I’m asking because yes, I DO intend to go read them, if there is any kind of consensus. I’m talking about fiction or nonfiction from almost any field of human endeavor: Art, History, Economics, Warfare, Poetry, etc., save one: Religion.
Religion is a personal and very subjective thing, so please, nobody suggest the Bible, Koran, Talmud, etc.
Since you requested it specifically, I shall not include The Bible. I shall only note that any such list that does not include The Bible has an air of futility about it.
Non-fiction: The educated, well-informed person must know history and science, but the precise books vary. Read the most up-to-date ones ( and the ones recommended there).
Finally, I shall restrict myself to books in the Western tradition, since I am not qualified to make recommendations from the Eastern one.
- Plato, The Republic
- Sophocles, The Theban Trilogy
- Dante, The Divine Comedy
- William Shakespeare, Complete Works
- John Milton, Paradise Lost
- The Norton Anthology of Poetry
- Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina
- Hermann Melville, Moby-Dick
- Charles Dickens, Bleakl House
- James Joyce, Ulysses
Of course, you can no more become well-read in ten books than you can learn General Relativity in an hour. If you want to do it properly, …
#1 A Fly Went By…Mike McClintock
#2 Goliath II a little golden book
#3 Any Dave Barry Book
#4 Any Isaac Asimov Book
#5 through 10 Any Stephen King Book
Who says I’m not a well rounded reader.
rande…
The Complete Robot, by Isaac Asimov (I’m currently reading this, so get your own copy)
Watchers, by Dean Koontz (This is the one that got me hooked on Koontz)
Jeeves and the Feudal Spirit, by P G Wodehouse (or any of the Jeeves stories)
The Liar, by Stephen Fry
Mr. Bean’s Diary, by Robin Driscoll and Rowan Atkinson
Blackadder : the Whole Damn Dynasty (contains the scripts of all four seasons)
The Lord of the Rings, by Tolkien
The Count of Monte Cristo, by Alexandre Dumas
The Complete Sherlock Holmes, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
The Wind in the Willows, by Kenneth Grahame
I’m not going to include the old classics, as everyone else will, I think. Instead, I’ll give you ten that have been definitive in my life and reading experience.
Belinda - Ann Rampling (aka Anne Rice)
The Villagers: A Novel of Greenwich Village - Edward Field & Neil Derrick
The Chronicles of Narnia - C.S. Lewis
Trilogy: A Boy’s Own Story, The Beautiful Room Is Empty, The Farewell Symphony - Edmund White
Girls, Visions & Everything - Sarah Schulman
The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas - Gertrude Stein
The Complete Works - Anne Sexton
Bastard Out Of Carolina - Dorothy Allison
She’s Come Undone - Wally Lamb
I think everyone should experience these at least once. Some of them I revisit time and time again.
I have two
The Prophet, Khalil Gibran
The Art of War, Sun Tzu
In no particular order, but numbered to keep it straight:
**
- Lord of the Rings by Tolkien.
- Hamlet by William Shakespeare
- Brother’s Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
- War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
- Dubliners by James Joyce.
- Neverending Story by Michael Ende
- Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis
- The Watchmen by Alan Moore
Read widely. Read varied. Read deep. Read what speaks to you.
Do not read lists compiled by others.
Above all, read often.
Yep. Agreed, 100%.
That said, here’s my list of favorites from my bookclub’s 10 year archive
Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood
Yellow Wallpaper - Charlotte Perkins Gilman
Emma - Jane Austin
Wicked - Gregory Maguire
The Sparrow - Mary Doria Russel
*Neuromancer * - William Gibson
To Kill A Mockingbird - Harper Lee
Possession - A.S. Byatt
The Red Tent - Anita Diamant
*A Girl Named Zippy: Growing Up Small in Mooreland, Indiana * - Haven Kimmel
*The Adventures of Kavalier and Clay * - Michael Chabon
C’mon, Expano, these lists are just suggestions to help Lizard avoid the mountains of wasted paper out there that are on a par with daytime television. Don’t kill the thread just because you can’t think of any!
Huckleberry Finn or any book by Mark Twain
The Works of Robert G. Ingersoll (in ten volumes…if you can find them)
Brave Men by Ernie Pyle
City Boy by Herman Wouk
Working by Studs Terkel
Unpopular Essays* by Bertrand Russell
Shogun or any book by James Clavell
It Was On Fire When I Lay Down On It or any book by Robert Fulghum
The Rubaiyat Of Omar Khayyam translated into English quatrains by Edward FitzGerald
The Grapes Of Wrath or any book by John Steinbeck
Lots of excellent suggestions here, and doubtless a multitude of others just waiting to be mentioned.
That said, I’ll just suggest the addition of:
A really good unabridged dictionary. The story of words is always fascinating.
An excellent world atlas.
Huckleberry Finn by Sam Clemens
The Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire by Gibbon.
