Re-Posting For The Holidays -- December 15, 2018

From Business Insider, twenty books coming out in 2019 and recommended by the writer at the linked article. Not one of them interests me.

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From February 7, 2014: Amazon's list of 100 best books to read in one's lifetime.

I'm a sucker for lists, and this is one of the best. I won't change my reading plans based on this list but it it is interesting. Here they are, all 100, said to be alphabetical, but some at the end are not in alphabetical order:

• 1984, George Orwell
• A Brief History of Time, Stephen Hawking
• A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, Dave Eggers
• A Long Way Gone, Ishmael Beah
• The Bad Beginning or. Orphans, Lemony Snicket
• A Wrinkle in Time, Madeleine Lengle
• Alice Munro: Selected Stories
• Alice in Wonderland, Lewis Carroll
• All the President's Men, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein
• Angela's Ashes, Frank McCourt
• Are You There, God? It's Me, Margaret, Judy Blume
• Bel Canto, Ann Patchett
• Beloved, Toni Morrison
• Born to Run -- A Hidden Tribe, Superathletes, and the Greatest Race the World Has Never Seen, Christopher McDougall
• Catch-22, Joseph Heller
• Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Roald Dahl
• Charlotte's Web, E. B. White
• Cutting For Stone, Abraham Verghese
• Diary of a Wimpy Kid, Jeff Kinney
• Dune, Frank Herbert
• Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury
• Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream, Hunter S. Thompson
• Goodnight Moon, Margaret Wise Brown
• Great Expectations, Charles Dickens
• Guns, Germs, and Steel, Jared M. Diamond (overrated)
• Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone, J. K. Rowling
• In Cold Blood, Truman Capote
• Interpreter of Maladies,  Jhumpa Lahiri
• Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison
• Jimmy Corrigan: Smartest Kid on Earth, Chris Ware
• Kitchen Confidential, Anthony Bourdain
• Life After Life, Kate Atkinson
• Little House on the Prairie, Laura Ingalls Wilder
• Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov
• Love in the Time of Cholera, Gabriel Garcia Marquez
• Love Medicine, Louise Erdrich
• Man's Search for Menaing, Viktor Franki
• Me Talk Pretty One Day, David Sedaris
• Middlesex, Jeffrey Eugenides
• Midnight's Children, Salman Rushdie
• Moneyball, Michael Lewis
• Of Human Bondage, W. Somerset Maugham
• On the Road, Jack Kerouac
• Out of Africa, Isak Dinesen
• Persepolis, Marjane Satrapi
• Portnoy's Complaint, Phillip Roth
• Silent Spring, Rachel Carson
• Slaughterhouse-Five, Kurt Vonnegut
• Team of Rivals, Doris Kearns Goodwin
• The Age of Innocence, EdithWharton
• The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, Michael Chabon
• Malcolm X, Malcolm X and Alex Haley
• The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Junot Diaz
• The Book Thief, Markus Zusak
• The Catcher in the Rye, J. D. Salinger
• The Color of Water, James McBride
• The Corrections, Jonathan Franzen
• The Devil in the White City, Erik Larson
• The Diary of Anne Frank, Anne Frank
• The Fault in our Stars, John Green
• The Giver, Lois Lowry
• Daring Greatly: How the Courage to Be Vulnerable Transforms the Way We Live, Love, Parent, and Lead, Brene Brown
• The Golden Compass, Phillip Pullman
• The Great Gatsby,  F. Scott Fitzgerald
• The Handmaid's Tale, Margaret Atwood
• Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen
• The Hunger Games, Suzanne Collins
• The House at Pooh Corner, A. A. Milne
• The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, Rebecca Skloot
• The Liar's Club, Mary Karr
• The Lightning Thief, Rick Riordan
• The Little Prince, Antoine de Saint-Exupery
• The Long Goodbye, Raymond Chandler
• The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and The Road to 9/11, Lawrence Wright
• The Lord of the Rings, J. R. R. Tolkien
• The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat and Other Clinical Tales, Oliver Sacks
• The Omnivore's Dilemma, Michael Pollan
• The Poisonwood Bible: A Novel, Barbara Kingsolver
• The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York, Robert A. Caro
• The Right Stuff, Tom Wolfe
• The Road, Cormac McCarthy
• The Secret History, Donna Tartt
• The Shining, Stephen King
• The Sun Also Rises, Ernest Hemingway
• The Things They Carried, Tim O'Brien
• The Very Hungry Caterpillar, Eric Carle
• The Wind in the Willows, Kenneth Grahame
• The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle: A Novel, Haruki Murakami
• The World According To Garp, John Irving
• The Year of Magical Thinking, Joan Didion
• Things Fall Apart, Chinua Achebe
• To Kill A Mockingbird, Harper Lee
• Unbroken: A World War II Story Of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption, Laura Hillenbrand
• Valley of the Dolls, Jacqueline Susann
• Where the Sidewalk Ends, Shel Silverstein
• Where the Wild Things Are, Maurice Sendak
• The Phantom Tollbooth, Norton Juster
• The Stranger, Albert Camus
• Breath, Eyes, Memory, Edwidge Danticat
• Gone Girl, Gillian Flynn

Comments:

• I was pleasantly surprised by some on the list, including Tim O'Brien
• I was surprised by the absence of the great women writers of the 18th, 19th, and early 20th centuries (Mary Shelley, Emily Bronte, George Eliot, Virginia Woolf, just to name a few)
• I was surprised to see Hawking but not Darwin on the list
• I was surprised to see none of the following: Defoe, Joseph Conrad, James Joyce
• any list that includes Fear and Loathing by Hunter S Thompson is almost a perfect list
• I was surprised to see how much reading I have left to do
• I think our older granddaughter (age 10) has read more on the list than I have (if one counts all seven volumes of Harry Potter and three volumes of Hunger Games)