I Want to Die a Very Well-Read Person

That’s right. I want to die a very well-read person. [I hope that doesn't sound too morbid.]

Now ever since the end of summer I’ve been wanting to start my own life list and just like most bloggers that I’ve come across, I’m modeling it based on Maggie’s Mighty Life List.

I want this list to “make” me a better person. And I say “make” because I know that writing a list with great, exciting things won’t automatically make me great and exciting. And while I want to write an awesome list and make other people awe at all the cool things that I’m going to “accomplish” before I kick the bucket I still want to remain true to myself and put things on there that I actually want to accomplish.

I don’t want anything on that list that I don’t agree with and I certainly don’t want to write things on that list just for the purpose of looking awesome. If there’s ever a time to be honest, shouldn’t it be with yourself?

So I’m making this list, bit by bit and today I’m starting with the easiest part, books. Books are easy. At least they are with a great site like thegreatestbooks.org, a site that compiles all the top book lists on the internet. ;)

Here are 25 fiction and 25 non-fiction books from my list of 200.

Fiction:

1. Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes

2. Ulysses by James Joyce

3. Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov

4. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain

5. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald

6. 1984 by George Orwell

7. War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy

8. In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust

9. Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy

10. Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert

11. The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoyevsky

12. Middlemarch by George Eliot

13. One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

14. The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner

15. Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison

16. The Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger

17. To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf

18. On the Road by Jack Kerouac

19. Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift

20. The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck

21. Moby Dick by Herman Melville

22. Beloved by Toni Morrison

23. The Portrait of a Lady by Henry James

24. The Iliad by Homer

25. Absalom, Absalom! by William Faulkner

….. the rest

Non-Fiction

1. The Education of Henry Adams by Henry Adams

2. The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money by John Maynard

3. The Interpretation of Dreams by Sigmund Freud

4. The Second World War by Winston Churchill (6 volumes)

5. The Double Helix: A Personal Account of the Discovery of the Structure of DNA by James D. Watson

6. Selected Essays of T. S. Eliot by T. S. Eliot

7. Confessions by St. Augustine

8. The Histories of Herodotus by Herodotus

9. The Prince by Niccolo Machiavelli

10. Silent Spring by Rachel Carson

11. The Civil War by Shelby Foote (3 volumes)

12. The Republic by Plato

13. Homage to Catalonia by George Orwell

14. The History of the Peloponnesian War by Thucydides

15. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas Kuhn

16. Essays by Michel de Montaigne

17. Relativity by Albert Einstein

18. On the Origin of Species by Charles Darwin

19. The Elements of Style by William Strunk, Jr and E. B. White

20. The Abolition of Man by C. S. Lewis

21. The Liberal Imagination by Lionel Trilling

22. The Right Stuff by Tom Wolfe

23. The Open Society by Karl Popper ( 2 Volumes)

24. Black Lamb and Grey Falcon by Dame Rebecca West

25. Black Boy by Richard Wright

…. the rest

I’ve got a lot of reading ahead of me, don’t I? Now to make awesome bookmarks and an adorable book tote!

How about you? Do you have a reading list or do you read whatever you want? What books on the list have you already read? Is this list going to be the cause of my death? Let me know in the comments!