The list by Harold Bloom that starts off this node is perhaps the most pretentious and self-absorbed list of its kind that I've ever seen. While most of the books in it are good, to call it a list of books you should have read by now and include six titles by John Ashbery smacks of a world of self-absorbed cultural irrelevance. These aren't 278 books you should have read by now, these are 278 books that a pretentious literary twat should have read by now.
Books you should have read by now should be engrossing, but at the same time have some degree of cultural relevance. Books you should have read by now shouldn't involve seven titles by the same tired author, but should include a huge amount of diversity, both topical and authorwise.
I could make a much better list... and in fact, I have.
278 Books You Should Have Read By Now
the 18thCandidate version
If you think a book should be on this list... That's wonderful and all. I'm sure you've got a wonderfully written book there, one of great prose and of wide interest. The problem is... this is my list, not yours.
If you think a book shouldn't be on this list... Too bad. The point of this list is to cross-cut as much of English letters as can be done in a list of this size. Some are fiction, some are non-fiction; some are genre-based, some are not; some are highbrow, some are decidedly lowbrow; some are expected, some are quite surprising. Read them all if you want to be a well rounded human being.
If you'd like to read some of these, but don't know where to start... Pick one completely at random. If that scares you, read some of the linked writeups for the books. If you still can't make up your mind, ask me by listing some of your favorites and I'll see what I can come up with.
And now, the list... (with some commentary below)
- King James Bible
- Quran
- Abbey, Edward - Desert Solitaire
- Abbott, Edwin - Flatland
- Achebe, Chinua - Things Fall Apart
- Adams, Douglas - The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
- Adams, Henry - The Education of Henry Adams
- Adams, Richard - Watership Down
- Aesop - Aesop's Fables
- Agee, James - Let Us Now Praise Famous Men
- Alcott, Louisa May - Little Women
- Aligheri, Dante - The Divine Comedy
- Amis, Kingsley - Lucky Jim
- Anderson, Sherwood - Winesburg, Ohio
- Asimov, Isaac - Gold
- Atwood, Margaret - The Handmaid's Tale
- Austen, Jane - Emma
- Baldwin, James - Giovanni's Room
- Barth, John - Lost in the Funhouse
- Baum, L. Frank - The Wonderful Wizard of Oz
- Beckett, Samuel - Waiting for Godot
- Bellow, Saul - Herzog
- Berger, Thomas - Little Big Man
- Bester, Alfred - The Stars My Destination
- Bissinger, H.G. - Friday Night Lights
- Borges, Jorge Luis - Ficciones
- Boyle, T. Coraghessan - The Tortilla Curtain
- Bradbury, Ray - Fahrenheit 451
- Bradley, Marion Zimmer - The Mists of Avalon
- Bronte, Charlotte - Jane Eyre
- Bronte, Emily - Wuthering Heights
- Brown, Dee - Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee
- Buck, Pearl S. - The Good Earth
- Bukowski, Charles - Post Office
- Burgess, Anthony - A Clockwork Orange
- Burroughs, William S. - Naked Lunch
- Calvino, Italo - If on a Winter's Night a Traveler
- Camus, Albert - The Stranger
- Capote, Truman - In Cold Blood
- Card, Orson Scott - Ender's Game
- Carroll, Jim - The Basketball Diaries
- Carroll, Lewis - Alice's Adventures in Wonderland
- Carroll, Peter - Liber Null
- Carson, Rachel - Silent Spring
- Cather, Willa - My Antonia
- Cervantes, Miguel de - Don Quixote
- Chabon, Michael - The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay
- Chandler, Raymond - The Long Goodbye
- Cheever, John - The Stories of John Cheever
- Chopin, Kate - The Awakening
- Clarke, Arthur C. - Childhood's End
- Confucius - The Analects
- Conrad, Joseph - Heart of Darkness
- Pat Conroy - The Prince of Tides
