Best Books
January 21, 2008 by PeregrinJoe
This is a list of some of the best books ever written as a part of a reading project of mine. This list is by no means exhaustive or in any particular order. It is simply a list I have compiled based on my studies, and personal desires. I would love to hear what you would add or subtract. The books that are crossed out are ones I have already read.
1. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
2. Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
3. The Aeneid by Virgil
4. The Red Badge of Courage by Stephen Crane
5. Animal Farm by George Orwell
6. The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer
7. The Lord of the Rings Trilogy by J.R.R. Tolkien
8. Lord of the Flies by William Golding
9. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
10. Works by Shakespeare
11. The Complete Poems of Robert Browning
12. The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson
13. Les Miserables by Victor Hugo
14. Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
15. Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift
16. The Iliad and the Odyssey by Homer
17. The Song of Roland by Anon.
18. Gilgamesh by Anon.
19. Beowulf by Anon.
20. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight by Anon.
21. The Travels of Marco Polo by Marco Polo
22. The Last of the Mohicans by James Fenimore Cooper
23. Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman
24. Aesop’s Fables by Aesop
25. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass by Lewis Carroll
26. Confucious Analects
27. Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
28. 1984 by George Orwell
29. Billy Budd by Herman Melville
30. The Brothers Karamozov by Fyodor Dostoevsky
31. War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
32. Candide by Voltaire
33. Cry, The Beloved Country by Alan Patton
34. A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway
35. The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde
36. Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson
37. Don Quixote by Cervantes
38. The Divine Comedy by Dante
39. The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas
40. Confession by St. Augustine
41. Institutes of the Christian Religion by John Calvin
42. The Bondage of the Will by Martin Luther
43. Little Women by Louisa May Alcott
44. Moby Dick by Herman Melville
45. Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck
46. Paradise Lost by John Milton
47. The Pilgrim’s Progress by John Bunyan
48. Aristotle’s Poetics and Politics by Aristotle
49. Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
50. The Prince by Niccolo Machiavelli
51. The Republic by Plato
52. Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe
53. The Scarlet Letter by Nathanial Hawthorne
54. The Sea Wolf by Jack London
55. Silas Marner by George Eliot
56. A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens
57. Tales From the Arabian Knights by Anon.
58. Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson
59. Walden by Henry David Thoreau
60. Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte
61. 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea by Jules Verne
62. The Oedipus Cycle by Sophocles
63. Everyman by Anon.
64. Cyrano De Bergerac by Edmund Rostand
65. Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriett Beecher Stowe
66. The Souls of Black Folk by W.E.B. Dubois
67. The Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
68. To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
69. The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin by Benjamin Franklin
70. Histories by Herodotus
71. Meditations by Marcus Aurelius
72. In Praise of Folly by Erasmus
73. The Imitation of Christ by Thomas A Kempis
74. Common Sense by Thomas Paine
75. Critique of Pure Reason by Immanuel Kant
76. The Castle by Franz Kafka
77. On War by Carl Marie Von Clausewitz
78. Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
79. Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut
80. Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolfe
81. A Passage to India by E.M. Forster
82. The Ambassadors by Henry James
83. All the King’s Men by Robert Penn Warren
84. Watership Down by Richard Adams
85. The Bridge of San Luis Rey by Thornton Wilder
86. Death Comes to the Archbishop by Willa Cather
87. A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess
88. The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner
89. The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton
90. The Art of War by Sun-Tzu
91. The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith
92. Democracy in America by Alexis de Tocquville
93. The Adventures of Augie March by Saul Bellow
94. Sophie’s Choice by William Styron
95. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce
96. Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Arthur Conan Doyle
97. On the Origin of Species by Charles Darwin
98. The Bible
99. The Time Machine by H.G. Wells
100. Utopia by Thomas Moore
How disapointed in me youll be, but Id like to add Harry Potter. Numbers 3, 4, 6, and 7 are my favorites.
I was probably the biggest critic, without having done any research on it or JK Rowling, and thinking that it was promoting withchcraft, but I broke down and read book number 4, and realized that it was as any fantasy book written by CS Lewis, or Tolkein. Theres magic, and there are spells, just like in Lord of the Rings.
The classic battle, good vs evil.
No disappointment from me girl. I have never read any of the books myself, but I really enjoy the movies. I keep telling myself that I will read them some day, but other things keep crowding them off my reading list.
The books, as in most cases, are so much better than the movies. Especially Goblet of Fire. They just couldnt squeeze all the book into an hour and a half. I really do recomend you read them. Atleast 3-7. You get so much more out of those books than the movies.