A Lifetime Library?

Question

Now, I have read my all-time favorite book, "Looking for Alaska." If you have read this book, you know that Alaska collects books that she likes in her library, and is determined to read them all. What are some classic books that could go in MY lifetime library? They COULD be classics, like The Illiad and The Oddessy, or they could be books that just came out that you have read and think are wonderful.








=o)

Answer 1

Checkout Clifton Fadiman's A Lifetime Reading Plan. It lists what he considers the best of the best. Everything from Beowolf to the end of the 20th C.

Answer 2

There are several lists of books, the top 100 books of all time, for example, but often I find that I can't even begin to agree with half the books on the list, although I've never read them all ... but I would go with all of the following:

Grapes of Wrath
Stranger in a Strange Land
1984
Brave New World
Martian Chronicles
Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn
Their Eyes Were Watching God
To Kill a Mocking Bird
The Davinci Code
The Sunne in Splendor (by Penman)
Sarum (by Rutherford)
London
Ireland (by Delaney)
Day in Infamy
Brothers Kharamazov
Siddhartha (by Hesse)
Ordeal by Hunger
Nothing Like it in the World

Answer 3

Anything by:
Shakespeare
Austen
Dickens
Twain
Poe
Hawthorne

Plus:
"Les Miserables" by Victor Hugo
"The Good Earth" by Pearl S. Buck
"To Kill a Mockingbird" by Harper Lee
"Gone With the Wind" Margaret Mitchell
"Roots" by Alex Haley

Answer 4

Some ideas (just the books I enjoyed reading and would advise to a friend)

W.M. Thackeray "Vanity Fair"
Douglas Adams "The Meaning of Liff"
Jeff Noon "Virt"
Sun Tsu "Art of War"
A. Burgess "The Clockwork Orange"
V. Nabokov "Lolita"
Hermann Hesse "The Glass Bead Game"
G. G. Marquez "One Hundred Years of Solitude" and "The Autumn of the Patriarch"