Intelliquest’s Top 100 Books

The best of human existance is what they’re after, and the task is one that takes art and churns it into butter…not for us though, the readers.  Lists attract us like moths to a flame…very true, and this is a good list by my estimation. 

So I’ve got the list below the fold, but a few selections I’ve read are worthy of comment, and the text of each I’ve got, the entire collection coming in at around 3.3GB.  Whoever is interested, let me know. 

• 066 The Old Man and the Sea – Ernest Hemingway

Talk about getting down to the root of what it is to be a human being in this life…this poor bastard lives for something besides that marlin, but of course that’s the bait, with the hook being that it’s a novela!  Afternoon, raining, done.  It’ll happen again.  Sidhartha by Herman Hesse was one I would have liked to have put up alongside this one, and then of course the next one…

• 092 Death of a Salesman – Arthur Miller

He died last year and it didn’t seem like anyone knew about it.  One radio show on WRKO in Boston questioned why nobody was calling about it.  I instantly assumed that the folks tuned in to WRKO at 1PM in the afternoon, the ones who’d waste their time calling, had no idea who Arthur Miller even was.  Kind of the snake eating it’s tail that day, because I knew that the host did care about it, but his political habit as a radio man simply HAD to turn it into a ‘deep question’, apparantly hoping that a flood of professors would storm the phone lines, nothing like that ever happened, and instead of remembering him, I felt worse about his death then I had when I first found it out.  Same with Hunter S. Thompson – whose death was brought to me by the great people down at the ‘Drudge Report’, the man himself was calling Dr. Thompson a loser, of course, ratings and politics, WRKO…

So when you watch this play or read the text, understand that the death of anyone in this life is sucked up by the whirlwind and cast out once no longer deemed usefull.  Sure, your loved ones will be there for you, satisfied, but how satisfied will YOU be in that position?  An American Dream – one version of it, and the one I relate to best.  

• 001 The Iliad – Homer
• 002 The Odyssey – Homer
• 003 The Aeneid – Virgil 

The Action Movie Genre is born!  Translated these in Latin class during high school.  Hazy recollections steer me towards caution in describing what I ‘really think’ about these.  They were all poetic and in another language…a cliffhanger-type of a read, especially frustrating when you think you understand a few lines to be about something like ‘handing the pig leg off of the spit to the amazon woman’ – only to find out the next day that it really meant ‘the amazon woman called him a snake and tore his leg off’…eventually you learn to fake it in class, sit back and just enjoy the ten lines of this book you’ll be privy to by the time it’s over.  Does he get back home?  I believe so.  Are the gods angry?  Always. 

• 004 Beowulf – Unknown
• 029 David Copperfield – Charles Dickens
• 030 A Tale of Two Cities – Charles Dickens
• 032 The Scarlet Letter – Nathaniel Hawthorne 
• 063 The Great Gatsby – F. Scott Fitzgerald
• 099 Walden – Henry David Thoreau

High School, with assignments or otherwise.  The Canterbury Tales were part of that and To Kill a Mockingbird, but it was during this time in my life that I made a distinction between what I considered ‘good’…and what I considered ‘bad’, ye see?  (homage to Bush J-R)

Some of the tripe shovelled into our skulls during school really had me wanting to never read a book ever again sometimes, but amongst all that were a number of genuinely ‘enjoyable’ reads…and I’m not saying that about any on the above list, some of those were responsible for my Prozac intake during high school.

• 034 Moby Dick – Herman Melville
• 064 A Farewell to Arms – Ernest Hemingway
• 065 For Whom the Bell Tolls – Ernest Hemingway

While I was in the army, there was a string of books written around this time or before that had me going.  These are three of them, and a lot of stuff written by John Irving, Kurt Vonnegut Jr., Herman Hesse, and a constant wherever I went back then, a copy of Big Sur by Jack Kerouac.  In between came some mamouth discoveries, which explains Hemingway.  Living in Europe, one of the parts that resembles Nebraska, still technically ‘in’ Europe nonetheless…the venues in his books rang true for me, and I really had a great time escaping life amidst that crowd, ‘Garden of Eden’ and ‘The Sun Also Rises’ are also worth checking out. 

Moby Dick made me feel like no matter what kind of bullshit life was about at a given time, that it could be a whole lot worse, let say for someone who believes in things like that, one could read a book like Moby Dick and somehow get the chills from knowing that your life is the least of someone else’s worries, obcessions, what have you…so in similar circumstances today, one could simply turn in his magnetic identification card and walk away, for these sorry fucks it wasn’t that easy.  See, their HR Departments were located in alternating rooms within the various brothels and saloons at least a life’s worth of ocean away. 

