All about my challenge...
I realised that the total extent of my knowledge of ‘literature greats’ consists only of Orwell thanks to an in-depth class study of 1984 whilst I was 16 years old. I decided that I’d missed out on far too many great classics and essential modern literature and so I decided to take matters into my own hands… Here is my list of essential books that I currently own from a Guardian Top 100 list or something, most of which I would like to read before I die (or maybe within the next two years so that this doesn’t run forever). I started this challenge approximately 1 month ago. The titles with lines through them denote the ones that I have already enjoyed. The underlined titles are the ones that I have started and not yet finished (I expect that I’ll be stuck on Ulysses forever!) Please feel free to join me on this journey and make your own comments/opinions of the list or make your own suggestions. A Farewell to Arms - Hemingway A Journey to the Center of the Earth -Verne A Portrait of the Artist As a Young Man -Joyce A Simple Soul -Flaubert A Tale of Two Citiesi -Dickens Adventures of Sherlock Holmes-Doyle Animal Farm -Orwell Anna Karenina -Tolstoy Anthem -Rand Atlas Shrugged -Rand Axolotl -Cortazar Brave New World -Huxley Catch 22 -Heller Common Sense -Paine Complete Original Maupassant -Maupassant Complete Oscar Wilde Collection -Wilde Crime and Punishment - Dostoyevsky Dracula -Stoker Dubliners - Joyce East of Eden -Steinbeck Emma -Austen Ethan Frome-Wharton Fahrenheit 451 -Radbury Flatland -Abbott For Whom the Bell Tolls -Hemingway Frankenstein-Shelley Great Expectations - Dickens Heart of Darkness - Conrad I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings -Angelou Little Women -Alcott Lord of the Flies -Golden Madame Bovary -Flaubert Mansfield Park -Austen Metamorhosis -Kafka Moll Flanders-Defoe My Antonia -Cather My Uncle Jules-Mauppasant Of Human Bondage.azw -Somerset Maugham Of Mice and Men -Steinbeck One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest -Kesey Sentimental Education - Flaubert Something Wicked This Way Comes - Bradbury Sons and Lovers - Lawrence Tender is the NIght - Fitzgerald The Age of Innocence - Wharton The Beautiful and Damned - Fitzgerald The Bell Jar - Plath The Brothers Karamazov - Dostoyevsky The Catcher in the Rye - Salinger The Count of Monte Christo. - Dumas The Crucible -Miller The Divine Comedy - Dante The Fountainhead - Rand The Grapes of Wrath - Steinbeck The Great Gatsby -Fitzgerald The Happy Prince -Wilde The Idiot -Dostoyevsky The Illustrated Man -Bradbury The Metamorphosis -Kafka The Old Man and the Sea -Hemingway The Other Two -Wharton The Picture of Dorian Gray - Wilde The Portrait of a Lady -James The Satanic Verses - Rushdie The Scarlet Letter - Hawthorne The Stranger - Camus The Sun Also Rises - Hemingway The Trial -Kafka The Virtue of Selfishness - Rand Their Eyes Were Watching God -Hurston This Side of Paradise -Fitzgerald Three Musketeers -Dumas To Kill a Mockingbird -Lee Tropic of Cancer -Miller Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea-Verne Ulysses -Joyce Vanity Fair -Thackeray Walden -Thoreau Women in Love -Lawrence Wuthering Heights -Bronte