I read 30 of 79, which 38%, or more than a third of them. If you include the ones where I saw the movie or read another book of the author’s, it’s up to 45 or 57%, more than half.
See how many of these you have read.
If you are a white man and you think you do not own one of these books, try looking under your bed, it’s probably there.
1. Shogun, James Clavell NO, but saw the movie
2. Slaughterhouse-Five, Kurt Vonnegut YES
3. A Confederacy of Dunces, John Kennedy Toole YES
4. Infinite Jest, David Foster Wallace NO
5. A collection of John Lennon’s drawings. NO
6. A Farewell to Arms, Ernest Hemingway YES
7. The first two volumes of A Song of Ice and Fire, George R. R. Martin NO
8. God Is Not Great, Christopher Hitchens NO
9. Catch-22, Joseph Heller YES
10. I Hope They Serve Beer In Hell, Tucker Max NO
11. Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand NO, and never will!
12. The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat, Oliver Sacks YES
13. The Catcher in the Rye, J. D. Salinger YES
14. The Godfather, Mario Puzo YES
15. The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald YES
16. Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov YES
17. Fight Club, Chuck Palahniuk NO, but read another one, Invisible Monsters
18. The Master and Margarita, Mikhail Bulgakov NO
19. The Da Vinci Code, Dan Brown NO, and never will
20. The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck YES
21. The Stand, Stephen King NO
22. The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, Stieg Larsson NO
23. The Naked and the Dead, Norman Mailer NO, but read An American Dream, The Armies of the Night, Of a Fire on the Moon, and The White Negro
24. Tuesdays With Morrie, Mitch Albom NO
25. It’s Not About the Bike, Lance Armstrong (definitely under the bed) NO
26. Who Moved My Cheese?, Spencer Johnson NO
27. Portnoy’s Complaint, Philip Roth YES
28. Seabiscuit, Laura Hillenbrand NO
29. John Adams, David McCullough NO
30. Ragtime, E. L. Doctorow YES
31. Lucky Jim, Kingsley Amis YES
32. America: The Book, Jon Stewart NO
33. The World Is Flat, Thomas Friedman NO, and never will! But read From Beirut to Jerusalem
34. The Tipping Point, Malcolm Gladwell YES
35. The Curious Incident of the Dog In the Night-Time, Mark Haddon NO
36. Exodus, Leon Uris (if Jewish) NO
37. Trinity, Leon Uris (if Irish-American) NO
38. The Road, Cormac McCarthy NO, but own All the Pretty Horses.
39. Marley & Me, John Grogan NO
40. Freakonomics, Steven D. Levitt YES
41. The Rainmaker, John Grisham NO, never will
42. Patriot Games, Tom Clancy NO, and never will
43. Dragon, Clive Cussler NO, never will
44. Guns, Germs, and Steel, Jared Diamond NO
45. The Agony and the Ecstasy, Irving Stone NO
46. The 9/11 Commission Report NO
47. The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, John le Carre NO, but read Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy.
48. Rising Sun, Michael Crichton NO, but saw Jurassic Park and The Andromeda Strain.
49. A Walk in the Woods, Bill Bryson NO, but read Made in America.
50. Airport, Arthur Hailey NO, but saw a movie of Roots.
51. Rich Dad, Poor Dad, Robert Kiyosaki NO, but saw the movie.
52. Burr, Gore Vidal NO
53. Angela’s Ashes, Frank McCourt NO
54. The Wheel of Time, Robert Jordan NO
55. Into Thin Air, Jon Krakauer NO
56. Into the Wild, Jon Krakauer NO
57. Cryptonomicon, Neal Stephenson NO, and never will!
58. Godel, Escher, Bach, Douglas Hofstadter NO
59. The World According to Garp, John Irving YES
60. A Brief History of Time, Stephen Hawking NO
61. The Tin Drum, Gunter Grass No, but read Dog Soldiers.
62. On the Road, Jack Kerouac YES
63. Lord of the Flies, William Golding YES
64. The Lord of the Rings, JRR Tolkien YES
65. The Bonfire of the Vanities, Tom Wolfe NO, but read The Hells Angels, The Electric Koolaid Acid Test, The Painted Word, The Right Stuff, Radical Chic and Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers, The Candy-Colored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby
66. Beowulf, the Seamus Heaney translation NO
67. Rabbit, Run, John Updike NO, but read Toward the End of Time and Hugging the Shore
68. The Satanic Verses, Salman Rushdie YES
69. The Complete Sherlock Holmes, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle NO
70. The Big Sleep, Raymond Chandler NO, but read The Maltese Falcon.
71. One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Ken Kesey NO, but saw the movie, and read The Demon Box.
72. A Clockwork Orange, Anthony Burgess YES
73. House of Leaves, Mark Danielewski NO
74. The Call of the Wild, Jack London NO
75. Gravity’s Rainbow, Thomas Pynchon YES
76. I, Claudius, Robert Graves NO
77. The Civil War: A Narrative, Shelby Foote NO
78. American Psycho, Bret Easton Ellis NO
79. Life, Keith Richards NO
