Top 100 Book List
March 3rd, 2009. Filed under: Tuesday's Tempting Reads.I’ll admit it. I’m a book worm. I love to read. When I was a kid we had a rule. No books at the table. Since I come from a family of book worms, I have since figured out the rationale behind the rule. We could have gone for days without speaking to each other if we were allowed to bring our reading material to the table. Instead my brother and I devoured anything that had the printed word on it. We read cereal boxes, ketchup bottles, salad dressing, A1 sauce. You get the picture. That’s why I was a bit dismayed when I ran across this list of the the “new classics.” 100 of the best reads from 1983 to 2008. Of the top 25, I’ve only read two. How embarrassing. It’s not as if I quit reading for 25 years. Of the hundreds (thousands, actually) of books I read, I just didn’t manage to read the right ones. I don’t even want to admit that those two books were the only ones out of the entire list that I’ve read. I think someone needs to make a list of the top thousand. Maybe I could do a little better.
Here’s the top 25. Did you do any better?
1. The Road , Cormac McCarthy (2006)
2. Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, J.K. Rowling (2000)
3. Beloved, Toni Morrison (1987)
4. The Liars’ Club, Mary Karr (1995)
5. American Pastoral, Philip Roth (1997)
6. Mystic River, Dennis Lehane (2001)
7. Maus, Art Spiegelman (1986/1991)
8. Selected Stories, Alice Munro (1996)
9. Cold Mountain, Charles Frazier (1997)
10. The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, Haruki Murakami (1997)
11. Into Thin Air, Jon Krakauer (1997)
12. Blindness, José Saramago (1998)
13. Watchmen, Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons (1986-87)
14. Black Water, Joyce Carol Oates (1992)
15. A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, Dave Eggers (2000)
16. The Handmaid’s Tale, Margaret Atwood (1986)
17. Love in the Time of Cholera, Gabriel García Márquez (1988)
18. Rabbit at Rest, John Updike (1990)
19. On Beauty, Zadie Smith (2005)
20. Bridget Jones’s Diary, Helen Fielding (1998)
21. On Writing, Stephen King (2000)
22. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Junot Díaz (2007)
23. The Ghost Road, Pat Barker (1996)
24. Lonesome Dove, Larry McMurtry (1985)
25. The Joy Luck Club, Amy Tan (1989)
March 3rd, 2009 at 22:05
I”m a book worm but… I’ve only read one of those.
If you come to the table with no book in my family
or DH’s you are considered odd.
Of course having small messy eaters in the house
did put a crimp in my eating style for a few years.
March 4th, 2009 at 05:57
Entering ninth grade we were *required* to bring a list and summary of all the books we’d read that summer. I had about 70 books and no one believed me. Reading is such a pleasure, but the books have to be GOOD! I don’t always find good ones.
I’ve read three of these on the list: JK Rowling’s The Goblet of Fire, Jon Krakauer’s Into Thin Air, and Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club. I also glanced through Stephen King’s On Writing. (He is an incredible writer, but I don’t read his stuff because it’s too disturbing). I don’t know. Sometimes movies seem to be the new books.
March 4th, 2009 at 12:06
Thanks for stopping by, Amy. I remember once in the ninth grade I heard one of the nerdy boys brag about reading a book a day. I thought, “If you can do it, so can I.” And I did. I can still do that, but force myself to do other things. You know. All the fun things such as cook, sleep, do laundry. If I hadn’t found Fly Lady, I would have to shovel my way through all this other stuff. ;p
March 4th, 2009 at 12:12
Nova,
I’ll tell you which one I’ve read if you tell me which one you’ve read. Now that I’m on my own, I can read any time, any place. I don’t even go to a restaruant alone without a book. Of course, when Consumer Man and I go out together, we manage to leave our books at home. It’s great to be married to a fellow book lover.