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All of them have literary quotes on them and currently I would go for the one depicted above, but perhaps this project is going to change all my bookish preferences? Anyway, here's my list (without any particular order within the centuries):
Pre-1700s
1. The Theban Plays: Oedipus the King, Oedipus at Colonus, Antigone, Sophocles
2. Don Quixote, Miguel de Cervantes
3. The Pilgrim’s Progress, John Bunyan
4. The Canterbury Tales, Geoffrey Chaucer
5. The Art of War, Sun Tzu
6. The Divine Comedy, Dante Alighieri
7. The Iliad, Homer
8. The Odyssey, Homer
9. Paradise Lost, John Milton
10. The Faerie Queene, Edmund Spenser
11. Il Decamerone, Govanni Boccaccio
12. Macbeth, William Shakespeare
13. Richard III, William Shakespeare
14. As you like it, William Shakespeare
15. Henry VIII, William Shakespeare
16. Much Ado about Nothing, William Shakespeare
1700s
17. Moll Flanders, Daniel Defoe
18. Clarissa, Samuel Richardson
19. Tom Jones, Henry Fielding
20. Nathan der Weise, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing
21. Die Leiden des jungen Werther, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
22. Gulliver’s Travels, Jonathan Swift
23. Candide, Voltaire
24. The Last of the Mohicans, James F. Cooper
1800s
25. The Devil’s Elixir, E.T.A Hoffman
26. Persuasion, Jane Austen
27. Emma, Jane Austen
28. Lés Miserables, Victor Hugo
29. The Count of Monte Christo, Alexandre Dumas
30. The Three Musketeers, Alexandre Dumas
31. Madame Bovary, Gustave Flaubert
32. The strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, Robert Louis Stevenson
33. Good Wives, Louisa May Alcott
34. Wuthering Heights, Emily Brontë
35. The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, Anne Brontë
36. Villette, Charlotte Brontë
37. Crime and Punishment, Fjodor Dostojewski
38. The Brothers Karamasow, Fjodor Dostoyevsky
39. The Complete Sherlock Holmes, Arthur Conan Doyle
40. Middlemarch, George Elliot
41. North and South, Elizabeth Gaskell
42. Faust, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
43. Far from the Madding Crowd, Thomas Hardy
44. Tess of D’Urbervilles, Thomas Hardy
45. The House of the Seven Gables, Nathaniel Hawthorne
46. The Portrait of a Lady, Henry James
47. Moby Dick, Herman Melville
48. Ivanhoe, Sir Walter Scott
49. Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy
50. War and Peace, Leo Tolstoy
51. Vanity Fair, William Makepeace Thackeray
52. Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Harriet Beecher Stowe
53. The Picture of Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde
54. A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, Mark Twain
55. Walden, Henry David Thoreau
56. The Fall of the House of Usher & other short stories, E. A. Poe
57. Oliver Twist, Charles Dickens
58. David Copperfield, Charles Dickens
59. Nicholas Nickleby, Charles Dickens
60. Hard Times, Charles Dickens
61. Our Mutual Friend, Charles Dickens
62. The Mystery of Edwin Drood, Charles Dickens
63. The Woman in White, Wilkie Collins
1900s
64. Gone with the Wind, Margaret Mitchell
65. The Metamorphosis, Franz Kafka
66. Collected Poems, W.B. Yeats
67. Ulysses, James Joyce
68. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, James Joyce
69. I know why the Caged Birds sing, Maya Angelou
70. A Handmaid’s Tale, Margaret Atwood
71. A Clockwork Orange, Anthony Burgess
72. The Good Earth, Pearl Buck
73. If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler, Italo Calvino
74. Heart of Darkness, Conrad Joseph
75. Rebecca, Daphne Du Maurier
76. As I Lay Dying, William Faulkner
77. The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald
78. I Capture the Castle, Dodie Smith
79. The Sun also Rises, Ernest Hemingway
80. Brave New World, Alduous Huxley
81. 1984, George Orwell
82. To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee
83. One Hundred Years of Solitude, Gabriel Garcia Marquez
84. The Waste Land, T.S. Eliot
85. The Heart is a lonely Hunter, Carson McCullers
86. Beloved, Toni Morrison
87. Siddharta, Hermann Hesse
88. To the Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf
89. A Room of One’s Own, Virginia Wollf
90. Mrs Dalloway, Virginia Woolf
91. The Age of Innocence, Edith Wharton
92. Ethan Frome, Edith Wharton
93. The Hobbit, J.R.R. Tolkien
94. The Lord of the Rings, J.R.R. Tolkien
95. East of Eden, John Steinbeck
96. Of Mice and Men, John Steinbeck
97. The Crucible, Arthur Miller
98. Norwegian Wood, Haruki Murakami
99. Midnight’s Children, Salman Rushdie
100.Doctor Zhivago, Boris Pasternak
101.Catch-22, Joseph Heller
102.Peter Pan, J.M. Barrie
103.Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury
104.The Perks of Being a Wallflower, Stephen Chbosky
105.The Power and the Glory, Graham Greene
106.The Bell Jar, Sylvia Plath
107.Collected Poems, Robert Frost
108. A Passage to India, E.M. Foster
109. A Room with a View, E.M. Foster
110. The Catcher in the Rye, J.D. Salinger
111.The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Milan Kundera
What do you say? Good choices? Bad? Are you joining too? Do we have any titles in common on our lists?
