100 Books, Omnibus edition

In anticipation of the Facepocalpyse, I’ve been cleaning out some of my FB profile of nuggets I’d like to save on my own blog – today’s is the 100 Books, Omnibus Edition, based on a recurring meme that I see pop up every fortnight.  In concept, I don’t mind this one as much because who doesn’t like lists.  However, when both of these appeared concurrently on my feed, one purporting to be from Some Committee whose name escapes me, and the other from “The BBC,” I took issue with the tone of the introductions being crafted to guilt one into proving themselves worthy by responding.  This is akin to the bullshit Facebook status we’ve seen in the form of:

“I bet 99% of my friends don’t love puppies|kittens|piglets|basal metabolism enough to repost as their status this utterly pointless chain-letter masquerading as making a difference”

I combined them into the 100 books Omnibus edition.. and substituted my own candidate, the venerable Green Eggs and Ham.  The list remains interesting to me because as it’s been a few years, I no longer remember a few of these books… or partial derivatives.

If you don’t repost this status, the pet goat will remain very, very sad.

Blah blah blah critics I’ve never heard of blah blah blah 100 novels blah blah blah alphabetically plus the BBC’s list.   Instructions: send guitars.  (cough)  I mean, boldify books you’ve read, italicize ones you’ve started and have not finished.  Tag me back if you’d like.

A – B

  • The Adventures of Augie March (1953), by Saul Bellow
  • All the King’s Men (1946), by Robert Penn Warren
  • American Pastoral (1997), by Philip Roth
  • An American Tragedy (1925), by Theodore Dreiser
  • Animal Farm (1946), by George Orwell
  • Appointment in Samarra (1934), by John O’Hara
  • Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret (1970), by Judy Blume
  • The Assistant (1957), by Bernard Malamud
  • At Swim-Two-Birds (1938), by Flann O’Brien
  • Atonement (2002), by Ian McEwan
  • Beloved (1987), by Toni Morrison
  • The Berlin Stories (1946), by Christopher Isherwood
  • The Big Sleep (1939), by Raymond Chandler
  • The Blind Assassin (2000), by Margaret Atwood
  • Blood Meridian (1986), by Cormac McCarthy
  • Brideshead Revisited (1946), by Evelyn Waugh
  • The Bridge of San Luis Rey (1927), by Thornton Wilder
This baby crustacean lacks self-esteem, and it’s all your fault because you’re not reposting to all of your friends.  Look at those weepy eyestalk things.  I hope you sleep well tonight.

C – D

  • Call It Sleep (1935), by Henry Roth
  • Catch-22 (1961), by Joseph Heller
  • The Catcher in the Rye (1951), by J.D. Salinger
  • A Clockwork Orange (1963), by Anthony Burgess
  • The Confessions of Nat Turner (1967), by William Styron
  • The Corrections (2001), by Jonathan Franzen
  • The Crucible (1953), by Arthur Miller
  • The Crying of Lot 49 (1966), by Thomas Pynchon
  • A Dance to the Music of Time (1951), by Anthony Powell
  • The Day of the Locust (1939), by Nathanael West
  • Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927), by Willa Cather
  • A Death in the Family (1958), by James Agee
  • The Death of the Heart (1958), by Elizabeth Bowen
  • Deliverance (1970), by James Dickey
  • Dog Soldiers (1974), by Robert Stone

F – G

  • Falconer (1977), by John Cheever
  • The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1969), by John Fowles
  • The Golden Notebook (1962), by Doris Lessing
  • Go Tell it on the Mountain (1953), by James Baldwin
  • Gone With the Wind (1936), by Margaret Mitchell
  • The Grapes of Wrath (1939), by John Steinbeck
  • Gravity’s Rainbow (1973), by Thomas Pynchon
  • The Great Gatsby (1925), by F. Scott Fitzgerald
  • Green Eggs and Ham (1960), by Dr. Seuss

H – I

  • A Handful of Dust (1934), by Evelyn Waugh
  • The Heart is A Lonely Hunter (1940), by Carson McCullers
  • The Heart of the Matter (1948), by Graham Greene
  • Herzog (1964), by Saul Bellow
  • Housekeeping (1981), by Marilynne Robinson
  • A House for Mr. Biswas (1962), by V.S. Naipaul
  • I, Claudius (1934), by Robert Graves
  • In Cold Blood (1966), by Truman Capote
  • Infinite Jest (1996), by David Foster Wallace
  • Invisible Man (1952), by Ralph Ellison

L – N

  • Light in August (1932), by William Faulkner
  • The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe (1950), by C.S. Lewis
  • Lolita (1955), by Vladimir Nabokov
  • Lord of the Flies (1955), by William Golding
  • The Lord of the Rings (1954), by J.R.R. Tolkien
  • Loving (1945), by Henry Green
  • Lucky Jim (1954), by Kingsley Amis
  • The Man Who Loved Children (1940), by Christina Stead
  • Midnight’s Children (1981), by Salman Rushdie
  • Money (1984), by Martin Amis
  • The Moviegoer (1961), by Walker Percy
  • Mrs. Dalloway (1925), by Virginia Woolf
  • Naked Lunch (1959), by William Burroughs
  • Native Son (1940), by Richard Wright
  • Neuromancer (1984), by William Gibson
  • Never Let Me Go (2005), by Kazuo Ishiguro
  • 1984 (1948), by George Orwell
Little girls happily petting piglets because 273% of my friends reposted this on their Facebook wall.

