.................
First off, no, we're not counting comic books (Tarzan), movies (Gone With The Wind, The Color Purple) or just leafing through, reading a bit here and there (The Tin Drum).
Second, I remember reading these books to varying degrees (was it For Whom The Bell Tolls or another Hemingway book?) I'll note this, occasionally, and when I read the book after each entry.
Third, the entire list for each decade can be found here (00s), here (10's), (20s), (30s) (40s), (50s) (60s), (70s), (80s), and (90s).
Also, after the titles in bold (the top ten for each decade...that I've read), are the also rans that I've read.
1900s
L. Frank Baum, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900)
childhood
Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness (1902)
circa 1990 (part of a book club--I gave a presentation on this)
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, The Hound of the Baskervilles (1902)
childhood, again in 80s
Jack London, The Call of the Wild (1903)
high school
Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams (1907)
college
Baroness Orczy, The Scarlet Pimpernel (1905)
jr. high
Beatrix Potter, The Tale of Peter Rabbit (1901)
childhood
1910s
Sherwood Anderson, Winesburg, Ohio (1919)
college
Frances Hodgson Burnett, The Secret Garden (1911)
childhood
James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916)
college
1920s
James Joyce, Ulysses (1922)
college
F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby (1925)
college
Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain (1924)
high school
E. M. Forster, A Passage to India (1924)
high school -- did I really read it?
Herman Melville, Billy Budd, Sailor (1924)
high school
A. A. Milne, Winnie-the-Pooh (1926)
childhood
Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own (1929)
All Quiet on the Western Front (1929)
high school
1930s
Pearl S. Buck, The Good Earth (1931)
high school
Aldous Huxley, Brave New World (1932)
college (did I read it all?)
P. L. Travers, Mary Poppins (1934)
childhood
William Faulkner, Absalom! Absalom!(1936)
college
Isak Dinesen, Out of Africa (1937)
80's
J. R. R. Tolkien, The Hobbit (1937)
high school
Thornton Wilder, Our Town (1938)
high school
T. H. White, The Sword in the Stone (1939)
high school (not sure about this one)
James Joyce, Finnegans Wake(1939)
70s - remember buying this; did I make it very far?
1940s
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince (1943)
childhood
Margaret Wise Brown, Goodnight Moon (1947)
childhood
George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949)
high school
Ernest Hemingway, For Whom the Bell Tolls(1940)
college (not sure which Hemingway)
George Orwell, Animal Farm (1945)
jr. high?
E. B. White, Stuart Little (1945)
childhood
Albert Camus, The Stranger (1946, first English translation)
high school (French class, with some French, untranslated)
Arthur Miller, Death of a Salesman (1949)
high school
1950s
J. D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye (1951)
high school
Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man (1952)
college
Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451 (1953)
high school
J. R. R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring (1954)
college--summer
Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita (1955)
college
Leon Uris, Exodus (1958)
high school
C. S. Lewis, The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe(1950)
childhood (may have been only partial)
Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha (first English translation, 1951)
high school
Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951)
college
Ernest Hemingway, The Old Man and the Sea (1952)
high school
E. B. White, Charlotte’s Web (1952)
childhood
Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot (1953)
high school
William Golding, Lord of the Flies (1954)
jr. high
Wallace Stevens, Collected Poems (1954)
college
Dr. Seuss, The Cat in the Hat (1957)
childhood
Jack Kerouac, The Dharma Bums (1958)
80s (did I read it all?)
John Knowles, A Separate Peace (1959)
high school
Strunk & White, The Elements of Style (1959)
80s
D. H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley’s Lover (unexpurgated U.S. version released 1959)
high school
1960s
Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird (1960)
jr. high
Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five (1969)
high school
Joseph Heller, Catch-22 (1961)
high school
Ken Kesey, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1962)
high school
Madeleine L’Engle, A Wrinkle in Time (1962)
jr. high
Maurice Sendak, Where the Wild Things Are (1963)
childhood
Kurt Vonnegut, Cat’s Cradle (1963)
high school
Ken Kesey, Sometimes a Great Notion (1964)
high school
Anaïs Nin, The Diary of Anais Nin Vol. 1 (expurgated version) (1966)
70s
Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49(1966)
high school
S. E. Hinton, The Outsiders (1967)
jr. high
Tom Wolfe, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (1968)
college
Mario Puzo, The Godfather (1969)
high school
1970s
- none
Boston Women’s Health Book Collective, Our Bodies, Ourselves (1971)
college
Richard Bach, Jonathan Livingston Seagull (1973)
high school
Studs Terkel, Working(1974)
70s
1980s
- none
- none
1990s
- none
Barack Obama, Dreams from My Father (1995)
2007
Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel (1997)
90s
I have a high school English teacher, Mr. Dobbins, to thank for so much high school reading. He gave extra credit points for book reports--what a deal, though each did involve an oral presentation.
Also:
* I seem to be a product of the '50s and 60s.
* Shocking that I've yet to read any of the 68 books listed for the 1980s: ten finalists, plus also-rans. * Ok, maybe I read selections from Elizabeth Bishop, The Complete Poems, 1927-1979 (1983) in the 90s, making it 15 female-authored books, out of 72.
* Lonely books read within a year or so of being published:
- The Cat In The Hat
- Slaughterhouse Five
- Where The Wild Things Are
- The Outsiders
- The Godfather
- Jonathan Livingston Seagull
- Guns, Germs and Steel
otherwise, my reading hasn't been particularly 'in the moment'.
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