Nick’s Top 100 Must Read Books

David Bowie recently shared his “Top 100 Must Read Books,” which you can check out here.

I was inspired to eke out my own list. When I look at the results I’m a little embarrassed. The list consists largely of what my parents and my teachers told me to read, plus comics.

100 of anything is a lot. I’ve barely read 100 books that I can give any kind of endorsement. There was no culling in the making of this list. Instead, I found myself limping to the finish line, resisting the urge to BuzzFeedify it down to a smaller number, reluctantly admitting the books that I’d initially discarded, weakening the overall integrity, damaging the literate reputation I sought to build. It was an interesting experience.

Anyway here’s my top 100. I hope it looks very different in ten years.

1. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain
2. The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, Arthur Conan Doyle
3. Aesop’s Fables, Aesop
4. Akira, Katsuhiro Otomo
5. Amerika, Franz Kafka
6. Animalia, Graeme Base
7. Bartleby, the Scrivener, Herman Melville
8. Black Hole, Charles Burns
9. Brave New World, Aldous Huxley
10. The Brothers Karamazov, Fyodor Dostoyevsky
11. Call of the Wild, Jack London
12. Candide, Voltaire
13. The Case of the Midwife Toad, Arthur Koestler
14. Catch-22, Joseph Heller
15. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Roald Dahl
16. Charlotte’s Web, E.B. White
17. A Clockwork Orange, Anthony Burgess
18. Collected Poems, Wallace Stevens
19. Concrete, Thomas Bernhard
20. The Confidence-Man, Herman Melville
21. A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, Mark Twain
22. Cuentos de amor de locura y de muerte, Horacio Quiroga
23. The Crying of Lot 49, Thomas Pynchon
24. Darkness at Noon, Arthur Koestler
25. Death of a Salesman, Arthur Miller
26. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, Philip K. Dick
27. Drunk Enough To Say I Love You?, Caryl Churchill
28. Dubliners, James Joyce
29. The Egoist, George Meredith
30. Encyclopedia Brown: Boy Detective, Donald J. Sobol
31. Exiles, James Joyce
32. The Eye of the World, Robert Jordan
33. Ficciones, Jorge Luis Borges
34. Fortunately, Remy Charlip
35. Foundation, Isaac Asimov
36. The Fountainhead, Ayn Rand
37. From Hell, Alan Moore
38. The Gay Science, Friedrich Nietzsche
39. The Goat, or Who is Sylvia?, Edward Albee
40. Good Morning, Midnight, Jean Rhys
41. Great Expectations, Charles Dickens
42. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams
43. The Hobbit, J.R.R. Tolkein
44. The House at Pooh Corner, A. A. Milne
45. I Saw Esau: The Schoolchild’s Pocket Book, Iona & Peter Opie
46. Ida, Gertrude Stein
47. In Cold Blood, Truman Capote
48. Jimmy Corrigan, the Smartest Kid on Earth, Chris Ware
49. Just So Stories, Rudyard Kipling
50. King Lear, William Shakespeare
51. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, C.S. Lewis
52. Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov
53. Lord Jim, Joseph Conrad
54. Lord of the Flies, William Golding
55. The Lord of the Rings, J.R.R. Tolkein
56. Lunch Poems, Frank O’Hara
57. The Master and Margarita, Mikhail Bulgakov
58. Maus, Art Spiegelman
59. The Metamorphosis, Franz Kafka
60. Moby-Dick, Herman Melville
61. Mrs Dalloway, Virginia Woolf
62. New Grub Street, George Gissing
63. Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist, Walter Kaufmann
64. The Odd Women, George Gissing
65. The Odyssey, Homer
66. The Once and Future King, T. H. White
67. The Ordeal of Richard Feverel, George Meredith
68. Out of the Silent Planet, C.S. Lewis
69. Paradise Lost, John Milton
70. The Phantom Tollbooth, Norton Juster
71. Philosophical Investigations, Ludwig Wittgenstein
72. The Picture of Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde
73. Pierre: or, the Ambiguities, Herman Melville
74. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, James Joyce
75. Redwall, Brian Jacques
76. The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Samuel Taylor Coleridge
77. A Scanner Darkly, Philip K. Dick
78. Secret Agent, Joseph Conrad
79. Shogun, James Clavell
80. The Sirens of Titan, Kurt Vonnegut
81. The Sorrows of Young Werther, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
82. The Story of Ferdinand, Munro Leaf
83. The Stranger, Albert Camus
84. Stranger in a Strange Land, Robert A. Heinlein
85. The Sun Also Rises, Ernest Hemingway
86. Tender Buttons, Gertrude Stein
87. The 13 Clocks, James Thurber
88. The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Milan Kundera
89. The Underwater Welder, Jeff Lemire
90. The Wild Duck, Henrik Ibsen
91. Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Friedrich Nietzsche
92. Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, Ludwig Wittgenstein
93. Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, Jules Verne
94. Ulysses, James Joyce
95. Waiting for the Barbarians, J.M. Coetzee
96. Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, Edward Albee
97. Wide Sargasso Sea, Jean Rhys
98. Wieland, Charles Brockden Brown
99. World Without End, Molly Cochran & Warren Murphy
100. Y: The Last Man, Brian K. Vaughan