The Time Traveller's Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
Middlemarch - George Eliot
Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
The Great Gatsby - F. Scott Fitzgerald
Bleak House - Charles Dickens
War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
Emma - Jane Austen
Persuasion - Jane Austen
The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis [odd bit of duplication re: #33]
The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
Captain Corelli's Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
Animal Farm - George Orwell
The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
A Prayer for Owen Meany - John Irving
The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood
Lord of the Flies - William Golding
Atonement - Ian McEwan
Life of Pi - Yann Martel
Dune - Frank Herbert
Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
The Secret History - Donna Tartt
The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
On The Road - Jack Kerouac
Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
Bridget Jones's Diary - Helen Fielding
Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie
Moby Dick - Herman Melville
Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
Dracula - Bram Stoker
The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
Ulysses - James Joyce
The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
Germinal - Emile Zola
Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
Possession - AS Byatt
A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
The Color Purple - Alice Walker
The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
Charlotte's Web - EB White
The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
The Faraway Tree Collection
Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
Watership Down - Richard Adams
A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
Hamlet - William Shakespeare [again, why the duplication?]
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

[Rainraven]

---------------------
Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee*
The Bible
Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
Great Expectations - Charles Dickens*
Little Women - Louisa May Alcott
Tess of the D'Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
Complete Works of Shakespeare
Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
The Time Traveller's Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
Middlemarch - George Eliot
Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
The Great Gatsby - F. Scott Fitzgerald
Bleak House - Charles Dickens
War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy*
The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
Emma - Jane Austen
Persuasion - Jane Austen
The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis
The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
Captain Corelli's Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
Animal Farm - George Orwell
The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
A Prayer for Owen Meany - John Irving
The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood
Lord of the Flies - William Golding
Atonement - Ian McEwan
Life of Pi - Yann Martel
Dune - Frank Herbert
Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen*
A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
The Secret History - Donna Tartt
The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
On The Road - Jack Kerouac
Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
Bridget Jones's Diary - Helen Fielding
Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie
Moby Dick - Herman Melville
Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
Dracula - Bram Stoker
The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
Ulysses - James Joyce
The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
Germinal - Emile Zola
Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
Possession - AS Byatt
A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
The Color Purple - Alice Walker
The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
Charlotte's Web - EB White
The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
The Faraway Tree Collection
Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
Watership Down - Richard Adams
A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
Hamlet - William Shakespeare
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

As far as changing the list goes, I'd remove the books only made famous by modern movies. Things like The Lovely Bones, Atonement, Bridget Jones' Diary.. I just don't believe they belong on an influential books list :rolleyes:

[Osweo]

Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
- I took the liberty of adding YELLOW - 'Books you refuse to read, EVAH! ;)

To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee - forced to for school... :yawn:

The Bible *** (I've read the important early bits, the 'Torah', I suppose, and the Gospels. Just a few bits in between that need reading. Boring stuff like Job and the Pauline Epistles... ;) I've heard most of the latter at school, I suppose.

Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
- a favourite. :p

Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell

- should be required reading for all in our civilisation...

His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
Little Women - Louisa May Alcott
Tess of the D'Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
Complete Works of Shakespeare *** (SOOO Many!)
Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
The Time Traveller's Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
Middlemarch - George Eliot
Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell ***
The Great Gatsby - F. Scott Fitzgerald ***
Bleak House - Charles Dickens
War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
- a superb Kniga.

The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
Emma - Jane Austen
Persuasion - Jane Austen
The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis [odd bit of duplication re: #33]
The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
Captain Corelli's Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
Animal Farm - George Orwell
The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
A Prayer for Owen Meany - John Irving
The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery *** :D
Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood
Lord of the Flies - William Golding - for schoolll.........
Atonement - Ian McEwan
Life of Pi - Yann Martel
Dune - Frank Herbert
Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
The Secret History - Donna Tartt
The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas ***
On The Road - Jack Kerouac
Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
Bridget Jones's Diary - Helen Fielding
Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie
Moby Dick - Herman Melville

- is there a greater English language novel?

Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
Dracula - Bram Stoker
The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
Ulysses - James Joyce - overrated shite.
The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
Germinal - Emile Zola
Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
Possession - AS Byatt
A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
The Color Purple - Alice Walker
The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
Charlotte's Web - EB White
The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
The Faraway Tree Collection
Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad **** (I've read 'Lord Jim', though. :)

The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
Watership Down - Richard Adams
- very recently in fact! :)

A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas ***
Hamlet - William Shakespeare [again, why the duplication?]
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
Les Miserables - Victor Hugo


It's fiction, and a factual list would be quite different, but that's what I mostly read.

Some Edward Bulwer Lytton should be in there. :p
Evelyn Waugh and Saki, too. Kipling?

