The Perfect Library? Sure, if you want to get some sleep

The UK's Telegraph newspaper published its "110 best books: The perfect library." Basically, it is another one of those pretentious lists mostly filled with dead white males, or mostly white authors (almost dead or heading there). There are a couple of gems here, but not too many. And how Harry Potter got in while Alice in Wonderland did not is beyond me. A far from perfect library in my humble opinion. Maybe a future post might be writing about what I would put in my perfect library. Anyhow, since summer is coming up, if you need a reading idea or two, maybe some books here might work (especially if you suffer from insomnia). And for my amusement, let's see how I did. As usual, snarky commentary in parenthesis. A lot of the ones here I read either as an English undergraduate major (and I was an Ed. major, not a pure English major, which means I got a good exposure but not as deep) or during my first masters.

Bold = I read it.

• The Classics (uh huh.):
  
• The Illiad and The Odyssey by Homer.
  
• The Barchester Chronicles by Anthony Trollope.
• Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen.
• Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift.
• Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë.
• War and Peace by Tolstoy.
• David Copperfield by Charles Dickens.
• Vanity Fair by William Makepeace Thackeray.
• Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert. (This was inflicted on me during my days as an English major).
  
• Middlemarch by George Eliot.
• Poetry:
  
• Sonnets by Shakespeare.
• Divine Comedy by Dante. (Yep, the whole damn thing.)
• Canterbury Tales by Chaucer. (Yep, this whole damn thing too. In Middle English nonetheless. Not too bad actually.)
• The Prelude by William Wordsworth.
  
• Odes by John Keats.
• The Waste Land by T. S. Eliot. (A lot of this canonical poetry I read as an English major. Barely remember a lot of it.)
  
• Paradise Lost by John Milton.
• Songs of Innocence and Experience by William Blake.
• Collected Poems by W. B. Yeats.
• Collected Poems by Ted Hughes. (I know I read some of this, but I don't recall it.)
• Literary fiction (codeword for "yawn," except for one book. See below.):
  
• The Portrait of a Lady by Henry James. (I read a few other of his works. Talk about seriously verbose.)
  
• A la recherche du temps perdu by Proust.
• Ulysses by James Joyce. (Somehow I was spared from reading this. Not that I am rushing to it either.)
• For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway.
• Sword of Honour trilogy by Evelyn Waugh. (I did read some other novel by Waugh, but can't recall which, only that I hated it.)
• The Ballad of Peckham Rye by Muriel Spark.
• Rabbit series by John Updike. (I had some of his short fiction inflicted on me. If I recall, the label given to him by a few back then was along the lines of literature about white male losers, or something like that. The Telegraph calls it "the great study of American manhood." Need I say more?)
• One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez. (The greatest book ever written, and it comes from Latin America. Yea baby! I make it a point to revisit Macondo every so often, and it is always rewarding.)
• Beloved by Toni Morrison.
• The Human Stain by Philip Roth.
• Romantic fiction. (In Spanish, this is usually a code word for "cursi." Spanish definition here. Somewhat close English translation for our friends who may not speak Spanish here. A few of the items on this list would classify as cursi stuff; I will let you guess which ones.):
• Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier.
• Le Morte D'Arthur by Thomas Malory.
• Les Liaisons Dangereuses by Choderlos de Laclos.
• I, Claudius by Robert Graves.
• Alexander Trilogy by Mary Renault.
• Master and Commander by Patrick O'Brian.
• Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell. (Have not read the book. I did see the film. Another overrated piece that pretty much left me not giving a damn. Here is a much funnier version--YouTube link.)
• Dr Zhivago by Boris Pasternak.
• Tess of the D'Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy.
• The Plantagenet Saga by Jean Plaidy.
• Children's books:
  
• Swallows and Amazons by Arthur Ransome.
• The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe by C.S. Lewis. (I have only read The Voyage of the Dawn Treader and The Silver Chair, and that was years ago. With the new movies coming out, I may consider reading the whole thing soon.)
• The Lord of the Rings by J.R. R. Tolkien. (I read The Hobbit too.)
• His Dark Materials by Philip Pullman. (I am curious about this series, in part due to the recent controversies. May pick it up.)
• Babar by Jean de Brunhoff.
• The Railway Children by E. Nesbit.
• Winnie-the-Pooh by A.A. Milne. (Yep, the whole thing too, not the Disney sanitized one, though I have read some of those too.)
• Harry Potter by J.K. Rowling.
• The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame.
• Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson. (If you are a young boy, you have to read this at some point.)
• Sci-Fi (quite a few things missing here, but that would be a whole new list. But off the top, what, no Heinlein, no Bester? What the hell?):
  
• Frankenstein by Mary Shelley.
• Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea by Jules Verne.
• The Time Machine by H.G. Wells.
• Brave New World by Aldous Huxley.
• 1984 by George Orwell.
• The Day of the Triffids by John Wyndham.
• Foundation by Isaac Asimov. (I have read other things by Asimov though.)
  
