The List | 200 Books

2008

December 28th, 2007

These are all the books I read in 2008. I finished with one day to spare.

Fiction

*1984 - Orwell, George
*A Handful of Dust - Waugh, Evelyn
*A House for Mr. Biswas - Naipaul, V.S.
*A Passage to India - Forster, E. M.
*A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man - Joyce, James
*A Tale of Two Cities - Dickens, Charles
*Animal Farm - Orwell, George
*Anna Karenina - Tolstoy, Leo
*Beloved - Morrison, Toni
*Black Mischief, Scoop, The Loved One, The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold - Waugh, Evelyn
*Brideshead Revisited - Waugh, Evelyn
*Canterbury Tales - Chaucer
*Carried Away - Munro, Alice
*Catch-22 - Heller, Joseph
*Collected Stories - Chandler, Raymond
*Collected Stories - Dahl, Roald
*Collected Stories - Kafka, Franz
*Collected Stories - Maugham, W. Somerset
*Crime and Punishment - Dostoevsky, Fyodor
*David Copperfield - Dickens, Charles
*Doctor Zhivago - Pasternak, Boris
*Dubliners - Joyce, James
*Great Expectations - Dickens, Charles
Heart of Darkness - Conrad, Joseph
*Jane Eyre - Bronte, Charlotte
*Joseph and His Brothers - Mann, Thomas
*Lolita - Nabokov, Vladimir
*Love in the Time of Cholera - Garcia Marquez, Gabriel
*Madame Bovary - Flaubert, Gustave
*Midnight’s Children - Rushdie, Salman
*Moby Dick - Melville, Herman
*Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unameable: A Trilogy - Beckett, Samuel
*Mr. Sampath – The Printer of Malgudi, The Financial Expert, Waiting for the Mahatma - Narayan, R.K.
*Mrs. Dalloway - Woolf, Virginia
*My Antonia - Cather, Willa
*Offshore, Human Voices, The Beginning of Spring - Fitzgerald, Penelope
*Oliver Twist - Dickens, Charles
*One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich - Solzhenitsyn, Alexander
*One Hundred Years of Solitude - Garcia Marquez, Gabriel
*Pale Fire - Nabokov, Vladimir
*Persuasion - Austen, Jane
*Pnin - Nabokov, Vladimir
*Pride and Prejudice - Austen, Jane
*Rabbit Angstrom - Updike, John
*Sense and Sensibility - Austen, Jane
*Song of Solomon - Morrison, Toni
*Swami and Friends, The Bachelor of Arts, The Dark Room, The English Teacher - Narayan, R.K.
*The Big Sleep; Farewell my Lovely; The High Window - Chandler, Raymond
*The Bookshop, The Gate of Angels, The Blue Flower - Fitzgerald, Penelope
*The Border Trilogy - McCarthy, Cormac
*The Brothers Karamazov - Dostoevsky, Fyodor
*The Castle - Kafka, Franz
*The Complete Henry Bech - Updike, John
*The Complete Short Novels - Chekhov, Anton
*The Complete Short Stories - Waugh, Evelyn
*The Garden of the Finzi-Continis - Bassani, Giorgio
*The General in His Labyrinth - Garcia Marquez, Gabriel
*The Handmaid’s Tale - Atwood, Margaret
*The House of the Spirits - Allende, Isabel
*The Human Factor - Greene, Graham
*The Lady in the Lake, The Little Sister, The Long Goodbye, Playback - Chandler, Raymond
*The Magic Mountain - Mann, Thomas
*The Maltese Falcon, The Thin Man, Red Harvest - Hammett, Dashiell
*The Mill on the Floss - Eliot, George
*The Name of the Rose - Eco, Umberto
*The Plague, The Fall, Exile and the Kingdom, and Selected Essays - Camus, Albert
*The Postman Always Rings Twice, Double Indemnity, Mildred Pierce, and Selected Stories - Cain, James M
*The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, The Girls of Slender Means, The Driver’s Seat, The Only Problem - Spark, Muriel
*The Radetzky March - Roth, Joseph
*The Scarlett Letter - Hawthorne, Nathaniel
*The Stranger - Camus, Albert
*The Tale of Genji - Murasaki, Shikibu
*The Talented Mr. Ripley, Ripley Underground, Ripley’s Game - Highsmith, Patricia
*The Trial - Kafka, Franz
*Things Fall Apart - Achebe, Chinua
*This Side of Paradise - Fitzgerald, F. Scott
*To the Lighthouse - Woolf, Virginia
*Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn - Twain, Mark
*Ulysses - Joyce, James
*Zeno’s Conscience - Svevo, Italo
*The Best of Wodehouse - Wodehouse, P. G.
*Dain Curse, The Glass Key and The Selected Stories - Hammett, Dashiel
*Death Comes for the Archbishop - Cather, Willa
*Ficciones - Borges, Jorge Luis
*If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler - Calvino, Italo
*The Master and Margarita - Bulgakov, Mikhail
*Sons and Lovers - Lawrence, D. H.
*The Cairo Trilogy - Mahfouz, Naguib
*The Sword of Honour Trilogy - Waugh, Evelyn
*Three Novels of Ancient Egypt Khufu’s Wisdom, Rhadopis of Nubia, Thebes at War - Mahfouz, Naguib
*Mansfield Park - Austen, Jane
*Northanger Abbey - Austen, Jane
*Emma - Austen, Jane

