Eli Bendersky's website Some time ago I decided that if I read a lot of books (fiction), these should at least be good ones. So, I found some page listing the 100 best books of the 19-20th centuries (according to polls from various newspapers). To my astonishment, I've only read a handful from that list. Here are the books I read that are one the list, before and after I discovered the list:
- Orwell, George. Nineteen Eighty-Four (before)
- Nabokov, Vladimir. Lolita (after)
- Marquez, Gabriel Garcia. One Hundred Years of Solitude (before)
- Huxley, Aldous. Brave New World (after)
- Twain, Mark. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (before)
- Wharton, Edith. The Age of Innocence (after)
- Heller, Joseph. Catch-22 (before)
- Mitchell, Margaret. Gone With The Wind (before)
- Orwell, George. Animal Farm (before)
- Tolkien, J.R.R.. The Lord of the Rings (before)
- Tolstoy, Leo. War and Peace (after)
- Carroll, Lewis. Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (after)
- Burgess, Anthony. A Clockwork Orange (before)
- Melville, Herman. Moby Dick (after - in progress)
So, as you see from the multitude of afters, I'm making a good progress in reading quality books. And I must say - these are quality books indeed, I liked 90% of them...
Moby Dick, as I mentioned, is in progress... but considering the length of the book and the fact that I read 3-4 books in parallel, it may take some time.