2013 New Year’s Resolution

This entry was posted on January 4, 2013, in -General Post and tagged . Bookmark the permalink. 2 Comments

Last year, my new year’s resolution was book themed- to rediscover the library and spend less money on books. I am happy to say that I met last year’s goal by leaps and bounds; I spent over $2000 less on books in 2012 than in 2011. However, I read even more than I did the previous year.

This year’s resolution will also be book themed- I am going to revisit classics I read a long time ago with young, less mature eyes and I am going to pick up novels for the first time that have been selected as the best novels of all time, even if they are outside my usual tastes.

My hopes are that 1) I will broaden my horizons, 2) I will discover some really good novels that I would not have normally picked up, and 3) I will change my opinion of books (War and Peace) that I always thought were highly overrated. I compiled the list of books below from many different lists on the Internet. These are the 100 with which I decided to begin.

This does not mean I am not going to be reading my zombie, vampire, dystopian and apocalyptic books anymore; it just means that every once in a while, I will go back to the school in my head, pick up a classic and begin class- starting with The Great Gatsby.

Top 100 Classics Reading List

(in alphabetical order by title)

  1. 1984 by George Orwell
  2. Absalom, Absalom! by William Faulkner
  3. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, The by Mark Twain
  4. Aeneid, The by Virgil
  5. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll
  6. All the King’s Men by Robert Penn Warren
  7. And then there Were None by Agatha Christie —  — REVIEW PENDING
  8. Animal Farm by George Orwell
  9. Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
  10. Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand
  11. Awakening, The by Kate Chopin
  12. Beloved by Toni Morrison
  13. Blindness by Jose Saramago
  14. Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
  15. Brothers Karamazov, The by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
  16. Call of the Wild by Jack London
  17. Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer
  18. Castle, The by Franz Kafka
  19. Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
  20. Catcher in the Rye, The by J.D. Salinger —  — READ MY REVIEW
  21. Charlotte’s Web by E.B. White
  22. Clockwork Orange, A by Anthony Burgess
  23. Color Purple, The by Alice Walker —  — REVIEW PENDING
  24. Count of Monte Cristo, The by Alexandre Dumas
  25. Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
  26. Dead Souls by Nikolai Gogol
  27. Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio
  28. Deliverance by James Dickey
  29. Divine Comedy, The by Dante Alighieri
  30. Dracula by Bram Stoker
  31. Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson
  32. Dr. Zhivago by Boris Pasternak
  33. Dune by Frank Herbert
  34. Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury —  — READ MY REVIEW
  35. For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway
  36. Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
  37. Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell —  — REVIEW PENDING
  38. Grapes of Wrath, The by John Steinbeck
  39. Gravity’s Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon
  40. Great Gatsby, The by F. Scott Fitzgerald —  — READ MY REVIEW
  41. Great Expectations by Charles Dickens
  42. Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift
  43. Hamlet by William Shakespeare
  44. Handmaid’s Tale, The by Margaret Atwood
  45. Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
  46. I, Claudius by Robert Graves
  47. Iliad, The by Homer
  48. Invisible Man, The by Ralph Ellison
  49. Les Miserables by Victor Hugo
  50. Little Women by Louis May Alcott
  51. Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
  52. Lord of the Flies by William Golding
  53. Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
  54. Master and the Margarita, The by Mikhail Bulgakov
  55. Metamorphoses by Ovid
  56. Middlemarch by George Eliot
  57. Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie
  58. Moby Dick by Herman Melville
  59. Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf
  60. Name of the Rose, The by Umberto Eco
  61. Native Son by Richard Wright
  62. Neuromancer by William Gibson
  63. Notes from Underground by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
  64. Odyssey, The by Homer
  65. Oedipus the King by Sophocles
  66. Of Human Bondage by W. Somerset Maugham
  67. Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck
  68. Old Man and the Sea, The by Ernest Hemingway
  69. On the Beach by Nevil Shute
  70. One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest by Ken Kesey
  71. One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez —  — READ MY REVIEW
  72. Picture of Dorian Gray, The by Oscar Wilde
  73. Plague by Albert Camus
  74. Prayer for Owen Meany, A by John Irving
  75. Pride & Prejudice by Jane Austen
  76. Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, The by Muriel Spark
  77. Red Badge of Courage, The by Stephen Crane
  78. Scarlet Letter, The by Nathaniel Hawthorne
  79. Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut
  80. Sons and Lovers by D.H. Lawrence
  81. Sound and the Fury, The by William Faulkner
  82. Stranger, The by Albert Camus
  83. Sun Also Rises, The by Ernest Hemingway
  84. Tale of Two Cities, A by Charles Dickens
  85. Tess of the D’Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy
  86. Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston
  87. Tin Drum, The by Gunter Grass
  88. To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
  89. Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller
  90. Ubik by Philip K. Dick
  91. Ulysses by James Joyce
  92. Vanity Fair by William Makepeace Thackery
  93. War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
  94. War of the Worlds, The by H.G. Wells
  95. Watership Down by Richard Adams —  — READ MY REVIEW
  96. Way of All Flesh, The by Samuel Butler
  97. Westing Game, The by Ellen Raskin
  98. Wonderful Wizard of Oz, The by L. Frank Baum
  99. Wrinkle in Time, A by Madeleine L’Engle
  100. Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte

Suggested by my dad-

  1. Beau Geste by Percival C. Wren
  2. Dr. Strangelove: or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb by Peter Bryan George
  3. Ivanhoe by Walter Scott

2 thoughts on “2013 New Year’s Resolution”

  1. Pingback: REVIEW: The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald « Book Expectations

  2. Pingback: BORING! High School Reading Lists « Book Expectations

Leave a comment