create a list of 100 must-read books and read them.

1. Carrie by Stephen King
2. Art History by Michael Hatt and Charlotte Klonk
3. Blood Thirst: 100 Years of Vampire Fiction
4. Yellow Jack by Josh Russell
5. Embers by Sandor Marai
6. When The Ghost Screams by Leslie Rule
7. A Walk To Remember by Nicholas Sparks
8. Phantom of the Opera by Gaston Leroux
9. Julius Caesar by William Shakespeare
10. The Island of Dr. Moreau by H.G. Wells
11. The Stepford Wives by Ira Levin
12. A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens
13. Jack the Ripper: A Psychic Investigation by Pamela Ball
14. Witchling by Yasmine Galenorn
15. Changeling by Yasmine Galenorn
16. Darkling by Yasmine Galenorn
17. Dragon Wytch by Yasmine Galenorn

And my list:

1. All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque
2. Saturday by Ian McEwan
3. Heart-Shaped Box by Joe Hill
4. Wives and Daughters by Elizabeth Gaskell
5. The Cement Garden by Ian McEwan
6. The Unconsoled by Kazuo Ishiguro
7. I Am Legend by Richard Matheson
8. The Jane Austen Book Club by Karen Joy Fowler
9. The Brooklyn Follies by Paul Auster
10. On Chesil Beach by Ian McEwan
11. After Dark by Haruki Murakami
12. Bartleby The Scrivener by Herman Melville
13. A Handful of Dust by Evelyn Waugh
14. London Fields by Martin Amis
15. An Artist of the Floating World by Kazuo Ishiguro
16. High Rise by J.G. Ballard
17. The Memory Keeper’s Daughter by Kim Edwards
18. One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest by Ken Kesey
19. The Luzhin Defense by Vladimir Nabokov
20. Rabbit Run by John Updike
21. Elizabeth Costello by J.M. Coetzee
22. White Noise by Don DeLillo
23. Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro
24. Franny and Zooey by J.D. Salinger
25. Norwegian Wood by Haruki Murakami
26. Perdido Street Station by China Mieville
27. The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafón
28. Kafka on the Shore by Haruki Murakami
29. Duma Key by Stephen King
30. Unconsoled by Kazuo Ishiguro
31. Rosemary’s Baby by Ira Levin
32. The Inheritance of Loss by Kiran Desai
33. Crome Yellow by Aldous Huxley
34. Beneath the Wheel by Hermann Hesse
35. Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom by Cory Doctorow
36. Lucky Jim by Kingsley Amis
37. Breakfast of Champions by Kurt Vonnegut
38. Blindness by José Saramago
39. Little Brother by Cory Doctorow
40. Historian by Elizabeth Kostova
41. The House of the Seven Gables by Nathaniel Hawthorne
42. Something Wicked This Way Comes by Ray Bradbury
43. Grass by Sheri S. Tepper
44. Falling Man by Don DeLillo
45. Atonement by Ian McEwan
46. Portnoy’s Complaint by Philip Roth
47. The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga
48. Choke by Chuck Palahniuk
49. Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell
50. The Circular Study by Anna Katharine Green
51. Diary by Chuck Palahniuk
52. The Onion Girl by Charles de Lint
53. Dance, Dance, Dance by Haruki Murakami
54. Running Wild by J.G. Ballard
55. A Room With a View by E.M. Forster
56. Practical Magic by Alice Hoffman
57. God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater by Kurt Vonnegut
58. The Postman by David Brin
59. Keep the Aspidistra Flying by George Orwell
60. Possession by A.S. Byatt
61. Foe by J.M. Coetzee
62. The Human Stain by Philip Roth
63. The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood
64. In the Heart of the Country by J.M. Coetzee
65. The Talented Mr. Ripley by Patricia Highsmith
66. Creepers by David Morrell
67. The Postman Always Rings Twice by James M. Cain
68. The Reader by Bernhard Schlink
69. A Demon In My View by Ruth Rendell
70. A House for Mr Biswas by V. S Naipaul
71. The Good Soldier by Ford Madox Ford
72. The Robber Bride by Margaret Atwood
73. Time’s Arrows by Martin Amis
74. The Circular Staircase by Mary Robert Rinehart
75. The Club Dumas by Arturo PérezbyReverte
76. Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro
77. Disgrace by J.M. Coetzee
78. Fool on the Hill by Matt Ruff
79. The Cement Garden by Ian McEwan
80. Night and Day by Virginia Woolf
81. Hell House by Richard Matheson
82. The Hotel New Hampshire by John Irving
83. She’s Come Undone by Wally Lamb
84. Pinball, 1973 by Haruki Murakami
85. Coming Up for Air by George Orwell
86. Cannery Row by John Steinbeck
87. Night Train by Martin Amis
88. A Pale View of Hills by Kazuo Ishiguro
89. The Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan
90. Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town by Cory Doctorow
91. The Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon
92. Girl with a Pearl Earring by Tracy Chevalier
93. The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami
94. Dandelion Wine by Ray Bradbury
95. Everyman by Philip Roth
96. When We Were Orphans by Kazuo Ishiguro
97. Rachel’s Papers by Martin Amis
98. Eastern Standard Tribe by Cory Doctorow
99. Other People by Martin Amis
100. Lost in a Good Book by Jasper Fforde

I’ll love this.

