I initially began putting this list together as an exercise in testing my memory, although I also have a bit of a compulsion in labeling things and listing things, but the memory part of it was fun – wracking my brain, trying to see how many books from the past I could recall to mind. I wasn’t really planning on posting this until I realized that it would be kind of fun to compare notes with my fellow book lovers out there. You might even want to try a “Books I Have Known” list yourself.
After a couple days of deep contemplation, if I’m lucky, I think I probably got about two-thirds of the books that I’ve actually read. I could probably qualify the list then by saying, these were the ones worth remembering:
Alighieri, Dante
The Inferno
Anthologies
Stories: All-New Tales
Azerrad, Michael
Come As You Are: The Story of Nirvana
Bible, The
The New Testament
Blume, Judy
Are You There, God? It’s Me, Margaret
Blubber
Forever…
Booth, Stanley
Dance With the Devil: The Rolling Stones and Their Times
Bradbury, Ray
The Martian Chronicles
Fahrenheit 451
Brooks, Terry
The Shannara Series
The Sword of Shannara
The Elfstones of Shannara
The Wishsong of Shannara
Brown, Dan
The Da Vinci Code
Bryson, Bill
A Short History of Nearly Everything
Bugliosi, Vincent and Gentry, Curt
Helter Skelter: The True Story of the Manson Murders
Burroughs, Edgar Rice
The Barsoom Series (John Carter, Warlord of Mars)
A Princess of Mars
The Gods of Mars
The Warlord of Mars
Thuvia, Maid of Mars
The Chessmen of Mars
Byrne, Rhonda
The Secret
Carnegie, Dale
How to Win Friends and Influence People
Chekhov, Anton
The Cherry Orchard
Five Great Stories
Chrichton, Michael
Congo
Clarke, Arthur C.
Childhood’s End
Collins, Suzanne
The Hunger Games
Conrad, Joseph
Heart of Darkness
Davis, Miles and Troupe, Quincy
Miles: The Autobiography
Davis, Stephen
Hammer of the Gods: The Led Zeppelin Saga
Diamond, Jared
Guns, Germs and Steel
Dick, Philip K.
Radio Free Albemuth
Selected Stories of Philip K. Dick
Dickens, Charles
A Christmas Carol
Donaldson, Stephen R.
The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, The Unbeliever
Lord Foul’s Bane
The Illearth War
The Power that Preserves
Dostoyevsky, Fyodor
The Double (translated by Constance Garnett)
Notes from Underground
Crime and Punishment
The Gambler (translated by Constance Garnett)
The Idiot
Demons
The Brothers Karamazov
Durant, Will and Ariel
The Lessons of History
Ellis, Bret Easton
American Psycho
Imperial Bedrooms
Fernandez-Armesto, Felipe
Ideas that Shaped Mankind
Frankl, Viktor E.
Man’s Search for Meaning
Frey, James
A Million Little Pieces
My Friend Leonard
Gaddis, John Lewis
The Cold War
Gibson, William
Neuromancer
Gilder, George
Wealth and Poverty
Gogol, Nikolai
Dead Souls
The Collected Tales of Nikolai Gogol (translated by
Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky)
Golding, William
Lord of the Flies
Gottlieb, Anthony
The Dream of Reason
Heinlein, Robert A.
