1

My suggestions:

Pasternak, Boris - Doctor Zhivago. Essential.
Swift, Jonathan - Gulliver's Travels
Melville, Herman - Moby Dick. Going to desert without good pacific tale?
de Cervantes, Miguel - Don Quixote. (Erich Auerbach's Mimesis is good companion with it. You'll learn lot more about Don Quixote and other classics from it.)
London, Jack - The Call of the Wild

One could always add more to that list. For example, with Joseph Conrad you cannot go wrong (Youth and other stories, Nostromo).

-Sasa

2

Hey Sasa,

Funny you should mention Mimesis. I bought it after reading an article about it in Slate.com but never got around to reading it. I've also been intending to read Don Quixote for some time so I think I'll toss those two my seabag.

I also started Gulliver's Travels last night. Like Robinson Crusoe, I had mistakenly assumed it was "childrens" book. So far its been rather good. (I particularly like the part about how the Lilliputians believe Gulliver's pocket watch is a God since he consults it before taking any action. That bit of satire is even more applicable in our clock-obsessed culture.)

Thanks for the suggestions.

3

I'd highly recommend Death Comes for the Archbishop. I've been surprised to see that no one who has blogged this list has read it.

4

Try Cannery Row by Steinbeck. Great book and I think better than the Grapes. Great blog by the way.

5

I've read a lot of the books on your list that you've read too. Some of the others I loved:

Death Comes for the Archbishop - beautiful recounting of a noble life; have recommended it often

Crime & Punishment - works out Christian themes

Moby Dick - couldn't read enough about whales and whaling after this and was gripped by the exploration of good and evil

I also agree about Conrad's tales.

6

You have a good list there, Joe. You might add McTeague, by Frank Norris, and Ivanhoe, by Sir Walter Scott. Also, if you can find a compilation of short stories by Saki (Hector Hugh Munro), you will ensure many blissful latrine experiences.

A great nonfiction selection is Hannibal, by Ernle Bradford. Not at all dry, trust me! The great Carthaginian general is only remembered by most people for crossing the Alps with war elephants. What a pity.

7

Homer's well and good, but I personally prefer some of the Archaic and Classical writers, like Aristophanes or Herodetus. Plato's dialogues are wonderful, especially "The Symposium", which is absolutely beautiful... ::sighs happily::

Why isn't "Rosencrantz and Gildenstern are Dead" on that list?

As far as Swift's concerned, I like some of his short articles better that "Gulliver's Travels". "A Modest Proposal" is great, as is "An Argument Against the Abolishment of Christianity".

Dostoyevsky's "Notes from the Underground" is great, if you like "Crime and Punishment".

8

Short list of my favorites:

"Armagaddon", by Leon Uris ("Exodus" is also terrific)

"The Gulag Archipelago", by Alexander Solzenitsyn

"We the Living" by Ayn Rand, also "Atlas Shrugged"

Anything by PJ O'Rourke, but especially "Eat the Rich" and "The Worst of Everything"

"The Bonfire of the Vanities" or "A Man in Full" by Tom Wolfe

9

Some good, and many bad in the above list.

Where are:
The Lord of the Rings, The Silmarillion by JRRT
The Narnia Chronicles by CSL
That Hideous Strength by CSL
Faery Queene by Spencer
The Battle of Maldon
Dream of the Rood, Crist and Genesis from the School of Cunewulf
Bede's history of Britain
Wolf Time and Year of the Warrior by Lars Walker
Domesday Book by Connie Willis
No Clock in the Forest by Paul Willis
The Ballad of the White Horse by GK Chesterton
Dorothy Sayers' historicals
Macauley's Lays of Ancient Rome
Kipling's poetry
GKC's poetry

And a whole lot more that I would remember if I wanted to leave this window open all day.

10

a few off-the-top-of-my-head recommendations:

A Hero of Our Time, Mikhail Lermontov
The Black Sheep, Balzac
Crime and Punishment is the Dostoevsky book non-Christians should read, but I think Christians would probably appreciate The Brothers Karamazov more.

11

Eh, I don't have time to post my reading list... I'm always behind on it, anyway... LOL... but, just for the sake of pickiness, THat Hideous Strength is part 3 of a trilogy that begins with Out of the Silent Planet, and ends with Perelandra. Also, his Great Divorce is _awesome_.

12

If I had to choose 10 of them ..

Beowulf (Seamus Heaney's new translation is very readable)
Chaucer, Geoffrey - The Canterbury Tales
Dante - Inferno
de Cervantes, Miguel - Don Quixote
Hardy, Thomas - Tess of the d'Urbervilles
Homer - The Iliad
London, Jack - The Call of the Wild
Melville, Herman - Moby Dick
Shakespeare, William - Macbeth
Twain, Mark - The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

I agree with the other posters - Lermontov Hero of our time is great.

Walter Scott - Ivanhoe is OK for entertainment but he wrote it in about 6 days so not his best. I would take his Heart of Midlothian.

How about Hilaire Belloc. Path to Rome is a travel book with a difference.

Bunyan - Pilgrim's Progress.

Currently reading 'The Bridge over the Drina' - a novel based on actual events from Balkan history.

Good Luck.

