My booklist page, by the way, is right here. But it's not updated yet.

There are a lot of books that are on these lists that I have read, but have not read recently or written up for the booklist. This includes books I have read for school (like Lord of the Flies), books I have read multiple times (like Pride and Prejudice), or books I loved but can't remember that well (Catch-22). I would like to re-read many of these books and write about them, but I would also somehow like to be able to cross off other books without ever reading them again. But that might not be in keeping with the spirit of the thing.

Let's take the Modern Library list, which was my first booklist and one of the two "main" lists I am working off of. (If you follow this link, keep in mind there was also a "reader's list" and it was hijacked by Scientologists. It needs to stop being perpetuated as a real list.)

I have read, specifically for this project, twenty-five books on this list. (Ulysses, The Great Gatsby, Sons and Lovers, The Way of All Flesh, To The Lighthouse The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, Slaughterhouse-Five, A Passage to India, The Wings of the Dove, As I Lay Dying, Howard's End, Go Tell It on the Mountain, Women in Love, Pale Fire, The Maltese Falcon, The Age of Innocence, Death Comes for the Archbishop, The Catcher in the Rye, The House of Mirth, A Room with a View, Brideshead Revisited, Midnight's Children, Wide Sargasso Sea, and Sophie's Choice.)

I enjoyed most of these books. The ones I didn't like were The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, A Passage to India, Women in Love, Midnight's Children, and Wide Sargasso Sea. Ones I liked were Ulysses, As I Lay Dying, Howard's End and Sophie's Choice. The rest I loved.

I just realized Portrait of a Lady is not on the Modern Library list. That's as big of an omission as To Kill a Mockingbird, in my opinion!

Before this project started, I read eight more of the books on this list. (A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Brave New World, Catch-22, 1984, Lord of the Flies, A Clockwork Orange, Of Human Bondage, and The Call of the Wild.) That leaves sixty-seven books to go! Which is I guess is intimidating, but all I have to say about that is: I read Ulysses. There is nothing on this list that has the power to intimidate me after that.

The second of my "main" lists is the Radcliffe list, which corrects a lot of the insane omissions of the Modern Library list. There is a lot of overlap as well. (This is the list that I'd vote you start with, if you wanted to do a similar project. You have to have Lolita on your booklist, for one thing. I won't allow anything else.)

I have read, for this project, thirty-two books on this list. (The Great Gatsby, Catcher in the Rye, To Kill a Mockingbird, The Color Purple, Ulysses, Lolita, As I Lay Dying, Song of Solomon, Slaughterhouse-Five, To the Lighthouse, Portrait of a Lady, Go Tell It on the Mountain, A Room with a View, Lord of the Rings, The Age of Innocence, Mrs. Dalloway, The Awakening, My Antonia, Howard's End, Franny and Zooey, Sophie's Choice, A Passage to India, Sons and Lovers, Cat's Cradle, The Wings of the Dove, Brideshead Revisited, Women in Love, The Maltese Falcon, Wide Sargasso Sea, O Pioneers!, Death Comes from the Archbishop, and Midnight's Children.) Other than the exceptions already noted above and anything else by D.H. Lawrence that might have snuck in here, I loved all of these books. This is the list, man. This is the one.

In addition, I read twenty books on this list before beginning this project. (Hey, I am more than halfway done.) Those books are The Lord of the Flies*, 1984, Of Mice and Men*, Charlotte's Web, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Catch-22, Brave New World, Winnie-the-Pooh, Their Eyes Were Watching God, Gone With the Wind, The Old Man and the Sea*, the Call of the Wild*, The World According to Garp, The Fountainhead, The Jungle*, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, A Clockwork Orange, Things Fall Apart, A Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, and White Noise.

* = I do not want to read this book again.

Like I said, only forty-eight books to go on this list. Woo!

Also my initial project included the Feminista list of books by women, but that book has contained more than its fair share of duds. I would not consider many of them to be great literature. I want to find a better list of books by women, maybe ones that don't include fluff like Fried Green Tomatoes or what have you. I can go read The Talented Mr. Ripley on my own without suffering through the entirety of this list.

Then there's the 100 Best Gay Novels, from the Advocate. I like this one because the books aren't always overtly gay, but they touch on themes of exclusion and alienation, or perhaps were written by gay authors. (I just realized that this is the first of the lists that contains Moby-Dick! How is that possible?) I've only read ten of these so far, though.

There's another list out of the UK called The Books of the Century that I like, possibly because it covers books like The Remains of the Day and The Bell Jar and nonfiction like A Brief History of Time (which everyone should read) and The Diary of Anne Frank. Oh, and it has Jurassic Park on it, and I think Michael Crichton is very underrated. Also Stephen King is on here. A non-snobby list.

Oh, and this is the only list containing The Unbearable Lightness of Being which is a life-changing book and everyone should read it.

There are also a bunch of lists that go outside the 20th century to cover the best books of all time. These lists are more daunting because they include things like the Bible and the Canterbury Tales! But these are also the lists where you can find George Eliot and Dostoyevsky and Homer and Lewis Carroll. Here is one of them.

Just for fun, I went through to see if I could pick my own personal favorite (fiction) books at this point. I would have to include A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, which in a recent discussion was one of our candidates for "the Great American Novel" but nevertheless is not on any of these other lists. Since I am not smoking crack or brain damaged, I will be including it on mine.

Any disagreements? Agreements? Exclamations? Thoughts? My new contact address is piegirl over at gmail. I tried, even, to put them in order. Then about halfway through I gave up. But here is my attempt.

1. The Portrait of a Lady
2. Lolita
3. A Tree Grows in Brooklyn
4. The Age of Innocence
5. The Wings of the Dove
6. Middlemarch
7. Pride & Prejudice
8. Franny and Zooey
9. Alice in Wonderland
10. A Midsummer Night's Dream
11. To Kill a Mockingbird
12. The Odyssey
13. Cat's Cradle
14. Little Women
15. The Great Gatsby
16. A Clockwork Orange
17. Pale Fire
18. Catch-22
19. Mrs. Dalloway
20. Slaughterhouse-Five
21. To The Lighthouse
22. The Color Purple
23. The Lord of the Rings
24. The Remains of the Day
25. White Noise

In looking back, I see that I like some of these books a lot more than I did right after I first read them, (for instance, The Remains of the Day which I think I initially underrated) and there are some others that I felt tepid about rather quickly. And this was hard. I cut a lot of great books out. But this list is full of books that I genuinely love and that have stuck with me.

I guess from this list you would guess my favorite authors are Virginia Woolf, Henry James, Vladimir Nabakov, and Kurt Vonnegut. You'd be right!