The Greatest Books You’ll Ever Read

I’ve decided that I’m not a true-blue thrift store shopper. I understand that thrift stores have hit their second-wind with people my age, yet somehow I missed it or it missed me. But when Value Village has its 50% off sale the last Wednesday of every month, you’re crazy not to go. So go, I did. And what should I find but a few bookshelves in the back left corner of the store, tucked away next to the employee lounge pumping out music our friends over at Notes could critique for days on end.

If Books Could Talk…
Have you ever thought about the life of a book? How does it end up on the trash heap of bookdom: the bookshelves at Value Village? It rolled off the press just like all its other brothers and sisters, but instead of lining the shelf of a grateful elderly couple’s well-kept library or the rickety but oft-visited book case in the back of a junior high classroom, it’s shamefully wedged between two harlequin romance novels in a thrift store by way of a community college student’s five-week stab at English 101.

It Takes All Kinds
The selection and presentation of books in discount stores always interests me. I can’t help but wonder whose job it is to shelve them. At the risk of sounding like a lit snob, it’s either humorous or disconcerting for a self-diagnosed selectively OCD sufferer to jump arbitrarily from Tom Clancy to Anton Chekov to Jackie Collins to The Dummies Guide to DOS. But six books and $5.25 later, I’m not complaining. I left with John Steinbeck, Anton Chekov, a World Literature textbook, and a Norton Anthology to Short Fiction.

Which Reminds Me
Over the last few months I’ve been trying to compile (“whittle down” might be more accurate) a list of the greatest literature across all time periods around the globe—a pretty hefty job it turns out. Right away it seemed easiest to start by authors. I want to share with you what I have so far (thanks to invaluable input from a good friend) and invite your feedback.

Essential World Literature (a Working List)

• Homer, Odyssey
  
• Beowulf


• Chaucer, Canterbury Tales


• Dante, Inferno


• Virgil, Aenid (Book 2: Fall of Troy)


• Milton, Paradise Lost


• George Herbert


• Shakespeare


• Jane Austen


• Charles Dickens


• Jonathan Swift


• Tolstoy, Master & Man / Father Sergius/ Anna Karenina


• Dostoyevsky, Grand Inquisitor


• Chekov, “The Bishop”


• T.S. Eliot – Four Quartets / Wasteland


• Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury / As I Lay Dying


• Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby


• Flannery O’Conner, “Parker’s Back” / “Revelation” / “Good Man is Hard to Find” / “Temple of the HG” / “Everything that Rises Must Converge”


• Richard Wright, Native Son


• Alice MunroeMurakami, “Burning Barn” / “Oh God”


• Ondaatje, English Patient


• Jumphai Lauri, Malady


• Gabriel Garcia Marquez


• Borges


• Graham Greene, Power & the Glory / End of the Affair / Quiet


• CS Lewis – The Screwtape Letters


• G. Orwell - Essays


• Flaubert / Hugo / Balzac


• Saul Bellow / Bernard Malamud


• Chinua Achebe

You Be the Judge
Everyone has his own picks, and there are tons of “100 Greatest Novels” lists out there. But what do you think? What am I missing? If you had to cut my list in half, how would you? Thanks for sharing your thoughts.