Some friends have asked me to elaborate on the books (fiction / literature) I have listed in my profile. So I’m providing the names of the authors, and some links. I've added a few titles, which could not be accommodated in the list within the text limits set by Blogger. The order is more or less according to when I read the book, with the first one read in 1969, and the last one being what I'm now reading.
The Coral Island, RM Ballantyne
Count of Monte Cristo, Alexander Dumas
David Copperfield, Charles Dickens
The Spanish Gardener, AJ Cronin
Tarzan, Edgar Rice Burroughs
The Book of One Thousand and One Nights
She, H Rider Haggard
Madame Curie, Eve Curie
Vanity Fair, WM Thackeray
Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain
Mahabharata
Cry, The Beloved Country, Alan Paton
Travels with My Aunt, Graham Greene
The Old Man and the Sea, Ernest Hemingway
The Little Prince, Antoine Saint de Exupery
Animal Farm, George Orwell
One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, Alexander Solzhenitsyn
Don Camillo, Giovannino Guareschi
Ragtime, EL Doctorow
The Importance of Being Ernest, Oscar Wilde
Nineteen Eighty Four, George Orwell
Death of a Salesman, Arthur Miller
Herself Surprised, Joyce Cary
Waiting for Godot, Samuel Beckett
Catch 22, Joseph Heller
My God Died Young, Sasthi Brata
The Collected Stories of Guy de Maupassant
Untouchable, Mulk Raj Anand
The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck
Cannery Row, John Steinbeck
The Winter of Our Discontent, John Steinbeck
To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee
The Other, Thomas Tryon
Crowned Heads, Thomas Tryon
My Family and Other Animals, Gerald Durrell
Other Voices, Other Rooms, Truman Capote
The Work is Innocent, Rafael Yglesias
The Escape Artist, David Wagoner
Where is My Wandering Boy Tonight?, David Wagoner
The Collected Stories of Hortense Calisher
The Nickel Mountain, John Gardener
Face to Face, Ved Mehta
Humboldt's Gift, Saul Bellow
The River of Blood, Indira Parthasarathy
Because of the Cats, Nicolas Freeling
How Green Was My Valley, Richard Llewellyn
Ruslan and Ludmila, Alexander Pushkin
The Captain's Daughter, Alexander Pushkin
Moby Dick, Herman Melville
Fathers and Sons, Ivan Turgenev
The Tin Drum, Gunter Grass
The Magic Mountain, Thomas Mann
The Stories of Nathaniel Hawthorne
Bullet Park, John Cheever
Cat's Cradle, Kurt Vonnegut, Jr
Revolutionary Road, Richard Yates
Gimpel the Fool, Isaac Bashevis Singer
The Castaway, JG Cozzens
In the Beginning, Chaim Potok
The Adventures of Herbie Bookbinder, Herman Wouk
Collected Works of Edgar Allan Poe
I, Robot, Isaac Asimov
Farenheit 451, Ray Bradbury
The Stories of Ray Bradbury
Being There, Jerzy Kosinski
A Burnt-Out Case, Graham Greene
The Narrow Corner, Somerset Maugham
Heaven's My Destination, Thornton Wilder
Look Homeward Angel, Thomas Wolfe
Franny & Zooey, JD Salinger
Walden, Henry David Thoreau
The Dark Labyrinth, Lawrence Durrell
The Day of the Locust, Nathanael West
Falling Bodies, Sue Kaufman
Zen & the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Robert Pirsig
Death in Venice, Thomas Mann
Love of Seven Dolls, Paul Gallico
Clear Light of Day, Anita Desai
One Hundred Years of Solitude, Gabriel Garcia Marquez
The Puppeteer's Tale, Manik Bandopadhyay
So Many Hungers, Bhabani Bhattacharya
Gift of a Cow, Premchand
The Journey to the East, Herman Hesse
Life & Times of Michael K, JM Coetzee
Memed My Hawk, Yaşar Kemal
Crime and Punishment, Fyodor Dostoevsky
Chronicle of a Death Foretold, Gabriel Garcia Marquez
The Jungle, Upton Sinclair
The Village by the Sea, Anita Desai
Childhood's End, Arthur J Clarke
Kim, Rudyard Kipling
The Enigma of Arrival, VS Naipaul
The Day Lasts More Than a Hundred Years, Chingiz Aitmatov
The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, Milan Kundera
The Name of the Rose, Umberto Eco
Memoirs of a Survivor, Doris Lessing
Love in the Time of Cholera, Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Songlines, Bruce Chatwin
Into Their Labours, John Berger
The Song of Solomon, Toni Morrison
The Last Days of Louisiana Red, Ishmael Reed
The Asiatics, Fredrick Prokosch
The Man With the Golden Arm, Nelson Algren
The Famished Road, Ben Okri
In the Garden of the North American Martyrs, Tobias Wolf
Ordinary Love & Good Will, Jane Smiley
The Age of Grief, Jane Smiley
In the Skin of a Lion, Michael Ondaatje
The Family of Pascual Duarte, Camilo José Cela
Stones for Ibarra, Harriet Doerr
Lila, Robert Pirsig
Sita's Kitchen, Ramachandra Gandhi
The Storyteller, Mario Vargas Llosa
Maus, Art Spiegelman
The Prophet, Khalil Gibran
The Conference of the Birds, Fariduddin Attar
Baumgartner's Bombay, Anita Desai
Ramayana
Where the Wild Things Are, Maurice Sendak
Invisible Cities, Italo Calvino
The Prince Who Became a Cuckoo, Lo-Dro
The Light of Asia, Edwin Arnold
Old Paths White Clouds, Thich Nhat Hanh
God's Pauper, Nikos Kazantzakis
The Prophets, Abraham Joshua Heschel
Savitri, Sri Aurobindo
The Jataka
An Imaginary Life, David Malouf
The Little Locksmith, Katherine Butler Hathaway
Rouse Up O Young Men of the New Age, Kenzaburo Oe
A Quiet Life, Kenzaburo Oe
Women as Lovers, Elfriede Jelinek
Persepolis, Marjane Satrapi
Blindness, Jose Saramago
All the Names, Jose Saramago
Buddha, Osamu Tezuka
My Name is Red, Orhan Pamuk
Calcutta: A Long Poem, P Lal
2 comments:
Great list, Rama. I could not but help reflecting that while my own reading is very much the same in the beginning (out of the first 25, about 16 are common), it diverges significantly in the middle, and then there is common ground again towards the end. If this list is indeed chronological, I wonder what it says about the intellectual growth of our generation, or about growing up in the company of books in general.
I started maintaining my own list only about a decade back, and is available here if you are interested.
Hullo Bhupi! My list - yes it's more or less chronological. The books I happened to read - were to a large extent a result of the books that were at my home (thanks to my father and aunt), and my use of the American libraries in Calcutta (including the now closed American University Centre).
I would like to read your reflections about "the intellectual growth of our generation, or about growing up in the company of books in general"!
Best
rama
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