Mark's Classic Reading List

The Best Novels

The Spear (1955) Louis De Wohl
This Present Darkness (1989)  Frank Pereti and other worksA Walk to Remember by Nickolas Sparks (1999) FAVORITE NOVEL

A Philadelphia Catholic to King James's Court (1999)  Martin Deporres Kennedy

The Testament (1999) by John Grisham and other works

Older Dean Koontz
Books by Robert Cormier

Books I read and Liked

The Great Gatsby  F Scott Fitzgerald (1925)

Lord of the Flies William Golding (1954)
The Lord Of The Rings J. R. R. Tolkien (1954/55)
Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl Anne Frank (1959)
To Kill A Mockingbird  Harper Lee (1960)

Life of Pi by Yann Martel (2001)

TOP BOOKS TO READ OR REREAD

Brave New World Aldous Huxley (1932)

Animal Farm George Orwell (1945)
Nineteen Eighty-Four George Orwell (1949)

Catcher in the Rye J.D. Salinger (1951)

Catch-22 Joseph Heller  (1961)

 

Classic Authors Great Works

James Joyce

Chamber Music(poems, 1907)
Dubliners(short-story collection, 1914)
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916)
Exiles(play, 1918)
Ulysses (1922)

NOT IN PD
 Pomes Penyeach (poems, 1927)
 Collected Poems (poems, 1936)
 Finnegans Wake(novel, 1939)
Virginia Woolf.
 The Voyage Out (1915)
 Night and Day (1919)
 Jacob's Room (1922)
 Two Stories (1917)
 Monday or Tuesday (1921)

 F. Scott Fitzgerald

The Beautiful and Damned (1920)
This Side of Paradise (1920)
The Great Gatsby (1925)
Tender Is the Night (1934)

Collections

Flappers and Philosophers (1920)
Tales of the Jazz Age (1922)
All the Sad Young Men (1926)
Taps at Reveille (1935)
The Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald (1951)
The Pat Hobby Stories (1962)
The Fantasy and Mystery Stories of F Scott Fitzgerald (1991)
Spires and Gargoyles: Early Writings, 1909-1919 (2010)

Non fiction

The Letters of F. Scott Fitzgerald (1964)

Ernest Hemingway

The Sun Also Rises(1926)
A Farewell to Arms(1929)
To Have and Have Not(1937)
For Whom the Bell Tolls(1940)
The Old Man and the Sea(1952)

Collections
In Our Time(1925)
Men Without Women(1927)
The Snows of Kilimanjaro(1936)

William Faulkner
The Sound and the Fury (1929)
As I Lay Dying (1930)
Light in August (1932)
Absalom, Absalom! (1936)

John Steinbeck

The Red Pony (1933)
To a God Unknown (1933)
Of Mice and Men (1937)
The Grapes of Wrath (1939)
Cannery Row (1945)
The Pearl (1947)
East of Eden (1952)
The Winter of Our Discontent (1961)
Travels with Charley: In Search of America (1962)
The Acts of King Arthur and His Noble Knights (1976)

Flannery O'Connor
Novels
•Wise Blood, 1952
•The Violent Bear It Away, 1960
 
Short story collections
•A Good Man Is Hard to Find, 1955
•Everything That Rises Must Converge, 1965
•The Complete Stories, 1971 Other works
· Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose, 1969
· The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O'Connor, 1979
· The Presence of Grace: and Other Book Reviews, 1983
· Flannery O'Connor: Collected Works, 1988

Chaim Potok

The Chosen, 1967

The Promise, 1969
My Name is Asher Lev, 1972
The Gift of Asher Lev (1990)

Other Classic Authors

• E. M. Forster
• Thomas Hardy
• Hermann Hesse
• D. H. Lawrence
• Sinclair Lewis
• Mario Puzo
• Virginia Woolf

 

Classics to Read or Reread 

The Metamorphosis (1915) Franz Kafka, Stanley Corngold (Translator)
The Bridge of San Luis Rey (1927) Thornton Wilder

Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927) Willa Cather

I, Claudius (1934) Robert Graves

The Good Earth (1931) Pearl S. Buck

The Power and the Glory (1940) Graham Greene

Native Son(1940)   Richard Wright
The Human Comedy (1943) William Saroyan 
Brideshead Revisited (1945) Evelyn Waugh
Loving (1945) Henry Green
A Member of the Wedding (1946) Carson McCullers
Hiroshima (1946) John Hersey
Death Be Not Proud (1949) John Gunther

