read at least 43 of the World's 100 Greatest Books

Just finished reading The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway.

...back when I finished reading Silas Marner. That brings my count up to 28 books read.
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Now I’m attempting to read the Iliad. Three months into it I’m still on Chapter 2. :(

Just read The Rime of the Ancient Mariner by Samuel Coleridge which went fast as it is a short story sized narrative poem. I also realized that I also forgot to list Gulliver’s Travels in the entry of the books that I read before starting this goal like I did on List of Bests so now the numbers match up of 27 books read and 1 book attempted but found not to be worth reading.

Just finished Silas Marner and had previously read and forgot to record Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey when they were read earlier.

I finished Huckleberry Finn yesterday. :)

That brings my count up to 27 books read.

I think I’ll join Celtic_Christian and read “Silas Marner” next. It’s available online here, and I hope it’s also available in the local library. Wikipedia describes it as “a tale of familial love and loyalty, reward and punishment, and humble friendships.”

I finished reading Treasure Island a few days ago and will be starting to read Silas Marner next. Although more likely than not it is not a book that I will be starting to read right away from a few other more important things that I want to get in first.

I finished Tom Sawyer yesterday.

That brings my count up to 26 books read.

I’ve also started “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn”.

I finished reading The Republic by Plato yesterday and today I started reading Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson.

My new total is 21 books read and 1 book attempted but found not to be worth reading.

I have read a few they are the ones crossed out .

1. The Iliad – Homer
2. The Odyssey – Homer
3. The Aeneid – Virgil
4. Beowulf – Unknown
5. The Divine Comedy – Dante Alighieri
6. The Travels of Marco Polo – Marco Polo
7. The Canterbury Tales – Geoffrey Chaucer
8. Don Quixote – Cervantes
9. Paradise Lost – John Milton
10. The Pilgrim’s Progress – John Bunyan
11. Robinson Crusoe – Daniel Defoe
12. Moll Flanders – Daniel Defoe
13. Gulliver’s Travels – Jonathan Swift
14. Tom Jones – Henry Fielding
15. Candide – Voltaire
16. The Rime of the Ancient Mariner – Samuel Taylor Coleridge
17. The Tragedy of Faust – Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
18. The Lady of the Lake – Sir Walter Scott
19. Ivanhoe – Sir Walter Scott
20. Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen
21. Frankenstein – Mary Shelley
22. The Red and the Black – Stendahl
23. The Last of the Mohicans – James Fenimore Cooper
24. The Three Musketeers – Alexandre Dumas
25. Carmen – Prosper Merimee
26. Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte
27. Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte
28. Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray
29. David Copperfield – Charles Dickens
30. A Tale of Two Cities – Charles Dickens
31. Great Expectations – Charles Dickens
32. The Scarlet Letter – Nathaniel Hawthorne
33. Camille – Alexandre Dumas
34. Moby Dick – Herman Melville
35. Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert
36. Idylls of the King – Alfred Lord Tennyson
37. Silas Marner – George Eliot
38. Middlemarch – George Eliot
39. Les Miserables – Victor Hugo
40. Fathers and Sons – Ivan Turgenev
41. Crime and Punishment – Feodor Dostoyevsky
42. The Brothers Karamazov – Feodor Dostoyevsky
43. Little Women – Louisa May Alcott
44. Far From the Madding Crowd – Thomas Hardy
45. The Adventures of Tom Sawyer – Mark Twain
46. The Prince and the Pauper – Mark Twain
47. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn – Mark Twain
48. A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court – Mark Twain
49. Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy
50. War and Peace – Leo Tolstory
51. The Return of the Native – Thomas Hardy
52. Tess of the D’Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy
53. The Portrait of a Lady – Henry James
54. The Turn of the Screw – Henry James
55. Treasure Island – Robert Louis Stevenson
56. The Picture of Dorian Gray – Oscar Wilde
57. The Time Machine – H. G. Wells
58. Dracula – Bram Stoker
59. The Way of All Flesh – Samuel Butler
60. Call of the Wild – Jack London
61. Babbitt – Sinclair Lewis
62. An American Tragedy – Theodore Dreiser
63. The Great Gatsby – F. Scott Fitzgerald
64. A Farewell to Arms – Ernest Hemingway
65. For Whom the Bell Tolls – Ernest Hemingway
66. The Old Man and the Sea – Ernest Hemingway
67. The Maltese Falcon – Dashiell Hammett
68. Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck
69. The Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck
70. To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee
71. The Republic – Plato
72. The Prince – Machiavelli
73. The Social Contract – Jean-Jacques Rousseau
74. The Wealth of Nations – Adam Smith
75. The Origin of Species – Charles Darwin
76. Das Kapital – Karl Marx
77. The Decline of the West – Oswald Spengler
78. Prometheus Bound – Aeschylus
79. Oedipus Rex – Sophocles
80. The Taming of the Shrew – William Shakespeare
81. Hamlet – William Shakespeare
82. Othello – William Shakespeare
83. Macbeth – William Shakespeare
84. The Tempest – William Shakespeare
85. Tartuffe – Moliere
86. Peer Gynt – Henrik Ibsen
87. A Doll’s House – Henrik Ibsen
88. The Importance of Being Earnest – Oscar Wilde
89. Cyrano de Bergerac – Edmond Rostand
90. The Cherry Orchard – Anton Chekhov
91. Our Town – Thornton Wilder
92. Death of a Salesman – Arthur Miller
93. The Nicomachean Ethics – Aristotle
94. Meditations – Rene Descartes
95. The Critique of Pure Reason – Immanuel Kant
96. The World as Will and Idea – Arthur Schopenhauer
97. Nature – Ralph Waldo Emerson
98. Self-Reliance – Ralph Waldo Emerson
99. Walden – Henry David Thoreau
100. How We Think – John Dewey

“Studies show that 45 percent of Americans say they never read a book. Worse than that, the National Commission on Excellence in Education reported in 1983 that the average college graduate does not read one serious book in the course of a year. You have too much to lose by not reading, and too much to gain by disciplined reading. Discipline yourself to learn by reading, and choose your books well. You will be able to read relatively few books in your lifetime, so read the best books. … Don’t waste your time on books you’ll regret reading when you look back upon them from the perspective of eternity. I believe in recreational reading. I don’t maintain that every volume you read should be didactic or even theological. There are books to be read for relaxation and refreshment. But even these should be edifying and help you in some sense to love God with your mind.”
~Spiritual Disciplines For The Christian Life by Donald S. Whitney page 232

Therefore I resolve to stop reading any book on this list if I determine that it is not worth reading instead of forcing myself to finish it and mark it of as not worth reading on List of Bests. Also I resolve to not waste my time rereading books that I read in school and remember what it is about unless it is one that I find worth reading more than once.

My revised read list under the new standards now includes:

Paradise Lost by John Milton
Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck
To Kill A Mockingbird by Harper Lee
Hamlet by William Shakespeare
The Taming of the Shew by William Shakespeare
Othello by William Shakespeare
Macbeth by William Shakespeare
The Tempest by William Shakespeare
Death of a Salesman by Author Miller

finished reading Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain and The Prince and the Pauper by Mark Twain goes on the not worth it list as a fifth of the way in I am finding it too much not to my liking to carry on.

My new total is 20 books read and 1 book attempted but found not to be worth reading.