- Cooper, James Fenimore - The Last of the Mohicans
- Coupland, Douglas - Microserfs
- Cunningham, Michael - The Hours
- Dahl, Roald - Danny the Champion of the World
- Danielewski, Mark - House of Leaves
- Davies, Robertson - The Deptford Trilogy
- Dawkins, Richard - The Blind Watchmaker
- Delany, Samuel - Dhalgren
- De Beauvoir, Simone - The Second Sex
- DeLillo, Dom - Underworld
- Dick, Philip K. - The Man in the High Castle
- Dickens, Charles - David Copperfield
- Dickey, James - Deliverance
- Dickinson, Emily - The Complete Poems
- Dinesen, Isak - Out of Africa
- Doctorow, E.L. - World's Fair
- Dostoyevsky, Fyodor - The Brothers Karamazov
- Dreiser, Theodore - An American Tragedy
- DuBois, W.E.B. - The Souls of Black Folk
- Dumas, Alexandre - The Count of Monte Cristo
- du Maurier, Daphne - Rebecca
- Eco, Umberto - Foucault's Pendulum
- Eggers, Dave - A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
- Eliot, George - Silas Marner
- Eliot, T.S. - The Waste Land
- Ellis, Bret Easton - American Psycho
- Ellison, Harlan - The Essential Ellison
- Ellison, Ralph - Invisible Man
- Ellroy, James - L.A. Confidential
- Euclid - The Elements
- Eugenides, Jeffrey - The Virgin Suicides
- Faulkner, William - The Sound and the Fury
- Fielding, Henry - Tom Jones
- Fitzgerald, F. Scott - The Great Gatsby
- Flaubert, Gustave - Madame Bovary
- Fo, Dario - Accidental Death of an Anarchist
- Ford, Richard - The Sportswriter
- Forster, E.M. - A Room With A View
- Fowles, John - The Magus
- Gaarder, Jostein - Sophie's World
- Gabaldon, Diana - Outlander
- Gaiman, Neil - American Gods
- Garcia Marquez, Gabriel - One Hundred Years of Solitude
- Gibran, Kahlil - The Prophet
- Gibson, William - Count Zero
- Ginsberg, Allen - Howl
- Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von - Faust
- Golding, William - Lord of the Flies
- Grahame, Kenneth - The Wind in the Willows
- Grass, Günter - The Tin Drum
- Greene, Graham - The Power and the Glory
- Grimm, Wilhelm and Jacob - The Complete Grimm's Fairy Tales
- Haggard, H. Rider - She
- Haley, Alex - Roots
- Hardy, Thomas - Tess of the d'Urbervilles
- Hamilton, Edith - Mythology
- Hammett, Dashiell - The Maltese Falcon
- Hansberry, Lorraine - A Raisin in the Sun
- Harris, Mark - Bang the Drum Slowly
- Hawking, Stephen - A Brief History of Time
- Hawthorne, Nathaniel - The Scarlet Letter
- Heinlein, Robert - The Moon is a Harsh Mistress
- Heller, Joseph - Catch 22
- Hemingway, Ernest - A Farewell To Arms
- Henry, O. - 41 Stories
- Herbert, Frank - Dune
- Hesse, Herman - Siddharta
- Hofstadter, Douglas - Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid
- Homer - The Odyssey
- Hornby, Nick - High Fidelity
- Hughes, Langston - The Collected Poems
- Hugo, Victor - Les Miserables
- Hurston, Zora Neale - Their Eyes Were Watching God
- Huxley, Aldous - Brave New World
- Ibsen, Henrik - The Wild Duck
- Irving, John - A Prayer For Owen Meany
- Jackson, Shirley - The Lottery and Other Stories
- James, William - The Varieties of Religious Experience
- Jin, Ha - War Trash
- Jones, Edward P. - The Known World
- Jones, James - From Here to Eternity
- Joyce, James - Ulysses
- Kafka, Franz - The Metamorphosis
- Keats, John - The Complete Poems
- Kerouac, Jack - On the Road
- Kesey, Ken - One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest
- Keyes, Daniel - Flowers for Algernon
- King, Stephen - It
- Kingsolver, Barbara - The Poisonwood Bible
- Kinsella, W.P. - Shoeless Joe
- Kipling, Rudyard - Kim
- Knowles, John - A Separate Peace
- Koestler, Arthur - Darkness at Noon
- Kohn, Alfie - No Contest
- Kristol, Irving - Neoconservatism
- Kundera, Milan - The Unbearable Lightness of Being
- Lahiri, Jhumpa - Interpreter of Maladies
- Larson, Erik - The Devil in the White City
- Larson, Gary - The Complete Far Side
- Lawrence, D.H. - Sons and Lovers