1. A Clockwork Orange
2. The Jungle
3. The Grapes Of Wrath
4. The Great Gatsby
5. Lord Of The Flies
6. Slaughterhouse Five
7. The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy
8. The Restaurant At The End Of The Universe
9. Dante’s Inferno
10. Dante’s Purgatorio
11. Dante’s Paradise
12. Ender’s Game
13. A Farewell To Arms
14. Watership Down
15. A Room With A View
16. The Death Of The Heart
17. The Puppet Masters
18. Animal Farm
19. Communist Manifesto
20. One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest
21. Gone With The Wind
22. The Count Of Monte Cristo
23. Les Miserables
24. Frankenstein
25. Dracula
26. The Bell Jar Wonderful. Read it!
27. David Copperfield
28. Gravity’s Rainbow
29. For Whom The Bell Tolls
30. Persuasion
31. The Three Musketeers
32. Emma
33. As I Lay Dying
34. It
35. Don Quixote
36. War And Peace
37. Invisible Monsters
38. Vanity Fair Horrible book. Avoid at all costs.
39. Paradise Lost
40. Candide
41. The Handmaid’s Tale
42. Crime and Punishment
43. Rip Van Winkle
44. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
45. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
46. The Old Curiosity Shop
47. The Canterbury Tales
48. The Poisonwood Bible
49. Anne of Green Gables
50. Republic
51. Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil
52. Death in Venice and Other Stories
53. Hocus Pocus
54. The Federalist Papers
55. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
56. Death of a Salesman
57. The Pickwick Papers
58. Eden
59. Zombie Survival Guide
60. Anarchy, State and Utopia
61. Freakonomics
62. The Perks of Being a Wallflower
63. The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich
64. The History of Love
65. American Psycho
66. Big Fish
67. The Crucible
68. A History of English Speaking Peoples
69. Antigone
70. Sparrow
71. The Enchanted Broccoli Forest
72. Sense and Sensibility
73. Will You Please be Quiet, Please?
74. Bleak House
75. And I Don’t Want to Live This Life
76. Lend Me Your Ears – Great Speeches In History
77. The Education of Little Tree
78. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
79. Thirteen Reasons Why
80. The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby
81. House of Stairs
82. Democracy and Distrust
83. City of Glass
84. Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
85. This Perfect Day
86. Witching Times
87. The Life and Adventures of Martin Chuzzlewit
88. Hope Was Here
89. Job: A Comedy of Justice
90. Chaos and Order
91. Ivanhoe
92. Love Warps the Mind a Little
93. Things Fall Apart
94. Water for Elephants
95. Barnaby Rudge
96. Beggars in Spain
97. Amerika
98. Discipline and Punish
99. Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World
100. Just Listen

Legend:

Strike=Finished
Bold=In Progress
Italics=What I plan on reading next

Another short one – this Booker prize-winning novel traces the parallel stories of Olivia, a young Englishwoman living in the Raj in the 20s, and the narrator, another young Englishwomen who goes to India fifty years later to try and trace Olivia’s story. This is a very easy book to read but I found both of the main characters slightly annoying, and I didn’t understand why they acted the way they did which made it rather a frustrating read. This is another one where I would like to see the film, although I suspect it might be quite different to the book.

This novel is a sort of literary riff, or variations, on Virginia Woolf’s “Mrs Dalloway”. I did find it clever, and I enjoyed reading it, but I didn’t find myself thinking about it once I’d finished (which didn’t take long, it’s a very short book). I am now keen to watch the film though, I’ll be intrigued to see how they adapted it.

