Instead of actually reading...

I found this on 50 Books, a blog I've been stalking in recent months. She's great, read her stuff. Anyway she had a link to this article about the 30 books you should read before you die*:

To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
The Bible
The Lord of the Rings Trilogy by JRR Tolkien
1984 by George Orwell
A Christmas Carolby Charles Dickens
Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte
Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
All Quiet on the Western Front by E M Remarque
His Dark Materials Trilogy by Phillip Pullman
Birdsong by Sebastian Faulks
The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
The Lord of the Flies by William Golding
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time by Mark Haddon
Tess of the D'Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy
Winnie the Pooh by AA Milne
Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte
The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Graham
Gone With the Wind by Margaret Mitchell
Great Expectations by Charles Dickens
The Time Traveler's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger
The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold
The Prophet by Khalil Gibran
David Copperfield by Charles Dickens
The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho
The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov
Life of Pi by Yann Martel
Middlemarch by George Eliot
The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver
A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess
A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Alexander Solzenhitsyn

*- I bolded all books I've read (I'm totally counting ones that I only read part of...because I have a habit of dropping books, particularly ones I'm reading for school, with only 15 or so pages to go).

I'm pretty impressed with how much of this list I've conquered, particularly because I find myself reading mostly crap. However, I think that this is a fault of the list more than a dazzling biblophilic feat of mine. A huge number of these books are very contemporary and so, while excellent reads, are probably not going to resonate through the ages like their older counterparts. While I think The Time Traveler's Wife is a wonderful book that should be read by all who really want to believe in desperate, miserable, wonderful, forever Love-with-a-capitol-L-and-a-sigh-at-the-end I don't think it is a more important book than many others I've read (including Don't Lets Go to the Dogs Tonight and Kite Runner both of which I think should be read by everyone).

This list was manufactured by a group of Librarians, which is kind of interesting from a sociological point of view (and by "kind of" I mean "not really" unless you're a big, fat dork like me). When I think of librarians I always think of Mrs. Makela who was the librarian at my elementary school until third grade. She wore sensible black shoes and glasses that hung from a string around her neck. She always wrote in this beautiful style of calligraphy. She was married, I think, and was wonderful and nice and grandmotherly. I know that there are librarians who aren't moments away from cashing those crucial social security checks but I haven't met them (except I totally just got why Time Travelers is on the list, like 80% of it takes place in a library, doi). I guess this is the difference between having Librarians make a list and having English professors make a list.

I am a big book geek. Eventually I'll make my own list.