Yesterday I noticed someone located my blog by searching for “100 Pretentious Books to Read Before you die” which I found rather amusing and upon further investigation I found I was the top result with this post. After some fun on Twitter trying to pick 100 Books to read if you want to consider yourself as a pretentious reader, I thought I would post it here.
Note: this is a work in progress and I regularly add and remove books as I read more that fit this list.
- 2666 by Roberto Bolaño
- A Brief History of Seven Killings by Marlon James
- A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce
- Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
- Antkind by Charlie Kaufman
- Aracoeli by Elsa Morante
- As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner
- Baron Wenckheim’s Homecoming by László Krasznahorkai
- Belladonna by Daša Drndić
- Beowulf by Unknown
- Candide by Voltaire
- Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
- Celestial Bodies by Jokha Alharthi
- Chess by Stefan Zweig
- Crash by JG Ballard
- Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky
- Death in Spring by Mercè Rodoreda
- Divine Comedy by Dante
- Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
- Ducks, Newburyport by Lucy Ellmann
- Either/Or by Søren Kierkegaard
- Encyclopedia of a Life in Russia by José Manuel Prieto
- Faust by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
- Fictions by Jorge Luis Borges
- Fieldwork in Ukrainian Sex by Oksana Zabuzhko
- Flights by Olga Tokarczuk
- Foucault’s Pendulum by Umberto Eco
- Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
- Hopscotch by Julio Cortázar
- House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski
- If On A Winters Night A Traveler by Italo Calvino
- In the First Circle by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
- In Watermelon Sugar by Richard Brautigan
- Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace
- Les Misérables by Victor Hugo
- Limonov by Emmanuel Carrère
- Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
- Love in the New Millennium by Can Xue
- Mac & His Problems by Enrique Vila-Matas
- Malina by Ingeborg Bachmann
- Middlemarch by George Eliot
- Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf
- Naked Lunch by William S. Burroughs
- Nancy by Bruno Lloret
- Nausea by Jean-Paul Sartre
- Near to the Wild Heart by Clarice Lispector
- Notes from Underground by Fyodor Dostoevsky
- Notes of a Crocodile by Qiu Miaojin
- On the Road by Jack Kerouac
- One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez
- Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov
- Paradise Lost by John Milton
- Questions of Travel by Michelle de Kretser
- Revenge of the Translator by Brice Matthieussent
- Savage Detective by Roberto Bolaño
- Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse
- Sir Gawain and the Green Knight by Unknown
- Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut
- Sphinx by Anne Garréta
- Story of the Eye by Georges Bataille
- Submission by Michel Houellebecq
- Surrealist Manifesto by André Breton
- Swimming Home by Deborah Levy
- The 7th Function of Language by Laurent Binet
- The Art of War by Sun Tzu
- The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath
- The Bible
- The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky
- The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer
- The Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels
- The Dry Heart by Natalia Ginzburg
- The Death of Ivan Ilyich by Leo Tolstoy
- The Dud Avocado by Elaine Dundy
- The Flamethrowers by Rachel Kushner
- The Four Books by Yan Lianke
- The Fox Was Ever the Hunter by Herta Müller
- The Invention of Morel by Adolfo Bioy Casares
- The Map and the Territory by Michel Houellebecq
- The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov
- The Monk by Matthew Lewis
- Themystery.doc by Matthew McIntosh
- The New York Trilogy by Paul Auster
- The Odyssey by Homer
- The Parrots by Filippo Bologna
- The Prince by Niccolò Machiavelli
- The Satanic Verses by Salmon Rushdie
- The Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes
- The Seven Madmen by Roberto Arlt
- The Sorrow of Young Werther by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
- The Stranger by Albert Camus
- The Trial by Franz Kafka
- The Teleportation Accident by Ned Beauman
- The Tunnel by Ernesto Sabato
- The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera
- To The Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf
- Trout Fishing in America by Richard Brautigan
- Underworld by Don DeLillo
- Valley of the Dolls by Jacqueline Susann
- War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
- Zama by Antonio di Benedetto
Other suggestions (still need to read)
- A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole
- A Heart So White by Javier Marías
- Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand
- A Void by Georges Perec
- Being and Time by Martin Heidegger
- Coin Locker Babies by Ryu Murakami
- Dr. Awkward & Olson in Oslo: A Palindromic Novel by Lawrence Levine
- Finnegans Wake by James Joyce
- Gravity’s Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon
- In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust
- Interpretations of Dreams by Sigmund Freud
- Jonathan Livingston Seagull by Richard Bach
- J R by William Gaddis
- Life a User’s Manual by Georges Perec
- Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann
- Moby Dick by Herman Melville
- Requiem for a Dream by Hubert Selby Jr.
- Spring Snow by Yukio Mishima
- The Boy Detective Fails by Joe Meno
- The Iliad by Homer
- The Qur’an
- The Recognitions by William Gaddis
- The Tunnel by William Gass
- Ulysses by James Joyce
- Voss by Patrick White
- Wittgenstein’s Mistress by David Markson
- XX by Rian Hughes
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