A list of 100 books I have read. How many of these books have you read?

1984 – George Orwell

A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole

The Adventures of Tom Sawyer – Mark Twain

Alice in Wonderland – Lewis Caroll

All Creatures Great and Small – James Herriot

All Quiet on the Western Front – Erich Maria Remarque

Anarchist Portraits – Paul Avrich

And the Band Played On – Randy Shilts

Assassination Vacation – Sarah Vowell

Assimilate: A Critical History of Industrial Music – S Alexander Reed

The Autobiography of Malcolm X – Malcolm X

Bekenntnisse – Nina Hagen

Bird by Bird – Anne Lammot

The Boys of Summer – Roger Kahn

Charlotte’s Web – EB White

Das Boot – Lothar-Günther Buchheim

Catch-22 – Joseph Heller

The Catcher in the Rye – JD Salinger

Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – Roald Dahl

A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens

The Code Book – Simon Singh

The Color Purple – Alice Walker

The Complete Plays of Joe Orton – Joe Orton

Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Dead Souls – Nikolai Gogol

Death of a Salesman -Arthur Miller

Demon Haunted World – Carl Sagan

Der, Die, Was? – David Bergmann

The Divine Comedy – Dante Alighieri

The Diary of Anne Frank – Anne Frank

Drugs are Nice – Lisa Crystal Carver

Dune – Frank Herbert

The Edible Woman – Margaret Atwood

Eight Men Out – Eliot Asinof

The Elegance of the Universe – Brian Greene

Even Cowgirls Get the Blues – Tom Robbins

Fahrenheit 451 – Ray Bradbury

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas – Hunter S Thompson

The Good Earth – Pearl S Buck

The Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck

The Great Gatsby – F Scott Ftzgerlad

Ham on Rye – Charles Bukowski

Hamlet – “William Shakespeare”

Harry Potter und der Stein der Weisen – Joanne K Rowling

Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad

Hell’s Angel – Sonny Barger

Hey, Wait a Minute – John Madden

The History of Western Philosiphy – Bertrand Russel

The Hitchikers Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams

I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings – Maya Angelou

In the Land of Invented Languages – Arika Orkent

The Invisible Man – Ralph Ellison

Joe Turner’s Come and Gone – August Wilson

The Last Resort – Aggie Max

The Little Prince – Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

Lord of the Rings – JRR Tolkein

Les Miserablé – Victor Hugo

Me Talk Pretty One Day – David Sedaris

Men of Mathematics – ET Bell

The Mismeasure of Man – Stephen Jay Gould

Moby Dick – Herman Melville

The Moviegoer – Walker Percy

My Brief History – Stephen Hawking

My Gender Workbook – Kate Bornstein

My World and Welcome to it – James Thurber

Naked Lunch – William S Burroughs

Native Son – Richard Wright

No Exit – Jean Paul Sartre

Nothing for Ungood – John Madison

The Odyssey – Homer

On the Road – Jack Kerouac

The Once and Future King – TH White

One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Orange is the New Black – Piper Kerman

Packing for Mars – Mary Roach

Persopolis – Marjane Satrapi

Peter the Great – Robert k Massie

The Physics of Star Trek – Lawrence Krauss

The Picture of Dorian Gray – Oscar Wilde

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man – James Joyces

The Red Badge of Courage – Stephen Crane

Rock n’ Roll Melancholy – Kim Acrylic

The Scarlet Letter – Nathaniel Hawthorne

The Screwtape Letters – CS Lewis

Shock Value – John Waters

Slaughterhouse-Five – Kurt Vinnegut

The Souls of Black Folk – WEB Dubois

Steppenwolf – Herman Hesse

The Street – Ann Petry

The Sun Also Rises – Ernest Hemingway

The Thin Red Line – James Jones

To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee

The Trial – Franz Kafka

Trout Fishing in America – Richard Brautigan

Tyco and Kepler – Kitty Ferguson

Waiting for Godot – Samuel Beckett

Wanda Hickey’s Night of Golden Memories and Other Disasters – Jean Shepard

The Call of the Wild – Jack London

Who Wrote Shakespeare? – John Michel

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance – Robert M Pirsig

I didn’t list these particular books because they were necessarily standouts in my mind, and are not in any particular order or genre, save alphabetical. In writing this list I just started jotting down the first titles that came to mind. I mentioned the Walker Percy book because that writer was instrumental in getting A Confederacy of Dunces published.

I was careful not to list the same author twice. I’ve read many books by Hunter S Thompson and Sarah Vowell, for example, but I only listed one book by each of them. (Same for Richard Wright and Dostoyevsky and several others.) Some of these books I read for school. The Once and Future King and The Invisible Man, for instance.

In saying I’ve read these books I mean I’ve really read them, all the way through. One writer who wrote and article about William S Burrough’s Naked Lunch remarked that most people who had read the book had only really read half, or two thirds of the book, without finishing it, yet would still proclaim “I’ve read Naked Lunch”. The same thing applies to other works like Moby Dick. “I’ve read Moby Dick!” (They actually didn’t get around to finishing it three quarters of the way through.) Each and every book on this list was read by me cover-to-cover.

Some of these books I read in German. Das Boot for example. There are also a couple of books which I’ve read in English and then later on in German. Confederacy of Dunces and The Little Prince, for example. (The German translation of Confederacy was superb, FYI. By a translator named Peter Marginter, who must be an English and Deutsch Meister!) And I have read the first Harry Potter book, but it was the German translation, ergo the German title.

There is an awful lot of non-fiction on this list, it’s true. I do have a weakness for the stranger-than-fiction. There are also a few obscure titles on this list. Nina Hagen’s autobiography Bekentnisse hasn’t gotten around too much, at least in the US, and The Last Resort was written by a friend of mine, and never got much exposure. Her publisher didn’t put much elbow grease into promoting it.