- Lee, Harper - To Kill A Mockingbird
- LeGuin, Ursula K. - The Left Hand of Darkness
- Lem, Stanislaw - Memoirs Found in a Bathtub
- Leonard, Elmore - Swag
- Leopold, Aldo - A Sand County Almanac
- Levy, Steven - Hackers
- Lewis, C.S. - Mere Christianity
- Lewis, Meriwether and Clark, William - The Journals of Lewis and Clark
- Lewis, Michael - Moneyball
- Lewis, Sinclair - It Can't Happen Here
- London, Jack - The Call of the Wild
- Lowry, Lois - The Giver
- Mailer, Norman - The Executioner's Song
- Marlowe, Christopher - Doctor Faustus
- Martin, George R.R. - A Game of Thrones
- Marx, Karl - The Communist Manifesto
- Masters, Edgar Lee - Spoon River Anthology
- McCarthy, Cormac - The Border Trilogy
- McCourt, Frank - Angela's Ashes
- McMurtry, Larry - Lonesome Dove
- Mellick, Carlton III - Razor Wire Pubic Hair
- Miller, Arthur - Death of a Salesman
- Miller, Henry - Tropic of Cancer
- Miller Jr., Walter M. - A Canticle for Leibowitz
- Milne, A.A. - Winnie the Pooh
- Milton, John - Paradise Lost
- Moore, Alan - The Watchmen
- More, Thomas - Utopia
- Morris, Edmund - Dutch
- Morrison, Toni - Beloved
- Murakami, Haruki - The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle
- Nabokov, Vladimir - Lolita
- Nietzsche, Friedrich - The Portable Nietzsche
- Oates, Joyce Carol - We Were The Mulvaneys
- O'Nan, Stewart - A Prayer for the Dying
- Orczy, Baroness Emmuska - The Scarlet Pimpernel
- Orwell, George - 1984
- Palahniuk, Chuck - Fight Club
- Perez, Richard - The Loser's Club
- Pirsig, Robert - Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
- Plath, Sylvia - The Bell Jar
- Plato - The Republic
- Poe, Edgar Allan - Collected Tales and Poems
- Pound, Ezra - Selected Poems
- Pullman, Philip - Northern Lights
- Pynchon, Thomas - The Crying of Lot 49
- Quinn, Daniel - Ishmael
- Rand, Ayn - The Fountainhead
- Remarque, Erich Maria - All Quiet on the Western Front
- Reynolds, Sheri - The Rapture of Canaan
- Rhys, Jean - Wide Sargasso Sea
- Robbins, Tom - Still Life With Woodpecker
- Roberts, J.M. - The New History of the World
- Robinson, Kim Stanley - The Years of Rice and Salt
- Robinson, Marilynne - Housekeeping
- Roth, Philip - Portnoy's Complaint
- Rowling, J.K. - Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban
- Rushdie, Salman - The Satanic Verses
- Russo, Richard - Empire Falls
- Sachar, Louis - Holes
- Salinger, J.D. - The Catcher in the Rye
- Schlosser, Eric - Fast Food Nation
- Scott, Walter - Ivanhoe
- Sedaris, David - Me Talk Pretty One Day
- Shakespeare, William - Hamlet
- Shakur, Tupac - The Rose That Grew From Concrete
- Shaw, Bernard - Pygmalion
- Shelley, Mary - Frankenstein
- Shirer, William - The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich
- Shute, Nevil - On the Beach
- Simmons, Dan - Hyperion
- Sinclair, Upton - The Jungle
- Spark, Muriel - The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie
- Spiegelman, Art - Maus
- Steinbeck, John - The Grapes of Wrath
- Stephenson, Neal - Quicksilver
- Stevenson, Robert Louis - Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
- Stoker, Bram - Dracula
- Stowe, Harriet Beecher - Uncle Tom's Cabin
- Styron, William - Sophie's Choice
- Sundman, John F.X. - Acts of the Apostles
- Svevo, Italo - Confessions of Zeno
- Swift, Jonathan - Gulliver's Travels
- Takami, Koushun - Battle Royale
- Tan, Amy - The Joy Luck Club
- Tartt, Donna - The Secret History
- Thomas, Dylan - The Collected Poems
- Thompson, Craig - Blankets
- Thompson, Hunter S. - Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail '72
- Thoreau, Henry David - Walden
- Tocqueville, Alexis de - Democracy in America
- Tolkien, J.R.R. - The Lord of the Rings
- Tolstoy, Leo - Anna Karenina
- Toole, John Kennedy - A Confederacy of Dunces
- Trumbo, Dalton - Johnny Got His Gun
