bibliogramma | Entries tagged with m: reading lists

Another list of books one may or may jot have read, this time with an admirable theme: "100 MUST-READ SCI-FI FANTASY NOVELS BY FEMALE AUTHORS" by Nikki Steele. It's a good list, all in all - there's something for everyone here.

I've read about a third of these, have several more waiting on my ipad to be read, and have more still on my my "acquire when cash flow makes it possible" list. There are also some books I tried and didn't like enough to complete, and some that just did not call to me, or whose authors I don't seem to enjoy.

I've bolded the ones I've read, and put asterisks after the ones I want to read (i.e., have on my TBR or TBB (to be bought) lists.

1. Alanna: The First Adventure by Tamora Pierce

2. The Alchemy of Stone by Ekaterina Sedia

3. Among Others by Jo Walton

4. Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie

5. Ancient, Ancient by Kiini Ibura Salaam *

6. The Antelope Wife by Louise Erdrich *

7. Arrows of the Queen by Mercedes Lackey

8. Ash by Malinda Lo

9. Assassin’s Apprentice by Robin Hobb

10. The Pyramid Waltz by Barbara Wright

11. Biting the Sun by Tanith Lee

12. The Blazing World by Margaret Cavendish *

13. The Bloody Chamber by Angela Carter *

14. Boneshaker by Cherie Priest

15. Brown Girl in the Ringby Nalo Hopkinson

16. Cast in Shadow by Michelle Sagara

17. China Mountain Zhang by Maureen F. McHugh

18. Chorus of Mushrooms by Hiromi Goto *

19. Cinder by Marissa Meyer

20. The Crystal Cave by Mary Stewart

21. The Darkangel by Meredith Ann Pierce

22. Daughter of Smoke & Bone by Laini Taylor *

23. Daughter of the Blood by Anne Bishop

24. Daughter of the Forest by Juliet Marillier

25. Dead Until Dark by Charlaine Harris

26. Deathless by Catherynne M. Valente *

27. The Devil’s Arithmetic by Jane Yolen

28. The Dispossessed by Ursula K. Le Guin

29. Doomsday Book by Connie Willis *

30. Dragon Sword and Wind Child by Noriko Ogiwara *

31. Dragonflight by Anne McCaffrey

32. An Ember in the Ashes by Sabaa Tahir *

33. The Etched City by K.J. Bishop

34. The Female Man by Joanna Russ

35. Flesh and Spirit by Carol Berg

36. The Forgotten Beasts of Eld by Patricia A. McKillip

37. Frankenstein by Mary Shelley

38. The Ghost Bride by Yangsze Choo *

39. Graceling by Kristin Cashore *

40. The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood

41. Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone by J.K. Rowling

42. The Hearing Trumpet by Leonora Carrington

43. Her Smoke Rose Up Forever by James Tiptree Jr.

44. Hild by Nicola Griffith *

45. His Majesty’s Dragon by Naomi Novik

46. The House of the Spirits by Isabel Allende

47. The House on the Lagoon by Rosario Ferré

48. Howl’s Moving Castle by Diana Wynne Jones

49. The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins

50. Ink by Sabrina Vourvoulias *

51. Inkheart by Cornelia Funke

52. The Island of Eternal Love by Daína Chaviano

53. Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell by Susanna Clarke

54. Karen Memory by Elizabeth Bear

55. The Killing Moon by N.K. Jemisin *

56. Kushiel’s Dart by Jacqueline Carey

57. Luck in the Shadows by Lynn Flewelling

58. Magic for Beginners by Kelly Link

59. The Mirror Empire by Kameron Hurley *

60. The Mists of Avalon by Marion Zimmer Bradley

61. Moving the Mountain by Charlotte Perkins Gilman

62. Mr. Fox by Helen Oyeyemi *

63. My Christina & Other Stories by Mercè Rodoreda

64. My Soul to Keep by Tananarive Due

65. Native Tongue by Suzette Haden Elgin

66. The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern

67. Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler

68. The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake by Aimee Bender

69. The Queen of the Tearling by Erika Johansen

70. The Raven Boys by Maggie Stiefvater

71. The Red by Linda Nagata *

72. Redemption in Indigo by Karen Lord

73. Rosemary and Rue by Seanan McGuire

74. Salt Fish Girl by Larissa Lai *

75. The Second Mango by Shira Glassman *

76. Shards of Honor by Lois McMaster Bujold

77. Shikasta by Doris Lessing

78. The Snow Queen by Joan D. Vinge

79. Slave to Sensation by Nalini Singh

80. So Far from God by Ana Castillo

81. Sorcerer to the Crown by Zen Cho

82. Soulless by Gail Carriger *

83. The Sparrow by Mary Doria Russell *

84. The Speed of Dark by Elizabeth Moon

85. Spirits of the Ordinary by Kathleen Alcala

86. Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel *

87. A Stranger in Olondria by Sofia Samatar *

88. Sunshine by Robin McKinley

89. Swamplandia! by Karen Russell

90. Swordspoint by Ellen Kushner

91. The Thief by Megan Whalen Turner

92. Valor’s Choice by Tanya Huff

93. War for the Oaks by Emma Bull

94. We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson *

95. Who Fears Death by Nnedi Okorafor

96. Wicked As They Come by Delilah S. Dawson

97. Woman on the Edge of Time by Marge Piercy

98. The Woman Who Thought She Was a Planet and Other Stories by Vandana Singh

99. The Wrath and the Dawn by Renée Ahdieh

100. A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’Engle

Well, at least there's more than one woman on it.

