The 100 Greatest Books

One of my favorite movies is “The Equalizer” starring Denzel Washington . It grossed over $192 million and was lauded and condemned by critics. But to quote Teddy Roosevelt, “It’s not the critic that counts…” The sequel is almost as good. But I digress.

The movie is based on a really awful television series from the 80’s. Denzel plays Robert McCall, a former CIA operative with some special skills. (Think Liam Neeson in “Taken”). He is a solitary widower who has a hard time sleeping. Each night, he sits in his favorite diner reading a book. The reading list? The 100 Greatest Books Ever Written. It is an hommage to his late wife. Throughout this amazing story and in between reading the 100 books, he helps people who are being tyrannized by bad guys. What stuck with me in these movies was the 100 Books! Like a rock in my shoe, I had to read those books.

A few years ago, my old friend Kevin Thomas (the guy with two first names) sent me a poster of the 100 Greatest Books Ever Written. I hung it on my office door. Here is the list:

1 Twenty Thousand Leagues Under The Sea by Jules Verne

2 The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne

3 Dr. Jekyll And Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson

4 Walden by Henry David Thoreau

5 Gulliver’s Travels by Johnathan Swift

6 Moby Dick by Herman Melville

7 A Farewell To Arms by Ernest Hemingway

8 The Red Badge of Courage by Stephen Crane

9 The Jungle Books by Rudyard Kipling

10 The Odyssey by Homer

11 The Pilgrim’s Progress by John Bunyan

12 A Portrait Of The Artist As A Young Man by James Joyce

13 Paradise Lost by John Milton

14 Tales From The Arabian Nights by Richard Burton

15 Great Expectations by Charles Dickens

16 Candide by Voltaire

17 Oedipus The King by Sophocles

18 The Hunchback Of Notre Dame by Victor Hugo

19 The Last Of The Mohicans by James Fenimore Cooper

20 The Sea Wolf by Jack London

21 Cyrano De Bergerac by Edmund Rostand

22 The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer

23 Collected Poems by Robert Browning

24 The Essays Of Ralph Waldo Emerson by Ralph Waldo Emerson

25 The Portrait Of A Lady by Henry James

26 Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe

27 Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson

28 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

29 Collected Poems by John Keats

30 On The Origin Of Species by Charles Darwin

31 Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra

32 Collected Poems by Robert Frost

33 The Legend of Sleepy Hollow by Washington Irving

34 Animal Farm by George Orwell

35 Wuthering Heights by Emily Bront?

36 She Stoops To Conquer by Oliver Goldsmith

37 Of Mice And Men by John Steinbeck

38 Pride And Prejudice by Jane Austen

39 The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky

40 Les Misérables by Victor Hugo

41 The Iliad by Homer

42 Lady Chatterly’s Lover by D.H. Lawrence

43 The Count Of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas

44 Brave New World by Aldous Huxley

45 Aesop’s Fables by Aesop

46 Lord Jim by Joseph Conrad

47 The Autobiography Of Benjamin Franklin by Benjamin Franklin

48 The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas

49 Politics And The Poetics by Aristotle

50 The Aeneid by Virgil

51 Madam Bovary by Gustave Flaubert

52 The Prince by Niccolo Machiavelli

53 Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bront?

54 Hamlet by William Shakespeare

55 Pygmalion And Candida by George Bernard Shaw

56 Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe

57 Romeo And Juliet by William Shakespeare

58 The Cherry Orchard And The Three Sisters by Anton Chekhov

59 The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri

60 The Analects of Confucius by Confucius

61 A Midsummer Night’s Dream by William Shakespeare

62 Collected Poems by William Butler Yeats

63 The Picture Of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde

64 Vanity Fair by William Makepeace Thackeray

65 The Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio

66 Beowulf

67 Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy

68 The Necklace And Other Tales by Guy de Maupassant

69 The Time Machine by H.G. Wells

70 Fathers And Sons by Ivan Turgenev

71 Heart Of Darkness by Joseph Conrad

72 War And Peace by Leo Tolstoy

73 The History of Early Rome by Livy

74 Little Women by Louisa May Alcott

75 The Talisman by Sir Walter Scott

76 Tess Of The D’Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy

77 Alice’s Adventure In Wonderland by Lewis Carroll

78 Dracula by Bram Stoker

79 The Rubáiyát Of Omar Khayyám by Omar Khayyám

80 The Red And The Black by Stendhal

81 A Tale Of Two Cities by Charles Dickins

82 The Republic by Plato

83 Collected Poems by Emily Dickinson

84 Faust by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

85 Tom Jones by Henry Fielding

86 The Federalist Papers by Alexander Hamilton, James Madison

87 Silas Marner by George Eliot

88 The Rights of Man by Thomas Paine

89 Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman

90 Billy Budd by Herman Melville

91 The Confessions by St. Augustine

92 Tales of Mystery And Imagination by Edgar Allan Poe

93 Ivanhoe by Sir Walter Scott

94 The Way of All Flesh by Samuel Butler

95 The Sound And The Fury by William Faulkner

96 Crime And Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky

97 Grimm’s Fairy Tales by Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm

98 Adventures Of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain

99 Frankenstein by Mary Shelley

100 David Copperfield by Charles Dickens

After watching both EQ and EQ2, I set a lifetime goal. “I will read the 100 books over the next four years!” I was pleasantly surprised to see that I owned 15 of these masterpieces, moreover I had already read 13 of them and the other two were waiting patiently for me to pick up and read like an old man waiting in doctor’s office for his annual physical!  

Part of my motivation is to add years to my life and life to my years. Moreover, perhaps it’s to make up for my lack of formal education. (I have solid year of junior college!) There are no do-overs in life. Having said that, reading these 100 books is bound to have a positive impact on my life and make up for my misspent youth.  

“The books we don’t read won’t help. And people who don’t read are not better off and no advantage over people who cannot read.” Mark Twain said that. He made the list.

I read 54 pages of “Moby Dick” this morning. By my estimation, if I read 54 pages a day for 11-days, I will finish this extraordinary tome in July.  

Here a few quotes from Herman Melville’s classic novel: 

“It is not down on any map; true places never are.”

“Better to sleep with a sober cannibal than a drunk Christian.”

“As for me, I am tormented with an everlasting itch for things remote.”

What are you going to read in your lifetime? You could do worse than the list of 100 Greatest Books Ever Written! It’s better than romantic novels.  

I can always use “Moby Dick” as door stop to remind me to check off each book from my poster. Thanks Kevin….La La La!

Mark Matteson - Best Selling Author, International SpeakerTo order one of my books, go to: www.sparkingsuccess.net/store

206.697.0454 - 250 Beach Place, #301, Edmonds, WA 98020

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