100 top literary works to read?

Answer 1

Oh, my. This is a tall order. I doubt I'll be able to manage 100, but here goes.

First off, the "classics" are mostly rubbish. Dickens was a hack, Jane Austen writes worse schlock than Steve Austin.

1. Shakespear. He is the king. If you can work around the awkward phrasings brought on by a) the time his works were written, and b) his genius/borderline insane use of iambic pentameter, you'll thoroughly enjoy yourself. Julius Caesar was possibly the best stage work ever written, and there's a good reason why every writer ever has stolen something from this man. With that in mind, stay away from MacBeth. It was horrid.

Well, that should cover about a dozen or two.

2. Hit up some modern fantasy series, like The Wheel of Time, The Sword of Truth, and Harry Potter. These are all superbly written, and should be read by everyone. Don't forget about the father of modern fantasy, though. J.R.R.Tolkien. Without The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, none of those works would ever have seen the light of day. I recommend The Hobbit, but only read LotR if you're really desperate. Stay away from the Silmarillion.

There's another 30 or so.

Sci Fi. Sci Fi is great. It's a great big world of "What if?"
Authors to look for: Timothy Zahn, Michael A Stackpole, Aaron Allston, Isaac Asimov. The first three because they're just that good, the last because his place is right next to Tolkien. I Robot was nothing like the movie, but should be read by anyone who has ever cracked the pages of any book, ever. The Star Wars series of books contains many of the best Sci Fi books I've ever read, and some of the worst. Mostly, stick to those authors and anything that is in "The New Jedi Order" sub-series.

I also liked the Dark Tower by Stephen King, and anything he wrote as Richard Bachman. His other stuff is horrible, though.

I think there might actually be 100 books, or more there. Enjoy.

Answer 2

Huckelberry Finn - Mark Twain
Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
Sentimental Education - Flaubert
Collected Stories of Colette
Ulysses - James Joyce
Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man - Joyce
Mrs. Dalloway - Virginia Woolf
The Divine Comedy - Dante Alighieri
Antigone - Sophocles
The Canterbury Tales - Geoffrey Chaucer
The Decameron - Giovanni Boccaccio
Hamlet - Shakespeare
(also King Lear; Othello; Macbeth; Richard II; Julius Caesar)
The Immoralist - Andre Gide
Against the Grain - Joris Karl Huysmanns
Edgar Allan Poe's short stories
Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
Vathek - William Beckford
The Library of Babel - Jorge Luis Borges
Up Above the World - Paul Bowles
Nightwood - Djuna Barnes
Fragment 36 - Hilda Doolittle
Tender is the Night - F. Scott Fitzgerald
Pubis Angelical - Manuel Puig
The Picture of Dorian Gray - Oscar Wilde
The Four Quartets - T.S. Eliot
The Black Heralds - Cesar Vallejo
The Complete Poems - Hart Crane
A Hero of Our Time - Mikhail Lermontov
Anna Karenin - Leo Tolstoy
The Queen of Spades - Alexander Puskin
The Sandman - E.T.A. Hoffmann
The Mines of Falun - E.T.A. Hoffmann
The Wild ***'s Skin - Honore de Balzac
Lost Illusions - Balzac
The Flowers of Evil - Charles Baudelaire
A Season in Hell - Arthur Rimbaud
The Malady of Death - Marguerite Duras
End Game - Samuel Beckett
Night - Elie Wiesel
Barabbas - Par Lagerkvist
The Invisible Man - Ralph Ellison
The Empire of the Senseless - Kathy Acker
Paradiso - Jose Lezama Lima
Confessions of an English Opium Eater - Thomas DeQuincey
Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
Sons and Lovers - D.H. Lawrence
The Woman in the Dunes - Kobo Abe
Three Lives - Gertrude Stein
The Collected Poems - Dylan Thomas
Invisible Cities - Italo Calvino
The Poetry of Du Fu
The Poetry of Chu Yuan
Mikhael Kohlhaas - Heinrich Von Kleist
Geek Love - Katherine Dunn
Maldoror - Compte de Lautreamont
Our Lady of the Flowers - Jean Genet
The Promises of Glass - Michael Palmer

[I'd write more -- not sure if I'm at a hundred, but all of these books are well worth reading. I think the power is going to go out here soon.]

Answer 3

I can't come up with 100, but here are some.Some of these are considered classics,others aren't. Not all classics deserve to be called classics in my opinion.

Ferenheit 451
The Joy Luck Club
To Kill a Mockingbird
Uncle Tom's Cabin
Treasure Island
Island of the Blue Dolphins
Pollyanna
Girl of the Limberlost
A Tree Grows in Brooklyn
Anne of Green Gables
Pollyanna
The Grapes of Wrath
No Promises in the Wind
Charlotte's Web
The Blue Bottle Club
The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings Trilogy
The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe
Of Mice and Men
The Rag Nymph
A Christmas Carol
The Locket and it's sequel The Carousel
Christy
Little Women
The Secret Garden

Answer 4

I don't know if I can come up with 100, but here's a few to get you started:

Hamlet; Macbeth; Othello; The Tempest - Shakespeare
Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury
The Cider House Rules - John Irving
The Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
Crime and Punishment - Dostoyevsky
Slaugherhouse Five - Kurt Vonnegut
To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
The Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
The Alchemist - Paulo Coelho
The Odyssey - Homer

Answer 5

Rosamund excitement Adeline -- 4/10 -- does not circulate that nicely Abram Ira Bennett -- 2/10 -- Abram and Ira are only grotesque Matilda Charlotte Wren -- 3/10 -- Matilda and Wren are gross Lawson Elias Henry -- 3/10 -- %. 2 names out of the three because of the fact those 3 do no longer artwork Adelaide Ivy Philomena -- 2/10 -- the names look to have not have been given any connection to a minimum of one yet another Sullivan Whitney Reid aka "Sulley" -- 7/10 -- this mixture does artwork

Answer 6

The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes
The hound of the Baskerville's
The three Musketeers
Great Expectations
David Copperfield
Frankenstein
The Count of Monte Cristo
Fall of the Usher house
The man in the iron mask
Treasure Island
Harry Potter
The Da Vinci's Code

Answer 7

Here is a list of 100 books to read by The Modern Library.

Answer 8

read Motherless Brooklynn by J Lethem 100 times.

Answer 9

To save our time, I'd like you to visit the website below. I hope you can find some titles interesting to read there.

Answer 10

Here are a couple researched 100 lists that should be just what you were asking for

http://www.adherents.com/people/100_novel.html