And since some people have already started the meme, I may as well go along, with modifications, of course.

Bold = I've read it
Underline = I've read part of it
Asterisk = I was planning to read it even before it ended up on this list

1. The Lord of the Rings Trilogy, by J.R.R. Tolkien
2. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, by Douglas Adams
3. Ender's Game, by Orson Scott Card
4. The Dune Chronicles, by Frank Herbert
5. A Song of Ice and Fire Series, by George R. R. Martin
6. 1984, by George Orwell
7. Fahrenheit 451, by Ray Bradbury
8. The Foundation Trilogy, by Isaac Asimov
9. Brave New World, by Aldous Huxley
10. American Gods, by Neil Gaiman
11. The Princess Bride, by William Goldman
12. The Wheel Of Time Series, by Robert Jordan
13. Animal Farm, by George Orwell
14. Neuromancer, by William Gibson
15. Watchmen, by Alan Moore
16. I, Robot, by Isaac Asimov
17. Stranger In A Strange Land, by Robert Heinlein
18. The Kingkiller Chronicles, by Patrick Rothfuss
19. Slaughterhouse-Five, by Kurt Vonnegut
20. Frankenstein, by Mary Shelley
22. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, by Philip K. Dick
23. The Handmaid's Tale, by Margaret Atwood
24. The Dark Tower Series, by Stephen King
25. 2001: A Space Odyssey, by Arthur C. Clarke
26. The Stand, by Stephen King
27. Snow Crash, by Neal Stephenson
28. The Martian Chronicles, by Ray Bradbury
29. Cat's Cradle, by Kurt Vonnegut
30. The Sandman Series, by Neil Gaiman
31. A Clockwork Orange, by Anthony Burgess
32. Starship Troopers, by Robert Heinlein
33. Dragonflight, by Anne McCaffrey
34. The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress, by Robert Heinlein
35. A Canticle for Leibowitz, by Walter M. Miller
36. The Time Machine, by H.G. Wells
37. 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, by Jules Verne
38. Flowers for Algernon, by Daniel Keys
39. The War of the Worlds, by H.G. Wells
40. The Chronicles of Amber, by Roger Zelazny
41. The Belgariad, by David Eddings
42. The Mists of Avalon, by Marion Zimmer Bradley
43. The Mistborn Series, by Brandon Sanderson
44. Ringworld, by Larry Niven
45. The Left Hand of Darkness, by Ursula K. LeGuin
46. The Silmarillion, by J.R.R. Tolkien
47. The Once and Future King, by T.H. White
48. Neverwhere, by Neil Gaiman
49. Childhood's End, by Arthur C. Clarke
50. Contact, by Carl Sagan
51. The Hyperion Cantos, by Dan Simmons
52. Stardust, by Neil Gaiman
53. Cryptonomicon, by Neal Stephenson
54. World War Z*, by Max Brooks
55. The Last Unicorn, by Peter S. Beagle
56. The Forever War, by Joe Haldeman
57. Small Gods, by Terry Pratchett
58. The Chronicles Of Thomas Covenant, The Unbeliever, by Stephen R. Donaldson
59. The Vorkosigan Saga, by Lois McMaster Bujold
60. Going Postal, by Terry Pratchett
61. The Mote in God's Eye, by Larry Niven & Jerry Pournelle
62. The Sword of Truth, by Terry Goodkind
63. The Road, by Cormac McCarthy
64. Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, by Susanna Clarke
65. I Am Legend, by Richard Matheson
66. The Riftwar Saga, by Raymond E. Feist
67. The Shannara Trilogy, by Terry Brooks
68. The Conan the Barbarian Series, by R.E. Howard
69. The Farseer Trilogy, by Robin Hobb
70. The Time Traveler's Wife, by Audrey Niffenegger
71. The Way of Kings, by Brandon Sanderson
72. A Journey to the Center of the Earth, by Jules Verne
73. The Legend of Drizzt Series, by R.A. Salvatore
74. Old Man's War, by John Scalzi
75. The Diamond Age, by Neil Stephenson
76. Rendezvous With Rama, by Arthur C. Clarke
77. The Kushiel's Legacy Series, by Jacqueline Carey
78. The Dispossessed, by Ursula K. LeGuin
79. Something Wicked This Way Comes, by Ray Bradbury
80. Wicked, by Gregory Maguire
81. The Malazan Book of the Fallen Series, by Steven Erikson
82. The Eyre Affair, by Jasper Fforde
83. The Culture Series, by Iain M. Banks
84. The Crystal Cave, by Mary Stewart
85. Anathem, by Neal Stephenson
86. The Codex Alera Series, by Jim Butcher
87. The Book of the New Sun, by Gene Wolfe
88. The Thrawn Trilogy, by Timothy Zahn
89. The Outlander Series, by Diana Gabaldon
90. The Elric Saga, by Michael Moorcock
91. The Illustrated Man, by Ray Bradbury
92. Sunshine, by Robin McKinley
93. A Fire Upon the Deep, by Vernor Vinge
94. The Caves of Steel, by Isaac Asimov
95. The Mars Trilogy, by Kim Stanley Robinson
96. Lucifer's Hammer, by Larry Niven & Jerry Pournelle
97. Doomsday Book*, by Connie Willis
98. Perdido Street Station, by China Miéville
99. The Xanth Series, by Piers Anthony
100. The Space Trilogy, by C.S. Lewis

