MAKE A GOAL; READ 100 CLASSIC NOVELS

Literature is arguably (by me) one of the most rewarding pleasures in this life. As bibliophiles, we embrace our affinity to books, seeing them for all their worth. They are our escape from reality, our search for meaning, the inevitable decision to take multiple college English classes at once just because you want time to read some good books.

Read what you want to read. Read the types of books that are important to you, that will bring you insight into your own life journey. JUST READ!

I have compiledmy own list of books that I believe are important to read during my life. Notice all the Jane Austen sprinkled throughout. The ultimate goal is to read at least one hundred classic novels. No deadline, I’m just going to do it.

01.     The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes  by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

02.     The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton

03.     The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho

04.     Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll

05.     Animal Farm by George Orwell

06.     Anthem by Ayn Rand

07.     Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand

08.     Atonement by Ian McEwan

09.     The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath

10.     Birdsong by Don Stap

11.     Brave New World by Aldus Huxley

12.     The Call of the Wild by Jack London

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

14.     The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer

15.     A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess

16.     The Color Purple by Alice Walker

17.     The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexander Dumas

18.     Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky

19.     Dangerous Liaisons by Pierce Choderlos De Laclos

20.     The Dharma Bums by Jack Kerouac

21.     The Diary of Anne Frank by Anne Frank

22.     Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra

23.     The Driver Seat by Muriel Spark

24.     Emma by Jane Austen

25.     The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand

26.     For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemmingway

27.     Frankenstein by Mary Shelley

28.     Gone With The Wind by Margaret Mitchell

29.     Great Expectations by Charles Dickens

30.     The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald

31.     Hamlet by Shakespeare

32.     The Handmaid’s Tale by Margret Atwood

33.     The Harry Potter Series by J.K. Rowling

34.     Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad

35.     The Hobbit by J.R. Tolkien

36.     Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain

37.     The Hunger Games by Suzanne Colins

38.     The Iliad by Homer

39.     The Inferno by Dante

40.     The Importance of Being Earnest by Oscar Wilde

41.     Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradb

42.     The Jane Austen Book Club by Karen Joy Fowler

43.     Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte

44.     The Holy Bible

45.     The Jungle by Upton Sinclair

46.      The Kama Sutra

47.     La Boheme by Gluseppe Glacosta

48.     Lady Susan by Jane Austen

49.     The Lais of Marie de France

50.     Les Miserables by Victor Hugo

51.     The Life of Pi by Yann Martel

52.     The Lord of the Rings Series by J.R. Tolkien

53.     Lord of the Flies by William Golding

54.     Love and Friendship by Jane Austen

55.     Macbeth by Shakespeare

56.     Mansfield Park by Jane Austen

57.     Memoirs of a Geisha by Arthur Golden

58.     Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka

59.     Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck

60.     Moby Dick by Herman Melville

61.     Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf

62.     Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen

63.     The Notebook by Nicholas Sparks

64.     The Odyssey by Homer

65.     Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens

66.     On The Road by Jack Kerouac

67.     One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest by Ken Kesey

68.     Paradise Lost by John Milton

69.     The Penelopaid by Margret Atwood

70.     Persuasion by Jane Austen

71.     Peter Pan by James Matthew Barrie

72.     A Picture of Dorian Gray by Ernest Hemmingway

73.     Possession by Laurence Housman

74.     Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen

75.     Puff by Bob Flaherty

76.     The Red Badge of Courage by Stephen Crane

77.     Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro

78.     Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe

79.     Romeo and Juliet by Shakespeare

80.     The Rover by Aphra Behn

81.     The Scarlett Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorn

82.     The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett

83.     Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen

84.     Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse

85.     Songs of Innocence and Experience by William Blake

86.     The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemmingway

87.     A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens

88.     Things Fall Apart by Chinoa Achebe

89.     Till We Have Faces by C.S. Lewis

90.     To Kill A Mockingbird by Harper Lee

91.     Through the Looking Glass by Lewis Carroll

92.     Vanity Fair by William Makepeace Thackeray

93.     The Viking Book Of Poetry

94.     War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy

95.     Water for Elephants by Sara Gruen

96.     The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame

97.     The Wonderful Wizard of Oz by Lyman Frank Baum

98.     Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte

99.     10 Days in a Madhouse by Nellie Bly

100.   The Science of Mind by Ernest Holmes

Bibliomania

If we are going to be politically correct, I would have to identify myself as a bibliophile with high risk of developing bibliomania. I love holding a book worn by the hands of the past, the smell of a book as you flip through its sleek pages, the soft thud of closing a book for the last time as you finish a really good book …

I can’t help it. I just love books.

In Latin, bibl- means book & mania- means madness, (i.e. maniac, kleptomania)

BIBLIOMANIA is the collecting or hoarding of books that will have no use or intrinsic value to the collector, exhibiting behaviors such as purchasing multiple copies of the same book or simply buying more books thatn you have room for. BIBLIOMANIA can be linked to Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder, becoming a clinical psychological disorder when an individual’s social behaviors or health is put at risk.

The term was created by Dr. John Ferriar (1761 - 1815), a physician at the Manchester Royal Infirmary. He studied the causes of typhoid, wrote some essays, and reformed some sanitation laws. Apparently, he wrote a poem mocking wealthy, avid book collectors.

I guess that’s how they deal with politics in the 18th Century. I wonder if the world would be more peaceful if politics were required to be conducted in poems. But you could always argue that speeches are poems..

If elected President, I, Amanda Abend,

Solemnly swear to bring War to an end,

With the sweet caress of a poems soft lines

In leading a country whose fate in my hands lie.

So, that was a pretty terrible example, but you get my point. And if this was how people went about asking for things, I bet people would be less apt to be angry in general. With less anger in the world, we would have less war. Simple deductive reasoning.

Bibliomania is not to be confused with bibliophilia, the general love of books. Bibliophilia is not a psychological disorder.

Other book-related social behaviors include bibliophagy (the eating or swallowing of books), bibliokleptomania (the stealing of books), and bibliotaphy (taphos means tomb in Greek, the burying of books).

And there absolutely are people who do things like this. A guy named Stephen Blumberg was convicted of stealing $5.3 million dollars worth of books. Imagine spending $5,300,000 on books alone … how a person could steal such an obscene amount of books is impressively immoral.

Then there is this other guy named Thomas Phillipps who owned over 160,000 books and manuscripts when he died in 1872. He owned so many that the whole collection was auctioned off until around 1946 – over 100 years after his death. He literally had collected a lifetime of books.

Books are a part of my soul, one of the reasons I enjoy life. All the bibliophiles out there, this is a call to action. Everyone should know what it feels like to love books as we do, so I offer you this challenge. Though I encourage collecting books, I do not encourage developing a strong attachment to the physical in life. You can't take it with you. So choose a book that is dear to you, wrap it in newspaper and string, and gift it to someone who you believe will enjoy it. Simple surprises are another amazing gift of life - embrace them.