Lovely list! All good choices, as far as I'm aware... I think we do have quite a bit of overlap, but I'm far too lazy to count the number of titles in common. Of course, you're also a bit more daring than I am, with some of those very lengthy titles! (I guess I have a couple too--Don Quixote, for one.) I love your reward, too.
AntwortenLöschenI'm looking forward to comparing our thoughts on those we have in common!
LöschenI forbid myself to take the length into account when choosing the books and yes, I am a little bit scared of the chunksters (Anna Karenina namely...). I'll just have to use my summer break well :)
Fantastic list! You've got a great range of literature here. Some of these are on my list, and some are tried-and-true favourites. I'm looking forward to comparing notes with you.
AntwortenLöschenI read I Capture the Castle at the beginning of the year and absolutely fell in love with it. Already I'm looking forward to another reread. I hope you enjoy reading that one; its heroine, after all, shares your name. :)
Thank you, Diana! I am glad my intention has succeeded. It's strange how exited I am when I think of exploring all these books :)
LöschenDon't laugh, the name was one of the reasons I chose it! After all, how many Cassandras do we have nowadays? :)
Horray for an incredible list!! I can't wait to read your thoughts on -- so many of these. I won't even bother listing which ones, but it is most of your list and Gone With the Wind. :) Welcome to the group!! :D
AntwortenLöschenThank you Jillian! Since I borrowed a lot from your list I can only give that back :D
LöschenI am so looking forward to Gone with the Wind, it is so well-loved and I'm really curious to find out what all the fuss is about ;) Unfortunately it is pretty long, so it will have to wait until my current chunksters are finished.
Great List! Some comments:
AntwortenLöschenMy favorite title on it is Woolf's To the Lighthouse. It's my favorite novel ever... nowhere will you find language so exquisite... except perhaps in Shakespeare. However, To the Lighouse is a much more challenging text than Mrs. Dalloway. I reccomend you read Mrs. Dalloway before (which is a first-rate novel, by the way).
A suggestion about your Hardy titles. I would read Jude the Obscure or The Mayor of Casterbridge before Far from the Madding Crowd. They're better novels. Far from the Madding Crowd is his most optimistic novel, but not his best. Jude the Obscure is his bleakest, and BY FAR, BY FAR his best.
Read Robinson Crusoe before Moll Flanders, if you haven't already.
Also, read The House of Mirth before Ethan Frome, if you haven't already. Wharton is out of her element in Ethan Frome. The House of Mirth is her best novel. Lily Bart is a tragic heroine of Anna Karenina's and Emma Bovary's stature
Danny :)
O--just saw that you already put Mrs. Dalloway!
AntwortenLöschennever mind then. Although i do have a suggestion about the order you should read your three Woolf titles in.
first read A Room of One's Own, then read Dalloway, then read Lighthouse.
Danny
AND...
AntwortenLöschenyou are going to adore Anna Karenina. Make that a priority. It's not my favorite novel, but it has to be the best novel ever written. I just finished Middlemarch, thinking that Eliot would come close to Tolstoy---but no sir. Not even close.
The omniscient has spoken ;)
LöschenYour wish is my command:
I will stick to your proposed Woolf order, and I am really thankful that you comfort me over my fear of Anna Karenina. I will definitely tackle it during summer break.
I did read The Mayor of Casterbridge last year, and despite all the tragedy I somehow enjoyed it very much. Since you say Jude the Obscure is Hardy's best novel I will add it to the list.
I read Robinson Crusoe and wasn't quite overwhelmed, it was just too much of an adventure story to suit my taste, so Moll Flanders is just on the list because a friend has suggested it ardently.
With Ethan Frome I was just being lazy: we already have a copy of it at home, so I thought I might as well read it, but since I trust you I am going to read The House of Mirth instead.
Thanks a lot for putting so much thought into your suggestions!
Awesome list! We have quite a few books in common here. I can't wait to know what you think of all of these, especially Wuthering Heights. It's my favorite book ever, takes my breath away every time.
AntwortenLöschen