Friday, March 20, 2009

Easton Press: The 100 Greatest Books Ever Written

In search of a better list than that included in my BBC Meme, I went looking to see if Easton Press was still publishing its beautiful series of The 100 Greatest Books Ever Written. I was receiving these gorgeous volumes once a month before I was married and then stopped them coming to keep the bills at a minimum. I have 20 of them. Once I have a real writing contract, I will reward myself by completing the set!

If you like this list, copy the list onto your blog or facebook page, indicating the books you have read with an (X). Your total score is equal to the number of books you have read on the list.

Easton Press: The 100 Greatest Books Ever Written

1. Twenty Thousand Leagues Under The Sea by Jules Verne
2. The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne (X)
3. Dr. Jekyll And Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson
4. Walden by Henry David Thoreau
5. Gulliver's Travels by Johnathan Swift (X)
6. Moby Dick, or The Whale by Herman Melville (X)
7. A Farewell To Arms by Ernest Hemingway
8. The Red Badge of Courage by Stephen Crane
9. The Jungle Books by Rudyard Kipling (X)
10. The Odyssey by Homer (X)
11. The Pilgrim's Progress by John Bunyan (X)
12. A Portrait Of The Artist As A Young Man by James Joyce (X)
13. Paradise Lost by John Milton (X)
14. Tales From The Arabian Nights by Richard Burton (X)
15. Great Expectations by Charles Dickens (X)
16. Candide by Voltaire
17. Oedipus The King by Sophocles (X)
18. The Hunchback Of Notre Dame [Notre-Dame De Paris] by Victor Hugo
19. The Last Of The Mohicans by James Fenimore Cooper
20. The Sea Wolf by Jack London
21. Cyrano De Bergerac by Edmund Rostand
22. The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer (X)
23. Collected Poems by Robert Browning
24. The Essays Of Ralph Waldo Emerson by Ralph Waldo Emerson
25. The Portrait Of A Lady by Henry James
26. Uncle Tom's Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe (X)
27. Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson (X)
28. Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (X)
29. Collected Poems by John Keats
30. On The Origin Of Species by Charles Darwin
31. Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
32. Collected Poems by Robert Frost
33. The Legend of Sleepy Hollow and Other Stories by Washington Irving
34. Animal Farm by George Orwell (X)
35. Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë (X)
36. She Stoops To Conquer by Oliver Goldsmith
37. Of Mice And Men by John Steinbeck
38. Pride And Prejudice by Jane Austen (X)
39. The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky (X)
40. Les Misérables by Victor Hugo (X)
41. The Iliad by Homer (X)
42. Lady Chatterly's Lover by D.H. Lawrence
43. The Count Of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas
44. Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
45. Aesop's Fables by Aesop (X)
46. Lord Jim by Joseph Conrad
47. The Autobiography Of Benjamin Franklin by Benjamin Franklin (X)
48. The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas
49. Politics And The Poetics by Aristotle
50. The Aeneid by Virgil
51. Madam Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
52. The Prince by Niccolo Machiavelli
53. Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë (X)
54. Hamlet by William Shakespeare (X)
55. Pygmalion And Candida by George Bernard Shaw
56. Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe (X)
57. Romeo And Juliet by William Shakespeare (X)
58. The Cherry Orchard And The Three Sisters by Anton Chekhov
59. The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri (X)
60. The Analects of Confucius by Confucius
61. A Midsummer Night's Dream by William Shakespeare (X)
62. Collected Poems by William Butler Yeats
63. The Picture Of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde
64. Vanity Fair by William Makepeace Thackeray (X)
65. The Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio
66. Beowulf
67. Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy (X)
68. The Necklace And Other Tales by Guy de Maupassant
69. The Time Machine by H.G. Wells (X)
70. Fathers And Sons by Ivan Turgenev
71. Heart Of Darkness by Joseph Conrad (X)
72. War And Peace by Leo Tolstoy (X)
73. The History of Early Rome by Livy
74. Little Women by Louisa May Alcott (X)
75. The Talisman by Sir Walter Scott
76. Tess Of The D'Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy (X)
77. Alice's Adventure In Wonderland by Lewis Carroll (X)
78. Dracula by Bram Stoker
79. The Rubáiyát Of Omar Khayyám by Omar Khayyám
80. The Red And The Black by Stendhal
81. A Tale Of Two Cities by Charles Dickens (X)
82. The Republic by Plato (X)
83. Collected Poems by Emily Dickinson
84. Faust by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
85. Tom Jones by Henry Fielding
86. The Federalist Papers by Alexander Hamilton, James Madison and John Jay (X)
87. Silas Marner by George Eliot
88. The Rights of Man by Thomas Paine
89. Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman
90. Billy Budd by Herman Melville
91. The Confessions by St. Augustine
92. Tales of Mystery And Imagination by Edgar Allan Poe
93. Ivanhoe by Sir Walter Scott
94. The Way of All Flesh by Samuel Butler
95. The Sound And The Fury by William Faulkner
96. Crime And Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky (X)
97. Grimm's Fairy Tales by Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm (X)
98. Adventures Of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain (X)
99. Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
100. David Copperfield by Charles Dickens (X)

(My score = 44)

3 comments:

Loren said...

I got 45 this time. The poetry collections helped my score...

Gilion at Rose City Reader said...

I adopted this list as well -- one of many I keep track of on my blog.

As of today when I finished Crime and Punishment, I have read 49 of these. Unlike L.C., above, I lose points because of all the poetry books on this one.

Michael said...

I have been looking for the Easton Press 100 Greatest list. Here are a number of other Easton Press and Franklin Library book lists