Hi everyone!
I recently decided to begin my journey of reading the 50 Greatest Books of All Time. That said, I turned 35 a little over a week ago, and decided it might be more realistic to give "35 Books For 35 Years" a go instead. I consulted several "Greatest," "Most Impactful," and "Books to Read Before You Die" sorts of lists and started scratching out my options; in doing so, I came up with exactly 50 books on the first go around. Weird. I would love your help in narrowing this list down to 35!
A few disclaimers:
• Books I have already read are at the bottom so as to not be suggested again 🙂
• Several authors have multiple books that made the cut – I'd prefer to only read one book by each author and need help deciding which one it should be
• I realize there are many not listed here – fire your suggestions away!
Main List:
Animal Farm – George Orwell
The Heart is a Lonely Hunter – Carson McCullers
Lord of the Flies – William Golding
A Handful of Dust – Evelyn Waugh
A House for Mr. Biswas – V.S. Naipaul
The Day of the Locust – Nathaniel West
On the Road – Jack Kerouac
Uncle Tom’s Cabin – Harriet Beecher Stowe
Beloved – Toni Morrison
Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte
One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Great Expectations – Charles Dickens
Moby Dick – Herman Melville
Middlemarch – George Elliot
Don Quixote – Miguel De Cervantes
Blood Meridian – Cormac McCarthey
Their Eyes Were Watching God – Zora Neale Hurston
The Stranger – Alber Camus
Winesburg, Ohio – Sherwood Anderson
The House of Spirits – Isabel Allende
Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov
I, Claudius – Robert Graves
An American Tragedy – Theodore Dreuser
Tender is the Night – F. Scott Fitzgerald
Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad
In Search of Lost Time – Marcel Proust
1984 – George Orwell
Native Son – Richard Wright
The Trial – Franz Kafka
The Magic Mountain – Thomas Mann
Invisible Man – Ralph Ellison
In Cold Blood – Truman Capote
The Woman in White – Wilkie Collins
Infinite Jest – David Foster Wallace
American Pastoral – Philip Roth
And, the prolific greats:
-William Faulkner-
• The Sound and the Fury
• As I Lay Dying
• Light in August
-Fyodor Dostoevsky-
• The Brothers Karamazov
• The Idiot
• Crime and Punishment
-Leo Tolstoy-
• War and Peace
• Anna Karenina
-James Joyce-
• A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
• Ulysses
• Finnegan’s Wake
-Ernest Hemmingway-
• A Farewell to Arms
• The Old Man and the Sea
• For Whom the Bell Tolls
• The Sun Also Rises
I have already read these:
The Picture of Dorian Grey – Oscar Wilde
Fahrenheit 451 – Ray Bradbury
The Metamorphosis – Franz Kafka
East of Eden – John Steinbeck
The Great Gatsby – F. Scott Fitzgerald
Catch-22 – Joseph Keller
Slaughterhouse Five – Kurt Vonnegut
Man’s Search For Meaning – Viktor Frankl
The Catcher in the Rye – J.D. Salinger
To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee
by Miserable-Move131