100 Books, Omnibus edition

In anticipation of the Facepocalpyse, I’ve been cleaning out some of my FB profile of nuggets I’d like to save on my own blog – today’s is the 100 Books, Omnibus Edition, based on a recurring meme that I see pop up every fortnight.  In concept, I don’t mind this one as much because who doesn’t like lists.  However, when both of these appeared concurrently on my feed, one purporting to be from Some Committee whose name escapes me, and the other from “The BBC,” I took issue with the tone of the introductions being crafted to guilt one into proving themselves worthy by responding.  This is akin to the bullshit Facebook status we’ve seen in the form of:

“I bet 99% of my friends don’t love puppies|kittens|piglets|basal metabolism enough to repost as their status this utterly pointless chain-letter masquerading as making a difference”

I combined them into the 100 books Omnibus edition.. and substituted my own candidate, the venerable Green Eggs and Ham.  The list remains interesting to me because as it’s been a few years, I no longer remember a few of these books… or partial derivatives.

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Blah blah blah critics I’ve never heard of blah blah blah 100 novels blah blah blah alphabetically plus the BBC’s list.   Instructions: send guitars.  (cough)  I mean, boldify books you’ve read, italicize ones you’ve started and have not finished.  Tag me back if you’d like.

A – B

• The Adventures of Augie March (1953), by Saul Bellow
• All the King’s Men (1946), by Robert Penn Warren
• American Pastoral (1997), by Philip Roth
• An American Tragedy (1925), by Theodore Dreiser
• Animal Farm (1946), by George Orwell
• Appointment in Samarra (1934), by John O’Hara
• Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret (1970), by Judy Blume
• The Assistant (1957), by Bernard Malamud
• At Swim-Two-Birds (1938), by Flann O’Brien
• Atonement (2002), by Ian McEwan
• Beloved (1987), by Toni Morrison
• The Berlin Stories (1946), by Christopher Isherwood
• The Big Sleep (1939), by Raymond Chandler
• The Blind Assassin (2000), by Margaret Atwood
• Blood Meridian (1986), by Cormac McCarthy
• Brideshead Revisited (1946), by Evelyn Waugh
• The Bridge of San Luis Rey (1927), by Thornton Wilder

C – D

• Call It Sleep (1935), by Henry Roth
• Catch-22 (1961), by Joseph Heller
• The Catcher in the Rye (1951), by J.D. Salinger
• A Clockwork Orange (1963), by Anthony Burgess
• The Confessions of Nat Turner (1967), by William Styron
• The Corrections (2001), by Jonathan Franzen
• The Crucible (1953), by Arthur Miller
• The Crying of Lot 49 (1966), by Thomas Pynchon
• A Dance to the Music of Time (1951), by Anthony Powell
• The Day of the Locust (1939), by Nathanael West
• Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927), by Willa Cather
• A Death in the Family (1958), by James Agee
• The Death of the Heart (1958), by Elizabeth Bowen
• Deliverance (1970), by James Dickey
• Dog Soldiers (1974), by Robert Stone

F – G

• Falconer (1977), by John Cheever
• The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1969), by John Fowles
• The Golden Notebook (1962), by Doris Lessing
• Go Tell it on the Mountain (1953), by James Baldwin
• Gone With the Wind (1936), by Margaret Mitchell
• The Grapes of Wrath (1939), by John Steinbeck
• Gravity’s Rainbow (1973), by Thomas Pynchon
• The Great Gatsby (1925), by F. Scott Fitzgerald
• Green Eggs and Ham (1960), by Dr. Seuss

H – I

• A Handful of Dust (1934), by Evelyn Waugh
• The Heart is A Lonely Hunter (1940), by Carson McCullers
• The Heart of the Matter (1948), by Graham Greene
• Herzog (1964), by Saul Bellow
• Housekeeping (1981), by Marilynne Robinson
• A House for Mr. Biswas (1962), by V.S. Naipaul
• I, Claudius (1934), by Robert Graves
• In Cold Blood (1966), by Truman Capote
• Infinite Jest (1996), by David Foster Wallace
• Invisible Man (1952), by Ralph Ellison

L – N

• Light in August (1932), by William Faulkner
• The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe (1950), by C.S. Lewis
• Lolita (1955), by Vladimir Nabokov
• Lord of the Flies (1955), by William Golding
• The Lord of the Rings (1954), by J.R.R. Tolkien
• Loving (1945), by Henry Green
• Lucky Jim (1954), by Kingsley Amis
• The Man Who Loved Children (1940), by Christina Stead
• Midnight’s Children (1981), by Salman Rushdie
• Money (1984), by Martin Amis
• The Moviegoer (1961), by Walker Percy
• Mrs. Dalloway (1925), by Virginia Woolf
• Naked Lunch (1959), by William Burroughs
• Native Son (1940), by Richard Wright
• Neuromancer (1984), by William Gibson
• Never Let Me Go (2005), by Kazuo Ishiguro
• 1984 (1948), by George Orwell

O – R

• On the Road (1957), by Jack Kerouac
• One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1962), by Ken Kesey
• The Painted Bird (1965), by Jerzy Kosinski
• Pale Fire (1962), by Vladimir Nabokov
• A Passage to India (1924), by E.M. Forster
• Play It As It Lays (1970), by Joan Didion
• Portnoy’s Complaint (1969), by Philip Roth
• Possession (1990), by A.S. Byatt
• The Power and the Glory (1939), by Graham Greene
• The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1961), by Muriel Spark
• Rabbit, Run (1960), by John Updike
• Ragtime (1975), by E.L. Doctorow
• The Recognitions (1955), by William Gaddis
• Red Harvest (1929), by Dashiell Hammett
• Revolutionary Road (1961), by Richard Yates

S – T

• The Sheltering Sky (1949), by Paul Bowles
• Slaughterhouse Five (1969), by Kurt Vonnegut
• Snow Crash (1992), by Neal Stephenson
• The Sot-Weed Factor (1960), by John Barth
• The Sound and the Fury (1929), by William Faulkner
• The Sportswriter (1986), by Richard Ford
• The Spy Who Came in From the Cold (1964), by John le Carre
• The Sun Also Rises (1926), by Ernest Hemingway
• Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), by Zora Neale Hurston
• Things Fall Apart (1959), by Chinua Achebe
• To Kill a Mockingbird (1960), by Harper Lee
• To the Lighthouse (1927), by Virginia Woolf
• Tropic of Cancer (1934), by Henry Miller

U – W

• Ubik (1969), by Philip K. Dick
• Under the Net (1954), by Iris Murdoch
• Under the Volcano (1947), by Malcolm Lowry
• Watchmen (1986), by Alan Moore & Dave Gibbons
• White Noise (1985), by Don DeLillo
• White Teeth (2000), by Zadie Smith
• Wide Sargasso Sea (1966), by Jean Rhys

BBC list:

1 Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen    (and Zombies!) 

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 M 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 Faulk

18 Catcher in the Rye – JD Salinger

19 The Time Traveler’s Wife – Audrey Niffenegger

20 Middlemarch – George Eliot

21 Gone With The Wind – Margaret Mitchell

22 The Great Gatsby – F Scott Fitzgerald

23 Green Eggs and Ham – Dr. Seuss

24 War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy

25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams

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

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 – A.A. 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 Meaney – 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 Inferno – Dante 

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 – E.B. 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 – Enid Blyton

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

99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – Roald Dahl

100 Les Miserables – Victor Hugo