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The Strand 80


In 2007, as part of its 80th birthday celebration, the Strand Bookstore at the corner of 12th and Broadway in New York City (famous for its slogan “18 Miles of Books”) decided to poll its customers for their 80 favorite books. There are some surprising books on this list, which is made up almost exclusively of fiction. There are many I've read, and a few I'd like to try. Here’s the list they came up with (the books I’ve read are bolded):

To Kill a Mockingbird, by Harper Lee
Pride and Prejudice, by Jane Austen
The Great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzgerald
Catcher in the Rye, by JD Salinger
Atlas Shrugged, by Ayn Rand
The Fountainhead, by Ayn Rand
The Fellowship of the Rings, by JRR Tolkien
One Hundred Years of Solitude, by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Bronte
Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, by JK Rowling
Lolita, by Vladimir Nabokov
1984, by George Orwell
On the Road, by Jack Kerouac
Gone With the Wind, by Margaret Mitchell
Anna Karenina, by Leo Tolstoy
The Brothers Karamazov, by Fyodor Dostoevsky
Crime and Punishment, by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, by Betty Smith
Slaughter-House Five, by Kurt Vonnegut
Ulysses, by James Joyce
The Kite Runner, by Khaled Hosseini
Catch-22, by Joseph Heller
The Grapes of Wrath, by John Steinbeck
East of Eden, by John Steinbeck
The Sun Also Rises, by Ernest Hemmingway
War and Peace, by Leo Tolstoy
The Hobbit, by JRR Tolkien
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, by JK Rowling
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, by Michael Chabon
Wuthering Heights, by Emily Bronte
A Prayer For Owen Meaney, by John Irving

The Count of Monte Cristo, by Alexandre Dumas
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, by Lewis Carroll
The Stranger, by Albert Camus
Brave New World, by Aldous Huxley
Little Women, by Louisa May Alcott
Middlesex, by Jeffrey Eugenides
Moby Dick, by Herman Melville

The Alchemist, by Paul Coelho
Les Miserables, by Victor Hugo
A Tale of Two Cities, by Charles Dickens
Anthem, by Ayn Rand
The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, by Haruki Murakami
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, by Mark Twain
In Cold Blood, by Truman Capote
Cat’s Cradle, by Kurt Vonnegut
Love in the Time of Cholera, by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
The Little Prince, by Antoine De Saint-Eupery
The Time Traveler’s Wife, by Audrey Niffenegger
Invisible Man, by Ralph Ellison
The Unbearable Lightness of Being, by Milan Kundera
The Bell Jar, by Sylvia Plath

The World According to Garp, by John Irving
Middlemarch, by George Eliot
To the Lighthouse, by Virginia Woolf
The Poisonwood Bible, by Barbara Kingsolver
Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, by JK Rowling
Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, by JK Rowling

The Old Man and the Sea, by Ernest Hemingway
Ender’s Game, by Orson Scott Card
Bleak House, by Charles Dickens
Beloved, by Toni Morrison
Great Expectations, by Charles Dickens
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, by Dave Eggers
Fight Club, by Chuck Palahniuk
The Sound and the Fury, by William Faulkner
Mrs. Dalloway, by Virginia Woolf
The Giver, by Lois Lowry
Master and Margarita, by Mikhail Bulgakov
Blindness, by Jose Saramago
Life of Pi, by Yann Martel
Madame Bovary, by Gustave Flaubert
Where the Wild Things Are, by Maurice Sendak
The Chronicles of Narnia, by CS Lewis
The Odyssey, by Homer
The Da Vinci Code, by Dan Brown
Franny and Zooey, by JD Salinger

A Wrinkle in Time, by Madeleine L’Engle
Everything is Illuminated, by Jonathan Safran Foer
The Picture of Dorian Gray, by Oscar Wilde
The Handmaid’s Tale, by Margaret Atwood
(tied with The Picture of Dorian Gray, so this is really "The Strand 81")

Feel free to use this list in your own blog, bolding the one's you've read. So I was thinking: How many people here might be interested in participating in a challenge re: this list?

Comments

I think it would be great to do that challenge! I'm going to do the list on my blog and see how many I have read so far. My problem will be I'll want to buy all of them rather than getting them at the library or something. I think I own about half of them. My "to be read" pile is growing daily. *sigh* so many books so little time!
Amanda said…
What a great list! I have a ton of those on my to-read-list and it would be a great challenge!
Anonymous said…
I think it would be a great challenge, even though I can't believe how many of them I have read and how many are on my TBR list right now. Thanks for sharing. If you get the challenge together, let us all know.
Laura said…
Wow--you've read a good chunk of the 80! As I was reading the list, I was totally thinking that this list had "challenge" written all over it!
Unknown said…
That's a very high-brow list for a popularity poll. It speaks very well of the Strand's customers.

I go to the Strand everytime I'm in New York. It's one of the best bookstores in the country.

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