1. Time’s 100 Best Books of All Time

    October 4, 2013 ♥ Posted in: Nerd Topics, Writing by Kristina Horner

    I’ve had this list saved on a page in Evernote for months; when I realized I didn’t have any ideas for today’s blog post, it seemed like just the thing to do. What are we doing exactly? We are embarrassing ourselves with how not well read we are. This is Time’s 100 Best Books of All Time. The list was compiled by Time magazine’s critics Lev Grossman and Richard Lacayo, and I’m about to show you how many I’ve actually read cover to cover.

    The Adventures of Augie March
    All the King’s Men
    American Pastoral
    An American Tragedy
    Animal Farm
    Appointment in Samarra
    Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret 
    The Assistant
    At Swim-Two-Birds
    Atonement
    Beloved
    The Berlin Stories
    The Big Sleep
    The Blind Assassin
    Blood Meridian
    Brideshead Revisited
    The Bridge of San Luis Rey 
    Call It Sleep
    Catch-22
    The Catcher in the Rye
    A Clockwork Orange
    The Confessions of Nat Turner
    The Corrections
    The Crying of Lot 49
    A Dance to the Music of Time
    The Day of the Locust
    Death Comes for the Archbishop
    A Death in the Family
    The Death of the Heart
    Deliverance
    Dog Soldiers
    Falconer
    The French Lieutenant’s Woman
    The Golden Notebook
    Go Tell it on the Mountain
    Gone with the Wind
    The Grapes of Wrath
    Gravity’s Rainbow
    The Great Gatsby
    A Handful of Dust
    The Heart is a Lonely Hunter
    The Heart of the Matter
    Herzog
    Housekeeping
    A House for Mr. Biswas
    I, Claudius
    Infinite Jest
    Invisible Man
    Light in August
    The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe
    Lolita
    Lord of the Flies
    The Lord of the Rings
    The Moviegoer
    Loving
    Lucky Jim
    The Man Who Loved Children
    Midnight’s Children
    Money
    Mrs. Dalloway
    Naked Lunch
    Native Son
    Neuromancer
    Never Let Me Go
    1984
    On the Road
    One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
    The Painted Bird
    Pale Fire
    A Passage to India
    Play It As It Lays
    Portnoy’s Complaint
    Possession
    The Power and the Glory
    The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie
    Rabbit, Run
    Ragtime
    The Recognitions
    Red Harvest
    Revolutionary Road
    The Sheltering Sky
    Slaughterhouse Five
    Snow Crash
    The Sot-Weed Factor
    The Sound and the Fury
    The Sportswriter
    The Spy Who Came in From the Cold
    The Sun Also Rises
    Their Eyes Were Watching God
    Things Fall Apart
    To Kill a Mockingbird
    To the Lighthouse
    Tropic of Cancer
    Ubik
    Under the Net
    Under the Volcano
    Watchmen
    White Noise
    White Teeth
    Wide Sargasso Sea

    So… 10 out of 100. That’s terrible. And to be perfectly honest, most of those were books I read for school. There were a few titles I am so ashamed I haven’t read (The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe, Slaughterhouse Five, A Clockwork Orange, 1984) that I almost didn’t post this list, but I figured it would be a good catalyst for discussion. So here is my literary shame. Also, I didn’t count the ones I have only seen the movie of (Lord of the Rings, Never Let Me Go, etc).

    How many have you read on this list? Why do you think we often shy away from these classics? How important is it that we read them? Let me know in the comments!

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