Non-Fiction

*Democracy in America - Tocqueville, Alexis De
*Essays - Orwell, George
Meditations - Aurelius, Marcus
*Rights of Man and Common Sense - Paine, Thomas
*Speak, Memory - Nabokov, Vladimir
*The Republic - Plato
*The Prince - Machiavelli, Niccolo
*The Wealth of Nations - Smith, Adam
*Walden - Thoreau, Henry David
*We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live - Didion, Joan
*Waugh Abroad: Collected Travel Writing - Waugh, Evelyn
*A Vindication of the Rights of Woman - Wollstonecraft, Mary

Religion

*Tao Te Ching - Lao-Tzu
*The Collected Works - Gibran, Kahlil
*The Confessions - Augustine

Poetry

*The Aeneid - Virgil
*The Divine Comedy - Dante, Alighieri
The Iliad - Homer
*The Odyssey - Homer
*Marriage Poems - Hollander, John
*Baudelaire: Poems - Baudelaire, Charles

Philosophy

The Analects - Confucius

History

*The Histories - Herodotus

Biography

*The Periodic Table - Levi, Primo
*The Woman Warrior, China Men - Kingston, Maxine Hong
*The Life of Samuel Johnson - Boswell, James

Children’s

*Adventures of Robin Hood - Green, Roger Lancelyn
*Aladdin and Other Tales - Robinson, W. Heath
*Anne of Green Gables - Montgomery, L. M.
*A Apple Pie & Nursery Rhymes - Greenaway, Kate
*The BFG - Dahl, Roald
*Black Beauty - Sewell, Anna
*A Book of Nonsense - Lear, Edward
*A Child’s Garden of Verses - Stevenson, Robert Louis
*A Christmas Carol - Dickens, Charles
*Daddy Long Legs - Webster, Jean
*Don Quixote of the Mancha - Cervantes, Miguel De
*English Fairy Tales - Jacobs, Joseph
*The Everyman Anthology of Poetry for Children - Avery, Gillian
*The Everyman Book of Nonsense Verse - Guinness, Louise
*Fables - Aesop
*Fairy Tales - Andersen, Hans Christian
*Fairy Tales - The Brothers Grimm
*Jack the Giant Killer - Doyle, Richard
*Just So Stories - Kipling, Rudyard
*King Arthur and His Knights of the Round Table - Green, Roger Lancelyn
*The Light in the Forest - Richter, Conrad
*Little Red Riding Hood & Other Stories - Perrault, Charles
*Little Women - Alcott, Louisa May
*Mother Goose’s Nursery Rhymes - Jerrold, Walter
*Peter Pan - Barrie, J.M.
*The Pied Piper of Hamelin - Browning, Robert
*The Princess and the Goblin - MacDonald, George
*Ride a Cock-Horse and Other Rhymes and Stories - Caldecott, Randolph
*Robinson Crusoe - Defoe, Daniel
*Russian Fairly Tales - Avery, Gillian
*The Scarlett Pimpernel - Orczy, Baroness
*The Secret Garden - Burnett, Frances Hodgson
*Sherlock Holmes - Doyle, Sir Arthur Conan
*Sleeping Beauty - Evans, C.S.
*The Three Musketeers - Dumas, Alexandre
*Treasure Island - Stevenson, Robert Louis
*The Wind in the Willows - Grahame, Kenneth
*The Wizard of Oz - Baum, L. Frank
*A Wonder Book for Boys & Girls - Hawthorne, Nathaniel