65. The Hours, Michael Cunningham
66. Grimm’s Fairy Tales
67. Plutarch’s Lives
68. Heat and Dust, Ruth Prawer Jhabvala
69. Kidnapped, R L Stevenson
70. The Kite Runner, Khaled Hosseini
71. Suite Francaise, Irine Nemerovsky
72. Half of a Yellow Sun, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
73. The Alexandria Quartet, Lawrence Durrell
74. The Sound and the Fury, William Faulkner
75. A House for Mr Biswas, V S Naipaul
76. Tender is the Night, F Scott Fitzgerald
77. Lady Chatterly’s Lover, D H Laurence
78. The Regeneration Trilogy, Pat Barker
79. Middlesex, Jeffrey Eugenides
80. Vernon God Little, DBC Pierre

“What Leary took down with him was the central illusion of a whole lifestyle he helped to create… a generation of permanent cripples, failed seekers, who never understood the essential old mystic fallacy of the Acid Culture: the desperate assumption that someone – or at least some force – is tending that Light at the end of the tunnel.”

and I have finished five books off my second list. They are in bold.

1. Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino
2. Tender Is the Night by F.Scott Fitzgerald
3. The Easter Parade by Richard Yates
4. Our Band Could Be Your Life: Scenes from the American Indie Underground 1981-1991 by Michael Azerrad
5. Breakfast at Tiffany’s by Truman Capote
6. On the Road by Jack Kerouac
7. What We Talk About When We Talk About Love: Stories by Raymond Carver
8. The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner
9. Edie: American Girl by Jean Stein
10. The Beautiful and Damned by F.Scott Fitzgerald
11. A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius by Dave Eggers
12. Lost Daughter by Elena Ferrante
13. Of Human Bondage by W. Somerset Maugham
14. The Essentials of Psycho-analysis by Sigmund Freud
15. Timequake by Kurt Vonnegut
16. All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque
17. Portnoy’s Complaint by Philip Roth
18. The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath by Sylvia Plath
19. Native Son by Richard Wright
20. The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne
21. Couch by Benjamin Parzybok
22. The Origin of Species by Charles Darwin
23. To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf
24. A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens
25. John Peel: Margrave of the Marshes by John Peel
26. Old Goriot by Honore Balzac
27. Le Grand Meaulnes by Henri Alain-Fournier
28. Broken: A Novel by Daniel Clay
29. Seven Gothic Tales by Isak Dinesen
30. The Unbearable Lightness of Being: A Novel by Milan Kundera
31. Cousin Bette by Honore De Balzac
32. In Search of the Missing Eyelash by Karen Mcleod
33. Howl and Other Poems by Allen Ginsberg
34. Animal Farm by George Orwell
35. The Mysteries of Pittsburgh: A Novel by Michael Chabon
36. Things Fall Apart: A Novel by Chinua Achebe
37. Girl Factory by Jim Kruesoe
38. The Stranger by Albert Camus
39. My Life by Anton Chekhov
40. Eugene Onegin by Alexander Pushkin
41. Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman by Haruki Murakami
42. A Sorrow Beyond Dreams by Peter Handke
43. Rabbit, Run by John Updike
44. French Milk by Lucy Knisley
45. The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway
46. The Complete Stories by Flannery O’Connor
47. Under the Volcano by Malcolm Lowry
48. The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
49. The Adventures of Augie March by Saul Bellow
50. Pinball, 1973 by Huruki Murakami
51. Frankenstein: A Cultural History by Susan Tyler Hitchcock
52. The Driver’s Seat by Muriel Spark
53. The Wrecking Ball: A Novel by Christiana Spens
54. Independent People by Halldor Laxness
55. The Girl on the Fridge: Stories by Etgar Keret
56. The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann
57. Liars in Love by Richard Yates
58. The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton
59. Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
60. Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte
61. The Reader by Bernhard Schlink
62. Eleven Kinds of Loneliness by Richard Yates
63. Birds of America: Stories by Lorrie Moore
64. Ask the Dust by John Fante
65. Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway
66. Underground: The Tokyo Gas Attack and the Japanese Psyche by Haruki Murakami
67. Epileptic by David B.
68. The Second Sex by SIMONE DE BEAUVOIR
69. Expletives Deleted by Angela Carter
70. 2666: A Novel by Roberto Bolano
71. The Flying Troutmans by Miriam Toews
72. Dance Night by Dawn Powell
73. Go Tell It on the Mountain by James Baldwin
74. The New York Trilogy by Paul Auster
75. Doghead by Morten Ramsland
76. Main Street by Sinclair Lewis
77. Youth in Revolt by C.D. Payne
78. The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas
79. Cold Spring Harbor by Richard Yates
80. BUtterfield 8 by John O’Hara
81. Stories in the Worst Way by Gary Lutz
82. Young Hearts Crying by Richard Yates
83. Pippi Longstocking by Astrid Lindgren
84. White Walls: The Collected Stories by Tatyana Tolstaya
85. God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater by Kurt Vonnegut
86. Revenge of the Lawn, The Abortion, So the Wind Won’t Blow It All Away by Richard Brautigan
87. The Age of Reason by Jean-Paul Sartre
88. The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett
89. Passing by Nella Larsen
90. Baudelaire Rimbaud Verlaine: Selected Verse and Prose Poems by Charles-Pierre Baudelaire
91. The Pleasure of the Text by Roland Barthes
92. Existentialism Is a Humanism by Jean Paul Sartre
93. The Portrait of a Lady by Henry James
94. Life by Georges Perec
95. What Is the What by Dave Eggers
96. Faces in the Water by Janet Frame
97. What Am I Doing Here? by Bruce Chatwin
98. Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ’s Childhood Pal by Christopher Moore
99. Naked by David Sedaris
100. A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway

and I have only finished three books off my first list. They are in bold.