[Pallantides]

Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
The Bible
Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
Little Women - Louisa May Alcott
Tess of the D'Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
Complete Works of Shakespeare
Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
The Time Traveller's Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
Middlemarch - George Eliot
Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
The Great Gatsby - F. Scott Fitzgerald
Bleak House - Charles Dickens
War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
Emma - Jane Austen
Persuasion - Jane Austen
The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis [odd bit of duplication re: #33]
The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
Captain Corelli's Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
Animal Farm - George Orwell
The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
A Prayer for Owen Meany - John Irving
The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood
Lord of the Flies - William Golding
Atonement - Ian McEwan
Life of Pi - Yann Martel
Dune - Frank Herbert
Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
The Secret History - Donna Tartt
The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
On The Road - Jack Kerouac
Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
Bridget Jones's Diary - Helen Fielding
Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie
Moby Dick - Herman Melville
Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
Dracula - Bram Stoker
The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
Ulysses - James Joyce
The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
Germinal - Emile Zola
Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
Possession - AS Byatt
A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
The Color Purple - Alice Walker
The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
Charlotte's Web - EB White
The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
The Faraway Tree Collection
Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
Watership Down - Richard Adams
A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
Hamlet - William Shakespeare [again, why the duplication?]
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

[Pallantides]

Oh I forgot to mark the ones I love and those I don't... also some of these books I read in school.

[Zankapfel]

If these are supposed to be the most important books of all time I can only wonder where all of the friggin classics are! Books that are, IMO, way more important than more than half of the books on the list would include:
The Orestia - Aeschylus
The Theban Plays - Sophocles
Parsifal - Wolfram von Eschenbach
Tristan - Gottfried von Strassburg
Le Morte d'Arthur - Thomas Mallory
The Divine Comedy - Dante
Paradise Lost - John Milton
Canterbury Tales - Chaucer
Faust - Goethe
Illiad/Odyssey - Homer
The Nibelungenleid
Beowulf

Bolded those which I also consider should be in any either most loved or most influential book list.
I've not read Beowulf, oddly enough. I intend to correct that soon.
Divina Commedia is definitely one of the greatest literary and spiritual works ever produced.
Are you an Opera enthusiast, btw? One more reason to love you :D



I would lose Harry Potter and Bridget Jones immediately, though.

Oh please, you are hurting Psy's sensibilities.


Ishiguro's inclusion was a lovely touch. However the title by him on the list should have been The Unconsoled.

Should I add this to my to-read list?



But of course it's science fiction (bleh! yuck!), so it cannot be included on a list for serious, highbrow people who want to show each other how highbrow they are. :rolleyes:

Okay, now you're hurting my sensibilities >:/


Two novels by Márquez (again, adored by the champagne socialist crowd, so they can say they read a South American author), but nothing by Borges, Bolaño, Llosa, Carpentier, Neruda, etc?

This is an interesting comment.
I found One Hundred Years Of Solitude lying around my father's studio.
He also had some books by Borges whose work I also enjoyed.
The Book of Imaginary Beings was well, fantastic.
Now I have to picture my father popping the Rotkappchen (DDR's de rigeur cheap champagne) as he sat and read these.
I'm just being literal btw, I know what the term means ;]


Either Arthur C. Clarke or Isaac Asimov should have been included if only for decency's sake (both deserve to be).


Where's Kafka, Hamsun, Mann, Hesse, Eco, Calvino, Márai, etc etc?

My thoughts exactly. And, this list is far from decent in my humble opinion :p


And finally, where is the greatest novel ever written, Cervantes' Don Quijote de la Mancha ?!?

Somewhere in la Mancha, in a place whose name I do not care to remember, a gentleman lived not long ago...
I wholeheartedly agree!
As representative of Spanish literature as La Divina Commedia is of Italian.




Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
- should be required reading for all in our civilisation...


I'd like it if you ellaborated a bit more on this, Os.

I would include:
The Wealth Of Nations by Adam Smith and The Prince by Nicolo Macchiavelli.

[Psychonaut]

Divina Commedia is definitely one of the greatest literary and spiritual works ever produced.

Aye, it's the most beautiful portrayal of Thomism possible. The story written like a literary cathedral.


Are you an Opera enthusiast, btw? One more reason to love you :D

Hah! As it happens, kinda. I really can't stand most Classical opera (or much Classical music in general), but I love Baroque (esp. Handel and Purcell) and Romantic (esp. Wagner) opera. Et tu?


Oh please, you are hurting Psy's sensibilities.

