Lately I've been feeling very "blah" about books.
I have to literally force myself to read every night. Reading is becoming more of a chore than a relaxing activity and that worries me. I used to loveee reading! Also, I'm not in class this semester and I fear I may become dumber and less able to concentrate if I stop educating myself through recreational reading. Or maybe I'm just reading books that do not really interest me right now. Once I start a book though, I need to finish it.
The two puppies that I've been working tirelessly on for a bit are
The Red and the Black by Stendhal (Super good, but sooo long, I feel like I've been reading it for a year. I'm just ready to be done with it already.)
and Notes from a Small Island by Bill Bryson (Not as funny as I initially thought.)
I also started Franny and Zooey by J.D. Salinger the other day (Which I loveeee, but I really want to finish other two books before I really get into it.)
Today however, I came across two lists of books to read that I think (hope) with reinvigorate my appetite for literature.
They are: 100 books every man should read (http://artofmanliness.com/2008/05/14/100-must-read-books-the-essential-mans-library/) and 100 books every woman should read (http://www.thecompletewomanblog.com/2009/01/100-books-every-woman-should-read-1/).
I'm going to (try to) read all of them.
In doing so, I shall conquer the looming fate of my own illiteracy while also mastering the complexities of both the male and female sexes. Or not...but it's a good challenge :).
Here they are, I'll update this post and review each in a new post as I go.
I think my strategy will be to read the books alphabetically by author.
And if more than one book by one author is listed, I will read them in chronological order by the date they were published.
Also, even if I've read a book on the list before I'm going to re-read it.
(Obviously if a book is cross-listed I'm just going to read it once...but if that's the case, it's probably a super awesome book so maybe I will read it twice just for fun)
Yay! Excited! Books!
200ish Books Men/Women Should Read
*cross listed
bold = read
Chinua Acebe: Things Fall Apart
Douglas Adams: The Ultimate Hitchhiker's Guide
Lousia May Alcott: Little Women
Dante Alighieri: The Divine Comedy*
William Alocott: The Young Man's Guide
Margaret Atwood: The Handmaid's Tale
Stephen Ambrose: Undaunted Courage
Aristotle: The Politics
Saint Augustine: The Confessions of Saint Augustine
Marcus Aurelius: Meditations
Jane Austen:
- Sense and Sensibility
- Pride and Prejudice
- Mansfield Park
- Emma
- Northanger Abbey
- Persuasion
Boy Scouts of America: The First Edition of The Boy Scout Handbook
James Boswell: The Life of Samuel Johnson
Ray Bradbury: Fahrenheit 451
Charlotte Bronte: Jane Eyre
Emily Bronte: Wuthering Heights
Pearl S. Buck: The Good Earth
Mikhail Bulgakov: The Master and Margarita*
John Bunyan: Pilgrim's Progress
Edgar Rice Burroughs: Tarzan of the Apes
John Calvin: Institutes of the Christian Religion
Italo Calvino: If On a Winter's Night a Traveler
Albert Camus: The Stranger
Dale Carnegie: How to Win Friends and Influence People
Willa Cather: Death Comes for the Archbishop
Raymond Chandler: The Long Goodbye
Geoffrey Chaucher: The Canterbury Tales
Anton Checkhov: Short Stories
G.K. Chesterton: The Man Who Was Thursday
Winston Churchill: The Crisis
Joseph Conrad: Heart of Darkness
Stephen Crane: The Red Badge of Courage
Daniel Dafoe: Robinson Crusoe
Roald Dahl: The BFG
Joy Davidman: Smoke on the Mountain
Don Delillo: White Noise
Charles Dickens: David Copperfield
Fyodor Dostoevsky:
- Crime and Punishment*
- The Idiot
- Brothers Karamazov
Umberto Eco:
- The Name of the Rose
- Foucault's Pendulum
- The Mill on the Floss
- Middlemarch
William Faulkner: As I Lay Dying
Dorothy Canfield Fisher: Seasoned Timber
F. Scott Fitzgerald:
- This Side of Paradise
- The Great Gatsby
Benjamin Franklin: The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin
Betty Friedan: The Feminine Mystique
Elizabeth Gaskell: Cranford
