Philonoist.net

Sometime during my freshman year at Olin, the library called for submissions to create a list of 100 novels. In retrospect, I can’t recall why we felt we needed this list: lit readership was alive and well at Olin (thanks in no small part to Mel Chua), and with the Olin Library Community project (where each student selects a book for purchase) and Summer Reading (where in theory we all read a book and discuss it at the start of Fall term), a list of novels selected by members of the community, or even just students, seems superfluous.

I do remember that there was to be a challenge element to this: perhaps some sort of prize was going to be given to the student who read them all first.

At any rate, the list and the challenge died before sophomore year, but for old time’s sake, here is the draft list from which we were to pull the books, taken no doubt from the old Olin wiki, R.I.P. Some of these are classics, some classics of sci-fi, and others just Oliner’s favorite books: no parsed list ever came from these submissions, so this is perhaps an insight from those early days into either what we enjoyed reading, or what we thought we should be reading.

The ones in blue are the ones I’ve read:

100 Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez

1984 – George Orwell

A Day in the Life of Ivan Dennisovitch- Alexander Solzhenitsyn

A Farewell to Arms – Ernest Hemingway

A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius – Dave Eggers

A Suitable Boy – Vikram Seth

A Tree Grows in Brooklyn – Betty Smith

Age of Innocence – Edith Wharton

Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll

All the Pretty Horses – Cormac Mccarthy

Angle of Repose – Wallace Stegner

Animal Farm – George Orwell

Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy

As I Lay Dying – William Faulkner

Atlas Shrugged – Ayn Rand

Babbitt – Sinclair Lewis

Beowulf – Seamus Heaney’s translation

Brave New World – Aldous Huxley

Byzantium – Stephen R. Lawhead

Candide – Voltaire

Cat’s Cradle – Kurt Vonnegut

Catch-22 – Joseph Heller

Catcher in the Rye – J.D. Salinger

Charlotte’s Web – E. B. White

Chronicle of a Death Foretold – Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Clan of the Cave Bear – Jean Auel

Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole

Connections – James Burke

Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Cryptonomicon – Neal Stephenson

Dune – Frank Herbert

East of Eden – John Steinbeck

Eaters of the Dead – Ibn Fadlan (compiled by Michael Crichton)

Ender’s Game – Orson Scott Card

Ender’s Shadow – Orson Scott Card

Fahrenheit 451 – Ray Bradbury

Fire and Hemlock – Dianna Wynne Jones

Five Smooth Stones – Ann Fairbairn

For Whom the Bell Tolls – Ernest Hemingway

Frankenstein – Mary Shelly

Godel, Escher, Bach – Douglas Hofstadter

Good Omens – Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett

Great Expectations – Charles Dickens

Gulliver’s Travels – Jonathan Swift

Hamlet – William Shakespeare

Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad

Hedda Gabler – Henrik Ibsen

Henderson the Rain King – Saul Bellow

Huckleberry Finn – Mark Twain

Hyperion et al – Dan Simmons

I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings – Maya Angelou

I, Asimov – Isaac Asimov

I, Robot – Isaac Asimov

Invisible Man – Ralph Ellison

Islands in the Stream – Ernest Hemingway

Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte

Jimmy Corrigan: The smartest kid on earth – Chris Ware

Just So Stories for Little Children – Rudyard Kipling

Lamb – Christopher Moore

Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them – Al Franken

Lord of the Flies – William Golding

Lord of the Rings – J.R.R. Tolkien

Macbeth – William Shakespeare

Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert

Men of Mathematics – Eric Temple Bell

Naked Lunch – William S. Burroughs

Native Son – Richard Wright

Neverwhere – Neil Gaiman

Oh, the Places You’ll Go! – Dr. Seuss

One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest – Ken Kesey

Ordinary People – Judith Guest

Pale Fire – Vladimir Nabokov

Picture This – Joseph Heller

Pilgrim at Tinker Creek – Annie Dillard

Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen

Reading Lolita in Tehran – Azar Nafisi

Rootabega Tales- Carl Sandburg

Rosencrantz & Guildenstern are Dead – Tom Stoppard

She’s Not There – Jennifer Finney Boylan

Silas Marner – George Eliot

Slaughterhouse-Five – Kurt Vonnegut

Small Gods – Terry Pratchett

Snow Crash – Neal Stephenson

Song of Solomon – Toni Morrison

Sophie’s World – Jostein Gaarder

Sound and the Fury – William Faulkner

Spoon River Anthology – Edgar Lee Masters

Stranger in a Strange Land – Robert Heinlein

Tales of the Unexpected – Roald Dahl

The Amazing Adventure of Kavalier & Clay – Michael Chabon

The Bell Jar- Sylvia Plath

The Canterbury Tales – Geoffrey Chaucer

The Cider House Rules – John Irving

The Control of Nature – John Macphee

The Count of Monte Cristo – Alexandre Dumas

The Crying of Lot 49 – Thomas Pynchon

The Dancing Wu Li Masters – Gary Zukav

The Emigrants – Vilhelm Moberg

The Feminine Mystique – Betty Friedan

The First Circle – Alexander Solzhenitsyn

The Forever War – Joe Haldemann

The Giver – Lois Lowry

The Giving Tree – Shel Silverstein

The Great Gatsby – F. Scott Fitzgerald

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams

The Iliad & The Odyssey – Homer

The Jungle – Upton Sinclair

The Little Prince – Antoine de Saint Exupery

The Man Who Planted Trees – Jean Giono

The Moon is Down – John Steinbeck

The Oedipus Cycle – Sophocles

The Old Man and The Sea – Ernest Hemingway

The Phantom Tollbooth – Norton Juster

The Poisonwood Bible – Barbara Kingsolver

The Red Tent – Anita Diamont

The Right Stuff – Tom Wolfe

The Scarlet Letter – Nathaniel Hawthorne

The Search for Delicious – Natalie Babbitt

The Second Tree from the Corner – E B White

The Shipping News – E. Annie Proulx

The Stranger – Albert Camus

The Things They Carried – Tim O’Brien

The Tin Drum – Gunter Grass

The Unbearable Lightness of Being – Milan Kundera

The Wonderful O – James Thurber

The World According to Garp – John Irving

Their Eyes Were Watching God – Zora Neale Hurston

Things Fall Apart – Chinua Achebe

To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee

Trinity – Leon Uris

Tuesdays with Morrie – Mitch Albom

Waiting for Godot – Samuel Beckett

Walden – Henry David Thoreau

Welcome to the Monkey House – Kurt Vonnegut

Where the Wild Things Are – Maurice Sendak

Winesburg, Ohio – Sherwood Anderson

Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance – Robert Pirsig