The Books

There a few truths that I hold within this strange, beautiful, random, and sometimes twisted world: 1) Books are amazing friends that you can carry around with you, that do not judge. 2) Food is an incredible escape from the boring everyday life we all have. 3) There is not enough time in this world for either; especially books.

Below is the list of what I have read from the master list of 1,305 books that apparently are “required” to be read before we die. Only 54 of them. So many more to go…

As of 17 May, 2015, the books are as follows:

1. Candide – Voltaire
2. Frankenstein – Mary Shelley (do I get extra credit for 4 separate readings?)
3. Fall of the House of Usher – Edgar Allan Poe
4. Pit and the Pendulum – Edgar Allan Poe
5. The Scarlet Letter – Nathaniel Hawthorne
6. Walden – Henry David Thoreau
7. A Tale of Two Cities – Charles Dickens
8. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn – Mark Twain
9. Picture of Dorian Gray – Oscar Wilde
10. Tess of the D’Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy
11. The Yellow Wallpaper – Charlotte Perkins Gilman
12. Dracula – Bram Stoker
13. Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad
14. The Great Gatsby – F. Scott Fitzgerald
15. Mrs. Dalloway – Virginia Woolf
16. To the Lighthouse – Virginia Woolf
17. Orlando – Virginia Woolf
18. Brave New World – Aldous Huxley
19. Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck
20. The Poor Mouth – Flann O’Brien
21. 1984 – George Orwell
22. Catcher in the Rye – J.D. Salinger
23. The Lord of the Flies – William Golding
24. To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee
25. A Clockwork Orange – Anthony Burgess
26. The Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath
27. In Cold Blood – Truman Capote
28. Wide Sargasso Sea – Jean Rhys
29. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? – Philip K. Dick
30. Slaughterhouse-Five – Kurt Vonnegut
31. Play It As It Lays – Joan Didion
32. Invisible Cities – Italo Calvino
33. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams
34. If on a winter’s night a traveler – Italo Calvino
35. The Unbearable Lightness of Being – Milan Kundera
36. White Noise – Don Delillo
37. The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood
38. Beloved – Toni Morrison
39. Bonfire of the Vanities – Tom Wolfe
40. The Passion – Jeanette Winterson
41. Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro
42. The Virgin Suicides – Jeffrey Eugenides
43. The Hours – Michael Cunningham
44. Pastoralia – George Saunders
45. Ignorance – Milan Kundera
46. The Blind Assassin – Margaret Atwood
47. White Teeth – Zadie Smith
48. Atonement – Ian McEwan
49. Everything is Illuminated – Jonathan Safran Foer
50. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time – Mark Haddon
51. Cloud Atlas – David Mitchell
52. Never Let Me Go – Kazuo Ishiguro
53. The Sense of an Ending – Julian Barnes
54. 1Q84 – Haruki Murakami
55. The Marriage Plot – Jeffrey Eugenides