Major works of literature I’ve read

Here is a pretty complete list of literature (excluding short stories and poems) that I’ve read. I tend to go for quality over quantity.

My favorites:

• Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky
• A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole
• The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco
• The Glass Menagerie by Tennessee Williams
• Beowulf

I very much liked these:

• Great Expectations by Charles Dickens
• Don Quixote (part 1) by Cervantes
• Gulliver’s Travels by Johnathan Swift
• The Hobbit by J. R. R. Tolkien
• The Lord of the Rings by J. R. R. Tolkien
• The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams
• To Kill A Mockingbird by Harper Lee
• Tess of the D’Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy
• The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas
• The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
• The Hound of the Baskervilles by Arthur Conan Doyle
• 2001: A Space Odyssey by Arthur C. Clarke
• The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe by C. S. Lewis
• Prince Caspian by C. S. Lewis
• The Horse and his Boy by C. S. Lewis
• Pygmalion by George Bernard Shaw
• The Importance of Being Earnest by Oscar Wilde
• Lady Windemere’s Fan by Oscar Wilde
• Divine Commedy by Dante

I liked these:

• The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas
• A Study in Scarlet by Arthur Conan Doyle
• Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stephenson
• A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens
• Focault’s Pendulum by Umberto Eco
• War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
• The Silmarillion by J. R. R. Tolkien
• The Lost World by Arthur Conan Doyle
• The Restaurant at the End of the Universe by Douglas Adams
• Life, the Universe, and Everything by Douglas Adams
• So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish by Douglas Adams
• Mostly Harmless by Douglas Adams
• Animal Farm by George Orwell
• 1984 by George Orwell
• Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
• For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemmingway
• Voyage of the Dawn Treader by C. S. Lewis
• The Magicians Nephew by C. S. Lewis
• The Last Battle by C. S. Lewis
• Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll
• Through the Looking-Glass by Lewis Carroll
• Don Quixote de La Mancha, Part One, by Miguel de Cervantes
• 20,000 Leagues under the Sea by Jules Verne (audio)
• The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
• A Streetcar Named Desire by Tennessee Williams
• Death of a Salesman by Arthur Miller
• Picasso at the Lapin Agile by Steve Martin
• The Iliad by Homer

These I didn’t like too much:

• Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
• Journey to the Center of the Earth by Jules Verne
• The Silver Chair by C. S. Lewis
• Inherit the Wind by Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee
• Our Town by Thorton Wilder
• Oedipus Rex by Sophocles

I completely disliked these:

• A Separate Peace by Anthony Trolloge
• My Antonia by Willa Cather
• Antigone by Sophocles

These are the books I’ve found too boring to finish (so far):

• The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay by Michael Chabon
• Moby Dick by Herman Melville
• Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe (in fairness, it was fine until it should have been over)

Then there is Shakespeare. I find it too hard to pin down exactly how much I liked most of the plays; it changes all the time. Each one I’ve read twice was better the second time. The ones I liked, roughly in order:

• Macbeth
• The Taming of the Shrew
• King Lear
• Romeo and Juliet
• A Midsummer Night’s Dream
• Hamlet
• Julius Caesar
• As You Like It
• I Henry IV
• Richard III
• Measure for Measure
• The Tempest
• Othello, the Moor of Venice

And the ones I didn’t like:

• Much Ado About Nothing
• Coriolanus

And the ones I found too boring to finish:

• Love’s Labour’s Lost