O – R

  • On the Road (1957), by Jack Kerouac
  • One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1962), by Ken Kesey
  • The Painted Bird (1965), by Jerzy Kosinski
  • Pale Fire (1962), by Vladimir Nabokov
  • A Passage to India (1924), by E.M. Forster
  • Play It As It Lays (1970), by Joan Didion
  • Portnoy’s Complaint (1969), by Philip Roth
  • Possession (1990), by A.S. Byatt
  • The Power and the Glory (1939), by Graham Greene
  • The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1961), by Muriel Spark
  • Rabbit, Run (1960), by John Updike
  • Ragtime (1975), by E.L. Doctorow
  • The Recognitions (1955), by William Gaddis
  • Red Harvest (1929), by Dashiell Hammett
  • Revolutionary Road (1961), by Richard Yates

S – T

  • The Sheltering Sky (1949), by Paul Bowles
  • Slaughterhouse Five (1969), by Kurt Vonnegut
  • Snow Crash (1992), by Neal Stephenson
  • The Sot-Weed Factor (1960), by John Barth
  • The Sound and the Fury (1929), by William Faulkner
  • The Sportswriter (1986), by Richard Ford
  • The Spy Who Came in From the Cold (1964), by John le Carre
  • The Sun Also Rises (1926), by Ernest Hemingway
  • Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), by Zora Neale Hurston
  • Things Fall Apart (1959), by Chinua Achebe
  • To Kill a Mockingbird (1960), by Harper Lee
  • To the Lighthouse (1927), by Virginia Woolf
  • Tropic of Cancer (1934), by Henry Miller

U – W

  • Ubik (1969), by Philip K. Dick
  • Under the Net (1954), by Iris Murdoch
  • Under the Volcano (1947), by Malcolm Lowry
  • Watchmen (1986), by Alan Moore & Dave Gibbons
  • White Noise (1985), by Don DeLillo
  • White Teeth (2000), by Zadie Smith
  • Wide Sargasso Sea (1966), by Jean Rhys

BBC list:

1 Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen    (and Zombies!) 

