About exactly a year ago I started a project:  I had had a week or two where I’d kept running into Top 100 Books sorts of lists, and always when I read through them I’d read between a third and a half of the list.  There were always a few stalwarts that appeared on just about everything, but the differences around the edges between, say, TIME’s list and the one on Goodreads were sorta fascinating.

I decided, using three or four different lists that I felt looked reputable, that I’d put together my own personal Top 100 Books I Want to Read or Reread list, then read my way through the whole thing.  I wasn’t planning on doing it in order or anything like that, and obviously I’d be taking frequent breaks to read other stuff (frankly, I take breaks from reading Other Stuff to read books from the list) but over however long it took, I’d read all 100 of them.

I was pretty pleased with the list, which actually turned out to be 102 books long; I found a couple of others that I wanted to read after the list was “done” and decided that nobody but me cared if it was actually 100 books or not.  It was a good mix of stuff I’d never read (or, in some cases, never heard of) and some things that I wanted an excuse to reread.  I started book #26 today (THE CALL OF THE WILD, by Jack London, which I’ve never read) so if I stay at roughly the same pace it’ll take me four years to get through the entire list.  This is my 119th book of the year– I keep track over on Facebook, for those of you who aren’t following me from over there– so I’m not exactly focusing on sticking with List Stuff.

Anyway, here’s the books, assuming I can get WordPress to display them in something resembling a readable list.  Remember, everything on here was on somebody’s Top 100 list:

1	1984	George Orwell
2	A Clockwork Orange	Anthony Burgess
3	A Doll’s House	Henrik Ibsen
4	A Farewell to Arms	Anthony Burgess
5	Aeneid	Virgil
6	Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland	Lewis Carroll
7	All the King’s Men	Robert Penn Warren
8	Animal Farm	George Orwell
9	Anna Karenina	Leo Tolstoy
10	Beloved	Toni Morrison
11	Blindness	Jose Saramago
12	Brideshead Revisited	Evelyn Waugh
13	Catcher in the Rye	JD Salinger
14	David Copperfield	Charles Dickens
15	Deliverance	James Dickey
16	Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?	Philip K. Dick
17	Don Quixote	Miguel de Cervantes
18	Dr Jekyll and Mr. Hyde	Robert Louis Stevenson
19	Dracula	Bram Stoker
20	Emma	Jane Austen
21	Fairy Tales	Hans Christian Andersen
22	Finnegan’s Wake	James Joyce
23	Frankenstein	Mary Shelley
24	Go Tell it on the Mountain	James Baldwin
25	Gone with the Wind	Margaret Mitchell
26	Grendel	John Gardner
27	Gulliver’s Travels	Jonathan Swift
28	Hamlet	Shakespeare
29	Howards End	EM Forster
30	I, Claudius	Robert Graves
31	Jane Eyre	Charlotte Bronte
32	Kim	Rudyard Kipling
33	LA Confidential	James Ellroy
34	Leaves of Grass	Walt Whitman
35	Little Women	Louisa May Alcott
36	Lolita	Vladimir Nabokov
37	Lord of the Flies	William Golding
38	Love in the Time of Cholera	Gabriel Garcia Marquez
39	Macbeth	Shakespeare
40	Madame Bovary	Gustave Flaubert
41	Mahabharata	Vyasa
42	Metamorphoses	Ovid
43	Middlemarch	George Eliot
44	Midnight’s Children	Salman Rushdie
45	Mrs. Dalloway	Virginia Woolf
46	Native Son	Richard Wright
47	Neuromancer	William Gibson
48	Never Let Me Go	Kazuo Ishiguro
49	Njal’s Saga	Anonymous
50	Northern Lights	Phillip Pullman
51	Nostromo	Joseph Conrad
52	Odyssey	Homer
53	On the Road	Jack Kerouac
54	One Hundred Years of Solitude	Gabriel Garcia Marquez
55	One Thousand and One Nights	Anonymous
56	Pale Fire	Vladimir Nabokov
57	Pilgrim’s Progress	John Bunyan
58	Portnoy’s Complaint	Philip Roth
59	Pride and Prejudice	Jane Austen
60	Ramayana	Valmiki
61	Robinson Crusoe	Daniel Defoe
62	Snow Crash	Neal Stephenson
63	Song of Solomon	Toni Morrison
64	Sophie’s Choice	William Styron
65	The Adventures of Augie March	Saul Bellow
66	The Big Sleep	Raymond Chandler
67	The Brothers Karamazov	Fyodor Dostoyevsky
68	The Call of the Wild	Jack London
69	The Executioner’s Song	Norman Mailer
70	The Grapes of Wrath	John Steinbeck
71	The Great Gatsby	F Scott Fitzgerald
72	The Life of Gargantua and of Pantagruel	Francois Rabelais
73	The Lord of the Rings	JRR Tolkien
74	The Maltese Falcon	Dashiell Hammett
75	The Naked Lunch	William Burroughs
76	The Old Man and the Sea	Ernest Hemingway
77	The Picture of Dorian Grey	Oscar Wilde
78	The Plague	Albert Camus
79	The Portrait of a Lady	Henry James
80	The Satanic Verses	Salman Rushdie
81	The Sound and the Fury	William Faulkner
82	The Stranger	Albert Camus
83	The Sun Also Rises	Ernest Hemingway
84	The Thirty-Nine Steps	John Buchan
85	The Tin Drum	Gunter Grass
86	The Trial	Franz Kafka
87	The Way of All Flesh	Samuel Butler
88	The Wind in the Willows	Kenneth Grahame
89	The Woman in White	Wilkie Collins
90	Their Eyes were Watching God	Zora Neale Hurston
91	Things Fall Apart	Chinua Achebe
92	Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy	John Le Carre
93	To Kill a Mockingbird	Harper Lee
94	Tom Jones	Henry Fielding
95	Twelfth Night	Shakespeare
96	Ubik	Philip K. Dick
97	Ulysses	James Joyce
98	Vanity Fair	William Makepeace Thackeray
99	Waiting for the Barbarians	JM Coetzee
100	War and Peace	Leo Tolstoy
101	Wise Blood	Flannery O’Connor
102	Wuthering Heights	Emily Bronte

Hmm.  That at least looked like it worked (EDIT: Mostly.  It’ll do.)  I started with ULYSSES, which I hated, and plan to finish with FINNEGAN’S WAKE, which I also intend to hate, but other than that I’m more or less jumping around at random.  The biggest pleasant surprises so far have been Jose Saramago in general, FRANKENSTEIN, which somehow I’d never read, and THE PICTURE OF DORIAN GREY.  Meanwhile, PRIDE AND PREJUDICE is still my personal literary nemesis, even though I did manage to finish the sonofabitch this time, a feat I never managed when they tried to make me read it in high school.  It was one of the worst grades I ever got on an English paper– I’d not finished the book, and it was painfully obvious that that was the case; I managed to get the names of a few major characters confused, so the teacher completely saw through me.  A shame; I really liked him and his class, I just hate Jane Austen.  I was startled at how much I liked WUTHERING HEIGHTS, though, which I was expecting to be much the same thing.

Anyway.  Anything on there I should prioritize or fear?  Do you guys have any long-term reading projects I should know about?