Isn’t it strange that we have the term “well-read” but absolutely no one can come close to defining it? And isn’t also strange that other art forms don’t have equivalent terms for a vague sense of someone’s total experience of that form (well-seen for movies? well-heard for music? Absurd).
Thinking about this recently sucked me into a little thought-experiment: say someone had never read any literature and wanted to be well-read. What should they read? And how many books would it take them to get close?
This hypothetical forces any given answerer to do two things: provide their personal definition of well-read and then give a list of books that might satisfy that definition. The first hurdle to clear is cultural position: who is this person? As I can only provide a reasonable list of books from my own cultural position, I have to assume that this person is like me, at least in a very basic way: an alive American who can read English.
“Well-read” for this person then has a number of connotations: a familiarity with the monuments of Western literature, an at least passing interest in the high-points of world literature, a willingness to experience a breadth of genres, a special interest in the work of one’s immediate culture, a desire to share in the same reading experiences of many other readers, and an emphasis on the writing of the current day.
The following 100 books (of fiction, poetry, and drama) is an attempt to satisfy those competing requirements. After going through several iterations of the list, one thing surprised me: there are not as many “classic” books that I associate with the moniker well-read, and many more current books than I would have thought. Conversely, to be conversant in the literature of the day turned out to be quite a bit more important than I would have thought.
As for the number of 100: in addition to being a nice, round number, it is also a number that, at a one-book-every-two-week pace this hypothetical reader could accomplish in just about four years–the standard length of an undergraduate program.
Jeff included his list of books (My comments are in blue):
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain Read this
The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Arthur Conan Doyle Read this whole series
The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton ?
All Quiet on the Western Front by Eric Maria Remarque
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Klay by Michael Chabon
American Pastoral by Philip Roth ?
Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
Anne of Green Gables by Lucy Maud Montgomery Read this whole series.
Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand ?
The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath
Beloved by Toni Morrison
Beowulf (Summer reading for High School, Junior year- and then I found out I was in Honors English and had a totally different reading list)
The Book Thief by Markus Zusak
Brave New World by Alduos Huxley
The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz ?
The Call of the Wild by Jack London
Candide by Voltaire
The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer Read some of these stories
Casino Royale by Ian Fleming Read this
Catch-22 by Joseph Heller Not gonna happen
The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger Read this
Charlotte’s Web by E.B. White Read this and loved it!
Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell ?
The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson Read a small sample of her work
The Complete Stories of Edgar Allan Poe Read a couple of his stories
The Complete Stories of Flannery O’Connor ?
The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen ?
Crime & Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky Not gonna happen
The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown
Death of a Salesman by Arthur Miller Read this in High School and College
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 Not gonna happen
The Fault in Our Stars by John Green
Faust by Goethe Not gonna happen
Frankenstein by Mary Shelley Read only a little of this
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 Read them and have had them read to me...
The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
Great Expectations by Charles Dickens
The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald Read this
Hamlet by William Shakespeare Read this in High School
The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood
Harry Potter & The Sorceror’s Stone by J.K. Rowling Read this whole series multiple times
Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
The Help by Kathryn Stockett
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams Read this whole series
The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien Read this
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 ?
The Iliad by Homer
The Inferno by Dante
Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace ?
Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman ?
The Life of Pi by Yann Martel
The Lion, the Witch, and The Wardrobe by C.S. Lewis Read this whole series
The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exepury Read this
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 I read this- Love her!
The Odyssey by Homer I read Bernard Evslin’s retelling, not sure that counts.
Oedipus, King by Sophocles Reading Antigone should totally count...
On the Road by Jack Kerouac Not gonna happen
A Passage to India by E.M. Forster
The Pentateuch As the first five books of the bible and Leviticus was BRUTAL
Pride & Prejudice by Jane Austen I read this
Rabbit, Run by John Updike
The Road by Cormac McCarthy ?
Romeo & Juliet by William Shakespeare I read this in High School
The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne I read this in High School
Slaughterhouse-5 by Kurt Vonnegut Not gonna happen
The Sound and The Fury by William Faulkner
The Stand by Stephen King
The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway I read this in High School
Swann’s Way by Marcel Proust ?
Their Eyes Were Watching God 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 I read this last year for the first time
Ulysses by James Joyce Never gonna happen
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 After seeing the miniseries I have NO desire to read this
1984 by George Orwell Not gonna happen
50 Shades of Grey by E.L. James Not my cup of tea
And based on the comment section, folks were not delighted with Mr. O'Neal's choices. I have read at least some part of 26 of them. Not sure how that compares to the 27 I have never heard of and there are at least a few I will not be reading~ some things are just not my thing and others just seem like way too much effort.
A few are in my house (or Kindle) and on my "to read soon" list:
1.
The Book Thief by Markus Zusak
2.
The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown
3.
The Fault in Our Stars by John Green
4.
Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
5.
Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn
6.
The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood
7.
The Help by Kathryn Stockett
8.
The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins
9.
Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Maybe when I get through them, I will check out some of the others...
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