:pout:

[Logan]

Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
- Charlotte Bronte Jane Eyre
Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
The Bible
Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
Little Women - Louisa May Alcott
Tess of the D'Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
Complete Works of Shakespeare
Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
The Time Traveller's Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
Middlemarch - George Eliot
Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
The Great Gatsby - F. Scott Fitzgerald
Bleak House - Charles Dickens
War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
Emma - Jane Austen
Persuasion - Jane Austen
The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis [odd bit of duplication re: #33]
The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
Captain Corelli's Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
Animal Farm - George Orwell
The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
A Prayer for Owen Meany - John Irving
The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood
Lord of the Flies - William Golding
Atonement - Ian McEwan
Life of Pi - Yann Martel
Dune - Frank Herbert
Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
The Secret History - Donna Tartt
The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
On The Road - Jack Kerouac
Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
Bridget Jones's Diary - Helen Fielding
Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie
Moby Dick - Herman Melville
[/B[B]] Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
Dracula - Bram Stoker
The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
Ulysses - James Joyce
The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
Germinal - Emile Zola
Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
Possession - AS Byatt
A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
The Color Purple - Alice Walker
The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
Charlotte's Web - EB White
The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
The Faraway Tree Collection
Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
Watership Down - Richard Adams
A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
Hamlet - William Shakespeare
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
Les Miserables - Victor Hugo


Waverly Novels

[Zankapfel]

Aye, it's the most beautiful portrayal of Thomism possible. The story written like a literary cathedral.

Indeed. Slightly off-topic, but have you or anyone you know actually read Summa Theologica in its entirety?
I think Summa Theologica is the equivalent of Newton's Principia in the Philosophy world. Perhaps I'm wrong.
It's the impression I get from the circles I frequent, that everybody starts Summa and Principia, but eventually drops it.



Hah! As it happens, kinda. I really can't stand most Classical opera (or much Classical music in general), but I love Baroque (esp. Handel and Purcell) and Romantic (esp. Wagner) opera. Et tu?

I'm an enthusiast, not a specialist.
I'm pretty sure though, that when it comes to Opera, which tends to be a love it or hate it art form, surely it has no more polarizing practitioner than that the prickly, erratic and quite possibly insane Wagner.
If you like Wagner, you're okay in my book ;]
Wagner, Strauss and Bellini are my composers of choice these days.


:pout:

One of my most brilliant professors confessed in class once to have taken a liking to Harry Potter from reading them to his child, if that's of any consolation to you :p

[la bombe]

I just realized I got the colors wrong :p I hate the red books, love the blue ones.




Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte (one of my favorites)

Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
The Bible
Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell (THE favorite)

His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
Little Women - Louisa May Alcott
Tess of the D'Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
Complete Works of Shakespeare
Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger (overrated trash)

The Time Traveller's Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
Middlemarch - George Eliot
Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
The Great Gatsby - F. Scott Fitzgerald
Bleak House - Charles Dickens
War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
Emma - Jane Austen
Persuasion - Jane Austen
The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis [odd bit of duplication re: #33]
The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
Captain Corelli's Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
Animal Farm - George Orwell
The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
A Prayer for Owen Meany - John Irving
The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood
Lord of the Flies - William Golding
Atonement - Ian McEwan
Life of Pi - Yann Martel
Dune - Frank Herbert
Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
The Secret History - Donna Tartt
The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
On The Road - Jack Kerouac
Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
Bridget Jones's Diary - Helen Fielding
Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie
Moby Dick - Herman Melville
Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
Dracula - Bram Stoker
The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
Ulysses - James Joyce
The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
Germinal - Emile Zola
Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
Possession - AS Byatt
A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
The Color Purple - Alice Walker
The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert (one of the most overrated books ever)

A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
Charlotte's Web - EB White
The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
The Faraway Tree Collection
Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
Watership Down - Richard Adams
A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
Hamlet - William Shakespeare [again, why the duplication?]
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
Les Miserables - Victor Hugo



Very Anglo-centric list. But it's the BBC so I guess it isn't surprising!

[Sally]

Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
The Bible
Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
Little Women - Louisa May Alcott
Tess of the D'Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
Complete Works of Shakespeare
Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
The Time Traveller's Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
Middlemarch - George Eliot
Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
The Great Gatsby - F. Scott Fitzgerald
Bleak House - Charles Dickens
War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
Emma - Jane Austen
Persuasion - Jane Austen
The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis [odd bit of duplication re: #33]
The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
Captain Corelli's Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
Animal Farm - George Orwell
The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
A Prayer for Owen Meany - John Irving
The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood
Lord of the Flies - William Golding
Atonement - Ian McEwan
Life of Pi - Yann Martel
Dune - Frank Herbert
Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gi
Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark
Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
The Secret History - Donna Tartt
The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
On The Road - Jack Kerouac
Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
Bridget Jones's Diary - Helen Fielding
Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie
Moby Dick - Herman Melville
Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
Dracula - Bram Stoker
The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
Ulysses - James Joyce
The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
Germinal - Emile Zola
Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
Possession - AS Byatt
A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
The Color Purple - Alice Walker
The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
Charlotte's Web - EB White
The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
The Faraway Tree Collection
Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
Watership Down - Richard Adams
A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
Hamlet - William Shakespeare [again, why the duplication?]
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
Les Miserables - Victor Hugo




I cannot believe Dan Brown is on the list. Oh brother! :rolleyes:

The list could use some Camus (The Stranger) and Fowles (The Collector). Did I miss Poe? I think some of his short stories are excellent.

