Not long ago, my sister and I decided to embark on a great adventure. We shall read 100 books in one years time! Naturally, such an endeavor requires rules. There we sat, in the car, ipad in hand, brain storming categories and rules to ensure we did not read all of one thing. Once the rules were set, the great list making was easy for the first 50 books or so. At some point it became so many books and so little list space. There were moments of “oh no! Too many dead people!” and “wait… do I have all the continents,” ending in “which books do I get rid of?” The list is not by any means final. Feel free to argue about what should be on the list and what should not, but remember the rules must be followed at all times.

The Rules: 

1. Nothing I have read before

2. 4 categories: Banned, Nonficion, Embarrassed I have not read, and Recommended

3. 50% living Authors

4. No more than 70% American Authors. 

5. 6/7 continents

The List:

Title (Year Published), Author, (Alive/Dead), Country/ Ethnicity

Banned:

Ulysses (1918), James Joyce ,(D), Irish

Beloved (1987), Toni Morrison, (A), American

Portrait of a Lady (1880), Henry James (D), American

Finnegans Wake (1939), James Joyce, (D), Irish

Mrs Dalloway (1925), Virginia Woolf, (D), English

Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1928), H.D. Lawrence (D), English

The Awakening (1899), Kate Chopin, (D), American

Midnights Children (1981), Salman Rushdie, (A), English/ Indian

Balzac and Little Chinese Seamstress (2000), Sijic, (A), French

The Beautiful and the Damned (1922), F. Scott Fitzgerald, (D), American

My Antonia (1918), Willa Cather, (D), American

Doctor Zhivago (1957), Pasternak, (D), Russian

As I lay Dying (1932), William Faulkner, (D), American

In Cold Blood (1966), Capote, (D), American

Andersonville (1955), MacKinly Kantor, (D), American

Decameron (1313), Giocanni Baccacio, (D), Italian

Christine, Stephan King, (A), American

The Earth, My Butt, and Other Big, Round Things (2003), Carolyn Mackler, (A), American

The Time of Butterflies (1994), Alvarez, (A), Dominican

Moll Flanders (1722), Defoe, (D), English

Ethan Frome (1911), Edith Whorton,(D), American

100 Years of Solitude (1967), Marquez, (A), Columbian

The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), Margaret Atwood, (A), Canadian

The Perks of Being a Wallflower (1999), Stephen Chbosky (A), American

Schindler’s List/ ark (1982), Thomas Kenealy, (A), Australian

Embarrassed:

To Kill a Mockingbird (1960), Harper Lee, (A), American

The Catcher in the Rye (1951), J.D. Salinger, (D), American

Nineteen Eighty Four (1949), George Orwell, (D), American

Fahrenheit 451 (1953), Ray Bradbury, (A), American

A Wrinkle in Time (1962), Madeleine L’Engle, (D), American

Paradise Lost (1667), Milton, (D), English

The Scarlet Letter (1850), Nathaniel Hawthorne, (D), American

The Satanic Verses (1988), Salmon Rushdie, (A), English/Indian

Beowulf (D), English

Dracula (1897), Bram Stoker, (D), English

A Clockwork Orange (1962), Anthony Burgess, (D), English

Slaughterhouse Five (1969), Kurt Vonnegut, (D), American

Pride and Prejudice (1813), Jane Austin, (D), English

The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1879), Mark Twain, (D), American

Catch- 22 (1961), Joseph Heller, (D), American

Siddhartha (1922), Hermann Hesse, (D), German

The Count of Monte Cristo (1844), Alexander Dumas, (D), French

Moby Dick (1851), Herman Melville, (D), American

Dune (1965), Frank Herbert, (D), American

Gulliver’s Travels (1726), Jonathan Swift, (D), Irish

The Canterbury Tales, Geoffrey Chaucer, (D), English

The Red Badge of Courage (1895), Stephan Crane, (D), American

Night (1958), Elie Wiesel, (A), Romanian/American

Arabian Nights (1709), (D), Persian

A Farewell to Arms (1929), Ernest Hemingway, (D), American

Non-Fiction:

Why Read? (2004), Mark Edmunson, (A), American

The Universe in a Single Atom (2005), Dalai Lama, (A), Tibetan

The Art of Happiness (1998), The Dalai Lama, (A), Tibetan

The Alchemy of Air (2008), Thomas Hager, (A), American

The Elements of Style (1979), Strunk and White, (D), American

Orientalism (1978), Said, (D), Palestinian

Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue (2008), McWhorter, (A), American

Everything You Know About English is Wrong (2008), Bill Brohaugh, (A), American

Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid (2007), Jimmy Carter, (A), American

The Year of Living biblically (2007), AJ Jacobs, (A), American

The Coolest Race on Earth:Mud, Madmen, Glaciers, and Grannies at the Antarctica Marathon (2009), Hanc, (A), American/Antarctic

Reading Lolita in Tehran (2003), Nafisi, (A), Iranian

Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do (2008), Tom Vanderbilt, (A), American

This Book is Overdue! (2010), Marilyn Johnson, (A), American

Navajos wear Nikes (2011), Jim Kristofic, (A), American

A Child Called ‘it’ (1995), Dave Peezler, (A), American

I am Nujood, Age 10 and Divorced (2010), Nujood Ali, (A), Yemenite

Switching Time: A Doctors Harrowing Story of Treating a Woman with 17 Personalities (2007), Richard Baer, (A), American

Into the Wild (1996), Jon Krakauer, (A), American

The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin (1791), Benjamin Franklin, (D), American

The Beauty Myth (2002) Wolf, (A), American

The Qur’an (610), (D) Saudi Arabian

The Professor and the Madman (1999), Simon Winchester, (A), English

Longitude (1995), Sobel, (A), American

An Inconvenient Truth (2006), Al Gore, (A), American

Recommended:

Room 207 (2008), Kgebetli Moele, (A), South African

The Time Traveler’s Wife (2003), Audrey Niffenegger, (A), American

Ender’s Game (1985), Card, (A), American

Inherent Vice (2009), Thomas Pynchon, (A), American

One of Those Hideous Books Where the Mother Dies (2004), Sonya Sones, (A), American

Maus I: A Survivor’s Tale: My Father Bleeds History (1986), Art Spiegelman, (A), American

Persepolis (2000), Marjane Strapi, (A), French/Iranian

Stranger in a Strange Land (1961), Robert Heinlein, (D), American

Disgrace (1999), JM Coetzee, (A), South African

American Gods (2001), Neil Gaiman, (A), American

Jitterbug Perfume (1984), Tom Robbins, (A), American

The Turn of the Screw (1891), Henry James, (D), English

A Beautiful Math (2006), Tom Siegfried, (A), American

The Rise Silas Lapham (1885),  William Dean Howells, (D), American

McTeague: A Story of San Francisco (1899), Frank Norris, (D), American

What Maisie Knew (1897), Henry James, (D), American

Fledgling (2005), Octavia E Butler, (D), American

Out of the Silent Planet (1938), CS Lewis, (D), Irish

The Hunt For Red October (1984), Tom Clancy, (A), American

In the Heart of the Coutry (1982), J. M. Coetzee, (A), South African

Profiles of Courage (1955), JFK, (D), American

Exodus (1958), Uris, (D), American

Kafka on the Shore (2002), Murakami, (A), Japanese

The Historian (2005), Elizabeth Kostova, (A)

The Red Tent (1997), Anita Diamant, (A), American