The Moon is a Harsh Mistress
Hemingway, Ernest
A Farewell to Arms
The Old Man and the Sea
Islands in the Stream
The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway
Henderson, David
‘Scuse Me While I Kiss the Sky: The Life of Jimi Hendrix
Hitchens, Christopher
Arguably: Essays
Hopkins, Jerry and Sugerman, Danny
No One Here Gets Out Alive
Huxley, Aldous
Brave New World
Kafka, Franz
The Metamorphosis and Other Stories (trans. by Stanley Appelbaum)
Kerouac, Jack
On the Road
King, Stephen
The Shining
The Dead Zone
Dark Tower Series
The Gunslinger
The Drawing of the Three
The Waste Lands
Thinner
Nightmares & Dreamscapes
Desperation
The Regulators
Hearts in Atlantis
The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon
Black House
The Colorado Kid
Cell
Just After Sunset
Ur
Koestler, Arthur
Darkness at Noon
Koontz, Dean
The Servants of Twilight
Watchers
The Bad Place
Mr. Murder
Intensity
Seize the Night
Odd Thomas
What the Night Knows
77 Shadow Street
Krakauer, John
Into the Wild
L’Amour, Louis
Hondo
Lao Tzu
Tao Te Ching
Larsson, Stieg
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
Lehane, Dennis
Mystic River
Shutter Island
L’Engle, Madeleine
A Wrinkle in Time
Lewis, C.S.
The Screwtape Letters
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe
London, Jack
The Call of the Wild
White Fang
Best of Jack London Short Stories
Lovecraft, H.P.
The Shadow Over Innsmouth and Dagon
At the Mountains of Madness
Lowry, Malcolm
Under the Volcano
Machiavelli, Niccolò
The Prince
McCourt, Frank
Angela’s Ashes
McCullough, David
1776
Melville, Herman
Moby Dick
Miller, Henry
Tropic of Cancer
Black Spring
Tropic of Capricorn
Morrison, Toni
Song of Solomon
Musashi, Miyamoto
The Book of Five Rings
Nabokov, Vladimir
Lolita
Nevin, David
1812
Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm
The Prince
Orwell, George
Down and Out in Paris and London
Animal Farm
1984
Pirsig, Robert M.
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Values
Plath, Sylvia
The Bell Jar
Rand, Ayn
Anthem
The Virtue of Selfishness
Rice, Anne (as A.N. Roquelaure)
The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty
Beauty’s Punishment
Beauty’s Release
Rimbaud, Arthur (translated by Louise Varese)
A Season in Hell and The Drunken Boat
Robbins, Anthony
Personal Power
Get the Edge
Roberts, J.M.
The History of the World
Rosenberg, Joel C.
The Twelfth Imam
Rule, Anne
Bitter Harvest
Safire, William
On Language
Sagan, Carl
Pale Blue Dot
Saint John of the Cross
Dark Night of the Soul
Salinger, J.D.
The Catcher in the Rye
Franny and Zooey
Sendak, Maurice
Where the WIld Things Are
Steinbeck, John
Of Mice and Men
The Grapes of Wrath
East of Eden
Stein, Garth
The Art of Racing in the Rain
Stern, Howard
Private Parts
Miss America
Stoker, Bram
Dracula
Straub, Peter
Ghost Story
Houses Without Doors
Mr. X
5 Stories
Sun Tzu
The Art of War
Susann, Jacqueline
Valley of the Dolls
Tanner, Stephen
Afghanistan: A Military History from Alexander the Great
to the Fall of the Taliban
Tolkien, J.R.R.
The Hobbit
The Fellowship of the Ring
The Two Towers
The Return of the King
Tolstoy, Leo
Resurrection
Voltaire
Candide
Vonnegut, Kurt
The Sirens of Titan
Welcome to the Monkey House
Slaughterhouse-Five, or The Children’s Crusade: A Duty Dance with Death
Breakfast of Champions, or Goodbye Blue Monday
Warren, Robert Penn
All the King’s Men
White, E.B.
Charlotte’s Web
White, T.H.
The Once and Future King
Winchester, Simon
The Professor and the Madman
Wooten, Victor
The Music Lesson
Five classics I really wanted to read, but could not force my way through:
The Interpretation of Dreams by Sigmund Freud
The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie
The Silmarillion by J.R.R. Tolkien
Walden by Henry David Thoreau
and *gasp* Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand (and I just got banned for life from the Tea Party for admitting that . . . )
I welcome any discussion on these books and the books you have read.