[Psychonaut]

Indeed. Slightly off-topic, but have you or anyone you know actually read Summa Theologica in its entirety?
I think Summa Theologica is the equivalent of Newton's Principia in the Philosophy world. Perhaps I'm wrong.
It's the impression I get from the circles I frequent, that everybody starts Summa and Principia, but eventually drops it.

I've not yet read the whole, but since my MA program specializes in Aristotelian and Thomist philosophy, I'm pretty sure that I'll have to read most if not all of it. Still, I'm not sure that many students outside of Catholic universities read Aquinas at all. We certainly never did any dedicated coursework on him at the BA level, only reading extracts during the Medieval Philosophy section. All the people I know who have read it all the way through are Catholic theologians.


I'm an enthusiast, not a specialist.
I'm pretty sure though, that when it comes to Opera, which tends to be a love it or hate it art form, surely it has no more polarizing practitioner than that the prickly, erratic and quite possibly insane Wagner.
If you like Wagner, you're okay in my book ;]
Wagner, Strauss and Bellini are my composers of choice these days.

I hate to say that I've heard little Strauss and no Bellini. That'll have to be remedied. :thumbs up


One of my most brilliant professors confessed in class once to have taken a liking to Harry Potter from reading them to his child, if that's of any consolation to you :p

I see nothing wrong with adults liking HP, but I'd definitely agree that it has no place on a "great books" list. It's a fun read, but way too fluffy.

[Eldritch]

Should I add this to my to-read list?

Have you read anything else by Ishiguro? If not, I recommend you start with his recent short collection Nocturnes to see if he's your cuppa or not.


This is an interesting comment.
I found One Hundred Years Of Solitude lying around my father's studio.
He also had some books by Borges whose work I also enjoyed.
The Book of Imaginary Beings was well, fantastic.
Now I have to picture my father popping the Rotkappchen (DDR's de rigeur cheap champagne) as he sat and read these.
I'm just being literal btw, I know what the term means ;]

Drinking actual communist champagne immediately precludes one from real champagne socialist/armchair commie/boudoir Guevara status. ;)

I say this as someone who, due to the lethality of St. Petersburg tapwater to non-natives of the city, brushes his teeth with this stuff whenever I'm there:

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/4/45/Bouteille_de_Cobemckoe_Ulaunahckoe.JPG/450px-Bouteille_de_Cobemckoe_Ulaunahckoe.JPG

:thumbs up

I also realise that I was being incredibly unfair and flippant when I lumped Harry Potter together with Bridget Jones -- not the least because Ms Rowling has done the entire Western Civilization a huge favour by encouraging kids to read books again.

And of course, Chronicles of Narnia should have been red in my post, not blue. I enjoyed them immensely when I read them.


Did I miss Poe? I think some of his short stories are excellent.

How about ol' Howard Phillips?

[hajduk]

Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
Animal Farm - George Orwell
The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
Hamlet - William Shakespeare

[Osweo]

1984 - should be required reading
I'd like it if you ellaborated a bit more on this, Os.

With pleasure. :) We'll begin with your chatbox comment;

[02-07, 22:02] Zwietracht You said 1984 should be mandatory in schools, I'd like to see a rational argument on why, from someone who, unlike me, has no strong biases for science-fiction.

Okie dokie... Well, Orwell to me is a political writer, a man who knew the leftist scene of his day and lived through a particularly stark period in European political life. I would never think to call his work 'sci-fi'. To me, 'fable' would be more appropriate, perhaps. Prophecy, satire, deeply insightful commentary on human nature as evinced in the political systems we come up with, and the frightening way these systems can take on a life of their own.

Orwell understood a lot of things very well (and Huxley did the other side of the matter too), and knew that we are now always at danger, in our new modern world, of being tricked as entire nations into going down political paths that lead to horrific tyranny while pandering to our worst instincts and will fuck us right over in the end. Being aware of how we can be manipulated is vitally important if our societies are ever really to be participatory democracies, and so a good start can be made by teaching this book (and Animal Farm - though that is a little more Soviet specific) in schools.


http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/4/45/Bouteille_de_Cobemckoe_Ulaunahckoe.JPG/450px-Bouteille_de_Cobemckoe_Ulaunahckoe.JPG
Do you actually mean to say you don't LIKE it!?!? :eek: No!!! I often bought a butylka, in the good old days na Rusi...


And of course, Chronicles of Narnia should have been red in my post, not blue. I enjoyed them immensely when I read them.
They were rather ruined for me by the preachiness, and the sheeer incongruity of many aspects. Lewis failed to create an internally logical new world. It was just a pale pointless dependency of THIS world, with a cringeworthy moral never hiding well enough behind it all...

