June 08, 2014

Read 100 works in world literature

I love books. I am not an avid reader but a very slow reader. I appreciate each word, as I would be savoring each bite of a unique and delicate meal, preferably dessert. My preference goes for the big and heavy books, as you never have enough of a refined dessert…

For me, books are a tangible source of knowledge and comfort, an invitation to an unknown journey… I need to pile them up as if I was afraid that one day I would be running out of it. In a bookstore I feel like a child in a candy store. It is hard to walk away without a new book. I am an obsessive and compulsive book collector.

My father would buy most of the books, they would recommend in his favorite literary talk show but would barely read them, as he was already busy reading nearly every single article of his daily newspaper. The accumuation of all those books in the attic like a precious treasure was driving my mum batty.

I am very similar to my father in this regard. My books are a precious treasure. I may have more books that I will ever read in my entire life and I still make list of books to buy…

My literary tastes might look eclectic but the books that I picked for this list have all in common to sharpen my appetite for travel… the trip can take the form of a spiritual journey or the discovery of a different culture. I sprinkled with a few classics for the sake of my ignorance…

1. My african journey by Winston Churchill
2. Soul mountain by Gao Xingjian
3. The dream of the celt by Mario Vargas Llosa
4. Kafka on the shore by Haruki Murakami
5. The shadow of the wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafon
6. Them by Joyce Carol Oates
7. The Cairo trilogy by Naguib Mahfouz
8. Ake, the years of childhood by Wole Soyinka
9. The home and the world by Rabindranath Tagore
10. Black box by Amos Oz
11. The remains of the day by Kazuo Ishiguro
12. The god of small things by Arundhati Roy
13. Ibis Trilogy by Amitav Gosh
14. The little prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
15. The catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger
16. Sunset oasis by Bahaa Taher
17. Travels to Jerusalem and the Holy Land by François René Chateaubriand
18. Baltasar and Blimunda by Jose Saramago
19. Snow by Orhan Pamuk
20. The stranger by Albert Camus
21. Germinal by Emile Zola
22. Eugenie Grandet by Honoré de Balzac
23. The satanic verses by Salman Rushdie
24. Anna Karenine by Léon Tolstoï
25. The arabian nights
26. The lover by Marguerite Duras
27. Dangerous liaison by Pierre Choderlos de Laclos
28. In search of lost time by Marcel Proust
29. Candide by Voltaire
30. Crime eand punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
31. Alice’s adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Caroll
32. Around the world in 80 days by Jules Verne
33. A sentimental education by Gustave Flaubert
34. The pessoptimist by Emile Habibi
35. The confessions by Jean-Jacques Rousseau
36. Les miserables by Victor Hugo
37. Kim by Rudyard Kipling
38. The grapes of wrath by John Steinbeck
39. The Charterhouse of Parma by Stendhal
40. The devil’s pool by George Sand
41. The count of Monte-Christo by Alexandre Dumas
42. Tropic of cancer by Henry Miller
43. Out of Africa by Karen Blixen
44. The castle by Franz Kafka
45. Don quixote by Miguel de Cervantes
46. The upstart peasant by Marivaux
47. The adventures of Huckleberry by Mark Twain
48. Congo by David Van Reybrouck
49. One hundred years of solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
50. Gargantua and Pantagruel by Francois Rabelais
51. The 120 days of Sodom by Marquis de Sade
52. Azazel by Youssef Ziedan
53. Shira by Samuel Joseph Agnon
54. The three musketeers by Alexandre Dumas
55. The sun also rises by Ernest Hemingway
56. West with the night by Beryl Markham
57. Jacques the fatalist by Denis Diderot
58. Fear and trembling by Amelie Nothomb
59. David Copperfield by Charles Dickens
60. Uncle Tom’s cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe
61. Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë
62. The athenian murders by Jose Carlos Somoza
63. Bel-Ami by Guy de Maupassant
64. The picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde
65. The autobiography of Malcom X by Alex Haley
66. Ulysses by James Joyce
67. The handsome jew by Ali Al-Muqri
68. The mandarins by Simone de Beauvoir
69. Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
70. Children of the new world by Assia Djebar
71. In cold blood by Truman capote
72. The human stain by Philip Roth
73. Jazz by Toni Morrison
74. A bend in the river by Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul
75. The english patient by Michael Ondaatje
76. The shining by Stephen King
77. The spy who came in from cold by John Le Carré
78. The name of the rose by Umberto Eco
79. A prayer for Owen Meany by John Irving
80. The New-York trilogy by Paul Auster
81. Schindler’s list by Thomas Keneally
82. The dark child by Camara Laye
83. To kill a mocking bird by Harper Lee
84. Before night falls by Reinaldo Arenas
85. My father’s glory by Marcel Pagnol
86. The complete Sherlock Holmes by Arthur Conan Doyle
87. The collected stories by Isaac Bashevis Singer
88. Nausea by Jean-Paul Sartre
89. The bachelor girl by Victor Margueritte
90. The great Gasby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
91. Middlemarch by George Eliot
92. Fables by Jean de la Fontaine
93. Pride and prejudice by Jane Austen
94. Travels in the Congo by Andre Gide
95. Republic by Plato
96. Losing my virginity by Richard Branson
97. Agaat by Marlene Van Niekerk
98. Balbala by Abdourahman Ali Waberi
99. Long walk to freedom by Nelson Mandela
100. Bitter lemons by Lawrence Durrell

Happy Reading!

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