The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich by Shirer
The Moral Animal by Robert Wright
The Demon-Haunted World by Carl Sagan
A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking
The Odyssey by Homer
Starship Troopers by Robert Heinlein
The Lord of the Rings trilogy by JRR Tolkien
The Bible by various authors
I’m truly scared by some of the names here. If you’re wanting 10 books to read on a plane, I can understand Dean Koontz or Stephen King, but rather than snipe further, this is my list of works of genuine artistic and social importance in Western culture (apart from the Bible). I have avoided anthologies.
Ulysses - James Joyce (the greatest experimental novel in the English Language, and great fun)
Leaves of Grass - Walt Whitman (defined American poetry up to the present day. Also awesomely beautiful)
Moby-Dick - Herman Melville (the definitive novel about the development of capitalist America, a great adventure story and a big influence on the likes of Pynchon)
Divine Comedy - Dante (a classic of imaginative literature whose influence is still felt today, and whose religion is always balanced by humanism and satire)
Crime and Punishment - Feodor Dostoyevsky (the pinnacle both of the realist novel and the psychological novel)
Invisible Man - Ralph Ellison (the point at which American black literature became more clever and inventive than white literature)
Hamlet - William Shakespeare (great story, great jokes, great characters)
Ariel - Sylvia Plath (Not just a great poet, but the supreme symbol of the artist in late-20th C society)
Paradise Lost - John Milton (the most insanely ambitious work in English Literature, by arguably the greatest figure in English letters)
The Trial - Franz Kafka (another work that absolutely defined the last century)
That’s pretty offensive, dude. I purposely listed books that I found to be of great importance to me. Nowhere did I claim they were astounding works which the like we’ve never seen before. I listed things that truly made me think and reexamine my own life and thoughts.
It would be easy to take a potshot and say that you’ve probably never read ninety percent of the books on your list, but I’m not going to. Hey, you probably have, and that’s great. So have I. They’re all incredible works of art, but everything need not be over a thousand pages long and written in obscure terminology to be of importance or value.
I’m not trying to bust your balls, man. I’m just saying…don’t knock what’s important to other people simply because you may not agree.
A Confederacy of Dunces- John Kennedy Toole
Reflections on a Ravaged Century- Robert Conquest
The Great Gatsby- F. Scott Fitzgerald
Of Mice and Men- John Steinbeck
Choke- Chuck Pahlaniuk
To Kill a Mockingbird- Harper Lee
The Genocides- Thomas Disch
The Scarlet Letter- Nathaniel Hawthorne
The Black Book of Communism- Stephane Courtois, et. al
The Savage Wars of Peace- Max Boot
The Little Prince
The Phantom Toolbooth
Both readable by just about any age, and both have all kinds of life lessons - regardless of background, age, etc.
I read at one time, Eaters of the Dead by Michael Crichton. He has an essay in there about why he wrote the novel. Essentially his friend taught a class called, “The Great Bores” or something like that. It basically taught the books that we are always told are great works of literature, but are long-winded, boring and generally tedious to get through. The class was intended to teach the book and its significance and its style without having to read the whole book. (Crichton wrote the book because Beowulf was included in the class, and he felt it shouldn’t have been, because it was far from boring. So he took up a bet to re-write it.)
I bring this up, because some of these lists look like books that belong in this class. Either that or book snobbery. (For example- Moby Dick. Holy crap-- It probably took Melville 20 years to write, just from falling asleep at the typewriter all the time.) Don’t get me wrong, I’ve read a number of these books, and I understand their significance. Some of them are quite good. But like Queergeekgirl said, they had no bearing on me personally.
I mention this not to insult anybody who listed those books, or who like them. But to explain my list.
Also like Queergeek girl, these are books that affected me personally. Not necessarily “great” works of literature.
To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
Catcher in the Rye by JD Salinger
Where the Red Fern Grows by Wilson Rawls (this one is a kids
book, but its the first ever book to really get to me.)
poop… I posted my list before it was complete. grr…
OK. Starting over:
To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
Catcher in the Rye by JD Salinger
Where the Red Fern Grows by Wilson Rawls
Enders Game by Orson Scott Card
The Gunslinger by Stephen King
The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand (I don’t necessarily agree with her philosophy, but again its a book that made me consider things differently)
Pretty much any Shakespeare.
Thats all I can think of for now. I’m sure later tonight I’ll think of 10 more.
I almost included Les Miserables on my list…but really that was mostly a favorite because finishing that beast deserves an Endurance Award. Bits are fantastic…others (like, say the rant about Spanish Nuns or the whole bit about Parisian sewers) are tedious in the extreme.
On a different note, I’m pleased to See To Kill A Mockingbird showing up in so many lists. It’s always nice when other people also like one of your favorites.
Here’s 10 that have influenced me greatly in life:
Charlotte’s Web - E. B. White
The Giving Tree - Shel Silverstein
A Wrinkle in Time - Madeline L’Engle
To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee (seems like most of us are in agreement on this one!)
Seabiscuit - Laura Hillenbrand
Weaveworld - Clive Barker
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest - Ken Kesey
Different Seasons - Stephen King (this book has the stories “The Body” and “Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption”, which I loved even before they became movies)
Cosmos - Carl Sagan
Oh, yeah, and how about:
The Straight Dope - Cecil Adams (that book definitely changed my outlook on life…I read it when I was like in 8th grade!)