1. The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle: A Novel by Haruki Murakami
2. If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller by Italo Calvino
3. Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
4. The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov
5. Cold Comfort Farm by Stella Gibbons
6. Dead Souls: A Novel by Nikolai Gogol
7. Mansfield Park by Jane Austen
8. Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
9. Ficciones by Jorge Luis Borges
10. Bloody Chamber and Other Stories by Angela Carter
11. Fairy Tales by Hans Christian Andersen
12. I Looked Alive: Stories by Gary Lutz
13. The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter by Carson Mccullers
14. Trainspotting by Irvine Welsh
15. Emma by Jane Austen
16. The Peacock Manifesto by Stuart David
17. A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole
18. Nineteen Eighty-four by George Orwell
19. Pastoralia by George Saunders
20. One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest by Ken Kesey
21. The Holy Barbarians by Lawrence Lipton
22. The Jungle by Upton Sinclair
23. The Fortress of Solitude: A Novel by Jonathan Lethem
24. Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World: A Novel by Haruki Murakami
25. A Rage to Live by John O’Hara
26. Novels in Three Lines by Felix Feneon
27. Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens
28. Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf
29. Women In Love by D.H. Lawrence
30. Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
31. Zeno’s Conscience: A Novel by Italo Svevo
32. Miss Lonelyhearts & the Day of the Locust by Nathanael West
33. The Nimrod Flipout: Stories by Etgar Keret
34. Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
35. The Portable Dorothy Parker by Dorothy Parker
36. A Void by Georges Perec
37. The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay by Michael Chabon
38. Kafka on the Shore by Haruki Murakami
39. Geek Love: A Novel by Katherine Dunn
40. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass
by Lewis Carroll
41. Wise Blood: A Novel by Flannery O’Connor
42. The Illustrated Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte
43. Tess of the D’Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy
44. Sixty Stories by Donald Barthelme
45. Pnin by Vladimir Nabokov
46. Persuasion by Jane Austen
47. The Elegance of the Hedgehog by Muriel Barbery
48. Home Land: A Novel by Sam Lipsyte
49. Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth by Chris Ware
50. Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen
51. Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates
52. The Dharma Bums by Jack Kerouac
53. The Bus Driver Who Wanted To Be God & Other Stories by Etgar Keret
54. Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie
55. Lady Chatterley’s Lover by D.H. Lawrence
56. To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
57. Candide: Or, Optimism by Francois Voltaire
58. Margherita Dolce Vita by Stefano Benni
59. Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka
60. post office: A Novel by Charles Bukowski
61. Beloved by Toni Morrison
62. White Noise by Don DeLillo
63. Atomised by Michel Houellebecq
64. Middlemarch by George Eliot
65. Crime and Punishment by F.M. Dostoevsky
66. One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
67. Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift
68. The Complete Fairy Tales by Brothers Grimm
69. The Picture of Dorain Gray by Oscar Wilde
70. Cigarettes by Harry Mathew
71. Complete Short Stories by Franz Kafka
72. The Book of Disquiet by Fernando Pessoa
73. The Little Girl and The Cigarette by Benoit Duteurtre
74. South of the Border, West of the Sun by Haruki Murakami
75. White Teeth: A Novel by Zadie Smith
76. Moby Dick by Herman Melville
77. The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton
78. Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
79. The Wild Palms by William Faulkner
80. Stranger Things Happen: Stories by Kelly Link
81. Inferno by Dante Alighieri
82. Bed by Tao Lin
83. War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
84. The Slynx: A Novel by Tatyana Tolstaya
85. Journey to the End of the Night by Louis-Ferdinand Celine
86. Black Hole by Charles Burns
87. Eeeee Eee Eeee by Tao Lin
88. Little Women by Louisa May Alcott
89. Swann’s Way by Marcel Proust
90. The Trial by Franz Kafka
91. Another Country by James Baldwin
92. The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky
93. Hunger by Knut Hamsun
94. Catch 22 by Joseph Heller
95. Ulysses by James Joyce
96. Moravagine by Blaise Cendrars
97. We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson
98. Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
99. Hopscotch by Julio Cortazar
100. Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes