* Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
* Anna Karenina
* Crime and Punishment
* Catch-22
* One Hundred Years of Solitude
* Wuthering Heights
* The Silmarillion
* Life of Pi : a novel
* The Name of the Rose
*
* Moby Dick
* Ulysses
*
* The Odyssey
* Pride and Prejudice
* Jane Eyre
* The Tale of Two Cities
* The Brothers Karamazov
* Guns, Germs, and Steel: the fates of human societies
* War and Peace
* Vanity Fair
* The Time Traveler’s Wife
* The Iliad
* Emma
*
* The Kite Runner
* Mrs. Dalloway
* Great Expectations
* American Gods
* A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
* Atlas Shrugged
* Reading Lolita in Tehran : a memoir in books
* Memoirs of a Geisha
* Middlesex
* Quicksilver
* Wicked : the life and times of the wicked witch of the West
* The Canterbury tales
* The Historian : a novel
* A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
* Love in the Time of Cholera
* Brave New world
* The Fountainhead
* Foucault’s Pendulum
* Middlemarch
* Frankenstein
* The Count of Monte Cristo
* Dracula
* A Clockwork Orange
*
* The Once and Future King
* The Grapes of Wrath
* The Poisonwood Bible : a novel
* 1984
* Angels & Demons
* The Inferno
* The Satanic Verses
* Sense and Sensibility
* The Picture of Dorian Gray
* Mansfield Park
* One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
* To the Lighthouse
* Tess of the D’Urbervilles
* Oliver Twist
* Gulliver’s Travels
* Les Misérables
* The Corrections
* The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
* The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
* Dune
* The Prince
* The Sound and the Fury
* Angela’s Ashes : a memoir
* The God of Small Things
* A People’s History of the United States : 1492-present
* Cryptonomicon
* Neverwhere
* A Confederacy of Dunces
* A Short History of Nearly Everything
* Dubliners
* The Unbearable Lightness of Being
* Beloved
* Slaughterhouse-five
* The Scarlet Letter
* Eats, Shoots & Leaves
* The Mists of Avalon
* Oryx and Crake : a novel
* Collapse : how societies choose to fail or succeed
* Cloud Atlas
* The Confusion
* Lolita
* Persuasion
* Northanger Abbey
*
* On the Road
* The Hunchback of Notre Dame
* Freakonomics : a rogue economist explores the hidden side of everything
*
* The Aeneid
* Watership Down
* Gravity’s Rainbow
* The Hobbit
* In Cold Blood : a true account of a multiple murder and its consequences
* White Teeth
* Treasure Island
* David Copperfield
* The Three Musketeers
Hmmm, it's not a very interesting list. In fact, it looks to me like a list of books that people were asked to read at school or college - and couldn't be bothered to. If that's their definition of "pretentious"...?
ReplyDeleteAnyway, glad to see you hated Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance :) It is rubbish!
But you should give Madame Bovary another chance. It really is the most devastating expose of romance ever!!
Shame that Dead Souls by Gogol isn't on the list, one of the funniest books ever written.
ReplyDeleteAnd if you are going to read The Unbearable Lightness of Being I suggest you read Anna Karenina first, because it plays quite a significant part in the novel.
Oh and you best have a box of tissues handy for Anna Karenina - well I cried and I'm not ashamed to admit it.
Thank you for stopping by my blog and showing your support. It's very much appreciated!
ReplyDeleteBtw, you've read an impressive number of books on this list! It reminds me that I just don't have as much time to read anymore. Must try harder!
I can wholeheartedly recommend Les Mis, even if you skim the big chunks of minute detail about the Napoleonic wars. The writing is just beautiful, especially the chapter on love.
ReplyDeleteI've read all of 40 of them and not finished several more (how many people read the whole of the Canterbury Tales? Of those, I thought that 'The God of Small Things' and 'Love in the time of Cholera' were particularly overrated and 'The Name of the Rose' was the most pretentious.
ReplyDelete