• 2001: A Space Odyssey by Arthur C. Clarke. (I have read others by Clarke as well.)
• Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick.
• Neuromancer by William Gibson.
• Crime (what is criminal is some of the stuff that did not make it to this list as a whole. And by the way, no Spillane? That's just not right.):
  
• The Talented Mr Ripley by Patricia Highsmith.
• The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett. (I may have mentioned before. Have not read this one, but I have read some of his short fiction. Good stuff.)
• The Complete Sherlock Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. (Yes, I did read the complete stuff. Sherlock Holmes is one of my favorites).
  
• The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler. (Same as with Hammett. Have not read this one, but read his short stuff.)
• Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy by John le Carré. (I tried reading one of his other novels. I just could not get into it. Unlikely I will try again.)
• Red Dragon by Thomas Harris. (I also read Silence of the Lambs, Hannibal, and Hannibal Rising. Hannibal the book is better than the movie, and that last one, Hannibal Rising, was not so good.)
• Murder on the Orient Express by Agatha Christie. (I have read a couple other Christie novels. I tend to like the ones featuring Poirot. I don't care for Miss Marple.)
  
• The Murders in the Rue Morgue by Edgar Allan Poe.
• The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins.
• Killshot by Elmore Leonard.
• Books that changed the world:
  
• Das Kapital by Karl Marx. (I did read the Communist Manifesto).
  
• The Rights of Man by Tom Paine. (I did read Common Sense.)
• The Social Contract by Jean-Jacques Rousseau.
• Democracy in America by Alexis de Tocqueville.
• On War by Carl von Clausewitz. (What? No Art of War by Sun-Tzu? I did read that one.)
• The Prince by Niccolo Machiavelli.
• Leviathan by Thomas Hobbes.
• On the Interpretation of Dreams by Sigmund Freud.
  
• On the Origin of Species by Charles Darwin.
• L'Encyclopédie by Diderot, et al.
  
• Books that changed your world (maybe their world, not necessarily mine. Hmm, that could be another post prompt sometime: Books that changed my world. And by the way, no Paulo Coehlo?)
• Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert M. Pirsig.
  
• Jonathan Livingston Seagull by Richard Bach.
• The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams.
  
• The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell.
  
• The Beauty Myth by Naomi Wolf.
• How to Cook by Delia Smith. (If you have not figured out how to cook, I am sure there are a bunch of other books, starting with The Joy of Cooking.)
• A Year in Provence by Peter Mayle.
  
• A Child Called 'It' by Dave Pelzer. (A bit much like James Frey one would think. Why it made it here is a good question.)
• Eats, Shoots and Leaves by Lynne Truss. ("Picks Up, glances over, and drops" is more like it for me when it comes to this book.)
• Schott's Original Miscellany by Ben Schott. (I have not heard of this one before now, but it sounds interesting.)
• History (What? No William Shirer? No Michael Grant? No Barbara Tuchman? No People's History of the U.S.? Ok, that last one I can see missing given this is mostly a Brit list.):
  
• The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by Edward Gibbon.
• A History of the English-Speaking Peoples by Winston Churchill.
• A History of the Crusades by Steven Runciman.
  
• The Histories by Herodotus.
  
• The History of the Peloponnesian War by Thucydides.
• Seven Pillars of Wisdom by T. E. Lawrence.
• The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. (I had some of this inflicted on me too, and some in Old English.)
• A People's Tragedy by Orlando Figes. (What is really tragic is the stuff missing from this list.)
• Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution by Simon Schama.
• The Origins of the Second World War by A.J.P. Taylor.
• Lives (some of which we could probably do without, but let's not go there, shall we?):
• Confessions by St Augustine. (I have read parts of this, but never the whole thing; I had it inflicted on me when I was in Catholic school. The idea of a hypocritical hedonist who converts at the last minute, after actually praying to God to make him holy, just not yet, is not exactly appealing. I happen to think you should be a good person out of decency, not because you are threatened by the afterlife. There, I said it.)
  
• Lives of the Caesars by Suetonius.
• Lives of the Artists by Vasari.
• If This is a Man by Primo Levi.
• Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man by Siegfried Sassoon.
  
• Eminent Victorians by Lytton Strachey.
  
• A Life of Charlotte Brontë by Elizabeth Gaskell.
• Goodbye to All That by Robert Graves.
• The Life of Dr Johnson by Boswell.
• Diaries by Alan Clark.

So, how did I do? 36. Not too shabby considering the kind of list this is, and that a lot of it was obligatory reading. And by the way, no Cervantes either? Or Borges? Man, this people really missed the boat here.