Reading List

The truth is that I never understood - and I still don't understand - Shakespeare.

It's actually quite embarrassing. I never "got" the language of his plays or why someone would read plays at all. Isn't the point to see it performed?

I do remember in English class, when my teacher said that "even if you never ever take English again, you must read Shakespeare. It's the sign of a cultured individual and you will be terribly embarrassed at a cocktail party if you have never read Hamlet."

Darn it.

Well, reading is a bit different from understanding it, right?

One of my goals is to become more well-read. There are so many references to famous novels everywhere and many things in arts, humanities, whatever you're studying becomes easier if you've read more books. I looked up (on Wikipedia) the list of the best 100 books picked out by authors and my goal is to read them all before I graduate :)

1. Things Fall Apart - Chinua Achebe
2. Fairy tales – Hans Christian Andersen
3. The Divine Comedy – Dante Alighieri
4. Epic of Gilgamesh – Unknown
5. Book of Job – Unknown
6. One Thousand and One Nights – Unknown
7. Njál's Saga – Unknown
8. Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen
9. Le Père Goriot - Honoré de Balzac
10. Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable (a trilogy) – Samuel Beckett
11. The Decameron – Giovanni Boccaccio
12. Ficciones – Jorge Luis Borges
13. Wuthering Heights - Emily Brontë
14. The Stranger – Albert Camus
15. Poems – Paul Celan
16. Journey to the End of the Night – Louis-Ferdinand Céline
17. Don Quixote – Miguel de Cervantes
18. The Canterbury Tales – Geoffrey Chaucer
19. Stories – Anton Chekhov
20. Nostromo – Joseph Conrad
21. Great Expectations – Charles Dickens
22. Jacques the Fatalist – Denis Diderot
23. Berlin Alexanderplatz - Alfred Döblin
24. Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoevsky
25. The Idiot - Fyodor Dostoevsky
26. The Possessed - Fyodor Dostoevsky
27. The Brothers Karamazov - Fyodor Dostoevsky
28. Middlemarch – George Eliot
29. Invisible Man – Ralph Ellison
30. Medea – Euipides
31. Absalom, Absalom! – William Faulkner
32. The Sound and the Fury - William Faulkner
33. Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert
34. Sentimental Education - Gustave Flaubert
35. Gypsy Ballads - Federico García Lorca
36. One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel García Márquez
37. Love in the Time of Cholera - Gabriel García Márquez
38. Faust – Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
39. Dead Souls – Nikolai Gogol
40. The Tin Drum - Günter Grass
41. The Devil to Pay in the Backlands - João Guimarães Rosa
42. Hunger – Knut Hamsun
43. The Old Man and the Sea – Ernest Hemingway
44. Illiad – Homer
45. Odyssey – Homer
46. A Doll’s House – Henrik Ibsen
47. Ulyssees – James Joyce
48. Stories – Franz Kafka
49. The Trial - Franz Kafka
50. The Castle - Franz Kafka
51. Shakuntala – Kālidāsa
52. The Sound of the Mountain - Yasunari Kawabata
53. Zorba the Greek - Nikos Kazantzakis
54. Sons and Lovers – D. H. Lawrence
55. Independent People - Halldór Laxness
56. Poems - Giacomo Leopardi
57. The Golden Notebook – Doris Lessing
58. Pippi Longstocking – Astrid Lindgren
59. A Madman’s Diary – Lu Xun
60. Children of Gebelawi - Naguib Mahfouz
61. Buddenbrooks – Thomas Mann
62. The Magic Mountain – Thomas Mann
63. Moby-Dick – Herman Melville
64. Essays – Michel de Montaigne
65. History – Elsa Morante
66. Beloved – Toni Morrison
67. The Tale of Genji - Murasaki Shikibu
68. The Man Without Qualities – Robert Musil
69. Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
70. Nineteen Eighty-Four – George Orwell
71. Metamorphoses – Ovid
72. The Book of Disquiet - Fernando Pessoa
73. Tales – Edgar Allan Poe
74. In Search of Lost Time – Marcel Proust
75. The Life of Gargantua and of Pantagruel - François Rabelais
76. Pedro Páramo - Juan Rulfo
77. Masnavi – Rumi
78. Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie
79. Bostan – Saadi
80. Season of Migration to the North – Tayeb Salih
81. Blindess - José Saramago
82. Hamlet - William Shakespeare
83. King Lear - William Shakespeare
84. Othello - William Shakespeare
85. Oedipus the King – Sophocles
86. The Red and the Black – Stendhal
87. Tristram Shandy – Laurence Sterne
88. Confessions of Zeno – Italo Svevo
89. Gulliver’s Travels – Jonathan Swift
90. War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy
91. Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
92. The Death of Ivan Ilyich - Leo Tolstoy
93. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn – Mark Twain
94. Ramayana – Valmiki
95. Aeneid – Virgil
96. Mahabharata – Vyasa
97. Leaves of Grass – Walt Whitman
98. Mrs Dalloway – Virginia Woolf
99. To the Lighthouse - Virginia Woolf
100. Memoirs of Hadrian - Marguerite Yourcenar

The more that you read, the more things you'll know. The more that you learn, the more places you'll go. 

-Dr. Seuss