Two down, ninty eight more to go.

Well I’ve finished book number two of my goal to read the top 100 books of all time. I think I replaced about 10 of the ones on the list with others that might not be a top 100 book but is generally agreed to be a good work of literature which also caught my eye. I just finished Brave New World, it was an ok book I guess but to be honest I didn’t really care for it all that much. It was similar to 1984 in that it tries to show a dystopia of how society might become and how it might change into something that would be unacceptable to most people, this one based on the overabundance of pleasure and having no desire to really think, while 1984 was more based on not being allowed to think for yourself, only doing what you were told. I didn’t choose the two similar genres on purpose, it just worked out that way because I was reading from an electronic edition and I wanted a shorter book because I don’t like reading on the computer screen. I need to make it over to the library soon to pick up physical copies of the stuff I want to read. Anyway, I think the main theme that I took away from the whole thing is that to be really human and do things that are worth doing you need to make sacrifices and go through hardships. If you go through your entire life only taking the path of least resistance and never experiencing anything that might be unpleasant then you will never be completely alive or happy. That kind of hit home a little bit for me since I think my over my life in general I have often taken the path of least resistance and I think if I wouldn’t have I could be in a whole different place than I am right now. See, this little project is already doing some good and I’m only on book two!

Anyway, here’s the preliminary list that I am going to try and do. I might swap some in and out if the title isn’t appropriate for what I’m going for.

1984 – George Orwell 1949
A Clockwork Orange – Anthony Burgess 1962
A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole
A Passage to India – E. M. Forster 1924
All the King’s Men – Robert Penn Warren 1946
An American Tragedy – Theodore Dreiser 1925
Animal Farm – George Orwell 1945
Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy 1877
As I Lay Dying – William Faulkner 1930
Atlas Shrugged – Ayn Rand
Beloved – Toni Morrison 1987
Brave New World – Aldous Huxley 1932
Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh 1945
Canterbury Tales – Geoffrey Chaucer 15th century
Catch-22 – Joseph Heller 1961
Charlotte’s Web – E. B. White 1952
Confessions – St. Augustine 4th century
Das Kapital Karl Marx 1867
Death Comes for the Archbishop – Willa Cather 1927
Democracy in America – Alexis de Tocqueville 1835
Divine Comedy – Dante Alighieri 1321
Eminent Victorians – Lytton Strachey 1918
For Whom the Bell Tolls – Ernest Hemingway 1940
Frankenstein – Mary Shelley 1818
Go Tell It on the Mountain – James Baldwin 1953
Gone with the Wind – Margaret Mitchell 1936
Goodbye to All That – Robert Graves 1929
Gulliver’s Travels – Jonathan Swift 1726
Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad 1902
I, Claudius – Robert Graves 1934
In Cold Blood – Truman Capote 1965Ž
Into the Wild – Jon Krakauer
Invisible Man Invisible Man – Ralph Ellison 1952
Kim – Rudyard Kipling 1901
Leaves of Grass – Walt Whitman 1855
Leviathan – Thomas Hobbes 1651
Light in August Light in August – William Faulkner 1932
Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov 1955
Lord Jim – Joseph Conrad 1900
Lord of the Flies – William Golding 1954
Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert 1857
Middlemarch – George Eliot 1874
Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie 1981
Mrs. Dalloway – Virginia Woolf 1925
Native Son – Richard Wright 1940
Night – Elie Wiesel 1958
On the Road – Jack Kerouac 1957
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest – Ken Kesey 1962
One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez 1967
Origin of Species – Charles Darwin 1859
Paradise Lost – John Milton 1667
Portnoy’s Complaint – Philip Roth 1969
Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen 1813
Rabbit, Run – John Updike 1960
Remembrance of Things Past – Marcel Proust 1913
Silent Spring – Rachel Carson 1962
Slaughterhouse-Five – Kurt Vonnegut 1969
Song of Solomon – Toni Morrison 1977
Sons and Lovers – D. H. Lawrence 1913
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn – Mark Twain 1885
The Affluent Society – John Kenneth Galbraith 1958
The Age of Innocence – Edith Wharton 1920
The Art of Warfare – Sun Tzu
The Autobiography of Malcolm X – Alex Haley and Malcolm X 1965
The Big Sleep – Raymond Chandler 1939
The Catcher in the Rye – J. D. Salinger 1951
The Color Purple – Alice Walker 1982
The Day of the Locust – Nathanael West 1939
The Education of Henry Adams – Henry Adams 1918
The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money – John Maynard Keynes 1936
The Golden Notebook – Doris Lessing 1962
The Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck 1939
The Great Gatsby – F. Scott Fitzgerald 1925
The Heart is a Lonely Hunter – Carson McCullers 1940
The Histories – Herodotus 440 B.C.
The History of the Peloponnesian War Thucydides 431 B.C.
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams
The Illiad and The Odyssey – Homer 8th century B.C.
The Interpretation of Dreams – Sigmund Freud 1900
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe – C. S. Lewis 1950
The Lord of the Rings – J. R. R. Tolkien 1954
The Maltese Falcon – Dashiell Hammett 1930
The Prince – Niccolo Machiavelli 1532
The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt – Edmund Morris
The Social Contract – Jean-Jacques Rousseau 1762
The Souls of Black Folk – W. E. B. Du Bois 1903
The Sound and the Fury The Sound and the Fury – William Faulkner 1929
The Sun Also Rises – Ernest Hemingway 1926
The Thin Red Line – James Jones
The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature – William James 1902
The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith
The Wind in the Willows – Kenneth Grahame 1908
Things Fall Apart – Chinua Achebe 1958
To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee 1960
To the Lighthouse – Virginia Woolf 1927
Tropic of Cancer – Henry Miller 1934
Ulysses – James Joyce 1922
War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy 1869
Wide Sargasso Sea – Jean Rhys 1966
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance – Robert Pirsig