So Dave and I stopped at a bookstore in Chilliwack on our way to Harrison Hot Springs. They had a lot of free things to pick up by the door, and one of them was How to be well-read: Fifty books you must be acquainted with to make the grade by Siri Agrell. Here they are for your benefit in no particular order.

Bold means I've read it, italics means I want to read it, underlined means I own it but haven't gotten around to it yet.

1. The Tin Drum - Günter Grass, Germany



2. Krapp's Last Tape - Samuel Beckett, Ireland



3. The Stranger - Albert Camus, France



4. Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad, England



5. Inferno - Dante Alighieri, Italy
Actually, I want to read the whole thing.


6. Bleak House - Charles Dickens, England



7. The Brothers Karamazov - Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Russia



8. The Sound and the Fury - William Faulkner, United States



9. Love in the Time of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Márquez, Columbia
I've read "1000 Years of Solitude"


10. The Sun Also Rises - Ernest Hemingway, United States



11. Dubliners - James Joyce, Ireland



12. Metamorphosis - Franz Kafka, Bohemia



13. The Time and the Place - Naguib Mahfouz, Egypt



14. Moby-Dick - Hermal Melville, United States



15. Beloved - Toni Morrison, United States



16. 1984 - George Orwell, England



17. Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie, India/Britain



18. King Lear - William Shakespeare, England
As an English major, perhaps I shouldn't come out of the closet here, but I HATESES Shakespeare. >:( I managed to go through an entire English degree and only have to read Romeo and Juliet (three times...once in high school, twice for classes) and MacBeth (high school)


19. Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy, Russia



20. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn - Mark Twain, United States



21. Leaves of Grass - Walt Whitman, United States



22. To the Lighthouse - Virginia Woolf, England



23. The Red and the Black - Stendhal, France



24. Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov, United States
God, I wish I hadn't. What a horrible, horrible book. *shudder*


25. The Great Gatsby - F. Scott Fitzgerald, United States



26. The Catcher in the Rye - J.D. Salinger, United States



27. Catch-22 - Joseph Heller, United States



28. The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood, Canada
It's so good. I love it. And not just because it's Canadian, or feminist, or science fiction-esque.


29. On the Road - Jack Kerouac, United States



30. The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath, United States



31. The Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck, United States
I've read a bit of Steinbeck, and I have a book of his about King Arthur, but never read this one.


32. To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee, United States



33. Heartbreak House - George Bernard Shaw, Ireland



34. The Picture of Dorian Gray - Oscar Wilde, Ireland
Wicked good book.


35. A Clockword Orange - Anthony Burgess, England



36. The Glass Bead Game - Hermann Hesse, Switzerland



37. The Awakening - Kate Chopin, United States



38. The Color Purple - Alice Walker, United States



39. One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest - Ken Kesey, United States



40. Tropic of Cancer - Henry Miller, United States
Tis supposed to be filthy. I'm interested. :)


41. Naked Lunch - William S. Burroughs, United States



42. Howl - Allen Ginsberg, United States



43. The Waste Land - T.S. Eliot, England



44. Gravity's Raindow - Thomas Pynchon, United States



45. Slaughterhouse Five or the Children's Crusade - Kurt Vonnegut, United States



46. Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen, England
I've never had any urge to read Jane Austen. I probably should.


47. Lord of the Flies - William Golding, England



48. Don Quixote - Miguel de Cervantes, Spain



49. Collected Poems - Robert Frost, United States
Of course, I've read some of his stuff, but I really should read the rest. Is it a bad thing that sometimes I get Robert Frost and Robert Burns' poems mixed up? *blush*


50. Barney's Version - Mordecai Richler, Canada