I Haven’t Read These? I’m Embarrassed

I was idly checking a few of the Top 100 type lists on this site and began to note the titles I should consider reading (and many I am embarrassed to admit I haven’t read yet). I started a pen and paper list on a 3×5 card but soon ran out of room so I returned to the computer to create a more extensive list. I transcribed all the titles from the major lists that I hadn’t read to date. But then I looked at some of the entries and made an executive decision about some of the texts I knew I would never read (Ayn Rand for instance) and pared a small number of titles from the list.

I don’t know if the list is valuable to others but these are some of the books experts tell us we should have read yet I (sob) have not read them myself.

Recommended Books I Have Yet To Read (54)

1. Dream of the Red Chamber
2. The Princess of Cleves
3. Lucky Jim – Kingsley Amis
4. Money – Martin Amis
5. Alcools – Guillaume Apollinaire
6. Aurelien – Louis Aragon
7. The Origins of Totalitarianism – Hannah Arendt
8. The Theatre and its Double – Antonin Artaud
9. The Bottle Factory Outing – Beryl Bainbridge
10. Writing Degree Zero — Roland Barthes
11. The Second Sex – Simone de Beauvoir
12. The Adventures of Augie March – Saul Bellow
13. Herzog – Saul Bellow
14. Petersburg — Andrei Bely
15. The Old Wives’ Tale – Arnold Bennett
16. Under the Sun of Satan – Georges Bernanos
17. Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret – Judy Blume
18. The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui – Bertolt Brecht
19. The Sleepwalkers — Hermann Broch
20. The Thirty-Nine Steps — John Buchan
21. The Master and Margarita – Mikhail Bulgakov
22. Pilgrim’s Progress – John Bunyan
23. Second Thoughts – Michel Butor
24. The Tartar Steppe – Dino Buzzati
25. Oscar And Lucinda – Peter Carey
26. Furor and Mystery – René Char
27. No Orchids For Miss Blandish – James Hadley Chase
28. Falconer – John Cheever
29. The Riddle of the Sands – Erskine Childers
30. Cold Nights — Pa Chin
31. The Murder of Roger Ackroyd – Agatha Christie
32. The Satin Slipper – Paul Claudel
33. Les Vrilles de la vigne (French) – Colette
34. The Woman in White – Wilkie Collins
35. Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard – Joseph Conrad
36. The BFG – Roald Dahl
37. Ubik – Philip K. Dick
38. Play It As It Lays – Joan Didion
39. Sybil – Benjamin Disraeli
40. The USA Trilogy – John Dos Passos
41. The Count of Monte Cristo – Alexandre Dumas
42. Daniel Deronda — George Eliot
43. L. A. Confidential – James Ellroy
44. Capital of Pain – Paul Éluard
45. Absalom, Absalom! – William Faulkner
46. The Sportswriter – Richard Ford
47. The Order of Things – Michel Foucault
48. The French Lieutenant’s Woman – John Fowles
49. The Diary of a Young Girl – Anne Frank
50. Gaston – André Franquin
51. Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality – Sigmund Freud
52. The Death of Artemio Cruz — Carlos Fuentes
53. The Recognitions – William Gaddis
54. Neuromancer – William Gibson
55. Oblomov — Ivan Goncharov
56. The Opposing Shore – Julien Gracq
57. Lanark – Alasdair Gray
58. The Heart of the Matter – Graham Greene
59. The Good Soldier Švejk — Jaroslav Hašek
60. In Our Time – Ernest Hemingway
61. Les Misérables — Victor Hugo
62. The Bald Soprano – Eugène Ionesco
63. The Berlin Stories – Christopher Isherwood
64. Blake and Mortimer – Edgar P. Jacobs
65. The Ambassadors – Henry James
66. The Bostonians – Henry James
67. The Golden Bowl – Henry James
68. Portrait of a Lady – Henry James
69. The Wings of the Dove – Henry James
70. Snow Country — Yasunari Kawabata
71. Schindler’s List – Thomas Keneally
72. A Separate Peace — John Knowles
73. The Book of Laughter and Forgetting – Milan Kundera
74. The Joke – Milan Kundera
75. Écrits – Jacques Lacan
76. The Wonderful Adventures of Nils – Selma Lagerlö
77. The Spy Who Came in From the Cold – John le Carre
78. Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy — John Le Carre
79. Women in Love – D.H. Lawrence
80. The Interrogation – J. M. G. Le Clézio
81. A Hero of Our Time — Mikhail Lermontov
82. The Golden Notebook – Doris Lessing
83. If This Is a Man – Primo Levi
84. The Periodic Table – Primo Levi
85. Tristes Tropiques – Claude Lévi-Strauss
86. Martin Eden – Jack London
87. Gypsy Ballads – Federico García Lorca
88. Dom Casmurro — Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis
89. The Executioner’s Song – Norman Mailer
90. The Betrothed — Alessandro Manzoni
91. Of Human Bondage – W. Somerset Maugham
92. Thérèse Desqueyroux – François Mauriac
93. The Rosy Crucifixion [Sexus, Plexus, Nexus] – Henry Miller
94. Gone With the Wind – Margaret Mitchell
95. The Pursuit Of Love – Nancy Mitford
96. Watchmen – Alan Moore & Dave Gibbons
97. Contempt – Alberto Moravia
98. Cities of Salt — Abdelrahman Munif
99. The Man Without Qualities – Robert Musil
100. Doctor Zhivago — Boris Pasternak
101. Nightmare Abbey – Thomas Love Peacock
102. Amers – Saint-John Perse
103. Ballad of the Salt Sea – Hugo Pratt
104. Paroles – Jacques Prévert
105. Northern Lights [The Golden Compass] – Philip Pullman
106. Journal, 1887–1910 – Jules Renard
107. The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge – Rainer Maria Rilke
108. Housekeeping – Marilynne Robinson
109. Call It Sleep – Henry Roth
110. Haroun and the Sea of Stories – Salman Rushdie
111. Satanic Verses – Salman Rushdie
112. Being and Nothingness – Jean-Paul Sartre
113. Tropisms – Nathalie Sarraute
114. Waverley — Walter Scott
115. The Strange Case of Peter the Lett – Georges Simenon
116. The Jungle – Upton Sinclair
117. The Gulag Archipelago – Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
118. White Teeth – Zadie Smith
119. The Man Who Loved Children – Christina Stead
120. Angle of Repose – Wallace Stegner
121. The Charterhouse of Parma – Stendhal
122. The Confessions of Nat Turner – William Styron
123. Some Prefer Nettles — Jun’ichirō Tanizaki
124. The Magnificent Ambersons – Booth Tarkington
125. Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont – Elizabeth Taylor
126. Friday – Michel Tournier
127. The Last Chronicle of Barset – Anthony Trollope
128. The Way We Live Now – Anthony Trollope
129. Asterix the Gaul – René Goscinny and Albert Uderzo
130. Le Silence de la mer – Vercors
131. Froth on the Daydream – Boris Vian
132. Infinite Jest – David Foster Wallace
133. Native Son – Richard Wright
134. Revolutionary Road – Richard Yates
135. Germinal— Emile Zola
136. Confusion of Feelings – Stefan Zweig