heh, now we'll add to the list anything that was required reading for junior or senior year high school. Here's what I read in high school or should have read in high school that I would still recommend. I read Tess, but it's not on my list. More-or-less chronologically:
1. The Sun Also Rises, Hemingway: not because it was the best, but because this was the first example of real literature I read that made me fall in love. Nowadays it reads like a bar tab, but who's judging. Everything Hemingway wrote is worth reading. I've read all his short-stories, A Farewell to Arms, For Whom the Bell Tolls, The Old Man and the Sea, and A Moveable Feast. I remember reading a story from A Moveable Feast over a solitary dinner in a restaurant and weeping.
2. the Great Gatsby, Fitzgerald: because it was a source of my own personal great awakening, and it was revolutionary. To be kind, it's possible I had a better teacher than others that are badmouthing it. This is a great book. Like to Kill a Mockingbird, it's practically a one-hit wonder, but it is great in its treatment of class, taste and morality in America. Without any doubt a great American novel that should still be on the top-ten list. Or maybe it should just share a spot with To Kill a Mockingbird. Both are essential. Please don't read Sallinger unless you really have nothing better to do.
3. The Heart of Darkness. Conrad. Brilliant. Conrad is easily on my top-ten authors list. I read Lord Jim this year, which is freely available on e-book, and which I think was the best I've read in two or three years. Interestingly, he's born Polish, not a fluent English speaker until his 20s. How's that for a top-ten pick in a particular language...
4. The Stranger by Albert Camus. Previously mentioned here as The Outsider. That's actually the title of another story (The Outsiders) that was made into a film starring unknown actors Matt Dillon, Ralph Macchio, Rob Lowe, Patrick Swayze. Emilio Estevez, and Tom Cruise by the unknown director Francis Ford Coppola. A book worth reading for any intelligent child under 13 by author S.E.Hinton, but not on my top 50 list.. The book The Stranger by Albert Camus was my personal introduction to a lot of important literary devices I hadn't experienced until that moment, not to mention existentialism, which fit me awfully well for a 14 year old. I don't consider Camus a top-10 author, but The Stranger and the Plague should both be required reading.
5. Herman Hesse, my introduction was "Siddhartha" and it was a revelation for me at 15. In my 20s I revisited Hesse with "Steppenwolf" and it was not unrewarding. Also not a top-10, but indispensable.
6. Dostoyevsky. Unfuckingbelievable. I majored in Literature and loved reading before and after college. He is my favourite author and hands down the most adept at bringing out the minutest corruption of the human soul. A good excuse to learn Russian. My introduction was Crime and Punishment. Today (I shit you not) I finished Brothers Karamazov (after 12 years of sporadic reading) and I deem it better. Without any doubt, Dostoyevsky never wrote anything that wasn't a masterpiece. If this weren't chronological, Bros Karamazov would be my number one. It is hands down the best and most instructional novel I ever read.
7. On the top 100 list there is one novel by JMCoetzee, "Disgrace", which I thoroughly enjoyed. I've read and enjoyed every thing he's published. He should have at least two in the top 100 because "Waiting for the Barbarians" is one of the best (short) novels I've ever read.
7. I was given the award for best English student of my high-school class, but I was not a good student. Many assigned works were ignored but read later, including Melville's Billy Budd. I am half-way through Moby Dick now and I love it. It should be about half it's original length, but it is a masterpiece. Other books I didn't read in highschool but should have: Hawthorne's Scarlet Letter (Hawthorne is a top-shelf American author), Bridge of San Luis Rey (Excellent!) by Thornton Wilder (3-times Pulitzer Prize), Silas Marner by George Elliot, whose "Middlemarch" is a frequent appearance on top-ten lists (It's waiting on my shelf...).
8. I love Tolkien, but I have to say this (opening a can of worms): There are novels that we enjoy and there are novels that form us. Tolkien does not form us. As a coherent narrative, The Hobbit is artistically superior to the Lord of the Rings. The Silmarillion is an exquisite exercise in myth making and a unique insight into the writer's process. But Tolkien is not an important writer. It's time to grow up. Same goes for Herbert (Dune) and Asimov (Foundation). Of the three, I can say without any hesitation that Asimov taught me some memorable and applicable lessons and so earns the one spot on my top-ten list that is reserved for Fantasy / Sci-Fi. Honourable mention also for Robert Heinlein's "Stranger in a Strange Land" and Orson Scott Card's "Ender's Game". Card is a hack but that was a pretty good story that has stuck with me over the years. There is one sci-fi writer that has been mentioned several times here that I have not read: Ursula K Le Guin. She's definitely on my reading list.
9. Anything by Shakespeare. NOT Henry V. I've read it all, most of it's good.
10. Anything by Joyce. Try this: Start with Virginia Wolfe (Mrs. Dalloway, To the Lighthouse). Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man is for wankers, but worth reading nonetheless. This is hard going, not for the light-hearted.
There are some honourable mentions from other times (not uni):
The Death Ship by B. Traven, who is more famous for the (Excellent!) Hollywood adaptation of the Treasure of the Sierra Madre. Both are good introductions to serious anarchism in addition to good literature. Later check out Proudhom and Bakunnin (who predicted that if a Marxist party came to power, it would form the new elite).
Everything by Jorge Luis Borges. The master of the short story. Sorry Poe. Also everything by Poe. Interestingly, Borges opposed Communism on the grounds that the Individual was of primordial importance and the state was secondary. Marked me for life. Also Gabriel Garcia Marquez. My favourite, unsurprisingly, is 100 Years of Solitude. Other Spanish Lit: Cervantes (Don Quijote is seminal but didn't age well. Read when you're 10. La Celestina by Fernando De Rojas and Life is a Dream by Pedro Calderon De La Barca are also good intros to classical Spanish).
Long and random list of honourable mentions in no particular order and with lots and lots of absences: Douglas Adams, Dante, Defoe, Delillo, Stephen Dobyns, Faulkner, William Gass, Gardner, Greene, Gogol, Kafka, Lao She, Naipul, John Kennedy O'Toole, Pamuk, Pynchon, Rushdie, Marquis de Sade, Sterne, Steinbeck , Vonnegut, David Foster Wallace...
That's novels and stories, no poets or philosophy / non-fiction.
My newly updated reading list includes about half of what Putin33 listed (the half I haven't read yet).
Rank the diplo territories in order of importance using Instant Runoff Voting (IRV)
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