I’ve been thinking for some time about a new book challenge, but I haven’t been quite able to come up with a theme. After attending an event celebrating Banned Books Week last year, I thought about reading all 100 of the most commonly banned or challenged books in the United States. I checked out the Modern Library’s lists of top 100 fiction and non-fiction books of the 20th Century. I thought about reading more from Nobel Prize winners in literature, and I didn’t want to give up on the theme of my Around the World Virtual Book Club. I went through others’ lists of books that will change your life (this one I found most interesting). In the end, I narrowed it down to 100 titles and came up with the following list, which will probably take my whole life to get through.

1. One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest by Ken Kesey
2. Snow by Orhan Pamuk
3. Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky
4. Manufacturing Consent by Noam Chomsky
5. The Complete Works of William Shakespeare
6. For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway
7. Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh
8. Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass
9. Burger’s Daughter by Nadine Gordimer
10. Go Tell it on the Mountain by James Baldwin
11. The Art of Non-Conformity by Chris Guillebeau
12. The Call of the Wild by Jack London
13. The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini
14. Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
15. A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens
16. The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien
17. A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway
18. The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood
19. The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka
20. The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt by Edmund Morris
21. The Apology by Plato
22. A Separate Peace by John Knowles
23. The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien
24. The Making of the Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes
25. The Color Purple by Alice Walker
26. Lady Chatterley’s Lover by D.H. Lawrence
27. The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger
28. Zen in the Art of Writing by Ray Bradbury
29. War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
30. Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
31. The Good Terrorist by Doris Lessing
32. The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism by Max Weber
33. The Stranger by Albert Camus
34. Native Son by Richard Wright
35. Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston
36. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce
37. The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas by Gertrude Stein
38. Beloved by Toni Morrison
39. Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
40. The Razor’s Edge by W. Somerset Maugham
41. The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien
42. The Jungle by Upton Sinclair
43. Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
44. Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe
45. Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut
46. All the King’s Men by Robert Penn Warren
47. The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie
48. Cat’s Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut
49. Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
50. Strength to Love by Martin Luther King, Jr.
51. NRSV Bible with the Apocrypha
52. The Stand by Stephen King
53. Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller
54. A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess
55. Capital, Volume 1 by Karl Marx
56. Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman
57. The Art of War by Sun Tzu
58. The Qu’ran (as translated by M.A. Abdel Haleem)
59. The Awakening and Selected Stories by Kate Chopin
60. The Complete Sherlock Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
61. The Life of Pi by Yann Martel
62. Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card
63. The Motorcycle Diaries by Ernesto Guevara
64. Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak
65. Gandhi An Autobiography: The Story of My Experiments with Truth
66. Naked Lunch by William S. Burroughs
67. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
68. The Death of Ivan Ilyich by Leo Tolstoy
69. As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner
70. Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
71. The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot
72. The Conservationist by Nadine Gordimer
73. The Gnostic Gospels by Elaine Pagels
74. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
75. Walden by Henry David Thoreau
76. An American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser
77. Sophie’s Choice by William Styron
78. The Republic by Plato
79. Ulysses by James Joyce
80. The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian by Sherman Alexie
81. On the Origin of Species by Charles Darwin
82. Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison
83. The Pilgrim’s Progress by John Bunyan
84. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz
85. Rabbit, Run by John Updike
86. The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway
87. The Naked and the Dead by Norman Mailer
88. A People’s History of the United States by Howard Zinn
89. American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis
90. The Odyssey by Homer
91. The Exorcist by William Peter Blatty
92. Pedagogy of the Oppressed by Paulo Freire
93. The Autobiography of Mark Twain
94. Women on Top by Nancy Friday
95. The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing
96. Karate-Do: My Way of Life by Gichin Funakoshi
97. To Kill A Mockingbird by Harper Lee
98. The Kingdom of God is Within You by Leo Tolstoy
99. Women in Love by D.H. Lawrence
100. The Lord of the Flies by William Golding

Post in Comments: What’s on your essential reading list?