Top 40 .. and Counting

My Top 40+ Reading Recommendations

  1. Ulysses — James Joyce
  2. Madame Bovary — Gustave Flaubert
  3. The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy — Laurence Sterne
  4. Don Quixote — Miguel de Cervantes
  5. À la recherche du temps perdu — Marcel Proust
  6. The Brothers Karamazov — Fyodor Dostoevsky
  7. Anna Karenina — Leo Tolstoy
  8. The Faerie Queene — Edmund Spenser
  9. Finnegans Wake — James Joyce
  10. Waiting For Godot — Samuel Beckett
  11. The Man Without Qualities — Robert Musil
  12. Our Lady of the Flowers — Jean Genet
  13. Under the Volcano — Malcolm Lowry
  14. The Last Temptation of Christ — Nikos Kazantzakis
  15. The Cairo Trilogy — Naguib Mahfouz [Palace Walk, Palace of Desire, Sugar Street]
  16. La Vie mode d’emploi — Georges Perec
  17. Bouvard et Pécuchet — Gustave Flaubert
  18. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man — James Joyce
  19. The Magic Mountain — Thomas Mann
  20. JR — William Gaddis
  21. Crime and Punishment — Fyodor Dostoevsky
  22. Le Voyeur — Alain Robbe-Grillet
  23. The Makioka Sisters — Junichero Tanizaki
  24. Absalom, Absalom! — William Faulkner
  25. Lolita — Vladimir Nabokov
  26. The Recognitions — William Gaddis
  27. The Sea of Fertility — Yukio Mishima
  28. War and Peace — Leo Tolstoy
  29. Moby Dick — Herman Melville
  30. The Leopard — Giuseppe di Lampedusa
  31. A Dance to the Music of Time — Anthony Powell
  32. To the Lighthouse — Virginia Woolf
  33. Mulligan Stew — Gilbert Sorrentino
  34. Naked Lunch — William S. Burroughs
  35. The Awakening Land — Conrad Richter
  36. The Alexandria Quartet — Lawrence Durrell
  37. Berlin Alexanderplatz – Alfred Döblin
  38. Middlemarch — George Eliot
  39. Clarissa — Samuel Richardson
  40. The Tin Drum — Günter Grass
  41. The Adventures of Augie March — Saul Bellow
  42. Europe Central — William T. Vollmann

3 thoughts on “Top 40 .. and Counting

  1. I just wanted you to know that I discovered your website in 1998 or 1999. I was in college at the time and just happened across it one day. I remember thinking to myself that you had a killer reading list. It became a habit, every few weeks, to check to see what you had added. Over the years, I have discovered many new writers because of your site. Often times, when I read a book that is good (in my opinion) and thought-provoking, I’ll check to see if you have read it as well, and what your thoughts were. Anyway, I just wanted you to know that your website (in it’s many incarnations) has helped me find some good books along the way.

    Like

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