Zero to 100
December 27, 2013 at 4:17 am (Education) (book lists, Book Riot, books, lists, well-read)
Go From Zero to Well-Read in 100 Books (as per Book Riot)… I wanted to see how “well-read” I already am. I put two * after it if I’ve already read it.
- The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain **
- The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Arthur Conan Doyle **
- The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton **
- All Quiet on the Western Front by Eric Maria Remarque
- The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay by Michael Chabon
- American Pastoral by Philip Roth
- Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy **
- Anne of Green Gables by Lucy Maud Montgomery **
- Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand
- The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath
- Beloved by Toni Morrison
- Beowulf
- The Book Thief by Markus Zusak **
- Brave New World by Alduos Huxley
- The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz
- Call of the Wild by Jack London **
- Candide by Voltaire
- The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer **
- Casino Royale by Ian Fleming
- Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
- The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger **
- Charlotte’s Web by E.B. White **
- Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell
- The Collected Poems of Emily Dickinson **
- The Complete Stories of Edgar Allan Poe **
- The Complete Stories of Flannery O’Connor
- The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen
- Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky **
- The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown
- Death of a Salesman by Arthur Miller **
- Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes **
- Dream of Red Chamber by Cao Xueqin
- Dune by Frank Herbert **
- Everything is Illuminated by Jonathan Safran Foer
- Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
- The Fault in Our Stars by John Green
- Faust by Goethe
- Frankenstein by Mary Shelley **
- A Game of Thrones by George RR Martin
- The Golden Bowl by Henry James
- The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing
- Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn
- The Gospels **
- The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck **
- Great Expectations by Charles Dickens **
- The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald **
- Hamlet by William Shakespeare **
- The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood
- Harry Potter & The Sorceror’s Stone by J.K. Rowling **
- Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad **
- The Help by Kathryn Stockett
- The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams **
- The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien **
- House Made of Dawn by N. Scott Momaday
- Howl by Allen Ginsberg
- The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins **
- if on a winter’s night a traveler by Italo Calvino (* haven’t finished it yet)
- The Iliad by Homer **
- Inferno by Dante **
- Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace
- Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison **
- Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman **
- Life of Pi by Yann Martel **
- The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe by C.S. Lewis **
- The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exepury
- Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov **
- Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez **
- Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert **
- Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie
- Moby-Dick by Herman Melville **
- Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf **
- Murder on the Orient Express by Agatha Christie **
- The Odyssey by Homer **
- Oedipus the King by Sophocles **
- On the Road by Jack Kerouac
- A Passage to India by E.M. Forster **
- The Pentateuch **
- Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen **
- Rabbit, Run by John Updike
- The Road by Cormac McCarthy
- Romeo and Juliet by William Shakespeare **
- The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne **
- Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut **
- The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner
- The Stand by Stephen King
- The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway
- Swann’s Way by Marcel Proust
- Their Eyes Were Watching by Zora Neale Hurston **
- Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe **
- The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien
- To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee **
- Ulysses by James Joyce
- The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera
- A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan
- Waiting for the Barbarians by J.M. Coetzee
- Watchmen by Alan Moore
- The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami
- Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte **
- 1984 by George Orwell **
- Fifty Shades of Grey by E.L. James
So barely more than half. These lists always make me feel as though I have fallen so short as a human! But 50 Shades? Really, that makes you well read? Hmmm. Somehow I feel like that book is entirely out of place here. There are some on the list I may have read, but I can’t remember whether I did or not. I did not * those.
Which ones have you read? What do you think of Book Riot’s list?
Anakalian Whims 
Meb Bryant said,
December 27, 2013 at 2:54 pm
I’ve read about twenty on the list, including the 50 Shades trilogy which does NOT belong on any well-written list. But then again, what do I know? I was raised on Reader’s Digest Condensed books (many turned into blockbuster movies).
My reading tastes are like my wine favorites…I know what I like.
musingsfromthetardis said,
December 31, 2013 at 2:45 pm
I know theses lists are so random…I always wonder how I can read so much and check off so few…
50 Shades must be on there for the less avid readers….