This book is pretty cool, but it seems to be lacking in some ways. Written in 2006, it contains a list of 100 novels that you must read. So it is a good beginning point for people looking for ideas. It contains lists of the authors alphabetically along with their biggest works and a bit of information on those works. It contains references to other versions of the same story (i.e. movies) if you swing that way and other books to read if you like that book.

I give it 4/5 stars and would probably scour it for ideas in the future. ( )

http://spwebdesign.livejournal.com/771623.html ( )

A Categorization of Authors OR: a String of Cans Clattering Behind the Bandwagon

Gods
William Faulkner
Marguerite Yourcenar
Gustav Flaubert
David Foster Wallace
Don DeLillo
William T. Vollmann
Leo Tolstoy
Jorge Luis Borges
Herman Melville

Demigods
F. Scott Fitzgerald
Margaret Atwood
Saul Bellow
Thomas Mann
Mario Vargas Llosa
Kenzaburo Oe

Titans, above even the Gods
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Baruch Spinoza
Marcus Aurelius
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
John Milton
Dante Alighieri
William Shakespeare (of course)

Prophets
Philip K. Dick
Miguel de Cervantes
Kurt Vonnegut
George Orwell
Aldous Huxley
Franz Kafka
Hannah Arendt
Soren Kierkegaard
Plato
Joseph Heller

Bards
Vladimir Nabokov
Adrienne Rich
T. S. Eliot
Sylvia Plath
Flann O'Brien
Salman Rushdie
Alexander Pushkin
Anna Akhmatova
Yasunari Kawabata
John Donne
Hart Crane
Nikos Kazantzakis

Chroniclers
Emile Zola
Johnathan Franzen
Gore Vidal
Alexander Solzhenitsyn
Robert Graves
Jaroslav Hasek
Sinclair Lewis
Nikolai Gogol
Vasily Grossman
Fernando Pessoa
Sherwood Anderson
Flannery O'Connor
Graham Greene
Joseph Heller
Julian Barnes

Seers and Mystics
Joseph Campbell
Herman Hesse
Friedrich Nietzsche
Carl Jung

Far-Rightists who are Inexplicably Fascinating (and in the Latter's case, sexy)
Ezra Pound
Yukio Mishima

Being a Teenager is Hard, Really.
Chuck Palahniuk
Bret Easton Ellis

Black Steel Monoliths with Soundtrack by Ligeti
William Gaddis
William Gass
Marcel Proust
Joseph McElroy
James Joyce
Thomas Pynchon
Robert Musil

Hey There, Handsome. Tell Me More About Yourself.
Samuel Beckett
Guy de Maupassant
J. M. Coetzee
David Mitchell
Iain Banks
Paul Auster
Vladimir Mayakovsky
Ursula K. LeGuin
Hubert J. Selby
Georges Perec
Martin Amis
G. I. Gurdjieff
Bertolt Brecht
Gilbert Sorrentino
Raymond Queneau
Anais Nin
Christopher Isherwood
Ivan Bunin
Richard Brautigan
David Barthelme
John Dos Passos

One-Trick Ponies
Mark Z. Danielewski
Daniel Quinn

Good Grandpa
Mark Twain
G. K. Chesterton
Italo Calvino
Umberto Eco
Ambrose Bierce

Bad Grandpa
Philip Roth
John Updike

Grandpa with Good War Stories But Also Kinda Creepy
Norman Mailer

What Happened. You're Not the Man I Used to Know
Haruki Murakami

Childhood Friends, Most of Whom are Initialed
J. K. Rowling
C. S. Forster
Roald Dahl
C. S. Lewis
J. R. R. Tolkien
Franklin W. Dixon
Robert Heinlein
Lewis Carroll
Antoine de Saint-Exupery
Isaac Asimov

Childhood Ex-Friend, Now Expunged
Orson Scott Card

No Words. Just the Sound of Profuse Vomiting
Tao Lin
Johnathan Safran Foer
Robert Pirsig
Johnathan Littell
Tucker Max
Mitch Albom

The Dark Lord Satan
Ayn Rand

Oh look, a bandwagon. Must...not...oh why not.

Stand The Test Of Time
J.R.R. Tolkien
Philip Pullman
Michael Ende
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

Gone Our Separate Ways
Neil Gaiman
Anne Rice
Stephen King
Carol Goodman

Prose Prose Prose
Virginia Wolf
Vladimir Nabokov
Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez
Pearl S. Buck
Gregory Maguire
Cormac McCarthy

Ah Ha Ha Screw You
J.D. Salinger

Don't Get It
Haruki Murakami
John Banville
Jodi Picoult
F. Scott Fitzgerald
Harper Lee

I Got It The First Time, Jeez
Charles Dickens

Hmm...
Ernest Hemingway
Jonathan Swift
Shusaku Endo
Barbara Kingsolver

Thinking Pleases Me
Thomas Mann
W. Somerset Maugham
Aldous Huxley
Simone de Beuvoir
Jean-Paul Sartre
William Shakespeare
Hermann Hesse
Victor Pelevin
Milan Kundera
Fernando Pessoa
George Orwell
Ray Bradbury

Tell Me A Story
David Mitchell
Kazuo Ishiguro
John Steinbeck
Raymond Chandler

Guilty Pleasures
Jacqueline Carey
Robin McKinley

Soon My Pretties, Soon
Evelyn Waugh
Stefan Zweig
Yasunari Kawabata
Neal Stephenson
Alan Hollinghurst
Italo Calvino
China Miéville
Mark Z. Danielewski
Junichiro Tanizaki
Sarah Waters
Jeanette Winterson

Hurts So Good
James Joyce
William T. Vollmann
Yevegny Zamyatin

Bring It On
David Foster Wallace
Thomas Pynchon
Douglas R. Hofstadter
William Faulkner
William Gaddis
Alexander Theroux

Disturb The Comfortable And Comfort The Disturbed
Margaret Atwood
Dubravka Ugrešić
Jonathan Littell

Talk To Me, Like Lovers Do
Arundhati Roy
Victor Hugo
Tatyana Tolstaya

It Might Not Be You, But I'm Doubtful It's Me
Leo Tolstoy
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Albert Camus
Henry James
Emily Brontë
Salman Rushdie
José Saramago
Douglas Adams

So Far, So Good
Herman Melville
Jane Austen
Roberto Bolaño
Charlotte Brontë
Joseph Conrad
Umberto Eco
E.M. Forster
John Irving
Ian McEwan
Stendhal
Alexandre Dumas

Heard The Talk, Now Can You Walk
Franz Kafka
Toni Morrison
Flann O'Brien
Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn
Sylvia Plath
Philip Roth
Isaac Asimov
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
H.P. Lovecraft
Friedrich Nietzsche
Marquis de Sade

To Read Or Not To Read
Don DeLillo

Whew. Note, I did not read this book.

100 Must-Read Classic Novels (Bloomsbury Good Reading Guide S.) by Nick Rennison (2007)