My Top 86 Literary Picks!

I just updated my Goodreads log of the books I have read, and marked some titles, whether fiction, drama, non-fiction, theology, with my own personal Gold Star. Not books I consider “important,” but ones I simply like. Here are the fictional works (novels, stories, plays, science fiction, poetry).

Now that I list them, it strikes me that my taste is pretty conventional, that is, except for my complete lack of interest in the fantasy genre: sorry, no sorcerers or elves in the list! Nor Amish romance, for that matter.

I made no attempt to be representative of sub-genres, nor to filter out what might strike some as objectionable material. And while I would have liked a round number, like 50 or 100, 86 Favorites is what came out. I list them in alphabetical order, and put in bold print the 20 I especially love. Plays are marked with a “- p”. Enjoy!

Here is the list in pdf form: Shogren_Top 86 Literary Works

1984, George Orwell
A Confederacy of Dunces, John Kennedy Toole
A Prayer for Owen Meany, John Irving
The Adventures of Augie March, Saul Bellow
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain
All Quiet on the Western Front, Erich Maria Remarque
All the King’s Men, Robert Penn Warren
Animal Farm, George Orwell
Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy
Atonement, Ian McEwan
Babbitt, Sinclair Lewis
Billy Budd, Herman Melville
Brave New World, Aldous Huxley
The Bridge of San Luis Rey, Thornton Wilder
The Brothers Karamazov, Fyodor Dostoyevsky
The Children Act, Ian McEwan
The Chosen, Chaim Potok
The Complete Stories, Dorothy Parker
Crime and Punishment, Fyodor Dostoyevsky
The Crucible, Arthur Miller – p
David Copperfield, Charles Dickens
Death Comes for the Archbishop, Willa Cather
Don Quixote, Cervantes
Dubliners, James Joyce
Dune, Frank Herbert
The End of the Affair, Graham Greene
Ender’s Game, Orson Scott Card
Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury
For Whom the Bell Tolls, Ernest Hemingway
Foucault’s Pendulum, Umberto Eco
Foundation, Isaac Asimov
Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus, Mary Shelley
Gone with the Wind, Margaret Mitchell
The Good Earth, Pearl S. Buck
The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck
The Great Divorce, C. S. Lewis
The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald
Hamlet, William Shakespeare – p
Henry V, William Shakespeare – p
The Human Stain, Philip Roth
I, Claudius, Robert Graves
The Iceman Cometh, Eugene O’Neill – p
Lee Marvin delivers an amazing performance in “The Iceman Cometh”
The Illustrated Man, Ray Bradbury
Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison
The Jungle, Upton Sinclair
The Last Year of the War, Shirley Nelson
Middlesex, Jeffrey Eugenides
Leaves of Grass, Walt Whitman
Les Misérables, Victor Hugo
The Light of Other Days, A. C. Clarke
The Lord of the Flies, William Golding
The Magic Mountain, Thomas Mann
The Martian Chronicles, Ray Bradbury
The Name of the Rose, Umberto Eco
No Exit, Jean-Paul Sartre – p
The Old Man and the Sea, Ernest Hemingway
On the Road, Jack Kerouac
One Hundred Years of Solitude, Gabriel García Márquez
Othello, William Shakespeare – p
Pale Fire, Vladimir Nabokov
Pigeon Feathers and Other Stories, John Updike
Pilgrim’s Progress, John Bunyan
The Power and the Glory, Graham Greene
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, Muriel Spark
Prometheus Bound, Aeschylus – p
Rabbit, Run, John Updike
Ragtime, E. L. Doctorow
Rendezvous with Rama, A. C. Clarke
Ringworld, Larry Niven
Romeo and Juliet, William Shakespeare – p
The Screwtape Letters, C. S. Lewis
Siddhartha, Hermann Hesse
Silence, Shūsaku Endō
Slaughter-House Five, Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
The Space Trilogy: Out of the Silent Planet; Perelandra; That Hideous Strength, C. S. Lewis
The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Robert Louis Stevenson
Stranger in a Strange Land, Robert A. Heinlein
Strangers on a Train, Patricia Highsmith
The Sun also Rises, Ernest Hemingway
To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee
Ulysses, James Joyce
Vanity Fair, W. P. Thackeray
Waiting for Godot, Samuel Beckett – p
War and Peace, Leo Tolstoy
We, Yevgeny Zamyatin
World’s Fair, E. L. Doctorow