13

A good list, with certain oddities. (Only one volume of Remembrance of Things Past? - why that one? Four separate plays by Shakespeare? - I would just have thrown in "the collected works," which you can get in a volume not much larger than War and Peace. Portrait of the Artist . . . is not Joyce's greatest work, though it is probably the most readable. Bartleby is really just a short story. The Last of the Mohicans is unreadable; Mark Twain proved it. Everything by Pynchon is a "classic" - Lot 49 just gets read a lot because it's short.) You could easily assemble a different "101 Greatest" list with no duplication - possibly ten such lists.

What's interesting to me about it is that over a quarter of the titles were written after WWII - and a good number more were written in the first half of the 20th Century - meaning that over a third of what somebody thinks are the 101 best "literary classics" consists of very recent material. No doubt this is in part due to the provenance of the list - I would guess that the compiler is not a literature scholar, and tended to focus on more-accessible works rather than really obscure stuff. The entire list consists of things you would encounter in a good undergraduate literature program. Even so, this suggests that what intelligent, well-read people today are willing to regard as "the classics" is an eclectic mix of material, much of it by modern writers, including non-white and female writers. Whoever wrote this list apparently thinks that Invisible Man is a better book than Pilgrim's Progress (and who doesn't?), and that The Color Purple is better than all but 4 of Shakespeare's plays.

I think this list offers an eloquent counter to defenders of "the canon," like Harold Bloom. Whatever sputtering objections the professional curmudgeons may have, there is a wealth of good stuff from new and non-traditional perspectives, and insisting on leaving them all out until the nearly-endless list of classical authors and approved post-renaissance Europeans is exhausted is absurd. What makes the list above "classics" is the simple fact that people who like to read value them highly - that is, exactly the same thing that makes the stuff of the traditional canon "classics." The movement to broaden the canon is nothing more than the observation that the criteria of good literature didn't go into stasis when Shakespeare, or Voltaire, or Jane Austen died, but remain in effect and accessible today.

But, on to the list. I would suggest choosing types of books rather than just saying "oh, this one is good." What kind of thing are you going to want to read while you're in a difficult climate, under stress, away from home? I think I'd want something diverting and entertaining - not dreary stories of alcoholic self-annihiliation (sorry, Eugene O'Neill), dreary love affairs dying (Ford Madox Ford), heavy-handed social criticism (do read James Baldwin and Toni Morrison, but not in the desert during a war), or crank axe-grinders (Ayn Rand, C.S. Lewis, G.K. Chesterton - this means you). What options does that leave?

In the "Ripping Good Read" category:
Moby Dick
A Tale of Two Cities
Catch-22
Tom Jones
Gulliver's Travels
War and Peace

For "Interesting Historical/Social Context":
any book by any Bronte
Madame Bovary
Tess of the D'Urbervilles
Portrait of a Lady
Doctor Zhivago
The House of Mirth

For "Fascinating Stuff You Just Can't Put Down":
One Hundred Years of Solitude (also: Love in a Time of Cholera)
Crime and Punishment
The Magic Mountain
V or Gravity's Rainbow or Mason & Dixon by Thomas Pynchon (much more heft than Lot 49 - Mason & Dixon is the most readable)

As for off-list stuff:

• I second the recommendations of Conrad, as a "ripping good read"
  
• Leon Uris for ripping good historical novels (his biases are clearly in the open)
  
• one of the omnibus volumes of Wooster/Jeeves stories by P.G. Wodehouse - hilarious social satire that you can re-read with pleasure
  
• The Name of the Rose or Foucault's Pendulum, by Umberto Eco, for that artsy-fartsy historical/intellectual flair wrapped up in a good story
  
• Shogun or King Rat, by James Clavell - sweeping, gripping historical tales
  
• Rubyfruit Jungle, by Rita Mae Brown - just so you don't lose touch with your inner lesbian.

And, in a special category of "Military Fiction that Means Something" (if you're interested):

• the Aubrey/Maturin series (start with the first one, Master and Commander), by Patrick O'Brian - swashbuckling tales with high literary value, outstanding period detail, and a decent sense of history
  
• The Caine Mutiny - a good story and an interesting dissection of military duty
  
• The Naked and the Dead by Norman Mailer - considered a source text for the "modern" novel, and widely-remarked at the time for its use of "fug" as a euphemism; also an interesting look at the psychology of military leadership during a dreary, difficult hot-weather campaign
  
• Dress Gray by Lucian Truscott - one of the first of a spate of "West Point novels" by various authors, this one is regarded as one of the best - offers a very critical look at both the good and the bad of military tradition, and is reportedly a classic among serving officers
  
• The Great Santini, by Pat Conroy - more a psychological study than a military novel, it profiles a Marine officer whose rigid discipline doesn't carry over to his family relations

14

I have to say, there's even better novel about pacific war than The Naked and the Dead. It's James Jones' Thin red line. Where The Naked and the Dead aspired to be tough and hardboiled, it ended to be just tiresome and whiny.

Thin red line then, it was both emphatic mercilessly objective.

15

ummmmmm.....
Maybe the Bible?

16

Hey Daniel,

Naturally, I'll be taking my Bible with me. But it doesn't really qualify on this list because I don't consider it to be a work of "imaginative literature." I view the Bible as Truth rather than fiction.