I have this interesting past-time I call reading.  Oh, I of course, scan the news sites, blogs, and other sites on the World Wide Web, however, I am speaking primarily of books.  Literary pieces of fiction, knowledge, biographies, histories, civics, humor, and other pertinent members of the Dewey Decimal System.

I know that sometime in the next two to three months, I am hoping to become the owner of a brand new Kindle.  For those of you who are unfamiliar with the Kindle – and other electronic book readers – you can download books directly from Amazon.com at a much reduced price from a hard copy and you can get that book in about 1 minute from basically anywhere in the world thanks to the free wireless 3G network that comes complementary with your Kindle.  You now own the book and can store it on your Kindle along with up to 1,499 other books.  You can read the books directly on the Kindle which looks like the page of a book – even in sunlight, it looks like ink on a page.

One of the things Amazon.com offers is free copies of certain literary classics.   While I am certain I won’t mind revisiting some of my favorites from my youth, there are a few I never want to read again – I can’t figure out why I never got into Jane Austen.

To get an idea of where to start, I found Newsweek’s list of their Top 100 Books.  They say, “Declaring the best book ever written is tricky business. Who’s to say what the best is? We went one step further: we crunched the numbers from 10 top books lists (Modern Library, the New York Public Library, St. John’s College reading list, Oprah’s, and more) to come up with The Top 100 Books of All Time. It’s a list of lists — a meta-list. Let the debate begin.”

Which should I keep on my Kindle and which will never set foot inside my electronic book reader?