They refer to some of these as ‘Classics’ and others aren’t barely sniffed at, but for the sake of argument, let’s imagine having to pick the top 100 baseball players in history.  At first it would seem rudimentary, of course, until that space on the list started to run out, and then it became about something else.  All these authors, their publishers, some having to scratch and claw to even be part of the conversation, others in on merit alone…each of these authors lived just like us.  The titles we apply to them today, as a point of reference, it’s brilliant, but at the same time your mind will recall the one or two that you realize weren’t on there…blah.

Won’t be posting lists very often…Letterman took it and ran a while ago…

001 The Iliad – Homer
002 The Odyssey – Homer
003 The Aeneid – Virgil
004 Beowulf – Unknown
005 The Divine Comedy – Dante Alighieri
006 The Travels of Marco Polo – Marco Polo
007 The Canterbury Tales – Geoffrey Chaucer
008 Don Quixote – Cervantes
009 Paradise Lost – John Milton
010 The Pilgrim’s Progress – John Bunyan
011 Robinson Crusoe – Daniel Defoe
012 Moll Flanders – Daniel Defoe
013 Gulliver’s Travels – Jonathan Swift
014 Tom Jones – Henry Fielding
015 Candide – Voltaire
016 The Rime of the Ancient Mariner – Samuel Taylor Coleridge
017 The Tragedy of Faust – Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
018 The Lady of the Lake – Sir Walter Scott
019 Ivanhoe – Sir Walter Scott
020 Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen
021 Frankenstein – Mary Shelley
022 The Red and the Black – Stendahl
023 The Last of the Mohicans – James Fenimore Cooper
024 The Three Musketeers – Alexandre Dumas
025 Carmen – Prosper Merimee
026 Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte
027 Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte
028 Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray
029 David Copperfield – Charles Dickens
030 A Tale of Two Cities – Charles Dickens
031 Great Expectations – Charles Dickens
032 The Scarlet Letter – Nathaniel Hawthorne
033 Camille – Alexandre Dumas
034 Moby Dick – Herman Melville
035 Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert
036 Idyls of the King – Alfred Lord Tennyson
037 Silas Marner – George Eliot
038 Middlemarch – George Eliot
039 Les Miserables – Victor Hugo
040 Fathers and Sons – Ivan Turgenev
041 Crime and Punishment – Feodor Dostoyevsky
042 The Brothers Karamazov – Feodor Dostoyevsky
043 Little Women – Louisa May Alcott
044 Far From the Madding Crowd – Thomas Hardy
045 The Adventures of Ton Sawyer – Mark Twain
046 The Prince and the Pauper – Mark Twain
047 The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn – Mark Twain
048 A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court – Mark Twain
049 Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy
050 War and Peace – Leo Tolstory
051 The Return of the Native – Thomas Hardy
052 Toss of the D’Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy
053 The Portrait of a Lady – Henry James
054 The Turn of the Screw – Henry James
055 Treasure Island – Robert Louis Stevenson
056 The Picture of Dorian Gray – Oscar Wilde
057 The Time Machine – H. G. Wells
058 Dracula – Bram Stoker
059 The Way of All Flesh – Samuel Butler
060 Call of the Wild – Jack London
061 Babbitt – Sinclair Lewis
062 An American Tragedy – Theodore Dreiser
063 The Great Gatsby – F. Scott Fitzgerald
064 A Farewell to Arms – Ernest Hemingway
065 For Whom the Bell Tolls – Ernest Hemingway
066 The Old Man and the Sea – Ernest Hemingway
067 The Maltese Falcon – Dashiell Hammett
068 Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck
069 The Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck
070 To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee
071 The Republic – Plato
072 The Prince – Machiavelli
073 The Social Contract – Jean-Jacques Rousseau
074 The Wealth of Nations – Adam Smith
075 The Origin of Species – Charles Darwin
076 Das Kapital – Karl Marx
077 The Decline of the West – Oswald Spengler
078 Prometheus Bound – Aeschylus
079 Oedipus Rex – Sophocles
080 The Taming of the Shrew – William Shakespeare
081 Hamlet – William Shakespeare
082 Othello – William Shakespeare
083 Macbeth – William Shakespeare
084 The Tempest – William Shakespeare
085 Tartuffe – Moliere
086 Peer Gynt – Henrik Ibsen
087 A Doll’s House – Henrik Ibsen
088 The Importance of Being Earnest – Oscar Wilde
089 Cyrano de Bergerac – Edmond Rostand
090 The Cherry Orchard – Anton Chekhov
091 Our Town – Thornton Wilder
092 Death of a Salesman – Arthur Miller
093 The Nicomachean Ethics – Aristotle
094 Meditations – Rene Descartes
095 The Critique of Pure Reason – Immanuel Kant
096 The World as Will and Idea – Arthur Schopenhauer
097 Nature – Ralph Waldo Emerson
098 Self-Reliance – Ralph Waldo Emerson
099 Walden – Henry David Thoreau
100 How We Think – John Dewey