From Zero to Well-Read in 100 Books

Isn’t it strange that we have the term “well-read” but absolutely no one can come close to defining it? And isn’t also strange that other art forms don’t have equivalent terms for a vague sense of someone’s total experience of that form (well-seen for movies? well-heard for music? Absurd).

Thinking about this recently sucked me into a little thought-experiment: say someone had never read any literature and wanted to be well-read. What should they read? And how many books would it take them to get close?

This hypothetical forces any given answerer to do two things: provide their personal definition of well-read and then give a list of books that might satisfy that definition. The first hurdle to clear is cultural position: who is this person? As I can only provide a reasonable list of books from my own cultural position, I have to assume that this person is like me, at least in a very basic way: an alive American who can read English.

“Well-read” for this person then has a number of connotations: a familiarity with the monuments of Western literature, an at least passing interest in the high-points of world literature, a willingness to experience a breadth of genres, a special interest in the work of one’s immediate culture, a desire to share in the same reading experiences of many other readers, and an emphasis on the writing of the current day.

The following 100 books (of fiction, poetry, and drama) is an attempt to satisfy those competing requirements. After going through several iterations of the list, one thing surprised me: there are not as many “classic” books that I associate with the moniker well-read, and many more current books than I would have thought. Conversely, to be conversant in the literature of the day turned out to be quite a bit more important than I would have thought.

As for the number of 100: in addition to being a nice, round number, it is also a number that, at a one-book-every-two-week pace this hypothetical reader could accomplish in just about four years–the standard length of an undergraduate program.

So here’s the list, in alphabetical order:

1. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
2. The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Arthur Conan Doyle
3. The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton
4. All Quiet on the Western Front by Eric Maria Remarque
5. The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Klay  by Michael Chabon
6. American Pastoral by Philip Roth
7. Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
8. Anne of Green Gables by Lucy Maud Montgomery
9. Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand
10. The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath
11. Beloved by Toni Morrison
12. Beowulf
13. The Book Thief by Markus Zusak
14. Brave New World by Alduos Huxley
15. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz
16. The Call of the Wild  by Jack London
17. Candide by Voltaire
18. The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer
19. Casino Royale by Ian Fleming
20. Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
21. The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger
22. Charlotte’s Web by E.B. White
23. Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell
24. The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson
25. The Complete Stories of Edgar Allan Poe
26. The Complete Stories of Flannery O’Connor 
27. The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen
28. Crime & Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky
29. The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown
30. Death of a Salesman by Arthur Miller
31. Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes
32. Dream of Red Chamber by Cao Xueqin
33. Dune by Frank Herbert
34. Everything is Illuminated by Jonathan Safran Foer
35. Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
36. The Fault in Our Stars by John Green
37. Faust by Goethe
38. Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
39. Game of Thrones by George RR Martin
40. The Golden Bowl by Henry James
41. The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing
42. Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn
43. The Gospels
44. The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
45. Great Expectations by Charles Dickens
46. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
47. Hamlet by William Shakespeare
48. The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood
49. Harry Potter & The Sorceror’s Stone by J.K. Rowling
50. Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
51. The Help by Kathryn Stockett
52. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams
53. The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien
54. House Made of Dawn by N. Scott Momaday
55. Howl by Allen Ginsberg
56. The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins
57. if on a winter’s night a traveler by Italo Calvino
58. The Iliad by Homer
59. The Inferno by Dante
60. Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace
61. Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
62. Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman
63. The Life of Pi by Yann Martel
64. The Lion, the Witch, and The Wardrobe by C.S. Lewis
65. The Little Prince by Antoine  de Saint-Exepury
66. Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
67. Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
68. Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
69. Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie
70. Moby-Dick by Herman Melville
71. Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf
72. Murder on the Orient Express by Agatha Christie
73. The Odyssey by Homer
74. Oedipus, King by Sophocles
75. On the Road by Jack Kerouac
76. A Passage to India by E.M. Forster
77. The Pentateuch
78. Pride & Prejudice by Jane Austen
79. Rabbit, Run by John Updike
80. The Road by Cormac McCarthy
81. Romeo & Juliet by William Shakespeare
82. The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne
83. Slaughterhouse-5 by Kurt Vonnegut
84. The Sound and The Fury by William Faulkner
85. The Stand by Stephen King
86. The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway
87. Swann’s Way by Marcel Proust
88. Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston
89. Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe
90. The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien
91. To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
92. Ulysses by James Joyce
93. The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera
94. A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan
95. Waiting for the Barbarians by J.M. Coetzee
96. Watchmen by Alan Moore
97. The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami
98. Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte
99. 1984 by George Orwell
100. 50 Shades of Grey by E.L. James