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe: The Sorrows of Young Werther
William Golding: The Lord of the Flies
Kennethe Grahame: The Wind in the Willows
Graham Green: The Human Factor
H. Rider Haggard:
- King Solomon's Mines
- She
Cicely Hamilton: William: An Englishman
Dashiell Hammet: The Maltese Falcon
Thomas Hardy: Jude the Obscure
Nathaniel Hawthorne: The Scarlett Letter
Ernest Hemingway:
- Men Without Women
- A Farewell to Arms
- For Whom the Bell Tolls
Herman Hesse: Steppenwolf
Thomas Hobbes: Leviathan
Homer: The Iliad and The Odyssey*
Joseph Heller: Catch-22
Anthony Hope: The Prisoner of Zenda
Aldous Huxley: Brave New World*
Henrik Ibsen: A Doll's House
Conn and Hal Iggulden: The Dangerous Book for Boys
Denis Johnson: Seek: Reports from the Edges of America & Beyond
James Jones:
- From Here to Eternity
- The Thin Red Line
Roger Kahn: The Boys of Summer
Franz Kafka: The Metamorphosis
Jack Kerouac:
- On the Road
- Dharma Bums
Maxine Hong Kingston:
- China Men
- The Woman Warrior
John Krakauer:
- Into the Wild
- Into Thin Air
Harper Lee: To Kill a Mockingbird*
Gaston Leroux: The Phantom of the Opera
C.S. Lewis:
- The Great Divorce
- Chronicles of Narnia Collection
- Till We Have Faces
George Macdonald: Lilith
Niccolo Machiavelli: The Prince*
Denis Mackail: Greenery Street
Norman F. Maclean: A River Runs Through It
Norman Mailer: The Naked and The Dead
Sir Thomas Malory: Le Morte D’Arthur
Thomas Mann: Joseph and His Brothers
Catherine Marshall: Christy
W. Somerset Maugham: The Razor's Edge
Cormac McCarthy: Blood Meridian, or the Evening Redness in the West
Larry McMurty: Lonesome Dove
Herman Melville: Moby Dick
Henry Miller: Tropic of Cancer
John Milton: Paradise Lost*
Margaret Mitchell: Gone With the Wind
Edmund Morris
- The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt
- Theodore Rex
Flannery O'Conner: A Good Man is Hard to Find
Baroness Emmuska Orczy: The Scarlet Pimpernal
George Orwell:
- Animal Farm*
- 1984
Thomas Paine: Common Sense
Boris Pasternak: Doctor Zhivago
Gary Paulson: Hatchet
Robert Pirsig: Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
Christine De Pizan: The Book of Deeds of Arms and of Chivalry
Plato: The Republic*
Plutarch: Lives of Noble Greeks and Romans
Gene Stratton-Porter: A Girl of the Limberlost
Peter Post: Essential Manners for Men
Ann Radcliffe: The Mysteries of Udolpho
Ayn Rand: Atlas Shrugged
Erich Maria Remarq: All Quiet on The Western Front
Tom Robbins: Another Roadside Attraction
Theodore Roosevelt:
- The Rough Riders
- The Strenuous Life
Salman Rushdie: Midnight's Children
Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra: Don Quixote
J.D. Salinger: The Catcher and the Rye
Sir Walter Scott: Ivanhoe
Anna Sewell: Black Beauty
Shakespeare:
- Hamlet*
- The Complete Works
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley: Frankenstein*
Murasaki Shikibu: The Tale of Genji
Adam Smith: The Wealth of Nations
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn: One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
Robert Southey: The Chronicle of the Sid
Elizabeth George Speare: The Witch of Blackbeard Pond
John Steinbeck:
- The Grapes of Wrath*
- Cannery Row
- The Pearl*
- East of Eden
Jonathan Swift: Gulliver's Travels
Paul Theroux: The Great Railway Bazaar
Henry David Thoreau: Walden*
J.R.R. Tolkein:
- The Hobbit
- Lord of the Rings Triology
- Anna Karenina
Frederick Jackson Turner: The Frontier in American History
Mark Twain:
- The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
- Joan of Arc
Unknown:
- The Epic of Gilgamesh
- The Bible*
- Slaughterhouse-Five
- Bluebeard
Winifred Watson: Miss Pettigrew Lives For a Day
Evelyn Waugh: Brideshead Revisited
H.G. Wells: The Island of Dr. Moreau
Dorothy Whipple: The Priory
Oscar Wilde:
- The Picture of Dorian Gray
- The Importance of Being Earnest
P.G. Wodehouse: Very Good, Jeeves
Mary Wollstonecraft: A Vindication of the Rights of Women
Johann David Wyss: Swiss Family Robinson
Malcolm X: Malcolm X: The Autobiography
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