Invisible Man (1952) Ralph Ellison
The Adventures of Augie March (1953) Saul Bellow

A Death in the Family (1957) James Agee

On the Road (1957) Jack Kerouac

Things Fall Apart (1958) Chinua Achebe

 

Night (1960) Elie Wiesel

The Moviegoer (1961) Walker Percy
The Crying of Lot 49 (1965) Thomas Pynchon
The Contender (1967) Robert Lipsyte

One Hundred Years of Solitude(1967) Gabriel García Márquez, Gregory Rabassa (Translator)

I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1969) Maya Angelou

Jonathan Livingston Seagull (1970) Richard Bach

The Hiding Place (1971) Corrie Ten Boom
All Creatures Great and Small (1972) James Herriot
Ragtime (1974) E.L. Doctorow

A Confederacy of Dunces (1980) John Kennedy Toole
Midnight's Children (1980) Salman Rushdie

Saint Maybe (1991) Anne Tyler

A Man in Full (1998) Tom Wolfe

The Poisonwood Bible (1998) Barbara Kingsolver

A Thousand Splendid Suns (2007) Khaled Hosseini

Dear American Airlines (2008) Jonathan Miles

The Elegance of the Hedgehog (2008) Muriel Barbery

 

Some Contemporary Popular Novels
Brad Melzner Novels
Tom Clancy Novels
Girl with the Pearl Earring (1999) Tracy Chevalier
Bee Season  (2000) Myla Goldberg

Sue Monk Kidd (1948 - )
The Secret Life of Bees (2002)
The Mermaid Chair (2005)

Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time ( 2003) Mark Haddon

Matthew Pearl
The Dante Club (2003)
The Poe Shadow (2006)
The Last Dickens (2009)
No Rest for the Dead (2011)
The Technologists (2012)

Novellas
The Professor's Assassin (2011)

ClassicBooks Made into Classic Movies


A Passage to India (1924) E. M. Foster
All Quiet on the Western Front (1929) Erich Maria Remarque

Gone With the Wind (1936) Margaret Mitchell
Rebecca (1938) Daphne du Maurier
The Heart is a Lonely Hunter (1940) Carson McCullers Ox-bow Incident (1943), Walter Van Tilburg ClarkA Tree Grows in Brooklyn (1943) Betty SmithAll the King's Men Robert (1946) Penn Warren
Shane (1949) Jack Schaefer 

The Caine Mutiny  (1951) Herman Wouk
Light in the Forest (1953) Conrad Richter
The Miracle Worker :A Play (1957) William Gibson

A Clockwork Orange (1962) Anthony Burgess
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1962) Ken Kesey
Flowers for Algernon (1966) Daniel Keyes
Slaughterhouse-Five (1969) Kurt Vonnegut

Master and Commander (1970) Patrick O'Brian
The Day of the Jackal (1971) Frederick Forsyth
Ordinary People (1976) Guest, Judith
Roots (1976) Alex Hailey,
The World According to Garp (1978) John Irving
Sophie's Choice  (1979) William Styron

The Name of the Rose (1980) Umberto Eco

The Color Purple by (1982) Alice Walker
Schindler's List (1982) Thomas Keneally
Shoeless Joe (1982)W.P. KinesellaThe Power of One (1989) Bryce Courtenay

Atonement (2001) Ian McEwan

The Kite Runner (2003) Khaled Hosseini

A Little Mystery
Agatha Christie (1890 - 1976)
And then there were None (1939)

(Jane Gillson Langton) (1922 - )
Homer Kelly
1. The Transcendental Murder (1964)
2. Dark Nantucket Noon (1975)
3. The Minuteman Murder (1976)
4. The Memorial Hall Murder (1978)
5. Natural Enemy (1982)
6. Emily Dickinson Is Dead (1984)
7. Good and Dead (1986)
8. Murder At the Gardner (1988)
9. The Dante Game (1991)
10. God in Concord (1992)
11. Divine Inspiration (1993)
12. The Shortest Day: Murder at the Revels (1995)
13. Dead As a Dodo (1996)
14. The Face On the Wall (1998)
15. The Thief of Venice (1999)
16. Murder At Monticello (2001)
17. The Escher Twist (2002)
18. The Deserter: Murder at Gettysburg (2003)
19. Steeplechase (2005)