I’ve been working on a “greatest books” list for several years now. I recently reorganized my list and double checked my sources. My version of a “greatest” list comes from Pulitzer and National Book Award winners, Modern Library’s 100 Greatest Novels, and a list of lists from GreatestBooks.org.
Download the Greatest Books list here.
As I added more details, I started to wonder if there were trends in these data points.
This post was previously published on the BucketList.org blog in January 2015.
Authors are like rock stars to bookworms. So any bookworm bucket list will include meeting your favorite author, poet or essayist.
Who would be on your list? The author of your favorite book from childhood? The poet whose words were your first true love in a high school English class? Or the journalist who wrote the book that opened a whole new world to you?
At the top of my list are Wendell Berry, Thomas Moore, David Whyte, and Vicki Robin. Some of my favorite authors are no longer living, but I fantasize about asking Rumi, Alice Miller, Tee Corinne, or Flannery O’Connor to sign a book for me.
Luckily, I’ve met David Whyte and Thomas Moore and they were definitely bucket list experiences.
More than 6 years ago, I started reading fiction quite earnestly. Specifically, I pulled together several “greatest books” lists and began working my way through them.
However, I kept track of this effort on paper and didn’t collate my lists too well. I’ve resolved the issue, though, and am happy to start working with a refreshed “greatest book” list of my own.
Download the Greatest Books list here.
I pulled together four distinct lists of books to make this happen, including:
Six years ago, I combined several 100 Greatest Books lists and began reading my way through some of the greatest literature available.
Read about the journey so far here.
It’s been a truly rewarding experience, especially as I begin reading through the older Pulitzer Prize winners. Andersonville, by MacKinley Kantor (1958), for example, took me a month to get through, but the characters have continued to live on very vividly in my imagination. The Way West, by A.B. Guthrie (1950), too was a refreshing migration-westward novel.
Others were a bit forgettable or, rather, it was interesting to ponder why they’ve become so iconic (ahem, The Old Man and the Sea).
I’m slowly but surely making my way through my list of “100” greatest books of all time. I put “100” in quotes because I merged several top 100 lists and recently added the Pulitzer Prize winners in the Novel (1917-1947) and Fiction (1948-present) categories. This leaves me with a list of the 300 greatest books from varied sources.
The list is below. The titles in bold are the ones I’ve read. With 65 out of 300 read, I’m at 21.67%. I’ve been working on this list since 2008, so if I continue at this pace, the list will provide me with good reading for the next 20 years.
That seems both daunting and delicious.
The Greatest Books Challenge started in 2008, when I started reading fiction. Before then, I bet I hadn’t read more than five books of fiction outside of a classroom in my entire life. I just preferred non-fiction and that was that. But in 2008, I was trying to relax – my mind, my body, my use of time – and only fiction could do that for me.
So, in a truly un-relaxed way, I decided to do some searching and see if there were lists of the greatest books with which I should start. I found more than a few, and I’ve updated the links for your reference and use too:
Hands down, this is the best book I’ve read this year. Death of the Liberal Class by Chris Hedges won a Pulitzer Prize, so I’m clearly not the only one who thinks highly of it.
Hedges answers the question I (and many others) have been asking for several years: What the heck happened to the Democratic Party in this country? But Hedges goes far beyond party politics to examine how and why the liberal class and our institutions (universities, unions, newspapers, etc.) have become so weak as to not even remotely cause a threat when basic civil liberties or human rights are infringed upon.