1. War and Peace  -  Leo Tolstoy 1869
2. 1984 – George Orwell 1949
3. Ulysses – James Joyce 1922
4. Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov 1955
5. The Sound and the Fury  - William Faulkner 1929
6. Invisible Man – Ralph Ellison 1952
7. To the Lighthouse -  Virginia Woolf 1927 Virginia Woolf. like Jane Austen before her, never reached out and touched me on an emotional level.
8. The Illiad and The Odyssey - Homer 8th century B.C.
9. Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen 1813
10. Divine Comedy – Dante Alighieri 1321
11. Canterbury Tales – Geoffrey Chaucer 15th century
12. Gulliver’s Travels – Jonathan Swift 1726
13. Middlemarch – George Eliot 1874
14. Things Fall Apart – Chinua Achebe 1958   This is a must read for anyone who has not.  Respected by most literary critics as the first worldwide African novel, it is the story of a village leader and  wrestler and those around him who witness his slow but sure fall from power.
15. The Catcher in the Rye – J. D. Salinger 1951
16. Gone with the Wind - Margaret Mitchell 1936
17. One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez 1967
18. The Great Gatsby – F. Scott Fitzgerald 1925
19. Catch-22 - Joseph Heller 1961
20. Beloved – Toni Morrison 1987 Sorry, but for right now, I will not accept that any book written after 1969 is a classic – this is not to say I will not have any later books, it simply says I will not accept them out of hand as being a classic.
21. The Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck 1939
22. Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie 1981
23. Brave New World -  Aldous Huxley 1932
24. Mrs. Dalloway  - Virginia Woolf 1925
25. Native Son – Richard Wright 1940
26. Democracy in America – Alexis de Tocqueville 1835
27. On the Origin of Species  -  Charles Darwin 1859
28. The Histories – Herodotus 440 B.C.
29. The Social Contract -  Jean-Jacques Rousseau 1762
30. Das Kapital - Karl Marx 1867 Sorry, I’m just not that into reading Karl Marx.  Groucho Marx on the other hand …
31. The Prince -  Niccolo Machiavelli 1532
32. Confessions -  St. Augustine 4th century
33. Leviathan - Thomas Hobbes 1651
34. The History of the Peloponnesian - Thucydides 431 B.C.
35. The Lord of the Rings – J. R. R. Tolkien 1954
36. Winnie-the-Pooh -  A. A. Milne 1926
37. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe - C. S. Lewis 1950
38. A Passage to India - E. M. Forster 1924 E.M. Forster decided to channel his best Jane Austen into this convoluted Indian sub-continent epic.
39. On the Road – Jack Kerouac 1957
40. To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee 1960
41. The Holy Bible. Revised Standard Version. NA  I would also include The Koran, The Book of Mormon, The Bhagavad Gita, and more.
42. A Clockwork Orange - Anthony Burgess 1962
43. Light in August - William Faulkner 1932
44. The Souls of Black Folk - W. E. B. Du Bois 1903
45. Wide Sargasso Sea – Jean Rhys 1966
46. Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert 1857
47. Paradise Lost – John Milton 1667
48. Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy 1877
49. Hamlet - William Shakespeare 1603
50. King Lear - William Shakespeare 1608
51. Othello - William Shakespeare 1622
52. Sonnets – William Shakespeare 1609   About 49, 50, 51, and 52 – I do believe I would make sure to have the entire Shakespeare collection.
53. Leaves of Grass – Walt Whitman 1855
54. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn – Mark Twain 1885   I would also include the complete works of Mark Twain.
55. Kim – Rudyard Kipling 1901
56. Frankenstein – Mary Shelley 1818
57. Song of Solomon – Toni Morrison 1977
58. One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest - Ken Kesey 1962
59. For Whom the Bell Tolls - Ernest Hemingway 1940
60. Slaughterhouse-Five - Kurt Vonnegut 1969
61. Animal Farm – George Orwell 1945
62. Lord of the Flies – William Golding 1954
63. In Cold Blood – Truman Capote 1965
64. The Golden Notebook - Doris Lessing 1962
65. Remembrance of Things – Past R Marcel Proust 1913
66. The Big Sleep – Raymond Chandler 1939
67. As I Lay Dying -  William Faulkner 1930
68. The Sun Also Rises - Ernest Hemingway 1926
69. I, Claudius – Robert Graves 1934
70. The Heart is a Lonely Hunter -  Carson McCullers 1940
71. Sons and Lovers - D. H. Lawrence 1913
72. All the King’s Men – Robert Penn Warren 1946
73. Go Tell It on the Mountain – James Baldwin 1953
74. Charlotte’s Web – E. B. White 1952
75. Heart of Darkness -  Joseph Conrad 1902
76. Night -  Elie Wiesel 1958
77. Rabbit, Run - John Updike 1960
78. The Age of Innocence – Edith Wharton 1920
79. Portnoy’s Complaint – Philip Roth 1969
80. An American Tragedy – Theodore Dreiser 1925
81. The Day of the Locust – Nathanael West 1939
82. Tropic of Cancer – Henry Miller 1934
83. The Maltese Falcon - Dashiell Hammett 1930
84. His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman 1995
85. Death Comes for the Archbishop - Willa Cather 1927
86. The Interpretation of Dreams - Sigmund Freud 1900
87. The Education of Henry Adams - Henry Adams 1918
88. Quotations from Chairman Mao -  Mao Zedong 1964 Just as I wouldn’t read Marx, I’m not going to read Mao.
89. The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature – William James 1902
90. Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh 1945 Arghhhh, how many Jane Austen clones are there????
91. Silent Spring - Rachel Carson 1962
92. The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money – John Maynard Keynes 1936
93. Lord Jim - Joseph Conrad 1900
94. Goodbye to All That – Robert Graves 1929
95. The Affluent Society - John Kenneth Galbraith 1958
96. The Wind in the Willows – Kenneth Grahame 1908
97. The Autobiography of Malcolm X – Alex Haley and Malcolm X 1965
98. Eminent Victorians - Lytton Strachey 1918
99. The Color Purple - Alice Walker 1982
100. The Second World War (The Gathering Storm; Their Finest Hour; The Grand Alliance; The Hinge of Fate - Winston Churchill 1948

To replace the books I pulled, I want a few modern twists on the detective genre, a few novels by James Baldacci and David Patterson.  I would also include Team of Rivals by Doris Kearns Goodwin and The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt by Edmund Morris.  I would also include the complete Sherlock Holmes collection by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the complete works of Charles Dickens, Robert Louis Stevenson, Alexander Dumas, and many others.

Any other books anyone might want to suggest?

This entry was posted on Saturday, November 21st, 2009 at 5:16 am and is filed under Book Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.