THE GREAT READ

I've been fooling around with the design of the blog and feeling a little more comfortable each time I make an attempt at improving the layout, etc.  But that's not what I want to talk about today.

I think one of the greatest gifts we can give to children is the licence to explore anything that fuels their imagination and creativity.  And the thing that stands at the top of my list is reading.

Thankfully, I was blessed with parents who appreciated a good book and so, at a young age, I began to devour everything and anything that I could get my hands on, beginning with fairy tales and working my way up through many of the classics and volumes of short stories by Somerset Maugham that took me to exotic lands and characters that heightened my imagination and provided the impetus for my own writing path.

Speaking of great readers:

It seems there was a man employed by the Manitoba Provincial Government who was relegated to the back room of the department he worked in and given nothing to do.  Because he was still retained at the same salary, he devised a way of keeping busy by reading.  Apparently, in the course of four years, he read through 156 novels.  The list is impressive because it contains the works of most of the greatest writers in the English language.  It was fun to check the list and discover how many of these books I had read.

I've posted the list below in the hope that it inspires and encourages you to pick up one of these books and discover whole new worlds and characters who remain with you long after you have finished the last page.

Of course, there's more to the story of how Mr. Dalgliesh got to be a great reader.  Here's the link if you want the back story:


Link to full article

Jack Dalgliesh’s reading list:

The Great Gatsby – F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Catcher in the Rye – J.D. Salinger
The Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck
To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee
The Color Purple – Alice Walker
Beloved – Tony Morrison
The Lord of the Flies – William Golding
1984 – George Orwell
The Sound and the Fury – William Faulkner
Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov
Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck
Charlotte’s Web – E.B. White
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man – James Joyce
Catch-22 – Joseph Heller
Brave New World – Aldous Huxley
Animal Farm – George Orwell
The Sun Also Rises – Ernest Hemingway
A Farewell to Arms – Ernest Hemingway
Winnie the Pooh – A.A. Milne
Invisible Man – Ralph Ellison
One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest – Ken Kesey
Slaughterhouse Five – Kurt Vonnegut
For Whom the Bell Tolls – Ernest Hemingway
On the Road – Jack Kerouac
The Old Man and the Sea – Ernest Hemingway
The Call of the Wild – Jack London
To the Lighthouse – Virginia Wolfe
Portrait of a Lady – Henry James
Go Tell It on the Mountain – James Baldwin
The World According to Garp – John Irving
All the King’s Men – Robert Penn Warren
A Room with a View – E.M. Forster
The Lord of the Rings – J.R.R. Tolkien
Schindler’s List – Thomas Keneally
The Age of Innocence – Edith Wharton
The Fountainhead – Ayn Rand
The Jungle – Upton Sinclair
Mrs. Dalloway – Virginia Wolfe
The Wonderful Wizard of Oz – L. Frank Baum
Lady Chatterley’s Lover – D.H. Lawrence
A Clockwork Orange – Anthony Burgess
The Awakening – Kate Chopin
My Antonia – Willa Cather
Howard’s End – E.M. Forster
In Cold Blood – Truman Capote
Franny and Zooey – J.D. Salinger
The Satanic Verses – Salman Rushdie
Sophie’s Choice – William Styron
A Passage to India – E.M. Forster
A Good Man is Hard to Find – Flannery O’Connor
Tender is the Night – F. Scott Fitzgerald
A Separate Peace – John Knowles
Rebecca – Daphne du Maurier
A Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams
Naked Lunch – William S. Burroughs
Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh
Women in Love – D.H. Lawrence
Look Homeward, Angel – Thomas Wolfe
The Autobiography of Alice B. Tokias – Gertrude Stein
The Maltese Falcon – Dashiell Hammett
The Naked and the Dead – Norman Mailer
Wide Sargasso Sea – Jean Rhys
White Noise – Don DeLillo
O Pioneers – Willa Cather
Tropic of Cancer – Henry Miller
The War of the Worlds – H.G. Wells
Lord Jim – Joseph Conrad
The Bostonians – Henry James
An American Tragedy – Theodore Dreiser
Death Comes for the Archbishop – Willa Cather
Atlas Shrugged – Ayn Rand
The French Lieutenant’s Woman – John Fowles
Babbit – Sinclair Lewis
Kim – Rudyard Kipling
Rabbit, Run – John Updike
Main Street – Sinclair Lewis
Darkness at Noon – Arthur Koestler
Under the Volcano – Malcolm Lowry
The Way of all Flesh – Samuel Butler
I, Claudius – Robert Graves
The Heart is a Lonely Hunter – Carson McCullers
Henderson the Rain King – Saul Bellow
The Ambassadors – Henry James
The Good Soldier – Ford Madox Ford
Sister Carrier – Theodore Dreiser
The Bridge of San Luis Rey – Thornton Wilder
The Heart of the Matter – Graham Greene
Deliverance – James Dickey
The Secret Agent – Joseph Conrad
Portnoy’s Complaint – Philip Roth
The Wapshot Chronicle – John Cheever
The Day of the Locust – Nathanael West
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie – Muriel Spark
The Adventures of Augie March – Saul Bellow
Ragtime – E.L. Doctorow
The Old Wives’ Tale – Arnold Bennett
Loving – Henry Green
Tobacco Road – Erskine Caldwell
Ironweed – William Kennedy
The Postman Always Rings Twice – James Cain
The Ginger Man – J.P. Donleavy
Don Quixote – Miguel de Cervantes
War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy
Moby Dick – Herman Melville
Emma – Jane Austen
Great Expectations – Charles Dickens
Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte
Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen
Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte
Robinson Crusoe – Daniel Defoe
The Last of the Mohicans – James Cooper
Uncle Tom’s Cabin – Harriet Beecher Stowe
Les Miserables – Victor Hugo
Frankenstein – Mary Shelley
Dracula – Bram Stoker
The Three Musketeers – Alexandre Dumas
The Hound of the Baskervilles – Arthur Conan Doyle
The Transit of Venus – Shirley Hazzard
The Sportswriter – Richard Ford
A Dark-Adapted Eye – Barbara Vine
Breathing Lessons – Anne Tyler
The Bonfire of the Vanities – Tom Wolfe
Housekeeping – Marilynne Robinson
The Road – Cormac McCarthy
Black Water – Joyce Oates
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius – Dave Eggers
American Pastoral – Philip Roth
Rabbit at Rest – John Updike
Case Histories – Kate Atkinson
The Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro
The Stone Diaries – Carol Shields
Gilead – Marilynne Robinson
The Ruins – Scott Smith
A Thousand Acres – Jane Smiley
Kaaterskill Falls – Allegra Goodman
Atonement – Ian McEwan
Alias Grace – Margaret Atwood
Blind Assassin – Margaret Atwood
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer – Mark Twain
Stone Angel – Margaret Laurence
The Diviners – Margaret Laurence
Elementary Particles – Michael Hovellelnceq
The Female Eunuch – Germaine Greer
The Feminine Mystique – Betty Friedan
Treasure Island – Robert Louis Stevenson
Return of the Native – Thomas Hardy
Rabbit Redux – John Updike
Rabbit is Rich – John Updike
The Human Stain – Philip Roth
Independence Day – Richard Ford
Disclosure – Michael Crichton
Last Orders – Graham Swift
Fall on Your Knees – Anne-Marie McDonald
No Country for Old Men – Cormac McCarthy
We Were the Mulvaneys – Joyce Carol Oates
Accidental Tourist – Anne Tyler

Whew!  That was some list.  All right now, how many of those books have you read?  Better yet, how many would you like to read?