Why I Oughtta

Milquetoast (noun): a timid man or boy considered childish or unassertive

I plan on using this word constantly. Be ready.

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If you recall, I am preparing myself to read all the books I really should have read by now. I found these two lists of good books, but I found that I wasn’t really excited about plowing through someone else’s list. Especially since I hadn’t even heard of many of the books and, thus, don’t feel illiterate for not having read them. So I’m compiling my own list of stuff I haven’t read. There’s stuff I feel like I should read again (To Kill a Mockingbird, The Scarlet Letter, Brave New World, all the Sherlock Holmes stories, etc.), but I don’t think I can do that until I’ve given the following a read.

What I ask of you, is to tell me what I am missing. What should every person have read to consider themselves culturally literate? Suggest all you want. (I haven’t included things I’ve already read, so some suggestions might already be completed)

I’m also a little worried that I’m going to enjoy compiling this list more than actually making my way through the list.

So here’s my list of stuff I haven’t read. Don’t judge me. I thought this was a safe space.

(note: the books marked with an asterisk means that I want to read something by that author, but I don’t necessarily have one specific book in mind. Let me know if you think of anything better.)

1. Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut
2. Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe
3. Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift
4. Don Quixote by Miguel De Cervantes
5. Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte
6. Moby Dick by Herman Melville
7. Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte
8. The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas
9. David Copperfield by Charles Dickens
10. A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens
11. The Dubliners by James Joyce
12. Ulysses by James Joyce (this will be last thing I read)
13. On the Road by Jack Kerouac
14. Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
15. The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde
16. Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy*
17. The Call of the Wild by Jack London
18. The Trial by Franz Kafka
19. Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf*
20. As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner
21. Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
22. Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
23. One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
24. The Brothers Karamazov by Foyodor Dostoyevsky
25. The Awakening by Kate Chopin
26. Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass by Frederick Douglass
27. Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
28. Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift
29. 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea by Jules Verne
30. The Time Machine by H.G. Wells*
31. Moby Dick by Herman Melville
32. In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust*
33. Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
34. Portrait of a Lady by Henry James
35. The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
36. East of Eden by John Steinbeck
37. The Last of the Mohicans by James Fenimore Cooper
38. Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe
39. Les Miserables by Victor Hugo
40. Candide by Voltaire
41. Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston (I’ve read this, but there’s a good chance I skipped the last third)
42. A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway*
43. A Passage to India by E.M. Forster
44. My Antonia by Willa Cather
45. Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad

You guys all know that I’m illiterate, right?

I mean, I know I was an English major and all, but that just means that I did closed readings of small passages and tried to extrapolate from there. There’s so much shit I didn’t read that I was supposed to.

Anyways, I’m going to try to make up for that by reading all the classics that I haven’t read that I really should have. I’m trying to find a 100 best novels of all time list and I’m having a little bit of trouble selecting one. Some of the publishers’ lists seem a bit lenient to their own titles, and some of them have time restrictions (only 20th century, etc.).

I do like this one, though. It’s by some professor dude. And I like this one from the Guardian as well.