12.27.2005

Easton Press 100 Greatest Books Ever Written

One of my goals is to read the "100 Greatest Books Ever Written,” but there are many variations to the 100 greatest books. Therefore, I decided to utilize Easton Press’s list, but I could not find it anywhere. After a long search, I finally found it. The list came from an owner of the 100 books, selling it for a whopping $6000.00, but if you do the calculations right, it doesn’t seem that much considering the actual cost, and individual shipping of the books the previous owner must of spent. Anyway, after the difficult search I decided to put this list on my blog for my bookish people to find. Also, I know some of the books I’m sure not going to read for example Politics and Poetics by Aristotle; I have read some literature by Aristotle in college, and I’m sure some would differ, but to me it maybe dry.

The List:

1. A Journal of the Plague Year by Daniel Defoe
2. A Portrait of the Artist As a Young Man by James Joyce
3. A Tale of Two Cities by Dickens
4. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Twain
5. Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by A. Conan Doyle
6. Aesop's Fables
7. Alice's Adventures in Wonderland by Carroll
8. Anna Karenina by Tolstoy
9. Billy Budd/Benito Cereno by Herman Melville
10. Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
11. Candide by Voltaire
12. Crime and Punishment by Dostoevsky
13. David Copperfield by Dickens
14. Don Quixote by Cervantes
15. Euripedes by Euripedes
16. Fathers and Sons by Ivan Turgenev
17. Faust by Goethe
18. Great Expectations by Dickens
19. Grimm's Fairy Tales by Grimm
20. Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift
21. Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
22. The History of Early Rome by Livy
23. Ivanhoe by Walter Scott
24. Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte
25. Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy
26. Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman
27. Little Women by Alcott
28. Lord Jim by Conrad
29. Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
30. Moby Dick by Herman Melville
31. Oedipus the King by Sophocles
32. Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck
33. On the Origin of Species by Darwin
34. Paradise Lost by John Milton
35. Plato Dialogues on Love and Friendship by Plato
36. Poems of John Keats by Keats
37. Politics and Poetics by Aristotle
38. Pride & Prejudice by Jane Austen
39. The Rights of Man by Paine
40. Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe
41. She Stoops To Conquer by Goldsmith
42. Short Stories by Oscar Wild
43. Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Stevenson
44. Tales of Mystery and Imagination by Poe
45. The Federalist by Hamilton
46. The Aeneid by Virgil
47. The Alhambra by Washington Irving
48. The Analects of Confucius by Confucius
49. The Arabian Nights by Burton
50. The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin by Franklin
51. The Birds and the Frogs by Aristophanes
52. The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky
53. The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer
54. The Comedies by Shakespeare
55. The Confessions of Jean by Jacques Rousseau
56. The Confessions of St. Augustine by Augustine
57. The Decameron by Boccaccio
58. The Descent of Man by Darwin
59. The Divine Comedy by Dante
60. The Essayes by Francis Bacon
61. The Essays of Ralph Waldo Emerson by Emerson
62. The Flowers of Evil by Charles Baudelaire
63. The Histories by Shakespeare
64. The Iliad of Homer by Homer
65. The Jungle Books by Rudyard Kipling
66. The Last of the Mohicans by James Fenimore Cooper
67. The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman by Laurence Stern
68. The Mill on the Floss by George Eliot
69. The Odyssey of Homer by Homer
70. The Oresteia by Aeschylus
71. The Pilgrim's Progress by John Bunyan
72. The Poems of John Donne by Donne
73. The Poems of Robert Browning by Browning
74. The Poems of W.B. Yeats by Yeats
75. The Portrait of a Lady by Henry James
76. The Prince by Machiavelli
77. The Red and the Black by Stendhal
78. The Red Badge of Courage by Stephen Crane
79. The Republic by Plato
80. The Return of the Native by Thomas Hardy
81. The Scarlet Letter by Hawthorne
82. The Sea Wolf by Jack London
83. The Short Stories by Dickens
84. The Tales of Guy de Maupassant by De Maupassant
85. The Talisman by Scott
86. The Three Musketeers by Dumas
87. The Tragedies by Shakespeare
88. The Way of all Flesh by Butler
89. Three Plays by Henrik Ibsen
90. Tom Jones by Henry Fielding
91. Treasure Island by Stevenson
92. Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea by Jules Verne
93. Two Plays by Moliere
94. Two Plays for Puritans by George Bernard Shaw
95. Two Plays The Cherry Orchard/Three Sisters by Anton Chekhov
96. Uncle Tom's Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe
97. Vanity Faire by William Makepeace Thackeray
98. Walden by Thoreau
99. War and Peace by Tolstoy
100. Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

Many of these "books" are not books, they are plays, epic poems, collections of poems, collections of essays and collections of short stories. I feel that Easton Press should have given the list a different name, maybe the 100 Greatest Works of Literature or something.

Anonymous said...

or you could make your own list to read....instead of someone else who decided that these are definitively the best books ever written.
have you seen their commercial? They try to persuade you to have more books so people are impressed by how many books you have- and because the edges of the pages are gold, the books are better.

Valisa said...

Actually, I haven't seen any of Easton Press' commercials, but I do get their pamphlet in the mail. Also, I haven't bought a book or read a book to impress anyone. Mainly, I posted Easton Press' list of 100 Greatest Books because I was interested in reading books that are highly recommended, for they would be worth the reading time. Many of the books in Easton Press' list are consistent to other popular 100 Greatest Books. People review books, talk about books, write about books to make book lovers aware of great reading material, which could easily be obscured by popular fiction/nonfiction, not to mention there are a plethora of books out there to be read. With such limited time, it helps to look at list composed by other.

In addition, I did write a little piece on people who collect books for aesthetic or ostentatious reasons.

Maybe someday, I will write my own list.

Anonymous said...

From what I have seen online the list of 100 greatest books has actually changed. Some have been added and some have been removed. Supposedly there are actually 125 books in the collection. If someone says they are selling a complete set of 100 books, it may be erroneous. I have seen an online list of 125 books before. Here is a link to such a list:

http://hubpages.com/hub/Easton-Press-Top-100-Books-Ever-Written

Steve W. said...

I think the titles in the Franklin Library 100 Greatest are better.