Oh, and;


Are you an Opera enthusiast, btw? One more reason to love you :D
Oh, and not that anyone needs another reason for me, but;

TKR2Sb4NzgI:p

[Peasant]

The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
Complete Works of Shakespeare Macbeth and Twelfth Night @ school. Twelfth Night bored the hell out of me.
The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien <- Not sure, but I think I have read it.
The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis I have either read it, or an extract of it.
Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl

[Comte Arnau]

Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
The Bible
Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
Great Expectations - Charles Dickens*
Little Women - Louisa May Alcott
Tess of the D'Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy*
Catch 22 - Joseph Heller*
Complete Works of Shakespeare*
Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
The Time Traveller's Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
Middlemarch - George Eliot*
Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
The Great Gatsby - F. Scott Fitzgerald
Bleak House - Charles Dickens
War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams*
Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck*
Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy*
David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
Emma - Jane Austen*
Persuasion - Jane Austen*
The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis [odd bit of duplication re: #33]
The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
Captain Corelli's Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
Animal Farm - George Orwell
The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
A Prayer for Owen Meany - John Irving
The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy*
The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood
Lord of the Flies - William Golding*
Atonement - Ian McEwan
Life of Pi - Yann Martel
Dune - Frank Herbert
Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens*
Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
The Secret History - Donna Tartt
The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
On The Road - Jack Kerouac
Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
Bridget Jones's Diary - Helen Fielding
Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie
Moby Dick - Herman Melville
Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
Dracula - Bram Stoker
The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
Ulysses - James Joyce
The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
Germinal - Emile Zola*
Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray*
Possession - AS Byatt
A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
The Color Purple - Alice Walker
The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
Charlotte's Web - EB White
The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
The Faraway Tree Collection
Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
Watership Down - Richard Adams
A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
Hamlet - William Shakespeare [again, why the duplication?]
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
Les Miserables - Victor Hugo


Note 1: Those in red I love or either loved them when I read them. I am not sure if I'd love all of them again if I reread all now, as quite a few of them were read in my teen years.

Note 2: Those I have not read and are without asterisk are either completely unknown to me or I have watched the film already and hence I have lost interest in reading them.


And just out of curiosity, what books would you do away with and what would you choose for a substitute?

As LaBombe said, it's a totally Anglocentric list. Out of 100 books, only 13 don't belong to English literature (6 in French, 3 in Russian, 3 in Spanish and the Bible), which means almost 90% of the works belong to English literature. Not one single book in German, zum Beispiel. You can guess my list would be quite different. One day I'll make my personal 100 list of mustreads, although it's going to be a really hard task.


I'll let someone else post their results first, and I will follow.

We are still eagerly awaiting. :)

[mymy]

1. Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen

2. The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien

3. Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte

4. Harry Potter series - JK Rowling

5. To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6. The Bible

7. Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte

8. Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9. His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10. Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11. Little Women - Louisa May Alcott

12. Tess of the D'Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy*
13. Catch 22 - Joseph Heller*
14. Complete Works of Shakespeare

15. Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16. The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien

17. Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18. Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger

19. The Time Traveller's Wife - Audrey Niffenegger*
20. Middlemarch - George Eliot
21. Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell

22. The Great Gatsby - F. Scott Fitzgerald
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
34. Emma - Jane Austen

35. Persuasion - Jane Austen

36. The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis [odd bit of duplication re: #33]
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
41. Animal Farm - George Orwell

42. The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown

43. One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44. A Prayer for Owen Meany - John Irving
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
49. Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50.Atonement - Ian McEwan
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
58. Brave New World - Aldous Huxley

59. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60. Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez

61. Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62. Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov

63. The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64. The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65.Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas

66. On The Road - Jack Kerouac
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

74. Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75. Ulysses - James Joyce
76. The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
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
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
88. The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom

89. Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90. The Faraway Tree Collection
91. Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92. The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
*************....
83. The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94. Watership Down - Richard Adams
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 [again, why the duplication?]

99. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl

100. Les Miserables - Victor Hugo


I think i will read "The little Prince" many more times. I always have that book in my bad so it goes with me everywhere :)

I would add:
Divine Comedy- Dante
Demian- Hesse
Nana- Zola
The Trial- Kafka
The Stranger- Camus
Brothers Karamazov- Dostoyevsky
The Quiet Don- Sholokhov
Master and Margarita- Bulgakov
Many novels of Chekhov
Father Goriot- Balzac
Poems by Baudelaire, Mallarme, Rimbaud, Verlaine, poets of French simbolism in general
Waiting for Godot- Beckett
The old man and the sea- Hemingway
The Good Soldier Švejk- Hašek
Fear of flying- Erica Young
Man and boy- Parsons

and many more but i'm lazy to write

[Comte Arnau]

Mymy, which would be the best Serbian book in your opinion?