I've seen this meme in a couple of different versions, in the journals of

oursin,

yhlee and

frightened.

The books listed below are the top 106 books most often marked as "unread" by LibraryThing's users (as of whenever this meme started circulating, I presume).

The instructions that came with the meme said: As usual, bold what you have read, italicise what you started but couldn't finish, and strike through what you couldn't stand. The version from

frightened adds: Add an asterisk to those you've read more than once. Underline those on your to-read list.

I’ve bolded the ones I’ve read, underlined the ones on my to-read list, and added an asterisk to those I’ve read more than once (in whole or in part). I rarely stop reading a book, and none of the ones I’ve read here were among the few that I’ve been unable to finish.

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
Anna Karenina
Crime and Punishment
Catch-22
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Wuthering Heights
The Silmarillion *
Life of Pi: A Novel
The Name of the Rose
Don Quixote
Moby Dick
Ulysses *
Madame Bovary
The Odyssey *
Pride and Prejudice *
Jane Eyre *
A Tale of Two Cities
The Brothers Karamazov *
Guns, Germs, and Steel: the Fates of Human Societies
War and Peace
Vanity Fair
The Time Traveler's Wife
The Iliad *
Emma *
The Blind Assassin
The Kite Runner
Mrs. Dalloway
Great Expectations
American Gods
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
Atlas Shrugged
Reading Lolita in Tehran : A Memoir in Books
Memoirs of a Geisha
Middlesex
Quicksilver
Wicked : the Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West
The Canterbury Tales *
The Historian : A Novel
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Love in the Time of Cholera
Brave New World *
The Fountainhead
Foucault's Pendulum
Middlemarch
Frankenstein
The Count of Monte Cristo
Dracula
A Clockwork Orange
Anansi Boys
The Once and Future King *
The Grapes of Wrath
The Poisonwood Bible : A Novel
1984 *
Angels & Demons
The Inferno
The Satanic Verses
Sense and Sensibility *
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Mansfield Park *
One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest
To the Lighthouse
Tess of the D'Urbervilles
Gulliver's Travels
Les misérables [Some parts in French, the whole in English.]
The Corrections
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time
Dune *
The Prince
The Sound and the Fury
Angela's Ashes : A Memoir
The God of Small Things
A People's History of the United States : 1492-Present [actually, I’m reading this now, but I will finish it, so…]
Cryptonomicon
Neverwhere
A Confederacy of Dunces
A Short History of Nearly Everything
Dubliners
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Beloved
Slaughterhouse-five
The Scarlet Letter
Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation
The Mists of Avalon *
Oryx and Crake : A Novel
Collapse : How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed
Cloud Atlas
The Confusion
Lolita
Persuasion *
Northanger Abbey *
The Catcher in the Rye
On the Road
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Freakonomics : A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance : An Inquiry into Values *
The Aeneid *
Watership Down
Gravity's Rainbow
The Hobbit *
In Cold Blood : A True Account of a Multiple Murder and its Consequences
White Teeth
Treasure Island
David Copperfield
The Three Musketeers

So I was wandering through friends-of-friends-of-friends pages looking for interesting books reviews and recommendations, and I happened across this list that purported to contain the 1,001 books one should read before one dies.

I have not read very many of them. Alas, by the standards of the creator of this particular list, I am shockingly ill-read. I note that I have read very little of what is considered important literature (at least according to the creator of this list) from roughly the last 50 years, with the exception of important science fiction. There are certainly some authors on the list that I want to read, and want to read more of, but even were I to read everything I wanted to, I’d have read considerably less than half of the books on the list.

(Sept. 10/07) Edit: I've decided to revist this list from time to time, becasue there are books on this list I plan to read. Edit dates entered in the list refer to date of edit, not date the book was read.

( “2000s” )

( Read more... )

( Read more... )

( Read more... )

( Read more... )

All told. I’ve read about 175 of the 1,001 on the list - I lost count a couple of times and didn't really want to start over from the beginning.

It’s a flawed list in many ways, although at least it does have books by women and even a few by authors writing outside of the Western European tradition, which makes it better than some I’ve seen. It seems to be more of an author’s list than a booklist, though – for some authors, it lists almost all of their works, even the weaker ones, thus taking up places that might have otherwise have gone to other authors I happen to think are just as noteworthy, and ones that I’m glad I read before I died.