i’ve found cataloguing and lists wildly intriguing since childhood. one of my heroes—James somers—has a treasure of a books-read list on his website.
i thought it was a brilliant idea. so here’s mine, arranged old to new starting from high school.
To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee
2001: A Space Odyssey, Arthur C. Clarke
Brave New World, Aldous Huxley
Our Town, Thorton Wilder
Lord of the Flies, William Golding
Romeo and Juliet, William Shakespeare
Of Mice and Men, John Steinbeck
The Scarlet Letter, Nathaniel Hawthorne
A Doll’s House, Henrik Ibsen
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain
Madame Bovary, Gustave Flaubert
Hamlet, William Shakespeare
The Handmaid's Tale, Margaret Atwood
Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, J.K. Rowling
Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, J.K Rowling
The Color Purple, Alice Walker
Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, J.K Rowling
To Sir, With Love, E.R. Braithwaite
Hala, A.R. Khatoon
The Five People You Meet in Heaven, Mitch Albom
The Alchemist, Paulo Coelho
The Da Vinci Code, Dan Brown
The Kite Runner, Khaled Hosseini
Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, J.K Rowling
Circle of Friends, Maeve Binchy
The Lovely Bones, Alice Sebold
The Trendmaster’s Guide, Robyn Waters
Anatomy of a Murder, Robert Traver
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Ken Kesey
Catcher in the Rye, J.D. Salinger
Franny and Zooey, J.D. Salinger
Self Reliance, Ralph Waldo Emerson
Marching Powder, Rusty Young
Cutting for Stone, Abraham Verghese
Twilight, Stephenie Meyer
The Big Over Easy, Jasper Fforde
Swamplandia, Karen Russell
The Little Prince, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
The Help, Kathryn Stockett
Artemis Fowl, Eoin Colfer
Still Life, Louise Penny
The Lathe of Heaven, Ursula K. LeGuin
School for Love, Olivia Manning
How to Read a Book, Mortimer J. Adler
The First Muslim, Lesley Hazleton
The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald
A Giacometti Portrait, James Lord
Canadian History for Dummies, Will Ferguson (ongoing)
Symbol, Status, & Personality, S.I. Hayakawa
A Fatal Grace, Louise Penny
The Cruelest Month, Louise Penny
Dates, Nawal Nasrullah
The Hound of the Baskervilles, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
Tales of Toyland, Enid Blyton
Tuppeny, Feefo, and Jinks, Enid Blyton
Cyrano de Bergerac, Edmond Rostand
Iqbal, Zafar Anjum
A Rule Against Murder, Louise Penny
Stiff Upper Lip, Jeeves, P.G. Wodehouse
A Room with a View, E.M. Forster
Kartography, Kamila Shamsie
The Brutal Telling, Louise Penny
Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, J.K.Rowling
The Admirable Chrichton, J.M. Barrie
Out of the Desert, Ali Al-Naimi (ongoing)
The Machine Stops, E.M. Forster
Computing Machinery and Intelligence, Alan Turing
Upheaval: Turning Points for Nations in Crisis, Jared Diamond
A Gentleman in Moscow, Amor Towles
Bury Your Dead, Louise Penny
The Project Gutenberg, by Robert Sheckley
I, Robot, by Isaac Asimov
Neverwhere, Neil Gaiman
Educated: A Memoir, Tara Westover
Maneaters of Kumaon, Jim Corbett
Dracula, Bram Stoker
Norse Mythology, Neil Gaiman
Small Things Like These, Claire Keegan
A Trick of the Light, Louise Penny
The Beautiful Mystery, Louise Penny
The Richest Man in Babylon, George S Clason
An Inspector Calls, J.B. Priestley
Fantasia Mathematica, Clifton Fadiman
Eat That Frog, Brian Tracy
How the Light Gets In, Louise Penny
Spirits Abroad, Zen Cho
The Portland Book of Dates, Ashod Simonian and Eden Dawn
The Importance of Being Earnest, Oscar Wilde
Babur: Starry nights, Pirimquil Qodirov
The Long Way Home, Louise Penny
THE following aren’t BOOKS but it’s 2020 and wonderful things exist on the digital platform too:
Slate Magazine Series on Wayfinding—
The Secret Language of Signs
Lost in Penn Station
Legible London
Do you Draw Good Maps
The Big Red Word vs. the Little Green Man
A World Without Signs
Other Articles—
Seven Wonders of the Modern World
Why the British Tell Better Children’s Stories
Youtube talks—
Do Schools Kill Creativity