[mymy]

Mymy, which would be the best Serbian book in your opinion?

Hm, hard to say. I believe that Dictionary of the Khazars by Milorad Pavic is important part of Serbian literature, and i agree book is interesting and unusual and i can recommend it. It is for sure in top 3 if not the first.

Anything written by Ivo Andric is good to read, but he was Croat from Bosnia, most of part lived in Serbia and wrote on all dialects- and that's why everybody counts him for their own. Similar to Mesa Selimovic, Bosniak who wrote some books on Serbian dialects.

Avoid Jovan Ducic, most of Serbs like him, but he was just frustrated man full of complexes- I hope no one will get angry cause i say this.

Next, many people like books written by Dobrica Cosic, but if you ask me, he is just a political writer. Compared with Pavic, he is weak writer.

I talk about writers and books liked by big number of people, masses. Bus as you probably knows, what masses like isn't always the best.But from all those, i recommend first, and last 2 maybe you will like, but i wasn't satisfied while i was reading it, i was disappointed even. However, i know many people who adore them, so i mentioned because majority prefer it.

There are few interesting postmodern writers who build their own still and have different kind of readers, i don't know what to recommend because a lot of things depend on personal preferences, but some of them have quality for sure.



*I have to admit that i am influenced a bit by my high school literature teacher and I was also big nerd in high school especially when comes about literature like subject. This subject played big part in creating my personal identity and opinions. And sorry for big text, i couldn't resist.

[Comte Arnau]

Hm, hard to say. I believe that Dictionary of the Khazars by Milorad Pavic is important part of Serbian literature, and i agree book is interesting and unusual and i can recommend it. It is for sure in top 3 if not the first.

Anything written by Ivo Andric is good to read, but he was Croat from Bosnia, most of part lived in Serbia and wrote on all dialects- and that's why everybody counts him for their own. Similar to Mesa Selimovic, Bosniak who wrote some books on Serbian dialects.

Avoid Jovan Ducic, most of Serbs like him, but he was just frustrated man full of complexes- I hope no one will get angry cause i say this.

Next, many people like books written by Dobrica Cosic, but if you ask me, he is just a political writer. Compared with Pavic, he is weak writer.

I talk about writers and books liked by big number of people, masses. Bus as you probably knows, what masses like isn't always the best.But from all those, i recommend first, and last 2 maybe you will like, but i wasn't satisfied while i was reading it, i was disappointed even. However, i know many people who adore them, so i mentioned because majority prefer it.

There are few interesting postmodern writers who build their own still and have different kind of readers, i don't know what to recommend because a lot of things depend on personal preferences, but some of them have quality for sure.



*I have to admit that i am influenced a bit by my high school literature teacher and I was also big nerd in high school especially when comes about literature like subject. This subject played big part in creating my personal identity and opinions. And sorry for big text, i couldn't resist.

Great, Mymy!! I'll take all this into account! It's not much what is known about Serbian literature around here.

But now that you mentioned it, I remember reading the Dictionary of the Khazars a long time ago! You're right, it's interesting and unusual. I didn't know it was Serbian, though, I read it translated.

Cool! :thumb001:

[mymy]

Great, Mymy!! I'll take all this into account! It's not much what is known about Serbian literature around here.

But now that you mentioned it, I remember reading the Dictionary of the Khazars a long time ago! You're right, it's interesting and unusual. I didn't know it was Serbian, though, I read it translated.

Cool! :thumb001:


I hope i helped :) It's always nice to see passionate readers. I respect people who likes literature. Here are few more writers, mostly postmodern, some who create today and some who created in middle 20 century, mostly those who got few literal awards:
A Tomb for Boris Davidovich by Danilo Kis, Migrations by Milos Crnjanski, Roman about London by same author, Fuss about Cyclists by Svetislav Basara, Lagum by Svetlana Velmar-Jankovic, The voices in the wind by Grozdana Olujic(or any other). Marko Vidojkovic is writer who is adored among youger generation, he use lot of slang and unconventional language and also write about life of young people in Serbian society-quite realistic.

So, now is your turn to recommend? :)

[Zankapfel]

We are still eagerly awaiting. :)

For some reason, I thought I'd already gotten to my list.
I apologize profusely :p
I will get back to this thread in a few minutes, then.

[Zankapfel]

Have you read anything else by Ishiguro? If not, I recommend you start with his recent short collection Nocturnes to see if he's your cuppa or not.

I haven't, actually, so thanks for the suggestion.
I am sure that I can find this online.


I also realise that I was being incredibly unfair and flippant when I lumped Harry Potter together with Bridget Jones -- not the least because Ms Rowling has done the entire Western Civilization a huge favour by [I]encouraging kids to read books again

I agree with you on this much.


