Well-Read

A friend posted a list entitled something like "100 Books to Being Well-Read". I love lists like that as both Rob and I read about as much as we breathe. This list was a bit ridiculous though. At least in my humble opinion :) It even included 50 Shades of Gray, which I don't think should ever be included on a top 100 list of books. But that's just me. Rob and I decided to come up with our own list. Then we discovered that we really have to come up with several lists. The books we'd consider to belong on a list for books that would make you well-read are not necessarily the books we would include on a list of our top 100 books. Or the top 100 authors of all time. Although there would definitely be some cross-over between each of those.

We actually ended up needing a few more than 100 to compile a "List of books you should be familiar with if you want to be well-read". Note that I personally wouldn't actually read all of these - cliff notes or even wikipedia articles would probably be enough to familiarize yourself with some of the drier ones. Anyway, here's our list.

1.       A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens

2.       The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain

3.       The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Arthur Conan Doyle

4.       The Aenid by Virgil

5.       Aesop’s Fables by Aesop

6.       A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway

7.       Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll

8.       And Then There Were None by Agatha Christie

9.       Animal Farm by George Orwell

10.    Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy

11.    Anne of Green Gables by Lucy Maud Montgomery

12.    The Arabian Nights by Anonymous

13.    The Art of War by Sun Tzu

14.    A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens

15.    Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand

16.    Beowulf

17.    The Bible

18.    Black Beauty by Anna Sewell

19.    The Call of the Wild  by Jack London

20.    Candide by Voltaire

21.    The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer

22.    Catch-22 by Joseph Heller

23.    Charlie and the Chocolate Factory by Roald Dahl

24.    Charlotte’s Web by E.B. White

25.    The Color Purple by Alice Walker

26.    Common Sense by Thomas Paine

27.    The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson

28.    The Complete Stories of Edgar Allan Poe

29.    The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas

30.    Crime & Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky

31.    Death of a Salesman by Arthur Miller

32.    The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank

33.    Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes

34.    Dracula by Bram Stoker

35.    The Dream of the Red Chamber by Cao Xueqin

36.    Dr. Zhivago by Boris Pasternak

37.    Essential Dialogues of Plato by Plato

38.    Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury

39.    Fairy Tales by Hans Christian Anderson

40.    Faust by Goethe

41.    For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway

42.    Frankenstein by Mary Shelley

43.    Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell

44.    The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck

45.    Great Expectations by Charles Dickens

46.    Grimm’s Fairy Tales by Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm

47.    The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald

48.    Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift

49.    Hamlet by William Shakespeare

50.    Harry Potter & The Sorceror’s Stone by J.K. Rowling

51.    Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad

52.    The Hiding Place by Corrie Ten Boom

53.    The Histories by Herodotus

54.    The History of the Peloponnesian War by Thucydides

55.    The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams

56.    The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien

57.    The Hunchback of Notre Dame by Victor Hugo

58.    I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou

59.    The Iliad by Homer

60.    The Importance of Being Earnest by Oscar Wilde

61.    The Inferno by Dante

62.    Ivanhoe by Walter Scott

63.    Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte

64.    Journey to the Center of the Earth by Jules Verne

65.    The Jungle by Upton Sinclair

66.    The Jungle Book by Rudyard Kipling

67.    Lady Chatterley’s Lover by DH Lawrence

68.    Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman

69.    The Legend of Sleepy Hollow by Washington Irving

70.    Les Miserables by Victor Hugo

71.    The Lion, the Witch, and The Wardrobe by C.S. Lewis

72.    The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exepury

73.    Little Women by Louisa May Alcott

74.    Lord of the Flies by William Golding

75.    Lord of the Rings by JRR Tolkien

76.    The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka

77.    Middlemarch by George Eliot

78.    Moby-Dick by Herman Melville

79.    The Odyssey by Homer

80.    Oedipus, King by Sophocles

81.    Of Human Bondage by W. Somerset Maugham

82.    Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck

83.    Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens

84.    The Origin of the Species by Charles Darwin

85.    Paradise Lost by John Milton

86.    Peter Pan by JM Barrie

87.    The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde

88.    Pilgrim’s Progress by John Bunyan

89.    Plutarch’s Lives

90.    Pride & Prejudice by Jane Austen

91.    The Prince and the Pauper by Mark Twain

92.    Pygmalion by George Bernard Shaw

93.    Republic by Plato

94.    Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe

95.    Romeo & Juliet by William Shakespeare

96.    The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne

97.    The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett

98.    Slaughterhouse-5 by Kurt Vonnegut

99.    The Sound and The Fury by William Faulkner

100.The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson

101.The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas

102.To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee

103.Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson

104.Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea b Jules Verne

105.Ulysses by James Joyce

106.Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe

107.Vanity Fair by William Makepeace Thackery

108.Walden and Civil Disobedience by Henry David Thoreau

109.War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy

110.The War of the Worlds by HG Wells

111.Watership Down by Richard Adams

112.Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame

113.Winnie-the-Pooh by AA Milne

114.The Wonderful Wizard of Oz by L. Frank Baum

115.Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte