The List

Having lots of free time as a teacher (Sometimes I wish there was a sarcasm font) I used a tiny portion of that time to go through that list of books and compile, in an organized fashion, all of the ones that I had NOT YET read.

You may notice that Diary of a Wimpy Kid is absent from this list.  I have not read that book, but I refuse to read it.  When my students read it, it influences their writing in a way that is the opposite of what I am trying to teach them.  They write essays and answer reading comprehension questions as if they are writing a comic.  I recognize the value in it, in getting struggling readers to read, and I know there are many people who will disagree with me, which I can respect.  However, I am still going to abstain from reading it.  So, here is the list sans Wimpy Kid.

1. 1984 by George Orwell
2. A Brief History of Time by Steven Hawking
3. A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius by Dave Eggers
4. A Long Way Gone by Ishmael Beah
5. A Wrinkle in Time by Madeline L’Engle
6. Alice Munro: Selected Stories by Alice Munro
7. Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll
8. All the President's Men by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein
9. Angela's Ashes: A Memoir by Frank McCourt
10. Are You There, God? It's me, Margaret by Judy Blume
11. Bel Canto by Ann Patchett
12. Beloved by Toni Morrison
13. Born To Run - A Hidden Tribe, Superathletes, and the Greatest Race the World Has Never Seen by Christopher McDougall
15. Breath, Eyes, Memory by Edwidge Danticat
16. Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
17. Cutting For Stone by Abraham Verghese
18. Daring Greatly: How the Courage to Be Vulnerable Transforms the Way We Live, Love, Parent, and Lead by Brene Brown
19. Dune by Frank Herbert
20. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream by Hunter S. Thompson
21. Great Expectations by Charles Dickens
22. Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies by Jared M. Diamond
23. Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri
24. Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
25. Kitchen Confidential by Anthony Bourdain
26. Life After Life by Kate Atkinson
27. Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
28. Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
29. Love Medicine by Louise Erdrich
30. Man's Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl
31. Me Talk Pretty One Day by David Sedaris
32. Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides
33. Midnight's Children by Salman Rushdie
34. Moneyball by Michael Lewis
35. Of Human Bondage by W. Somerset Maugham
36. On the Road by Jack Kerouac
37. Out of Africa by Isak Dinesen
38. Portnoy's Complaint by Philip Roth
39. Pride & Prejudice by Jane Austen
40. Silent Spring by Rachel Carson
41. Team of Rivals by Doris Kearns Goodwin
42. The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton
43. The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay by Michael Chabon
44. The Autobiography of Malcolm X by Malcolm X and Alex Haley
45. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz
46. The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger
47. The Color of Water by James McBride
48. The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen
49. The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair that Changed America by Erik Larson
50. The Fault in Our Stars by John Green
51. The Giver by Lois Lowry
52. The Golden Compass: His Dark Materials by Philip Pullman
53. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
54. The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood
55. The House At Pooh Corner by A. A. Milne
56. The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot
57. The Liars' Club: A Memoir by Mary Karr
58. The Lightning Thief (Percy Jackson and the Olympians, Book 1) by Rick Riordan
59. The Long Goodbye by Raymond Chandler
60. The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 by Lawrence Wright
61. The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat: And Other Clinical Tales by Oliver Sacks
62. The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals by Michael Pollan
63. The Phantom Tollbooth by Norton Juster
64. The Poisonwood Bible: A Novel by Barbara Kingsolver
65. The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York by Robert A. Caro
66. The Right Stuff by Tom Wolfe
67. The Road by Cormac McCarthy
68. The Secret History by Donna Tartt
69. The Stranger by Albert Camus
70. The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway
71. The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien
72. The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame
73. The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle: A Novel by Haruki Murakami
74. The World According to Garp by John Irving
75. The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion
76. Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe
77.. Valley of the Dolls by Jacqueline Susann