Okie dokie... Well, Orwell to me is a political writer, a man who knew the leftist scene of his day and lived through a particularly stark period in European political life. I would never think to call his work 'sci-fi'. To me, 'fable' would be more appropriate, perhaps. Prophecy, satire, deeply insightful commentary on human nature as evinced in the political systems we come up with, and the frightening way these systems can take on a life of their own.

Orwell understood a lot of things very well (and Huxley did the other side of the matter too), and knew that we are now always at danger, in our new modern world, of being tricked as entire nations into going down political paths that lead to horrific tyranny while pandering to our worst instincts and will fuck us right over in the end. Being aware of how we can be manipulated is vitally important if our societies are ever really to be participatory democracies, and so a good start can be made by teaching this book (and Animal Farm - though that is a little more Soviet specific) in schools.

Well, the conditioning in both books is recognisable in our own lives, to a great extent.
They differ, however, in how the government controls the population and the strictness of the measures taken to maintain the stability of their totalitarian states.
In this respect, you are right, 1984 is more educational. Orwell seems to focus on the character's struggle amidst people who have no personality or identity and believe that they are not individuals, but part of an army that fights for a greater cause, because of what's been instilled in their minds.
Sounds like a few people I know.


TKR2Sb4NzgI:p

Yeah yeah, you're awesome, I know ;)



As LaBombe said, it's a totally Anglocentric list. Out of 100 books, only 13 don't belong to English literature (6 in French, 3 in Russian, 3 in Spanish and the Bible), which means almost 90% of the works belong to English literature. Not one single book in German, zum Beispiel. You can guess my list would be quite different. One day I'll make my personal 100 list of mustreads, although it's going to be a really hard task.

Message me, we can work something out.
German Literature is very rich, specially when it comes to prose and Märchen.
I'd very much like to make a more balanced list.



I would add:
Divine Comedy- Dante
Demian- Hesse
Nana- Zola
The Trial- Kafka
The Stranger- Camus
Brothers Karamazov- Dostoyevsky
The Quiet Don- Sholokhov
Master and Margarita- Bulgakov
Many novels of Chekhov
Father Goriot- Balzac
Poems by Baudelaire, Mallarme, Rimbaud, Verlaine, poets of French simbolism in general
Waiting for Godot- Beckett
The old man and the sea- Hemingway
The Good Soldier Švejk- Hašek
Fear of flying- Erica Young
Man and boy- Parsons
and many more but i'm lazy to write

Splendid, mymy! I find myself nodding to every book and author you've listed :)

[poiuytrewq0987]

I haven't finished a book since I was 13 years old. True story.

[Comte Arnau]

I hope i helped :) It's always nice to see passionate readers. I respect people who likes literature.

I also do. :thumb001:


So, now is your turn to recommend? :)

I'll do a post about Catalan literature one day. But I've been searching out of curiosity how many Catalan works have been translated into Serbian. I've only been able to find six, although there are probably more. The six are:


* Diamantski Trg by Mercè Rodoreda (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merc%C3%A8_Rodoreda). . Belgrad: Narodna Knjiga-Alfa, 1998. --It is one of the most acclaimed novels in Catalan of the 20th century, and one of the most translated, but not one I'd specially recommend, to be honest, as the context of a girl's life in post-war Barcelona can be too local sometimes.

* Svi Dnevnik [El Quadern Gris], by Josep Pla (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Josep_Pla). Belgrad: Alexandria Press, 2005 --This author is probably one of the best Catalan prose writers of the 20th century, but his style probably gets lost in translation. I personally wouldn't recommend the book either for a light reading, as he liked to focus on the depiction of the simple details of everyday life rather than on the kind of plots we're used to in more modern books.

* Srušeni grad [Camí de sirga] by Jesús Moncada (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jes%C3%BAs_Moncada). Belgrad: Laguna, 2007. --This is a nice book, quite local in its theme but a very nice book all the same. I wonder how the translators will have managed, though, with many of the terms that are even local for your average Catalan reader.

* Benzin by [B]Quim Monzó (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quim_Monz%C3%B3). Belgrad: Alexandria Press. --I haven't read this one in particular, but the author is one of the best short story writers in Europe by far. I'm pretty convinced he'd be widely known if he happened to write in one of the major European languages.

* Bearn ili soba slutkama by [B]Llorenç Villalonga . Beograd: Paideia, 2003. --I know this book won a prize and is regarded as a classic now, specially among Majorcan writers, but I haven't read it. It is a sort of Catalan [I]gattopardo.

Finally, a Catalan book I'd recommend, specially for a summer reading, is La pell freda (Cold skin) by Albert Sánchez Piñol (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_S%C3%A1nchez_Pi%C3%B1ol), which has been traslated as Hladna koza but I'm not sure whether it's in Serbian or Croatian. It's a nice read -someone compared it to Heart of Darkness but it's very different- and I know a Hollywood film is in process, so better reading it before, as usual. :D

http://leyenda.net/imagenes/cthulhu/noticias/skin.jpg


Well, those are my two cents. :)

[mymy]

I haven't finished a book since I was 13 years old. True story.

