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Let’s play.

44 Comments

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You’re here.

I think it’s required.

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If you’re a reader like me, you should score pretty high on this one.

I’m 17 for 20.

I admit to not having read The Odyssey, The Canterbury Tales or One Hundred Years of Solitude.

How about you?

What’s your classic book number…

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44 thoughts on “Let’s play.”

  1. I’m a reader, but not a reader like you. I had to read The Scarlet Letter for high school English (also A Tale of Two Cities, which I really liked and which I’m surprised isn’t on this list). I tried to read A Catcher in the Rye in college and The Grapes of Wrath as an adult, but couldn’t get through them. The only one I literally can’t be sure if I read or not is To Kill a Mockingbird. So, since that’s uncertain, my score is a solid 1! I read all the time, though, but not classic literature. 📚

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  2. I’m at 17 as well, although some of them I feel like I read, but I’m not sure. Which is weird, because most I remember clearly. So maybe I should count only those? I have a BA in liberal arts and an MA in comparative lit, so some stuff I had to rush through and some I spent eons picking apart. Why is there no Shakespeare here? No Milton? I guess this is strictly novels? I want to analyze this list, lol! Good post!

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    1. Okay, on second look, I feel sure of everything except 100 Years (I’m embarrassed to admit), Dorian Gray (isn’t that a short story?), and Sherlock Holmes. When I got my first iPhone, it had an app loaded with “classic” books – does anyone remember that? It’s how I read a few in the top left corner here.

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      1. I didn’t mean to throw around letters that obnoxiously. I meant to show that I’d been really busy reading back then, is all. I could take anyone on in a Hamlet word-by-word throw down, though. 🗡️

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      3. I’d planned on throwing in a PhD but got caught up in the politics of tenure (I was used by people on my thesis committee to deny tenure to other people on my committee) and decided an academic life was too stabby for me, lol! So glad I made that decision. I don’t read much these days though, maybe ten books a year compared to your hundreds of good books.

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  3. I’m batting a shiny golden goose egg on this one. I’ve read a fair amount of fiction; the obligatory Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings, as well as a lot of Science Fiction, mostly Robert Heinlein and Larry Niven/Jerry Pournelle. I’ve enjoyed a fair amount of historical fiction; The Killer Angels by Michael Shaara and When Christ and his Saints Slept by Sharon Kay Penman come most readily to mind, though there are others.

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      1. I’ve read that one, too. I knew about Joshua Chamberlain but had never heard of Ellis Spear. I was expecting a detailed account of the action at Little Round Top but the story of Spear’s and Chamberlain’s fortunes after the war was very interesting as well.

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  5. I’m 19 of 20, I have not read One Hundred Years of Solitude either. But I have read the others, mainly because while I was doing my bachelor’s degree I took my English and American Literature class and most of these were on there. Then of course I read like crazy, not like River crazy but I read a lot, lol.

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  8. Despite being mocked all my life for always having my nose in a book most of these were DNF for me. The Canterbury Tales was so fun because we read it in Middle English – I can still recite lines from it. I’ve opened all of these, didn’t finish finish half of them.

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  9. I once had the goal in life of reading One Hundred Years of Solitude in Spanish. It took me so long to read it in English that I dropped that goal and read something else by G.G. Márquez in Spanish. I had to go to Colombia in order to be able to read it, even in English.

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  13. Oh my gosh, I’m reading the comments here and bad for people. So many of these books were freaking revolutionary. Or stunningly beautiful. Often both. I can’t give up thinking about this list. I would add one modern book, David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest. And one old one, Paradise Lost. Wait, Joyce’s Ulysses, too. Very dense books, so worth the slog. When I was Ulysses it was with a companion book of notes just as thick, but man did that crack the puzzle of that book for me. I took a class just on that book (Paradise Lost and Hamlet by themselves, too). I wrote a paper on the use of one single word in Hamlet (bent), seriously. These books contain so many small and big treasures.

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  14. Chaucer definitely OUT! Fahrenheit 451 has to be in. Plus 3 Men In A Boat, Diary of a Nobody, The Ascent of the Rum Doodle, Cold Comfort Farm, Puckoon and Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy. I think I might be looking for different things…

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