Heard about J.D. Salinger’s death last night and just finished reading his obit in my local paper today. Now it’s true confessions time…
Although I know about Salinger and Catcher in the Rye–have even referenced them in conversation–I(gulp)never actually read the book. Nope. Never. I’m finally coming clean. War and Peace? Yup. Tale of Two Cities? Yup. Catcher in the Rye? Nope.
There are so many classics I realized it’s easy to overlook some great titles. Just never get around to them. But they’re so much a part of our culture it’s easy to “fake it”. And once you get out of school there’s no one saying “Read this” or “Read that” so most of us probably stick to new releases.
In honor of Salinger I’m make a list of “Classics I Never Read But Should Have”. Twelve–one for each month. I’m starting with Catcher in the Rye.
Does anyone have suggestions of classics everyone should read?
Jodi,
I would share the same deep, dark secret–for an English major, I’ve read my share of works that made me go “Huh?”, and I feel I’ve read more than my (and lots of other people’s) share of Shakespeare, but I am terribly, terribly behind in the “classics.” I set a similar goal for myself one year…perhaps 2009?…and I did buy a few books that I “should” read….and there they sit. Bad, bad English major! However, out of the ones I am pretty familiar with, I would recommend (see, normally I would put “Catcher in the Rye” right at the top–AMAZING book) “20,000 Leagues Under the Sea”, and “The Great Gatsby”–though, for my money, “Tender is the Night” is a far better book than “Gatsby”. JMO.
Hey Jodi, everybody fakes it. That’s why people write books like “100 Greatest Books.” Uh, not that I own that book or anything…:-)
Anyway, when I’m not catching up with Newbery books, I try to read Pulitzer books, or those books on the Classics rack in the library. If you haven’t read Ayn Rand, you could try “Atlas Shrugged.” It’s one of those iconoclastic reads, I think. “The Bridge of San Luis Rey” is one of those Pulitzer novels that sort of changed the way I think. “Death Comes for the Archbishop” by Willa Cather is one of those classics where I copied pages of quotes. And “Ellen Foster” by Kaye Gibbons is one of my favorite novels. Ever.
Happy reading! (And hey, props to you for reading “War and Peace.” I think that’s around here somewhere, propping a door open
Hi Jodi,
Here’s a little help from the BBC.
The BBC’s 100 Books You Should Read
1 Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen
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 – read some, but not others…
15 Rebecca – Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit – JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong – Sebastian Faulk
18 Catcher in the Rye – JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveller’s Wife – Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch – George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind – Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby – F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House – Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh
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
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 – AA 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 Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath
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 – EB 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