The New Classics

I love lists.
I love books.
It only stands to reason that I love lists of books.

A few years ago I stumbled across Time Magazine's top 100 novels written in the English language since 1923, the year the magazine was first published. It was great fun to go through the list and see how I fared against the "best of the best". I have only read 13; at the time I decided that it would be an excellent goal to slowly make my way through that list, and read all 100.

Well, fast forward a couple years; I have not made a lot of progress, but still love lists. Today I came across Entertainment Weekly's "New Classics" list: the top 100 books published in the last 25 years. (Which, coincidentally, is as long as I have been alive.)


Those which I have read:

• Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, J.K. Rowling (2000)
• Into Thin Air, Jon Krakauer (1997)
• A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, Dave Eggers (2000)
• The Handmaid's Tale, Margaret Atwood (1986)
• Bridget Jones's Diary, Helen Fielding (1998)
• Angela's Ashes, Frank McCourt (1996)
• Interpreter of Maladies, Jhumpa Lahiri (2000)
• The Glass Castle, Jeannette Walls (2006)
• Nickel & Dimed, Barbara Ehrenreich (2001)
• The Giver, Lois Lowry (1993)
• The Kite Runner, Khaled Hosseini (2003)
• The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, Mark Haddon (2003)
• A Prayer for Owen Meany, John Irving (1989)
• Gilead, Marilynne Robinson (2004)
• The Da Vinci Code, Dan Brown (2003)

Those which are actually on my To Be Read list:

• Beloved, Toni Morrison (1987)
• Love in the Time of Cholera, Gabriel García Márquez (1988)
• On Beauty, Zadie Smith (2005)
• The Joy Luck Club, Amy Tan (1989)
• Naked, David Sedaris (1997)
• The Lovely Bones, Alice Sebold (2002)
• The House on Mango Street, Sandra Cisneros (1984)
• Eva Luna, Isabel Allende (1988)
• Sandman, Neil Gaiman (1988-1996)
• The Poisonwood Bible, Barbara Kingsolver (1998)
• The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, Michael Chabon (2000)
• The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down, Ann Fadiman (1997)
• Eat, Pray, Love, Elizabeth Gilbert (2006)
• Atonement, Ian McEwan (2002)
• Holes, Louis Sachar (1998)
• High Fidelity, Nick Hornby (1995)

Which leaves 69 others that I know nothing about, or (as of now) have no interest in reading.