Zero to Well Read in 100 Books

[Melanie]

Isn’t it strange that we have the term “well-read” but absolutely no one can come close to defining it? And isn’t also strange that other art forms don’t have equivalent terms for a vague sense of someone’s total experience of that form (well-seen for movies? well-heard for music? Absurd).

Thinking about this recently sucked me into a little thought-experiment: say someone had never read any literature and wanted to be well-read. What should they read? And how many books would it take them to get close?

This hypothetical forces any given answerer to do two things: provide their personal definition of well-read and then give a list of books that might satisfy that definition. The first hurdle to clear is cultural position: who is this person? As I can only provide a reasonable list of books from my own cultural position, I have to assume that this person is like me, at least in a very basic way: an alive American who can read English.

“Well-read” for this person then has a number of connotations: a familiarity with the monuments of Western literature, an at least passing interest in the high-points of world literature, a willingness to experience a breadth of genres, a special interest in the work of one’s immediate culture, a desire to share in the same reading experiences of many other readers, and an emphasis on the writing of the current day.

The following 100 books (of fiction, poetry, and drama) is an attempt to satisfy those competing requirements. After going through several iterations of the list, one thing surprised me: there are not as many “classic” books that I associate with the moniker well-read, and many more current books than I would have thought. Conversely, to be conversant in the literature of the day turned out to be quite a bit more important than I would have thought.

As for the number of 100: in addition to being a nice, round number, it is also a number that, at a one-book-every-two-week pace this hypothetical reader could accomplish in just about four years–the standard length of an undergraduate program.

So here’s the list, in alphabetical order:

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Arthur Conan Doyle
The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton
All Quiet on the Western Front by Eric Maria Remarque
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay by Michael Chabon
American Pastoral by Philip Roth
Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
Anne of Green Gables by Lucy Maud Montgomery
Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand
The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath
Beloved by Toni Morrison
Beowulf
The Book Thief by Markus Zusak
Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz
Call of the Wild by Jack London
Candide by Voltaire
The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer
Casino Royale by Ian Fleming
Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger
Charlotte’s Web by E.B. White
Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell
The Collected Poems of Emily Dickinson
The Complete Stories of Edgar Allan Poe
The Complete Stories of Flannery O’Connor
The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen
Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky
The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown
Death of a Salesman by Arthur Miller
Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes
Dream of Red Chamber by Cao Xueqin
Dune by Frank Herbert
Everything is Illuminated by Jonathan Safran Foer
Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
The Fault in Our Stars by John Green
Faust by Goethe
Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
A Game of Thrones by George RR Martin
The Golden Bowl by Henry James
The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing
Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn
The Gospels
The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
Great Expectations by Charles Dickens
The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
Hamlet by William Shakespeare
The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood
Harry Potter & The Sorceror’s Stone by J.K. Rowling
Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
The Help by Kathryn Stockett
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams
The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien
House Made of Dawn by N. Scott Momaday
Howl by Allen Ginsberg
The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins
if on a winter’s night a traveler by Italo Calvino
The Iliad by Homer
Inferno by Dante
Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace
Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman
Life of Pi by Yann Martel
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe by C.S. Lewis
The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exepury
Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie
Moby-Dick by Herman Melville
Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf
Murder on the Orient Express by Agatha Christie
The Odyssey by Homer
Oedipus the King by Sophocles
On the Road by Jack Kerouac
A Passage to India by E.M. Forster
The Pentateuch
Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
Rabbit, Run by John Updike
The Road by Cormac McCarthy
Romeo and Juliet by William Shakespeare
The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne
Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut
The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner
The Stand by Stephen King
The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway
Swann’s Way by Marcel Proust
Their Eyes Were Watching by Zora Neale Hurston
Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe
The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien
To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
Ulysses by James Joyce
The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera
A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan
Waiting for the Barbarians by J.M. Coetzee
Watchmen by Alan Moore
The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami
Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte
1984 by George Orwell
Fifty Shades of Grey by E.L. James

[Melanie]

Currently stand at 24. A couple that I have not read are book club selections for this year.

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton
The Book Thief by Markus Zusak
Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
Call of the Wild by Jack London
Candide by Voltaire
The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer
The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown
Great Expectations by Charles Dickens
The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood
Harry Potter & The Sorceror’s Stone by J.K. Rowling
The Help by Kathryn Stockett
The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins
The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exepury
The Odyssey by Homer
On the Road by Jack Kerouac
Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
Romeo and Juliet by William Shakespeare
Their Eyes Were Watching by Zora Neale Hurston
To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan
Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte
Fifty Shades of Grey by E.L. James

[Bill]

Many of these I read at some point in school. One thing I never did was use Cliff Notes, I always read the book. I don't count many of them as having been read by me because I found them unbearable. Perhaps I should give them another try, but there are too many other books I'd much rather read. Seriously having looked at some of the "Listopias" on this site I know I'm not the only one who thinks Ulysses is perhaps the most overrated work in the English language.


Melanie, I don't know where you found this list, but I do have to question the defintion of "well-read". I think "well-rounded" might be better. I admit to having read The Harry Potter Series, The Hunger Games, and The Da Vinci Code. At the risk of sounding like an intellectual snob, which I hope I'm not, I'm not sure they belong on a list with Shakespeare, Dickens, or even Harper Lee. Not to say I didn't enjoy them, in some cases more than the classics. I just don't know.

[Melanie]

Last 3 on the list totally sucked!

[Melanie]

Here is where I found the list: http://bookriot.com/2013/12/31/10-bes...