One of my Things To Do Before I Die

One of the earliest items added to my list of things to do before I die was to read 100 classic works of literature. I assembled the list by soliciting suggestions from librarians, teachers, members of newsgroups, and culling titles from similar lists. I included novels, short story collections, poetry, and plays, but I limited myself to a single work by each author.

The list was assembled by the summer of 1985, and over the next two years young Carrington read his way through each of the books in a more or less random order. I’ve become a much faster reader since then, but at the time it took almost a full two years of constant reading for me to get through these books. I have rarely expended my time in a more valuable pursuit.

The Books:

1. Beowulf
2. A Death In The Family by James Agee
3. Poetics by Aristotle
4. Pride And Prejudice by Jane Austen
5. Waiting For Godot by Samuel Beckett
6. The Pilgrim’s Progress by John Bunyan
7. The Way Of All Flesh by Samuel Butler
8. The Rebel by Albert Camus
9. Sartor Resartus by Thomas Carlyle
10. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll
11. My Antonia by Willa Cather
12. Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
13. The Long Goodbye by Raymond Chandler
14. The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer
15. The Cherry Orchard by Anton Chekhov
16. No Name by Wilkie Collins
17. Heart Of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
18. The Last Of The Mohicans by James Fenimore Cooper
19. The Red Badge Of Courage by Stephen Crane
20. Inferno by Dante
21. Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe
22. Great Expectations by Charles Dickens
23. Crime And Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky
24. The Hound Of The Baskervilles by Arthur Conan Doyle
25. Sister Carrie by Theodore Dreiser
26. The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas
27. Middlemarch by George Eliot
28. The Wasteland by T. S. Eliot
29. Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
30. Ask The Dust by John Fante
31. The Sound And The Fury by William Faulkner
32. Joseph Andrews by Henry Fielding
33. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
34. Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
35. Aspects Of The Novel by E. M. Forster
36. New Grub Street by George Gissing
37. Faust by Goethe
38. Lord Of The Flies by William Golding
39. She Stoops To Conquer by Oliver Goldsmith
40. I Claudius by Robert Graves
41. Brighton Rock by Graham Greene
42. The Glass Key by Dashiell Hammett
43. The Mayor of Casterbridge by Thomas Hardy
44. The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne
45. Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
46. A Farewell To Arms by Ernest Hemingway
47. The Odyssey by Homer
48. Les Miserables by Victor Hugo
49. Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
50. Ulysses by James Joyce
51. The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka
52. On the Road by Jack Kerouac
53. Captains Courageous by Rudyard Kipling
54. Lady Chatterley’s Lover by D. H. Lawrence
55. Inherit The Wind by Jerome Lawrence
56. To Kill A Mockingbird by Harper Lee
57. The Call Of The Wild by Jack London
58. The Prince by Machiavelli
59. The Razor’s Edge by W. Somerset Maugham
60. Rebecca by Daphne Du Maurier
61. Moby Dick by Herman Melville
62. Death Of A Salesman by Arthur Miller
63. Paradise Lost by John Milton
64. Utopia by Thomas Moore
65. Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
66. 1984 by George Orwell
67. Metamorphosis by Ovid
68. The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath
69. The Republic by Plato
70. Collected Works by Edgar Allan Poe
71. The Crying Of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon
72. The Mysteries Of Udolpho by Ann Ward Radcliffe
73. Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand
74. The Catcher In The Rye by J.D. Salinger
75. Hamlet by William Shakespeare
76. Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
77. The School for Scandal by Richard Brinsley Sheridan
78. The Jungle by Upton Sinclair
79. Oedipus Rex by Sophocles
80. The Grapes Of Wrath by John Steinbeck
81. Tristram Shandy by Laurence Sterne
82. Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson
83. Dracula by Bram Stoker
84. Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe
85. Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift
86. Vanity Fair by William Makepeace Thackeray
87. Walden by Henry David Thoreau
88. War And Peace by Leo Tolstoy
89. The Warden by Anthony Trollope
90. Fathers And Sons by Ivan Turgenev
91. The Adventures Of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain
92. Around The World In Eighty Days by Jules Verne
93. The Aeneid by Virgil
94. Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh
95. The Time Machine by H. G. Wells
96. Ethan Frome by Edith Wharton
97. Leaves Of Grass by Walt Whitman
98. The Importance of Being Earnest by Oscar Wilde
99. A Streetcar Named Desire by Tennessee Williams
100. The Code Of The Woosters by P. G. Wodehouse