2 The Lord of the Rings – JRR Tolkien

3 Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte

4 Harry Potter series – JK Rowling   

5 To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee

6 The Bible  

7 Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte

8 Nineteen Eighty Four – George Orwell

9 His Dark Materials – Philip Pullman

10 Great Expectations – Charles Dickens 

11 Little Women – Louisa M Alcott 

12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy

13 Catch 22 – Joseph Heller

14 Complete Works of Shakespeare 

15 Rebecca – Daphne Du Maurier

16 The Hobbit – JRR Tolkien 

17 Birdsong – Sebastian Faulk

18 Catcher in the Rye – JD Salinger

19 The Time Traveler’s Wife – Audrey Niffenegger

20 Middlemarch – George Eliot

21 Gone With The Wind – Margaret Mitchell

22 The Great Gatsby – F Scott Fitzgerald

23 Green Eggs and Ham – Dr. Seuss

24 War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy

25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams

27 Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky

28 Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck

29 Alice in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll

30 The Wind in the Willows – Kenneth Grahame

31 Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy

32 David Copperfield – Charles Dickens

33 Chronicles of Narnia – CS Lewis

34 Emma -Jane Austen

35 Persuasion – Jane Austen

36 The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe – CS Lewis

37 The Kite Runner – Khaled Hosseini

38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin – Louis De Bernieres

39 Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden

40 Winnie the Pooh – A.A. Milne

41 Animal Farm – George Orwell

42 The Da Vinci Code – Dan Brown

43 One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez

44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney – John Irving

45 The Woman in White – Wilkie Collins

46 Anne of Green Gables – LM Montgomery

47 Far From The Madding Crowd – Thomas Hardy

48 The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood

49 Lord of the Flies – William Golding

50 Atonement – Ian McEwan

51 Life of Pi – Yann Martel

52 Dune – Frank Herbert

53 Cold Comfort Farm – Stella Gibbons

54 Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen

55 A Suitable Boy – Vikram Seth

56 The Shadow of the Wind – Carlos Ruiz Zafon

57 A Tale Of Two Cities – Charles Dickens

58 Brave New World – Aldous Huxley

59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time – Mark Haddon

60 Love In The Time Of Cholera – Gabriel Garcia Marquez

61 Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck

62 Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov

63 The Secret History – Donna Tartt

64 The Lovely Bones – Alice Sebold

65 Count of Monte Cristo – Alexandre Dumas

66 On The Road – Jack Kerouac

67 Jude the Obscure – Thomas Hardy

68 Bridget Jones’s Diary – Helen Fielding

69 Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie

70 Moby Dick – Herman Melville 

71 Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens

72 Dracula – Bram Stoker

73 The Secret Garden – Frances Hodgson Burnett

74 Notes From A Small Island – Bill Bryson

75 Ulysses – James Joyce

76 The Inferno – Dante 

77 Swallows and Amazons – Arthur Ransome

78 Germinal – Emile Zola

79 Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray

80 Possession – AS Byatt

81 A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens

82 Cloud Atlas – David Mitchell

83 The Color Purple – Alice Walker

84 The Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro

85 Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert

86 A Fine Balance – Rohinton Mistry

87 Charlotte’s Web – E.B. White

88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven – Mitch Albom

89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

90 The Faraway Tree Collection – Enid Blyton

91 Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad

92 The Little Prince – Antoine De Saint-Exupery

93 The Wasp Factory – Iain Banks

94 Watership Down – Richard Adams

95 A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole

96 A Town Like Alice – Nevil Shute

97 The Three Musketeers – Alexandre Dumas

98 Hamlet – William Shakespeare

99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – Roald Dahl

100 Les Miserables – Victor Hugo

6 thoughts on “100 Books, Omnibus edition”

  1. That loud “thunk” was my jaw hitting the ground when I saw you hadn’t read Watchmen… Now I have a good idea what to get you for Christmas 🙂

    I’ll fill out my list for you when I’m on a computer that better understands the whole concept of “cut and paste”.

  2. I think you should compile/fabricate a list of 100 guilt-meme-chain-letter examples. I anticipate great hilarity. 🙂 Loved the examples here!

  3. OK, here’s my list. All have been read in their entirety unless otherwise noted. I find it interesting that the BBC list cheats by putting whole series in as one entry.

    Animal Farm (1946), by George Orwell
    The Big Sleep (1939), by Raymond Chandler
    The Catcher in the Rye (1951), by J.D. Salinger – haven’t finished it (yet), I can’t stand the extremely self-centred narrator for more than short bursts.
    The Crucible (1953), by Arthur Miller
    Green Eggs and Ham (1960), by Dr. Seuss
    I, Claudius (1934), by Robert Graves
    The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe (1950), by C.S. Lewis
    The Lord of the Rings (1954), by J.R.R. Tolkien
    Mrs. Dalloway (1925), by Virginia Woolf
    Neuromancer (1984), by William Gibson
    1984 (1948), by George Orwell
    Slaughterhouse Five (1969), by Kurt Vonnegut
    Snow Crash (1992), by Neal Stephenson
    To Kill a Mockingbird (1960), by Harper Lee
    Ubik (1969), by Philip K. Dick
    Watchmen (1986), by Alan Moore & Dave Gibbons
    Harry Potter series by JK Rowling
    The Bible – read the New Testament, but only some of the Old Testament
    His Dark Materials by Philip Pullman
    The Hobbit by JRR Tolkien
    The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams
    Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll
    The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame
    Chronicles of Narnia by CS Lewis
    Winnie the Pooh by A.A. Milne
    The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown
    Anne of Green Gables by LM Montgomery
    Dune by Frank Herbert
    Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
    The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time by Mark Haddon
    Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas
    Bridget Jones’s Diary by Helen Fielding
    Dracula by Bram Stoker
    A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens
    Charlotte’s Web by E.B. White
    Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
    The Faraway Tree Collection by Enid Blyton – in fact I only recently finished reading this out aloud to miss 6.
    Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
    The Little Prince by Antoine De Saint-Exupery
    Watership Down by Richard Adams
    Charlie and the Chocolate Factory by Roald Dahl – once again, read aloud recently to miss 6

  4. I agree with you about Catcher in the Rye. As far as the Bible, most of my reading was when I was very young and attended church; though the most understanding came during a couple of religious studies courses. There are better things to read.

    The benefit of having miss 6 is (re)visiting classics. I tried to slide HHGTTG in for M, but the attention span wasn’t quite there. Of course, Anne of Green Gables was fun.

    1. < The benefit of having miss 6 is (re)visiting classics.

      Yes, we’re currently reading our way through Charlie & the Great Glass Elevator and The Nargun and the Stars. We’re also reading our way through The Great Big Enormous Book of Tashi, something which looks well on its way to becoming a classic of Australian children’s literature.

      Of the books on the list, The Little Prince and Charlotte’s Web would be good candidates when she’s slightly older (but not now, mainly due to the closing chapters of both books). The Wind in the Willows and Winnie the Pooh are also possibilities.

      Now I’m fruitlessly trying to remember where the quote “send guitars” comes from…

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