I was surprised at how many of the books on that list I had read as a child, and what an effect they had had on me as a reader and a person (er, I mean, dog).
Just a few that I distinctly remember reading in my childhood or by the end of high school:
The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald
Catcher in the Rye, JD Salinger
The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck
To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee
1984, George Orwell
Charlotte's Web, EB White
Catch-22, Joseph Heller
Brave New World, Aldous Huxley
Animal Farm, George Orwell
The Sun Also Rises, Ernest Hemingway
A Farewell to Arms, Ernest Hemingway
Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison
Slaughterhouse Five, Kurt Vonnegut
For Whom the Bell Tolls, Ernest Hemingway
The Old Man and the Sea, Ernest Hemingway
The Call of the Wild, Jack London
Franny and Zooey, JD Salinger
A Separate Peace, John Knowles
The War of the Worlds, HG Wells
Of those, the nicest surprises on the list were The War of the Worlds -- the first "serious" book I ever read, and when I was finished I read it again -- and Franny and Zooey, which was only laying around the house left over from an older sibling who had a collection of JD Salinger paperbacks and it had been packaged with Catcher in the Rye. I had no idea the book was well regarded, but I liked it quite a bit. Orwell and Huxley clearly belong on the list, more for their ideas as expressed in the literature than for the writing itself.
Of those listed above, the only one I didn't like a lot was Gatsby. I thought it was ok, but still wonder what all the fuss was about. |
