100 Books to Read before You Die

So, I get really tired of reading lists put out by various library associations about all the books you should read in order to be a literarily literate human being. Usually, these lists are pretty stuffy, and generally ignore female writers (or subjects), genre literature, and children's literature--even when pieces within these categories reach "classic" status. It doesn't make sense to me. So I've come up with a list of my own. I have not read all of these. As a matter of fact, by my own list, I've only clocked in at 64 of these babies. 

Before you look at the list, consider that I made myself a few rules before ever getting started. Except for certain passages in the Bible, the list contains no poetry--it also contains no plays and almost no non-fiction. Why? Because I felt like when you expand the list to include these criteria, what we're really placing value on is not the book/writing so much as the concept of story--and if we're going to do that, why not also include music? Besides, I'm guessing we all already know we should be reading Shakespeare.  

What I HAVE included that I feel is generally underrepresented in other lists are more American writers, children's/adolescent lit, genre fiction (how is that not important??), and books that are important milestones in the development of the novel form, even if no one would consider these books "good" by modern standards. They're important because without them we wouldn't enjoy the good things we read today. So. Here we go:

100 Books You Should Read:

1  .     The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald

2  .     The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck

3  .     My Antonia, Willa Cather

4  .     To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee

5  .     Jane Eyre, Charlotte Bronte

6  .     North and South, Elizabeth Gaskell

7  .     The Count of Monte Cristo, Alexandre Dumas

8  .     Great Expectations, Charles Dickens

9  .     Light in August, William Faulkner

1  . A Moveable Feast, Ernest Hemingway

1    The Holy Bible, God

1    Les Miserables, Victor Hugo

1    The Remains of the Day, Ishiguro Kazuo

1    A Room with a View, E.M. Forster

1    The Giver, Lois Lowry

1    The Witch of Blackbird Pond, Elizabeth George Speare

1    The Whipping Boy, Sid Fleischman

1    Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain

1    The Tale of Genji, Lady Murasaki

2    Little Women, Louisa May Alcott

2    The Fountainhead, Ayn Rand

2    Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy

2    The BFG, Roald Dahl

2    The Sun Also Rises, Ernest Hemingway

2    Ethan Frome, Edith Wharton

2    O, Pioneers!, Willa Cather

2    Number the Stars, Lois, Lowry

2    Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen

2    Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury

3    Memoirs of a Geisha, Arthur Golden

3    Anne of Green Gables, L.M. Montgomery

3    Emma, Jane Austen

      The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe, C.S. Lewis

3    Walk Two Moons, Sharon Creech

3    Middlemarch, George Eliot

3    The Tale of Despereaux, Kate DiCamillo

3    Charlotte’s Web, E.B. White

3    Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad

3    The Cay, Theodore Taylor

4    Harry Potter & the Sorcerer’s Stone, J.K Rowling

4    For Whom the Bell Tolls, Ernest Hemingway

4    The Old Man & the Sea, Ernest Hemingway

4    Persuasion, Jane Austen

4    The Odyseey, Homer

4    Watership Down, Richard Adams

4    As I Lay Dying, William Faulkner

4    The Secret Garden, Frances Hodgson Burnett

4    Slaughterhouse-Five, Kurt Vonnegut

4    Winnie-the-Pooh, A.A. Milne

5    Matilda, Roald Dahl

5    High Fidelity, Nick Hornby

5    Things Fall Apart, Chinua Achebe

5    Howards End, E.M. Forster

5    Oroonoko, Aphra Behn

5    A Tale of Two Cities, Charles Dickens

5    Wuthering Heights, Emily Bronte

5    A Wrinkle in Time, Madeleine L’Engle

5    The Scarlett Letter, Nathaniel Hawthorne

5    Robinson Crusoe, Daniel Defoe

6    1984, George Orwell

6    Frankenstein, Mary Shelley

6    Lord of the Flies, William Golding

6    The Diary of a Young Girl, Anne Frank

6    The Catcher in the Rye, J.D. Salinger

6    Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Lewis Carroll

6    Of Mice & Men, John Steinbeck

6    The Picture of Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde

6    Brave New World, Aldous Huxley

6    Crime & Punishment, Fyodor Dostoevsky

7    Vanity Fair, William Makepeace Thackery

7    Catch-22, Joseph Heller

7    The Hobbit, J.R.R. Tolkien

7    Lolita, Vladmir Nabakov

7    Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Harriet Beecher Stowe

7    Don Quixote, Miguel de Cervantes

7    The Good Earth, Pearl S. Buck

7    Moby Dick, Herman Melville

7    I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, Maya Angelou

7    Persuasion, Jane Austen

8    The Call of the Wild, Jack London

8    Gulliver’s Travels, Jonathan Swift

8    And Then There Were None, Agatha Christie

8    The Time Machine, H.G. Wells

8    Journey to the Center of the Earth, Jules Verne

8    Beloved, Toni Morrison

8    Their Eyes Were Watching God, Zora Neale Hurston

8    Tess of the D’Urbervilles, Thomas Hardy

8    Peter Pan, J.M. Barrie

8    Ulysses, James Joyce

9    Midnight’s Children, Salman Rushdie

9    One Hundred Years of Solitude, Gabriel Garcia Marquez

9    Gone With the Wind, Margaret Mitchell

9    The Sound and the Fury, William Faulkner

9    The Tell-Tale Heart and Other Writings, Edgar Allan Poe

9    The Portrait of a Lady, Henry James

9    The Green Mile, Stephen King

9    Contact, Carl Sagan

9    Atonement, Ian McEwan

9    Death Comes for the Archbishop, Willa Cather

1    Breakfast at Tiffany’s & Three Stories, Truman Capote