Posted by Mandi |

Comments »

Brent says

The Handmaid’s Tale? Nothing like angry feminist Science Fiction. I wonder how that one got on the list, as far as Dystopias go, it is not even that high on the list of Great Science Fiction works.

February 1st, 2008 | #

Mandi says

I don’t know anything about it…we’ll have to talk to everyman’s about their book choices.

February 1st, 2008 | #

Erin says

I read it when I was living in England, and it inspired one of the most elegantly twisted, indelible dreams I’ve ever had. It’s not Atwood’s best, but she is a monstrous talent in my opinion.

February 12th, 2008 | #

Keith says

NabOkov.

February 18th, 2008 | #

LeRoy baker says

A worthy goal, I hope you are able to do it. I enjoyed the newspaper story in Sunday’s paper. If you accomplish your goal with all you are doing, it will be amazing.

I am not real happy with your list. I think you could have found a better one. There are a lot of long boring books in the list and many are slanted toward a man,s point of view. For instance, “Moby Dick” is a man’s (or boy’s) book and it has too many words in it for the story, inspite of it being a classic. Another great story that is a real pain to read is “Doctor Zhivago”.

Try to put few light reading books between the heavy ones or you will go nuts.

I am a little disappointed that there are not more fantacy or science fiction stories in it and none by one of my favorite authors, Antoine de Saint-Exupery. You would think they would have had his classic, “The Little Prince” in the chidren’s section (It is more than a children’s book.) I like his “Wind, Sand and Stars” better.

In spite of the fact that “1984″ as written before the technology was available, I do not really consider it science fiction. It is a of how the government and special interests will try to control us when they have the technology (which is now available).

A really good fantasy to read is “Watership Down” by Richard Adams or “Johnathan Livingston Seagull” which is a quick read and will leave you sure that you can accomplish anything.

Another book that is an eye opener is “1421, the Year China Discovered America”. After reading that one, I believe it is almost a miracle that we do not speak Chinese instead of English. Did you know that both Columbus and Magellan were using Chinese maps during their explorations. China had colonies in the Carribean, Mexico, and California before Columbus. You can get it in some college bookstores.

If you want something light read Louis L’Amour, “Down the Long Hills”. I think it is almost as good as Tom Sawyer.

If you are in the area stop by and see my books. I have one pile that I haven’t even sorted yet that measures 9′ x 12′ x 9′ that I inherited from someone. If you come around the first week in Sept. I will probably give you a free watermelon.

February 19th, 2008 | #

Mandi says

Thanks for the proofread Keith…

Leroy:
I’m pretty happy with the list because of the way it’s challenging me to read things I wouldn’t otherwise bother with. I’ve tried to finish Moby Dick several times and failed and now I have to and while I’ve wanted to read Dante, Boswell and other wordy dead white males often the reluctance to start a long unfamiliar work has stopped me. Likewise I’m being forced to read lots of 20th century stuff that just doesn’t appeal to me but that I’m sure I’ll enjoy or at least learn from. As I’m a 21st century woman I think I have the most to learn from the male point of view and there are plenty of books by women on the list so there is balance there.
Anyway…I agree that a more perfect list could have been crafted (though we would probably differ as to what it would be) but I wanted the element of involuntary submission to someone else’s standard to force me out of my reading habits.
…so where do I go to find this free watermelon?

February 19th, 2008 | #

Lezlie says

Good Luck with your quest! I love lists that challenge me with books I may not have otherwise picked up. You may not be thrilled with all the selections, but I bet you won’t regret your adventure.

