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.
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
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
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