You are like my sister:eek: I don't believe she ever read whole book.



I also do. :thumb001:



I'll do a post about Catalan literature one day. But I've been searching out of curiosity how many Catalan works have been translated into Serbian. I've only been able to find six, although there are probably more. The six are:


* Diamantski Trg by Mercè Rodoreda (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merc%C3%A8_Rodoreda). . Belgrad: Narodna Knjiga-Alfa, 1998. --It is one of the most acclaimed novels in Catalan of the 20th century, and one of the most translated, but not one I'd specially recommend, to be honest, as the context of a girl's life in post-war Barcelona can be too local sometimes.

* Svi Dnevnik [El Quadern Gris], by Josep Pla (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Josep_Pla). Belgrad: Alexandria Press, 2005 --This author is probably one of the best Catalan prose writers of the 20th century, but his style probably gets lost in translation. I personally wouldn't recommend the book either for a light reading, as he liked to focus on the depiction of the simple details of everyday life rather than on the kind of plots we're used to in more modern books.

* Srušeni grad [Camí de sirga] by Jesús Moncada (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jes%C3%BAs_Moncada). Belgrad: Laguna, 2007. --This is a nice book, quite local in its theme but a very nice book all the same. I wonder how the translators will have managed, though, with many of the terms that are even local for your average Catalan reader.

* Benzin by [B]Quim Monzó (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quim_Monz%C3%B3). Belgrad: Alexandria Press. --I haven't read this one in particular, but the author is one of the best short story writers in Europe by far. I'm pretty convinced he'd be widely known if he happened to write in one of the major European languages.

* Bearn ili soba slutkama by [B]Llorenç Villalonga . Beograd: Paideia, 2003. --I know this book won a prize and is regarded as a classic now, specially among Majorcan writers, but I haven't read it. It is a sort of Catalan [I]gattopardo.

Finally, a Catalan book I'd recommend, specially for a summer reading, is La pell freda (Cold skin) by Albert Sánchez Piñol (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_S%C3%A1nchez_Pi%C3%B1ol), which has been traslated as Hladna koza but I'm not sure whether it's in Serbian or Croatian. It's a nice read -someone compared it to Heart of Darkness but it's very different- and I know a Hollywood film is in process, so better reading it before, as usual. :D

http://leyenda.net/imagenes/cthulhu/noticias/skin.jpg


Well, those are my two cents. :)

Thank you CA, I'm very impressed that you even found names of books in Serbian and described every book! I found the last book you recommended online, on Serbian site with e-books, but I prefer to read real book and not books on internet, so i will go search for it, and i believe i will find it for sure, but just for any case it is good to have it in PC(so i can be sure i will read it). This one is with Croatian translation, at least version i found, but that's fine. Thank you!

[SaxonCeorl]

Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
Complete Works of Shakespeare
The Great Gatsby - F. Scott Fitzgerald
Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
Brave New World - Aldous Huxley

I read most of these books in two summers during high school for my English literature classes, which was a very happy time in my life.

For me, I'd add:

The Divine Comedy - Dante Alighieri
The Iliad & The Odyssey - Homer
The Scarlet Letter - Nathaniel Hawthorne
Aesop's Fables and Grimms' Fairy Tales - I think these two compilations are tremendously important because they introduce ethnic European children around the world to our heritage and culture. They certainly did for me.

[ikki]

and then the lovely litte stories
Vril, the coming of the race -bulwer lytton
The terrible old man -HP (see: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XHpuAAnHdEc !!)
the ghoul -klarkash-ton

Letalone all the dragonlance and alien & alien vs predator highbrow stuff is missing :D But to also leave out then also The Backstaff ala Steven Schend is a sin plain and simple.

And nothing. Plain nothing from Clive Cussler. Just mind boggling.
Or Verne for that matter. What kind of a highbrow list leaves Verne out?

[Groenewolf]

Okie dokie... Well, Orwell to me is a political writer, a man who knew the leftist scene of his day and lived through a particularly stark period in European political life. I would never think to call his work 'sci-fi'. To me, 'fable' would be more appropriate, perhaps. Prophecy, satire, deeply insightful commentary on human nature as evinced in the political systems we come up with, and the frightening way these systems can take on a life of their own.

I probably have to read 1984 also one day, for the moment his Animal farm is on the pile of books yet to read on my table. Which I wanted to read first since it I have heard that it is a critique on equality thinking, or where systems based on it will lead to.

[The Ripper]

I haven't finished a book since I was 13 years old. True story.

You surprise us. ;):D