Cheering you on~
Lezlie

February 20th, 2008 | #

Steve says

I just wanted to say best of luck. Outside of manuscripts, I find it a challenge to complete one book and one audiobook (my eyes get tired) per week. Unlike earlier posters I am amazed at the list of classics you’ve included. You’ve inspired me to push my friends toward a more aggressive schedule in our own little book club. My only suggestions might be a pinch more religion and philosophy but that just tends to be my current obsessions. Just wishing you the very very best.
Warmest wishes,

Steve

February 20th, 2008 | #

Shanna says

As a fellow book industry gal, book lover and Pacific Northwesterner–I commend your year of reading 200 books…and I was impressed with myself that I read about 35 titles last year…have no kids, and do not run my own business!! Best of luck to you–I’m completely moved by your vision. Cheers! Shanna Knowlton
Publicist
Mountaineers Books, Skipstone and Braided River

February 20th, 2008 | #

Mandi says

Thanks for the kind comments.

Steve: I agree that religion and philosophy are under-represented but remember that this list is constrained by Everyman’s lists. I even had to add Augustine’s Confessions myself as it wasn’t on their 100 greatest!

February 20th, 2008 | #

Terri says

First, and most importantly - Wow. What a fabulous quest. I wish I would have thought of it. I am always looking for reasons to read and it often falls in the category of reward for getting something else done first. Now you have to just sit down and do it; afterall, you’ve told the world about it. Brilliant.
A question: what if you have already read some of the books on your list? As I look it over, imagining myself trying to catch up with you, I could knock 24 off the list, and realize that of course you have also read many before. Do you get to skim those ones quickly?
Finally, just to let you know that you are not the only one out there reading in every spare moment, I am now working on books #14 and 15 for 2008. If I keep that pace, I’ll hit 120 books for the year. And I don’t have small kids (my youngest is 12) and I don’t run a business. Do you sleep?

February 22nd, 2008 | #

Mandi says

Well I didn’t sleep last night but that wasn’t because I was reading…my two-month-old Luc woke me up every two hours! Jared did get up with him once thank God.
Actually I’d already read about 30 of the books. But I’m an advocate of multiple re-readings. I think it’s only by the third or fourth reading that a book really sinks into your life. And I don’t actually skim much at all…I read fast enough naturally that I don’t feel that I have to.

February 22nd, 2008 | #

Gouthum says

Bravo. Bravo.

Excellent list of titles to read. I am even moved by your re-reading of those you have already read. Though Melville..YEESH, talk about verbose.

I know you will succeed.
Gouthum

February 25th, 2008 | #

bybee says

Mandi,
I’ve been following your progress. You inspired me to go for 100 books this year. I just finished #43, so I’m still hopeful. You are way cool but maybe a little crazy for taking on this challenge with such a busy life. You rock!

June 7th, 2008 | #

Rebecca Reid says

I think this is a great list….And as for LeRoy’s comment, I think Moby Dick is not just a “man’s” book. I enjoyed it a little bit. It’s a hard read, for sure, but there are some intriguing aspects to it. I had just a few weeks to read it for a class. That’s how I got through it: a deadline. But I’m glad I had to read it.

I’ glad to have found your blog! An intriguing challenge for yourself!

June 23rd, 2008 | #

Rebecca Reid says

Oh, and even if it’s not on the Everyman’s list, you’ve got to read Winnie-the-Pooh to your kids. It is the best children’s book I’ve found!

June 23rd, 2008 | #

Amanda says

Wow! This is quite a list, and you’ve got some great titles on there. The most I’ve ever tried to read in a year is 52, that with a newborn and moving across the country twice. This year I’ve almost got 50 in and will likely hit 100 by the end of the year, but my goodness 200 is amazing! I salute you.

-Amanda
http://5-squared.blogspot.com

July 14th, 2008 | #

Jess says

This is an amazing, admirable goal. As a student, I am alsays looking to expand my reading list but it is hard to find time, especially at school, it’s good to see someone make a mission out of it. Good Luck to you!

December 25th, 2008 | #

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