- Twain, Mark - The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
- Ulrich, Laurel Thatcher - A Midwife's Tale
- Updike, John - Rabbit, Run
- Vergil - The Aeneid
- Vinge, Vernor - A Deepness in the Sky
- Voltaire - Candide
- Vonnegut, Kurt - Slaughterhouse Five
- Walker, Alice - The Color Purple
- Wallace, David Foster - Infinite Jest
- Warren, Robert Penn - All The King's Men
- Watterson, Bill - The Complete Calvin and Hobbes
- Waugh, Evelyn - Brideshead Revisited
- Webb, Mary - Precious Bane
- Wells, H.G. - The War of the Worlds
- Welsh, Irvine - Trainspotting
- Wharton, Edith - The Age of Innocence
- White, E.B. - Charlotte's Web
- White, T.H. - The Once and Future King
- Whitman, Walt - Leaves of Grass
- Wilde, Oscar - The Picture of Dorian Gray
- Wilder, Thornton - The Bridge of San Luis Rey
- Williams, Tennessee - A Streetcar Named Desire
- Wolff, Tobias - This Boy's Life
- Wolfe, Tom - The Right Stuff
- Woolf, Virginia - To the Lighthouse
- Wordsworth, William - The Major Works
- Wright, Richard - Native Son
- Yeats, William Butler - The Collected Works, Volume I
- Zinn, Howard - A People's History of the United States
Some Notes: This list was challenging to create. The goal was to create a culturally relevant and yet still challenging list of literary works that can speak to a modern audience without boring them. At the same time, I wanted desperately to avoid repeating the same voices and the same types of works, both within this list and also with respect to the lists that you often see of this kind. To me, the Harold Bloom list was a particularly terrible example of such a list, as it was caught up in literary snobbery to the point that the list became largely inaccessible.
I simply began by listing every book that had left an indelible mark on my psyche. After that, I sent this list to a wide number of friends and acquaintances, asking them to add books to the list that made an impact, while also marking any books that I had listed that made them feel that way. Thankfully, I have friends who are very outspoken and quite enjoy making such lists. Eventually, the list became long enough that I eliminated any books that did not have multiple mentions, leaving me still with a rather large catalogue of works to look at.
At one point, this book had more than four hundred works on it, and paring it down to the 278 that you see above was often tricky, particularly when deciding between multiple works by the same author. A few in particular were difficult: Douglas Coupland is a great voice, but which of his works speak best today: Generation X? Microserfs? How about Girlfriend in a Coma? Try doing the same thing with Tom Wolfe or Sinclair Lewis.
Everyone I have shown this list to has reacted with some sort of outrage, either due to a selection listed here that they deem ridiculous or a particular written work that they felt really deserved inclusion. That's a wonderful thing; that means I did this list right. If several people agreed completely with the list, I'd say that this list was a complete failure. The point of literature is to challenge the reader, ideally without overwhelming the reader, and also establish a particular point of view.
As for the idea that this list will grow out of date, I agree, for the most part. It will need a bit of maintenance every year or two, as the culture shifts and moves and grows. This is particularly true of the more modern pieces on the list, which describe aspects of the modern life that are constantly in flux. Fast Food Nation is a profound work, but how relevant will it be in twenty years? It's hard to say.
Nevertheless, it would be safe to say that tackling the books on this list would be a good way to make yourself a well-rounded reader, exposed to many different ideas, philosophies, and styles.
Now get to your local library and get cracking.